About St. Thomas Church, Sultan Bazar, Hyderabad in St. Thomas Church, Hyderabad

BRIEF HISTORY :
St. Thomas Church as it stands today is a modified reconstruction of the original that was built around 1800 AD. There were seven Churches (chapels) in the Kingdom of Golconda and St. Thomas was one among them. The older ones being the churches at Sithapur (ca.1768), Jahanuma (ca.1770) and Goshamahal (ca.1800). Fr. John Luigi, then parish priest of St. Joseph’s Church, Gunfoundry (ca. 1800 AD) and Msgr. Daniel Murphy (parish priest at Gunfoundry from 1848-1856), who came to Hyderabad in 1839, are the two prominent names mentioned around here. Kutbiguda or Sultan Bazar (in books of history mentioned as Chaderghat, cf.: “Home for the Aged started at Chaderghat and the Nizam impressed by their service offered them land and building at Musheerabad, Secunderabad”) had a chapel and three houses (one for the priest, one for the grave digger and one for the caretaker of the cemetery) and a few Portuguese graves. Hence, it can be inferred that St. Thomas was a Padroado Portuguese church.
The street was called, Esamiya Bazar (Esa in urdu means Jesus) during the Asaf Jahi dynasty. Thereafter during the British rule the adjacent road was called Chapel Bazar, indicating that a chapel, a place of worship and prayer existed on this road.
The feast of St. Thomas was celebrated in this chapel, every year on December 21, until the Church assigned July 3 as the proper date. In 1857, Sr. Mary Benigna Egan of Loretto Convent (the Loretto Sisters were invited to take care of the girls school at Gunfoundry), wrote to her Mother Superior at Dublin, “…we left Ootacamund on November 18 and arrived here on December 21 evening, the great feast of St. Thomas at Hyderabad, were the feast is celebrated with pomp and pageantry with buntings all around…” Around this time several miraculous cures have also been reported. Records of these cures are said to be preserved in Urdu and Persian, supposedly in very delicate and fragile fragments in the State Archives.
Records indicate (Endowments Department’s File No.2865 to 2870, dated 5th Sharewar 1351 Fasli; and File No. 2673 of 1350 Fasli) that Fr. Dante Magri PIME parish priest of St. Joseph’s Cathedral (1934–1949) is the official custodian of the Church.
The old church was demolished and reconstructed by Fr. Mulaguri Dhanraju during his tenure (1979-81) as parish priest of the Cathedral. In view of extending social welfare programmes through the Church a double-storied building was constructed with the chapel on the first floor, while the ground floor was kept free for the proposed programmes. In the reconstructed chapel, Mass was celebrated every Sunday. The proposed welfare programmes didn’t take off as planned, due to various reasons, and over the years the few families residing in the campus, gradually encroached upon the vacant land all around the building. Only the open ground floor was left for the church, that too mostly used by the occupants.
In these circumstances, Archbishop Samineni Arulappa erected St. Thomas as an independent parish on May 30, 1999 bifurcating it from the Cathedral. The efforts of Fr. Dominic Sylvester, the first parish priest, to establish a vibrant parish didn’t go well with the occupants of the church land. Thus the infant parish suffered a few scandalous moments, in the property dispute that ensued. But with the appointment of Fr. Michael Thiagaraj matters have definitely calmed down, but at the expense of the Church which was given a negative verdict in the court of law.
The parish has about 107 catholic families under its pastoral care. The support of the local people is laudable. Many of them though professing non-Christian religious traditions, have been very tolerant and supportive. The community at Sultan Bazar has thus survived against many odds.