A neo-Gothic cathedral dedicated to the Apostle Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ, the Saint Thomas Cathedral Basilica in Chennai, Tamil Nadu is popularly known as the Santhome or San Thome Church. The present structure was built by British authorities in 1896, replacing a sixteenth-century Portuguese-built church.
The site in Mylapore, now a locality of Chennai, originally hosted a small chapel housing Thomas’s remains, possibly built by Thomas himself. This is one of the three churches in the world known to have been constructed over a tomb of one of Jesus’s Apostles, the other two being St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City and Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Galicia, Spain.
Saint Thomas is considered responsible for the spread of Christianity in the Indian subcontinent, and is known as the Apostle of the East. He is commonly believed to have arrived here by sea in 52 CE; he presumably landed in Muziris (in present-day Kerala), where he conducted his missionary work for nearly two decades — other accounts claim that Thomas travelled by land, via present-day Punjab, then part of the Indo-Parthian kingdom.
In 69 CE, Thomas arrived in Mylapore, then a thriving port settlement and temple town, and was martyred in the area in 72 CE. The exact circumstances of his death are not known; some narratives claim that he was killed on a hillock some distance from Mylapore, now known as St. Thomas Mount. Others suggest that he died on or near the site where the Santhome Church now stands. He is also believed to have taken shelter from religious persecution in a cave at the Chinnamalai (Little Mount) hillock in Saidapet, Chennai, where the Little Mount Shrine now stands.
The Santhome Church has been an important site of pilgrimage throughout its history. The journals of Venetian explorer and merchant Marco Polo describe his visit here in the late thirteenth century.
Saint Francis Xavier spent a prolonged time here in 1545. In 1606, with the creation of the Diocese of Saint Thomas of Mylapore, the Santhome Church became the seat of the bishop of Mylapore, and was thereby elevated to a cathedral. In 1956, under Pope Pius XII, the church was designated a minor basilica, and in 1986 Pope John Paul II visited. It was recognised as a National Shrine by the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India in 2006.
Relics of the saint’s body were once housed in a small chapel here, built either by Thomas himself or dedicated to him — most of these were likely transported to Edessa in the third century; later to the Greek island Chios, and in the thirteenth century to the church in Ortona, Italy, where they are still housed. This initial shrine was likely succeeded by another structure built by Persian Nestorian Christians.
When Portuguese maritime explorers arrived on the Coromandel Coast in the sixteenth century, they built a church over this shrine. The scant visual documentation available indicates it was a rectangular pitched roof structure with Thomas’s tomb at one end, and wings housing the sacristy and presbytery. A statue of Mother Mary, roughly a metre tall, was brought from Lisbon at the time and is still housed at Santhome Church, commonly known as Our Lady of Mylapore or Mylai Matha.
In the late nineteenth century, British colonial authorities found the church in need of rebuilding, in light of its importance. They demolished it in 1893 and planned for it to be rebuilt in a neo-Gothic style — a revival of medieval architectural idioms that was popular in Europe, especially in England, in the nineteenth century.
The present structure shows key features of Gothic cathedral architecture — an emphasis on vertical elements in the form of pointed arches, pinnacles and tall spires; profuse decoration through facade detailing, tracery and stained glass windows; and rib-vaulted ceilings.
The church is built on a cruciform floor plan in the form of the Latin cross typical of medieval European church architecture, with an area of about 780 square metres. The two-storeyed, whitewashed structure is dominated by a 47 m tall spire, which abuts the west-facing entrance — at the long end of the cross — and serves as the bell tower.
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A smaller spire is built over the transept, where the two axes of the cross plan intersect; this spire originally marked the location of the saint’s tomb. Both spires are of octagonal sections, tapering to a tall point.
The front facade features six pointed arches — three doorways and three nearly identical windows above — and a pediment, flanked by two octagonal towers topped by belfries and small spires mimicking the larger spires. These pointed arches are seen along the entire structure, in arcades at the ground level and windows at the upper storey. A series of pinnacles runs along the top perimeter of the church.
Other elements of Gothic architecture such as stringcourses are seen on the exterior, as well as numerous mouldings of the trefoil motif and the trefoil cross. A pitched roof covered in Mangalore tiles shelters all four arms of the building.
The long arm of the cruciform constitutes the main hall or nave, which features a fan-vaulted teak wood ceiling. A row of arched doorways along both sides opens onto arcaded verandahs, which are roofed at the first-storey level in Madras terrace. Above them is a row of clerestory windows set with stained glass. Behind the altar, a stained-glass window set in a pointed arch — instead of the typical circular rose window — depicts the popular story of Doubting Thomas, in which Thomas is seen touching the side wound of Jesus Christ.
The stained glass panels of the church were commissioned from the historic studio Mayer & Company in Munich, Germany. The wooden statue of Jesus against the Holy Cross at the altar shows his feet resting upon a lotus and flanked by peacocks. A pipe organ added to the cathedral by the British in the nineteenth century is housed in the narthex.
The church was first renovated in 1952. In 2004, church authorities began restoring and remodelling several parts of the building’s interiors, especially the floor, ceiling, stained-glass windows and the tomb, though the exterior retains its nineteenth-century appearance. The floor was re-laid in marble; the paint on the ceiling was removed to expose the original finish of the wood. Other changes to the cathedral included the installation of an ornate wooden altar for the Our Lady of Mylapore statue.
The tomb of the saint, previously in an open crypt built into the floor of the transept in front of the altar, was shifted to an underground chapel in a new building that serves as the information centre and also houses a museum and auditorium. In addition the church complex today includes two chapels, several administrative offices, the head priest’s residence, and a liturgical centre — largely recent structures, built or renovated in 2004.
The museum contains the head of a spear believed to have killed Thomas, discovered during Portuguese excavations in the sixteenth century. Other important relics on the site include what is known as the Thomas pole — a wooden pole believed to have been fashioned by Thomas to protect the land and its dwellers from the sea. A popular belief holds that this pole prevented the destruction of the cathedral and its neighbouring areas during the tsunami that hit Chennai in 2004.
The church is a major religious site in Chennai, regularly used and well-maintained. It hosts an annual ten-day festival in June–July for the Feast of Saint Thomas, which celebrates the death anniversary of the saint: a statue of Thomas is paraded on a golden chariot in processions along Santhome High Road, in the vicinity of the church.
This article is taken from the MAP Academy‘s Encyclopedia of Art with permission. The MAP Academy is a non-profit, open-access educational platform committed to building equitable resources for the study of art histories from South Asia. Through its freely available digital offerings—Encyclopedia of Art, Online Courses, and Stories—it encourages knowledge-building and engagement with the visual arts of the region.