English
Church of Calvary and Church of Saint Thomas of Sandor
Nirmal, Mumbai Metropolitan Area (Bombay), India
Religious Architecture
These churches are noteworthy above all for their main façades, nearly identical in both: a retable façade in two superimposed orders (with a smaller third order in Nirmal). Both are topped by a curving gable and flanked by bell towers. These compositions are of the same type as Saint Andrew’s in Bandra, albeit more logically and architecturally contrived. Its components are columns and not pieces gathered in a seemingly haphazard manner, as in Bandra. We know nothing for sure and the information below, barring the dates, should be understood to be hypothetical. The façade of the Church of Calvary, almost certainly built in the 19th century, paraphrases the Church of Saint Thomas of Sandor. Features which in the latter may by 16th or early 17th century (the lower order’s incised pilasters) were replaced in Nirmal by smooth pilasters and columns. The upper order is probably 19th century on both façades, along with the bell towers and the gable. Saint Thomas’s of Sandor was founded in 1566 as a Jesuit parish. It was damaged during the Morro de Chaul Fort war in 1594 and rebuilt in 1597; that reconstruction may correspond to the main façade’s lower order. The church was destroyed by the Arabs from Oman in 1697. In 1889 it was much altered. The form of the façade we see today and the thorough transformation of the nave, now marked by abutment pillars holding up a wooden roof, may result from this intervention. The Nirmal church was rebuilt in 1856, as attested by a stone placed on site. It was established around 1557, under the invocation of Mt Calvary, on a hillock overlooking a tank where many Hindu sanctuaries are now situated. In 1739 it was destroyed by the Marathas. The designation of Calvary, justified by the church’s location, was characteristic of devotion of the Custody of Saint Thomas. During the Franciscan period there may have been small chapels on a Via Sacra leading to the church. The church’s rededication (to the Holy Cross) most likely corresponds to the 1856 reconstruction and later work, along with the introduction of a new element in the (wooden-roofed) single nave: the semi-circular shell niches articulating the lower floor’s side elevations. This is an originally Jesuit theme characteristic of Goa architecture, present in the north only in the Jesuit church of Diu. Two niches of this type can still be seen in Sandor, corresponding to the interior of the main façade’s side doors, a location most unusual if not unique. This may be because items were moved from other places in the church. If Sandor had semi-circular shell niches, then the presence of such niches in Nirmal is easier to explain.