Mount Mary's Candles

The neighborhood I live in, for those of you who don't know, is called Bandra, and it is the second or third suburb out of Bombay to the north, just after Mahim and Matunga, both very crowded middle-class Maharashtrian suburbs. Bandra juts like a hand out into the Arabian Sea to the west, and as recent as a hundred years ago, it was mostly farmland and populated almost entirely by Koli fisherfolk, the same people who called the seven islands of Bombay "Mumba," or "Mumbai" -- the city of Mumbadevi, the patron deity of all Indians who dip their nets into the ocean and live off the bounty of the sea.

These days, there is a different patron -- she's called Our Lady of the Navigators, and her statue is perched on a tree-lined hill towards lands end, the outstretched pinky finger of Bandra's hand, near the swanky Taj Hotel. The Portuguese brought Catholicism to Bombay in 1543, and handed over control of Bandra to the Jesuit missionaries in 1570. In 1640 they built the Castela de Aguada, or Bandra Fort to defend against Maratha raids, and in the same year, Mount Mary's chapel took her post on the hill, 30m above the blue sea. The church was destroyed, depite their efforts to protect it, in 1738, and the statue of the virgin was recovered from the sea by fishermen and temporarily installed in St. Andrews Church, which is right around the corner from my apartment, before being shifted to the rebuilt Mount Mary in 1761.

All that is interesting, I suppose, but the real reason I'm here today, boys and girls, is to talk about Mount Mary's candles, which are unlike any I've seen in a Catholic cathedral. If anyone knows anything about this devotional tradition, I'd love to hear a history (extremely detailed, of course) or an explanation.

And for now, you can also read about Mount Mary's from two wittier, artsier Bombay bloggers, just by clicking here and here.



The candlse you can buy come in many moulds. They are shaped like cars, airplanes, disembodied legs, arms, hands, stomachs, brains, and even full bodies, couples, or pregnant women. Your hand hurts? You buy one of Mount Mary's hands, put it on the sacred fire, and pray to the Mountain Mama. Want a baby? Pregnant candle. Want a new beamer or to find a cheap Cessna on eBay? You get the idea...

I found the candles to be, I dunno, ghastly... Very pale and smooth, and strange in part because they so often represented physical objects, material desires, and not spiritual ones...



I think this picture captures what I mean by "ghastly"...



More disembodied limbs, shadows...





Prayer-vendors:





The extensive collection...



Family portrait...



In memoriam...



Across the street from the candlewalas, we have the Jesuswalas, selling Jesus in every form, pose, color, and mood imaginable...





And an entirely different sort of candles...



And a flock of crucifixions...



And this is the old basilica, where the 17th century statue is still standing. Rumor has it that Arab pirates stole Our Lady's hand in 1700 because the had some sort of "gilt object" in it. What was it? A ring? Brass knuckles? Roach clip? I wanna know...



Here's a devotee, standing in front of the sacred fire with the wax that dripped in hissing drops to the grate below.



And further, to illustrate the passage of time in this posting, I spent a whole Wednesday after work at Mount Mary's, counting rosary at the mass with the whole mumbling congregation, until the moon came out over the balustrade...



And nighttime descended on Land's End...