Pune: St Crispin’s Home
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Introduction
Shalmali Bhagwat, May 29, 2023: The Indian Express
Weaving your way through a sea of vehicles on Pune’s busy Law College Road, you are bound to miss the rusty metal board of St Crispin’s Home in Erandawane. But once you enter the campus, tucked away behind a clump of trees, it is hard to miss the towering church in black stone, built in classic Gothic architecture style, surrounded by relatively newer buildings. The church looks like it has been plucked from a sleepy town in 1900s Great Britain and placed right next to the bustling Metro station in Pune. Saint Crispin’s Home, which is home to over 300 girls today, was built to help the destitute in then ‘Yerandawana’ in Poona around 1912.
A village school in a temple
“Imagine, this entire area which is so heavily populated right now once formed the outskirts of the city of Poona. It was named ‘Yerandawana’ after ‘Erandel’ – castor oil trees which covered the area,” says Vishram Bhave, director of Saint Crispin’s Home.
The book Forty-Five Years in Poona City by Father Elwin and Father Moore says that in 1891, a school opened in ‘Yerandawana’ inside a temple. “…the school there began in 1891 in the Hindu temple with a Christian master, and after a while a room in the centre of the village was rented for the purpose and the number of scholars was often large…,” the book says. Around 50 boys, both Hindu and Christian, attended the school, attendance registers show.
The school village in Yerandawana, however, was the only one the mission could maintain. “The one in Parbati was found to be too close to the city of Poona with numerous educational institutions and Hindu opposing influences too strong. The one in Hingne was inaccessible and cut off during the rainy season with mud and water while one in ‘Pasharn’ flourished for a while after the lone schoolmaster there was too alienated from the city and returned,” writes Father Elwin.
The plague in Pune and funds from the Great Britain
The plague in Pune in the 1890s and the subsequent loss of human life resulted in a fund being started in the Great Britain to build a boys’ home as a memorial to those who had died and as a response to the “unsatisfactory nature of the miscellaneous collection of buildings in which the boys of the Mission had to lodge”.
Soon, the Saint Nicholas’ Boys’ Home and the Home for Little Boys were founded in 1901. The mission bungalow inside the Saint Crispin’s Home campus was first built after the seven-acre campus was leased from an ‘inam’ in 1901. The campus then housed various buildings, including Saint Xavier’s Day School, the boys’ home and a large two-storied house for the sisters, along with stables, cook-rooms, officers, quarters for assistant teachers at school etc, remnants of which are hard to spot today.
With the plague returning to Poona – Forty-Five Years in Poona City says it was so widespread in 1899 “that it seemed almost as if the whole city was going to be swept away” – people flocked to Yerandawana. “Yerandawana is also one of the places to which more of the well-to-do citizens flee in the time of plague and at such seasons more than a thousand people are camped out there and the visitors to the Mission Bungalow are inconveniently numerous,” the book adds.
The Home for Little Boys was later renamed Saint Crispin’s Home. “Saint Crispin, born in Italy around the 1600s, was a shoemaker and cobbler before turning into a monk who served the destitute and distributed his earnings among them. This home was named after him because of the settlement of cobblers in the area and the society’s service towards them,” says Bhave.
A Grade-1 heritage site
In 1907, the church was opened for use. It was designed by Scottish architect Sir John Ninian Comper – one of his final works, Bhave believes – and was built using contributions worth 2,500 pounds, secured through donations then.
The church and the bungalow are what remains of the campus built in the 1900s with the current residential complex and school for girls built later. Walking inside the church, with its high arched ceilings, ornate canopy and altar and a hexagon stone fountain matching the walls, one is transported back to the 1900s. But it is hard to miss the cakey cement on the ceiling and the unintentionally exposed brickwork and the cracks in the corners serve as a reminder of the 117-odd years this structure has survived.
The church is a Grade-1 heritage site and the Archaeological Survey of India has taken up work to conserve it. “The brickwork got a fresh coat of white cement in the 60s I think, which needs work. The roots of trees have crept in from the roof. In the monsoons, the church usually floods as the water rises from the ground, through the cracks,” says Bhave.
One of the few churches in India with complex architectural features like flying buttresses, Bhave says the restoration will help the church regain its former glory. To help restore the church, Bhave has contacted the great grand-nephew of Sir Comper, John Buckham, who helped him secure pictures of the original construction.
A home for 300 girls
“Saint Crispin’s home has been a later work which combines both medical and welfare work. It grew out of an earlier organisation of Father Elwin, designed for destitute boys, Here the sisters apply their great experience in meeting the needs of unmarried mothers, broken homes and destitute children. It is a work which tries to heal emotional illness and through well-organised workshops and a school provides a wide range of therapeutic treatment,” writes H E W Slade in his book ‘A work just Begun, The Story of Cowley Fathers in India (1874-1961)’ explaining how a school earlier reserved for the education of boys was opened for women too.
Currently, St Crispin’s Home is a registered autonomous trust governed by an ecumenical board of trustees. Around 300 girls reside on the premises with many availing of education from nursery to Class 10.
