BOOK BUILDING
'After Madras, there was modern India'
D. MURALI
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What is more enjoyable than the many pictures that fill the book is the easy style of Muthiah in retelling history in Madras that is Chennai.
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Year 1639. That's when the story of Madras began in Fort St. George, writes S. Muthiah, in "Madras that is Chennai," from Ranpar Publishers.
In August that year, Francis Day, who had come from Nellore to scout for a place where the East India Company could `cloath better cheape' reported to the Company about the land grant from Beri Thimmappa. It was "a strip of no man's sand three miles long, one mile wide at its broadest." Within a year was built a fortified warehouse. On April 23, 1640, St. George's Day, Fort St. George came into being.
The beginnings...
What is more enjoyable than the many pictures that fill the book is the easy style of Muthiah in retelling history, even if you were to disagree with him when he says that after Madras there was Modern India. "Mine is not a popular view of history, but that's not stopped me singing this song for the past 25 years and pointing out that almost every single national institution in India had its beginnings in this city," says Muthiah.
"It was in Madras that the first rules of governance and justice, and the red tape and record keeping that went with both, were introduced by Langhorne and Master, Yale and `Pirate' Pitt. It was here that the oldest civic corporation was established outside Europe," recounts the author, listing the many firsts.
St. Mary's church was consecrated on October 28, 1680, and the marriage register records as the first entry the wedding of Elihu Yale, after who is named the Yale University in the U.S. "It was in Fort St. George that Robert Clive worked as a Writer in 1744 on a salary of £5 a year." Clive was bored with his work; and was `on the verge of suicide on occasion'. He found his true vocation "on the battlefields around Fort St. David in Cuddalore."
A rare picture
Do you know that the Senate House was the first home of the Madras University? Or that it was built "on the site of the Nawab of Carnatic's Artillery Park from where salvoes were fired to greet visiting dignitaries"? A rare picture in the book is that of the Ice House or Vivekanandar Illam sporting the U.S. flag. Muthiah explains: "It was in the 1840s that the Tudor Brothers of Massachusetts formed the Tudor Ice Company and harvested the ice of New England's lakes and ponds in winter and of the drifting Newfoundland icebergs in the summer and shipped them out to India in Yankee clippers." A thriving business, it was, till the 1880s.
A chapter titled `towns of lilies and peacocks' speaks of the Sri Parthasarathy Temple in Thiru-Alli-Keni, dating back to the middle of the 8th Century, and at various times occupied by `Golconda, the Dutch and the French'. To Golconda occupation in the 17th Century Triplicane owes its first Muslim settlers, informs the book. "Here were built some of the city's finest mosques and palaces."
Mylapore has a tradition of 2,000 years, informs Muthiah. "The temple of today, Sri Kapaleeswarar Temple, was, however built only 300-400 years ago, after the Portugese had pushed Mylapore far from shore in the mid-16th century." To the ancient Arabs and Nestorian Christians, the little settlement on the Meliapor beach was known as Betumah, `the Town of Thomas'. Legend has it that St. Thomas spent the last eight years of his life in Meliapor where he was buried in 72 AD. "It was to look for his remains that the Portugese arrived on the Coromandel Coast in 1509."
Interesting stories
The book narrates stories about: the Adyar River and Moore's Bungalow, Anna University including Guindy Engineering College ("the oldest technical school outside Europe"), Government Estate which was the home of Governors till Independence, Higginbotham's founded in 1844 by the librarian of the Wellington Book Depository, Syed Khan's pettai (now Saidapet) which was a gift of the Nawab of Arcot in 1730 to Syed Shah, the cave in Little Mount from where St. Thomas walked daily to the beach, hill temple of Kurathur Kumaran in Pallavaram dating back to the 12th Century, the growth of civic amenities along the road to Poonamallee, the first railway line in the South that linked Arcot with Royapuram in 1853, and the National Art Gallery that adorns the cover. These, apart from the discussions of modern developments such as Koyambedu, Kollywood and Tidel Park.
Spare a moment to read about Governor Charles Trevelyan on page 143. For, it was he who, "saved Madras from Income Tax (at least for a while) and lost his job for it, gave Madras both People's Park and a water supply in the 18 months he spent here (1859-60)."
A book that can make time stand by.
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