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The postman knocks
S. MUTHIAH
Reader K. Selvam reminds me that the YMCA building (Miscellany, September 5) was the first building built of stone in Madras. From what the experts tell me, it would probably be more accurate to say it was the first building in Madras to be cladded with stone. It was red sandstone mined near Madras - in Tada, I'm told, but I'm unable to locate the village - that was used as cladding on masonry walls.
* Teak (Miscellany, August 29) seems to have stirred the interest of several readers. One tells me that teak has been used in India for more than 2000 years (still no answers to where and how it came from) and that many temples in South India have teak beams over 1000 years old. Tectona grandis(teak, to you and me) is hard, does not warp, split, crack or decay, and is resistant to termites. Citing several sources, Selvam says they are unanimous that it was the most popular timber used for shipbuilding.
* Reader K.V.S. Krishnan reminds me that the oldest teak plantation in the world was in Nilambur in Kerala, planting having taken place in 1840. The harvest cycle used to be 50-70 years, but modern agro-techniques have brought it down to 20-30 years.
I recall Nilambur for another plantation crop: rubber. It was in 1878 that Ceara rubber seedlings from the Kew Gardens in England were introduced in the Nilambur teak plantations to be followed by 28 Hevea rubber seedlings from the Peradeniya Gardens in Ceylon. The rubber seeds had been smuggled to Kew by Henry Alexander Wickham, a smalltime planter in Brazil, at the urging of Clements R. Markham of the India Office. Wickham smuggled out of Brazil 70,000 rubber seeds in a shipment in 1876 and these were germinated in Kew, less that 3000 seedlings sprouting. But these seedlings were the beginnings of the whole rubber industry in Asia. He was given a knighthood - for breaking Brazilian law, it must be presumed.
Krishna, narrating his personal experience with teak, adds that he was in charge of removing a 20-acre coppice of 25-year-old teak trees in Carady Goody Estate, opened out by R.H. Goldies in Vandiperiyar in the 1860s and taken over by A.V. Thomas & Co. in 1941/2. The old dead roots/stumps, Krishnan recalls, were of four-four and-a-half feet diameter and when uprooted were sold to cartwheel makers in Cumbum. He particularly remembers one huge teak root that took 100 man-days to uproot. It was of diameter 6 feet and length 10 feet and weighed 7 to 8 tonnes. "It could not be lifted into a lorry and was left on the roadside in 1975, at the time I left the company." Teak trees like that one, I'm told, are no longer found in India.
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