The New Year marks a pause between what has been and what might yet unfold. It is a season of reflection, recalibration, and renewed attention to how we carry the past forward. Appropriately, stained glass, an art form built on light, memory, and continuity, has found itself at the centre of global conversation at precisely this moment.
In Paris, the debate surrounding the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral has reignited long-standing questions about heritage and change. Following the devastating 2019 fire, proposals to replace six intact 19th-century stained-glass windows with contemporary designs have drawn fierce opposition from conservationists and historians. Supporters argue that new stained glass can mark renewal and speak to the present; critics insist that altering surviving historic fabric risks erasing irreplaceable layers of meaning. The controversy is less about glass alone than about a deeper dilemma: how does one honour history without freezing it in time?
It is a question that resonates far beyond France, including in India, where stained glass survives quietly, often unnoticed, in churches, libraries, and civic buildings, carrying its own complex legacy of craftsmanship, adaptation, and neglect.
Stained glass is among the most poetic of architectural arts, an alchemy of sand, fire, and imagination. Its essential techniques have endured across centuries. Molten glass, coloured with metal oxides – cobalt for deep blues, copper for greens, gold for ruby reds – is shaped into sheets, cut into fragments, and joined with strips of lead known as cames. Painted details are added and fired, fixing image and color into the glass itself.
In medieval Europe, this process reached monumental scale. Gothic cathedrals dissolved stone walls into vast windows, transforming interiors into luminous spaces where light became theology. Stained glass narrated scripture, moral lessons, and cosmology to congregations for whom images spoke more clearly than words.
Over time, the medium evolved. Renaissance windows grew increasingly painterly, while the 19th-century Gothic Revival, aided by industrial advances, standardised production and enabled stained glass to travel widely. Through colonial networks, it reached far-flung regions, including the Indian subcontinent.
Elsewhere, stained glass followed different trajectories. In the Islamic world, coloured glass filtered light through intricate geometric and floral patterns, privileging abstraction over figuration. Across cultures, stained glass consistently served the same purpose: shaping light into meaning.
India’s relationship with stained glass is largely a product of the colonial period, though glass itself had long circulated through ancient trade routes. What arrived in the 19th century was the European tradition of architectural stained glass, introduced through churches, institutions, and civic buildings.
Landmarks such as St. John in the Wilderness in Dharamshala, St. Mark’s Cathedral in Bengaluru, St. Stephen’s Church in Delhi, and Mumbai’s Afghan Church house windows produced by British studios, their Christian iconography bathed in Indian light, brighter and more unforgiving than their makers anticipated.
The medium soon extended beyond churches. The J.N. Petit Library in Mumbai incorporated stained glass into its Neo-Gothic interiors, while Rajasthan’s Sunehri Kothi in Tonk combined Belgian stained glass with Indian enamel and mirror work, producing a striking hybrid aesthetic. Indian artisans gradually adapted the medium, introducing local motifs, flowers, birds, and royal insignia, allowing stained glass to quietly Indianise.
Despite its jewel-like beauty, stained glass is fragile. Lead weakens, glass corrodes, pigments fade, and India’s heat, humidity, and pollution accelerate deterioration. For decades, damaged windows were often ‘repaired’ with cement, industrial paints, or outright replacement, interventions that compromised authenticity and long-term stability.
Globally, conservation philosophy has shifted. Today, the emphasis lies on minimal intervention, reversibility, and respect for age. Damage is stabilised rather than erased; time is allowed to remain visible.
In India, organisations such as the Conservation Initiative for Art and Cultural Heritage (CIACH) have been instrumental in professionalising stained-glass conservation. The restoration of stained glass at the J.N. Petit Library, part of a UNESCO-recognised project, demonstrated how careful research, cleaning, and restoring could preserve historic windows without stripping them of history. Similar efforts are now underway in churches and civic buildings in Mumbai, Goa, and Chennai, many of which are only beginning to be properly documented.
These practices echo the debate unfolding at Notre-Dame: conservation is not about recreating the past, but about safeguarding its integrity.
While conservation looks backward, contemporary artists are pushing stained glass forward. Internationally, figures such as Sir Brian Clarke redefined the medium through abstraction and large-scale architectural collaborations, proving that stained glass could speak a modern visual language. Artists like Ursula Huth, Natasha Redina, and Kristi Cavataro have expanded its possibilities, creating works that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture.
In India, a growing number of artists and studios are revisiting stained glass beyond ecclesiastical settings. Practitioners such as Atul Bakshi, Malavika Tiwari, and Prabhakaran Kanichar blend traditional techniques with contemporary aesthetics, while studios in cities like Bengaluru and Mumbai continue to train artisans in leaded-glass methods. Increasingly, stained glass appears in private homes, hotels, and public spaces, not as religious narrative, but as experiential art.
As one year gives way to the next, stained glass offers a powerful metaphor for cultural continuity. It exists between permanence and fragility, history and reinvention, memory and light. The debate at Notre-Dame reminds us that heritage is not neutral; it is argued over, cherished, and constantly renegotiated.
In India, where many stained-glass windows remain vulnerable and undocumented, the coming years will determine whether these luminous fragments are preserved, reimagined, or quietly lost.
What stained glass teaches us, at the start of a new year, is this: renewal does not require erasure. Sometimes, it simply requires allowing the past to shine, differently, but still intact, into the future.