B 24

Since its inception in 1817, the CMS College kept increasing its educational excellence with each passing year, and in 1891, the college was adjudged as the best college in the Madras Presidency. The FA examination conducted by Madras University and the students from CMS College came out with flying colors. Female students were not included yet so the passed-out ones were all male.

In this relief work, artist Shaji Chalad has brought in the history of the college’s excellence not only in its physical glory but also in its abstract educational prowess. The symbolizing is palpable in the male students who stand in attention and say their prayers. The joy and jubilance are expressed in the symbolic degrees and the hats thrown up in the air though that was not the custom in those days in Travancore. As the glorious old buildings of the college could be seen in the right side corner of the relief, one could also see on the left side of it two mounts of knowledge and a genuflecting angelic figure with a halo marking him out as a divine embodiment of knowledge, a sort of Holy Spirit, that has become a point of worship for the men in the middle of the frame.