Church bells and school bells: A Christmas story

It's Christmas Eve! Tonight, in a 200-year-old Bangalore tradition, the English-speaking faithful (all faiths welcome) will gather for the Christmas Mass at the St Mark's Cathedral, the first garrison church in the erstwhile Bangalore Cantonment.

- Roopa Pai

As the bells toll the midnight hour, bread will be broken in joyous celebration of the birth of Mary's boy-child. And the presbyter will invite the congregation, as he did last year, to 'offer to one another the sign of peace, the namaskar.'

It is also a year-end tradition to look back and take stock, so let us rewind to 1698, to a royal charter that obliged the East India Company (EIC) to provide chaplains and schoolmasters for the Europeans at its 'factories' (trading posts) in India, while keeping its nose out of the religious and educational business of the Indians themselves, so as not to antagonize them. By 1812, when St Mark's became the first garrison church of the Bangalore Cantonment, things had changed considerably.

With the fall of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the EIC controlled most of the south; less concerned about local sentiment, the 1813 Charter allowed the clergy to set up churches and schools wherever they wished.