Place · Anglican cathedral · India
St Paul's Cathedral, Kolkata
Also known as 1847), Anglican cathedral (Bishop Wilson, Anglican cathedral (Bishop Wilson, 1847), Kolkata, St Paul's Cathedral
The 1839-1847 St Paul's Cathedral at Kolkata, West Bengal — the first Anglican cathedral built outside the British Isles. The Gothic Revival stone cathedral was built by Major William Nairn Forbes of the Bengal Engineers under the patronage of Bishop Daniel Wilson. The cathedral's 61-metre spire was damaged in the 1897 Shillong earthquake and the current spire (completed 1934) is a tapered reconstruction. The cathedral contains 19-century stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, including the famous West Window (1880) depicting the Last Supper. The cathedral houses memorials to British East India Company officers and the Calcutta European community through the 19-century. The 1947 Independence saw the cathedral transferred to the Church of North India (CNI). The cathedral remains an active CNI parish. ASI protection since 1951.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.545, 88.345
Connections (3)
- Companion in the same setSerampore & the Mission Press
St Paul's in Calcutta and the Serampore press stand twenty kilometres apart on the Hooghly and represent the two halves of British Christianity in India, which had very little to do with each other. The cathedral, consecrated in 1847, was built for the ruling community and the Company chaplaincy; the Baptists at Serampore were kept out of Company territory altogether and worked from a Danish enclave because missionary activity was thought likely to provoke unrest among the people being governed.
- Site adjacencyMother House, Kolkata
The Mother House on A.J.C. Bose Road and St Paul's Cathedral are a few kilometres apart in central Calcutta and represent the two Christianities of the city: an Anglican cathedral of 1847 built for the establishment of British India, and the headquarters of a Catholic order founded in 1950 by an Albanian nun to work in its slums. One was the church of the government; the other exists because of what the government left behind.
- Site withinKolkata
St Paul's Cathedral, Kolkata sits inside Kolkata and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “St. Paul's Cathedral, Kolkata”. Serampore and Tranquebar mission press records; Stuart Blackburn, Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India.
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