The EAST and WEST REVIEW

  Good architecture has ever been history in terms of bricks and mortar, and if the present generation of builders is to perpetuate architecture sincerely and honestly, it will do so only in so far as it keeps abreast of the trend of the world-currents of the present day. The characteristic feature of our times is the great and rapid change from isolation to interdependence which is taking place in all the nations of the world. Each nation has something to contribute to the good of all, and one of humanity's greatest needs at this time is to develop a consciousness of a world community. All the major problems of to-day are problems which affect the entire world, and mankind has to be considered as a whole in finding their solution. We therefore need to become world-conscious and to develop a community spirit. Anything that helps to convince humanity of its under-lying unity or which helps forward an appreciative understanding of other people is a step towards fellowship among the nations, and in consequence is meeting a present-day need.

  If this is true of mankind as a whole, to the Christian it comes as a definite and imperative summons. Within the world community is the Christian world fellowship--a small minority, and yet the greatest influence making for unity which the world possesses. This universal Christian community exists wherever Christians "assemble and meet together" The times demand that each Christian everywhere should allow a sense of this world-wide Christian fellowship to become a conscious reality in his life.

  Within the last few years Christians have, by degrees, been growing out of mere parochial thinking, and many are now catching the wondrous vision of a Universal Church. No longer are they content to think of them-selves as belonging to a British or to an Indian group of Christians, but are striving to attain to a loyalty and an attitude of mind that will reveal that they are citizens of a universal kingdom. But now a problem arises. Granting that the Church possesses universal truth, should this truth express itself through universal symbols, or should it take on local forms? In other words, what is the relation of local culture to religion?

  In answering this question, we need to be reminded that Christendom no longer means Europe, and that the Christian Church can no longer be identified with any one civilization. In a country like India, the days of the pioneer missionary are largely over. The pioneer missionary, in his praiseworthy efforts to make a complete break with the non-Christian faiths around him, resolutely declined to consider their culture. Hindu architecture, to him, was anathema and only suggested the worship of horrible bloodthirsty false gods. As a result, when he built his churches, it was perfectly natural that he took his examples from his homeland. This has had the effect of causing succeeding generations of Christians to become inoculated in favour of a foreign style for their places of worship as against the highly suitable forms of their own local styles.

  It follows, then, that every time a Gothic church is built in India, so the cultural inheritance of the land is being withheld. Surely this is a matter which needs a new and complete orientation by all the missionary societies. When the pioneer missionary first introduced the new faith into Eastern lands, he took with it what to-day can only be regarded as non-essential accompaniments of that faith—Western dress, Western salutations, Western names, exact translations of Western hymns and services, and so forth. All these indelibly stamp Christianity as a foreign religion, and until Christianity in India becomes Indian through and through it will never be the power that we pray it one day may be. Converts ought not to be confronted with the task of of assimilating Christianity through foreign media.

  Church architecture can vary greatly help in this process of naturalizing Christianity in the various sections of the one world community of Christ. Consideration of the local types of religious buildings is just one way of avoiding unnecessary breaks with a convert's past and of retaining valid religious suggestions from the externals of his former faith. The time has now come for the intelligent recognition of the fact that gopurams, temples and mosques have for centuries been beautiful, enduring, and influential elements in India's religious life and, as such, have much to teach us as we plan our Christian church buildings in India. Their form and architecture have been largely determined by climatic conditions. Here in the far south of India it is necessary to secure protection from the sun's heat and glare and to take advantage of the sea breezes which sweep the bottom of the peninsula for the greater part of the year. South Indian temples and other Hindu buildings are invariably designed to meet these conditions. In contrast to these properly designed local buildings, Gothic churches are wholly out of place. Exquisite though it be, Gothic architecture only belongs to the chilly temperate zone. Its aim is to get the maximum of light and sun for warmth in its buildings. In a fairly hot country like Italy, it is significant that Gothic architecture never really took root—how much less can it hope to thrive if transplanted to tropical latitudes?

  It has been part of the writer's joy and privilege to express in actual buildings what he feels he has so inadequately expressed on paper. As an architect in Lahore he was entrusted with several church-building schemes, and now, as principal of the S.P.G. Art Industrial School at Nazareth, Tinnevelly, all the more important building work of the diocese is under his control—most of it, again, being church building. Every building presents its own particular set of problems, but in every building which the writer has designed for use as a place of worship in India, he has primarily sought to provide a building which will not only be adequate to the demands of Christian worship and service, but will also by its very outlines belong to the people who use it. By way of illustration, the writer now proposes to describe two of his current building jobs—neither as yet completed.

  A year ago, he was asked to extend the church at the village of Oyangudi, four miles north-east of Nazareth. Here he found a perfect English Gothic church of moderate dimensions which would be in its correct setting on the Cotswold Hills or on the Northamptonshire uplands. His instructions were to retain the tower (of quite good Gothic design) and the nave; to extend east of the chancel arch as 'a cruciform plan by the provision of transepts and a considerably lengthened chancel; to give the church the highest sanctuary floor in the diocese, and to provide the church with the heaviest columns in the diocese. Much friendly rivalry goes on in church building out here, and the writer would be the last to discourage it. The most interesting of the items received was that dealing with the size of the columns. This requirement assisted the writer very considerably in the discretion demanded of him in dealing with the then ingrained idea of the good people of Oyangudi that the words Gothic and Christian were synonyms. In due course a Gothic design started to rise on the foundations of the new extension. One by one the vast rough-hewn granite blocks began to arrive from the near-by quarries to be dressed up into pillars on the site. In the able hands of the Hindu stonemasons (who had previously been given their orders about the shaping of the stones) the great blocks quickly began to assume their finished appearance. Mild surprise at once gave place to intense enthusiasm. These were temple columns that the stonemasons were carving! When the four great twenty-ton monoliths (for the intersection of transepts and chancel) arrived at Nazareth station, the villagers of Oyangudi turned out en masse, and with bullocks and themselves hauling on the ropes, the giant stones were dragged to the site over the four miles of rough country roads on corrugated iron sheets flattened out. Enthusiasm pre-vailed which could hardly have had its equal in England even in those days of enthusiasm in the Middle Ages when the village church was being built.

  "The old nave must go," said the villagers, "we want the whole church to be carried out in this style; it is Indian, it is our style, it is our village church." An influential villager was sent off post-haste to Ceylon, where many local people have business connexions and wealthy friends, to start collecting for this further extension; and so the work is proceeding with unabated enthusiasm. Various judicious alterations to the new exterior from time to time have made the building less and less Gothic and more and more Indian and, in consequence, more and more suitable to the climate. Above all, Oyangudi Church looks what it is, a Christian place of worship, and, in spite of its details, does not suggest Hinduism in the slightest. The old Gothic tower will remain on as a quaint reminder of the now-unwanted architecture of the pioneer missionary.

  A mile to the south of Nazareth, a very much larger church than that of Oyangudi is slowly rising above the flat, dusty countryside. When completed it will be the chapel of the Bishop's Theological College at Tirumaraiyur. It is big in every way, in its scale, in its details and, one fervently hopes, in the far-reaching effect it is going to have on the future clergy of South India, who as theological students are now worshipping and studying in its shadow. Begun in August 1938, the church is still quite in its initial stages although, between the network of bamboo scaffold poles, the features of its design can be discerned without much difficulty. The scheme is dominated by a lofty central tower. Flanking the tower to north and south are wings containing on the ground floor the vestries and on the first-floor quiet rooms. The first floor of the tower with its vaulted roof and open-air pulpit looks out to the west over the courtyard, which is cloistered on the north, west and south sides. The sanctuary, on the ground floor of the tower, and lying between the two vestries to north and south, faces into the courtyard which virtually becomes an open-air nave.

  When finished, the church of Tirumaraiyur will un-questionably take its place alongside the other great religious buildings in the district. Its local non-Christian brethren, with whom it has so much in common in its design, include the fine temples of Srivaikuntam, Aiwarti-runagari and Tiruchendur. The main difference will be that Tirumaraiyur will look like a Christian Church and the others will continue to look like Hindu temples. Like its brethren just referred to, Tirumaraiyur will show forth a bright gleaming light from the top of the tower by night, and again, in line with temple practice, a great bell will ring out its summons over the heads of the palmyra trees. Stonemasons who have had wide experience in building and repairing Hindu temples are now at work on this Christian church, and it is quite evident that they are taking great pride and interest in their work. The shape of the courtyard columns, cornices, etc., is exactly the same as those to be seen in Hindu temples, with just this difference. Where in Hinduism the various deities are carved in the stonework, here at Tirumaraiyur, Christian emblems, local plants and beasts, and the arms of the various colleges and universities represented by Nazareth missionaries are carved.

  Such, then, are but two instances where Christianity is being naturalized with the help of architecture, and where the buildings speak for themselves in no uncertain tone. One or two cases have occurred in recent years, years where non-Christian buildings have been copied for use as Christian places of worship. ‘This is a mistake. If sufficient care is taken, a church will always look like a church and will never be mistaken for a non-Christian building, no matter how much it breathes the spirit of its non-Christian brethren.

  To us who are in the midst of this new movement, the work is of absorbing interest—and why? Surely it is because local Indian culture is being given both fair play and an entirely new lease of life. Local architecture, hitherto consecrated to “the God whom ye ignorantly worship,” 1s now being offered to the same God as revealed in Jesus Christ. At Tirumaraiyur, the message of the Christian Church is being passed on, not only in the lecture-room and by Tamil services and music, but also by the architecture of its chapel. As one of those who boldly spoke out at Pentecost, men can say of Tirumaraiyur —"Behold now we hear, every man in our own language wherein we were born.”

  When one has once become sensitive to the conception of an indigenous church, it very much offends one’s sense of fitness to see a Gothic structure obtruding in an environment graced by the cloistered quadrangles, the curving gopurams, and the columned porticos of a near-by temple. The early Christians avoided any such unhappy results in their buildings when they unhesitatingly borrowed from pagan Rome the external forms of their churches. They boldly went ahead without any fear of confusing the style of their building with the doctrines professed in them. Just as the basilica and the dome were adopted by the Early Church, so the Christian tradition may still be enhanced and enriched by the gifts of every race which it touches.