By Soudhriti Bhabani, IANS,
Dumka (Jharkhand) : Bright fibreglass windows, arches shaped like onion domes and a statue of Jesus Christ bearing resemblance to tribal art are some of the unique features of a church in Jharkhand.
The Mount Carmel Church in Murugini village of Dumka district is a blend of Santhal tribal art and Mughal architecture.
Subrata Ganguly of Church Art, a Kolkata-based designing agency that helped build the church, said a number of new interior décor concepts were implemented in the church.
“We have given a different design to the church atmosphere using husker at the bottom of the sanctuary section. This apart, we have moulded many other things like altar, podium, pulpit, statues and relief murals into typical tribal forms,” Ganguly told IANS.
“Like the Santhal tribals, we have used flashy colours in the fibre glass windows and given a wooden finish to the Jesus statue that gives us an impression of tribal art. We have also designed the arches in the onion dome pattern, which is a very well-known form of Persian architecture,” Ganguly added.
The church was inaugurated Saturday after a three-year-long building process. A prayer hall used to earlier stand in its place.
“We have promoted tribal themes through the interior decor of the church. The architecture of the church is a shift from the conventional European mode to the local mode. It was done to make local people feel more familiar with Christianity,” Father Claudious Tauro, secretary of the Jesuit Santhal Society of Jharkhand, told IANS.
The building of the church in keeping with tribal art was part of ‘inculturation’, a practice that helps churches adopt a number of local traditions and practices to make it easier for people to relate to Christianity.
The Vatican approved the process in the 1960s when Rome embraced inter-faith dialogue and religious liberty.
This allowed the use of local languages instead of Latin in church services all over the world.
The total population of Dumka district is about 1.2 million, of which over 100,000 are Catholics.
“We never feel that Christianity did not originate in India. We always feel the religion is as much ours as it is to other Christians in the Western world. We feel very linked to the religion as it has merged our Santhal themes with Christian rituals,” said Sudhan Soren, a tribal of Tongra village.
Christianity is India’s third largest religion after Hinduism and Islam.
According to the World Christian Database of 2005, India accounts for about six percent of the global Christian population. The survey also claims that Catholics in India have grown from 1.52 percent of the population in 1970 to 1.66 percent in 2005.
(Soudhriti Bhabani can be contacted at [email protected])