Mumbai: Behind a cluster of tall trees and amidst thick bushes, mist and traffic of shops and buildings in the Fort area, the three-century-old St. Thomas Cathedral Have seen it all. But behind its famous arches and inside its walls lies an interesting piece of sculpture, stained glass and liturgical art history that is still unknown.
Inside the city’s oldest Anglican church, on its western wall, is a grand marble monument that is decidedly out of place at first glance. It is a monumental figure of a Hindu brahmin The priest wearing a dhoti and shawl and his hands joined in prayer under a banyan tree, bowed graciously on an urn. To understand how this monument took pride of place in a church, one would need to delve into the life of Jonathan Duncan, Bombay’s longest-reigning ruler from 1795 to 1811, who is buried in the cathedral and who The monument is dedicated.
At the center of the monument – built in 1817 by the British settlers of Bombay and sculpted by John bacon Junior – is a biographical sketch of a Scotsman who came to India as a writer East India Company at the age of 16 and distinguished himself as an administrator, a patron of ancient Indian education, who founded India’s first Sanskrit college in Banaras, and as a social reformer who focused on female feticide in Banaras and Kathiawar. Signed. According to Bombay recorder, James Mackintosh, Duncan was ‘Brahminised’ by his long residence in India for 39 years.
The topmost level of the monument features a young Brahmin and a female figure holding the scales of justice. Near her feet are two books, an open scroll and a mirror with a serpent around her handle. “Books and open scrolls represent the preservation of his scholarship and learning. The woman who identified justice, highlights Duncan’s status as a just and great administrator,” says noted historian Anila Varghese in a journal on South Asia Studies. In the central part there is a plaque praising Duncan and the two infants, with a scroll inscription ‘End infanticide at Benares and Kattivar’.
“After drawing the attention of the Bengal government to the existence of infanticide in Benares in October 1789, he devised a plan by which to stop it. He recognized the special status of Brahmins and translated a quote from Vratim Vayanta Paran to prove that the practice was against Hinduism. He then gathered the prince chiefs and argued with them to sign a pact abdicating the practice. As infanticide was also prevalent among the Raghuvanshis in Jaunpur, Duncan took similar engagements from them,” writes historian VA Narayan in his thesis on ‘The Life and Career of Jonathan Duncan’ in 1958.
As far as the western symbols are concerned- the weeping willow and the face and body of the Kalash or Brahmin which conforms to the Greco-Roman allegorical style, Vijaya Gupchup who wrote ‘St’. Thomas ‘Cathedral Bombay—A Witness to History’ believes that it was “the fusion of the best from the East and the West that characterized Duncan himself.”
“There is a lot of indoctrination in most of Bacon’s sculptural works, but Duncan’s monument is perhaps the most interesting. People tend to approach it from the perspective of a reformer,” says Rev. Avinash Rangayya, Presbyter-in-Charge of St.
Inside the city’s oldest Anglican church, on its western wall, is a grand marble monument that is decidedly out of place at first glance. It is a monumental figure of a Hindu brahmin The priest wearing a dhoti and shawl and his hands joined in prayer under a banyan tree, bowed graciously on an urn. To understand how this monument took pride of place in a church, one would need to delve into the life of Jonathan Duncan, Bombay’s longest-reigning ruler from 1795 to 1811, who is buried in the cathedral and who The monument is dedicated.
At the center of the monument – built in 1817 by the British settlers of Bombay and sculpted by John bacon Junior – is a biographical sketch of a Scotsman who came to India as a writer East India Company at the age of 16 and distinguished himself as an administrator, a patron of ancient Indian education, who founded India’s first Sanskrit college in Banaras, and as a social reformer who focused on female feticide in Banaras and Kathiawar. Signed. According to Bombay recorder, James Mackintosh, Duncan was ‘Brahminised’ by his long residence in India for 39 years.
The topmost level of the monument features a young Brahmin and a female figure holding the scales of justice. Near her feet are two books, an open scroll and a mirror with a serpent around her handle. “Books and open scrolls represent the preservation of his scholarship and learning. The woman who identified justice, highlights Duncan’s status as a just and great administrator,” says noted historian Anila Varghese in a journal on South Asia Studies. In the central part there is a plaque praising Duncan and the two infants, with a scroll inscription ‘End infanticide at Benares and Kattivar’.
“After drawing the attention of the Bengal government to the existence of infanticide in Benares in October 1789, he devised a plan by which to stop it. He recognized the special status of Brahmins and translated a quote from Vratim Vayanta Paran to prove that the practice was against Hinduism. He then gathered the prince chiefs and argued with them to sign a pact abdicating the practice. As infanticide was also prevalent among the Raghuvanshis in Jaunpur, Duncan took similar engagements from them,” writes historian VA Narayan in his thesis on ‘The Life and Career of Jonathan Duncan’ in 1958.
As far as the western symbols are concerned- the weeping willow and the face and body of the Kalash or Brahmin which conforms to the Greco-Roman allegorical style, Vijaya Gupchup who wrote ‘St’. Thomas ‘Cathedral Bombay—A Witness to History’ believes that it was “the fusion of the best from the East and the West that characterized Duncan himself.”
“There is a lot of indoctrination in most of Bacon’s sculptural works, but Duncan’s monument is perhaps the most interesting. People tend to approach it from the perspective of a reformer,” says Rev. Avinash Rangayya, Presbyter-in-Charge of St.
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