The Telegraph comes to Town

Telegraph stamps

The telegraph will become a thing of the past in the next few weeks. The sorrow over its impending demise is nothing compared to the excitement surrounding its introduction. Like the other Presidency cities, Madras was connected by telegraph in 1853, with Henry Nelson, Director of Parry & Co and Chairman of the Madras Chamber of Commerce, sending a message to Marseilles on 13 October, at a cost of Rs. 10. The general public had to wait till 1854, when on March 1, telegraph offices were opened in the Fort, Guindy, Mount Road and Poonamallee. As a promotional feature, the public was invited to send one message, not exceeding six words, free of cost on inaugural day.

There were howls of protest when the charges came into effect from 2 March. These, which had to be paid by purchasing telegraphic stamps that are in the picture, were found to be exorbitant. Messages sent within the city cost the same as those sent abroad! This was soon corrected. Sending messages to England was beset with problems. There was no sea link and telegrams were cabled from England to Aden and then brought from there to Bombay or Galle in Ceylon by steamer. These were then retransmitted to their destinations. A study done in 1860 showed that messages to Madras took anywhere between 30 to 50 days to reach. Frequent breakdowns in the Ceylon line led to the unearthing of a scam wherein four people were arrested for tampering with messages and bribing transmitters. The opening of the Indo-European line in 1865 brought Madras closer to London. Messages took three days from then on.

Even then, getting operators who knew English was difficult. Alexander Forrester Brown of Parry complained that a word such as shipment sent from England, became shipace in Karachi and shipoyo in Madras. By the same logic he added, “ferocious could pass to garocious or even garrocimbs.” But over time, Indians mastered the technique and language. The post of Telegraph Master was a coveted one and we still remember an incumbent, Telegraph Abboyi Naidu in a street-name in George Town. Interestingly, the Telegraph and Postal services were distinct and separate early on. When the Madras GPO was constructed in 1875, it was designed to accommodate the Telegraph Offices. This was prescient, for in 1913, the two were combined to form the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.

The heyday of the telegraph was during the British raj when the Empire practically ran on the service. Cables could be on high matters of state or ones such as the message from a panic-stricken stationmaster, minutes before ME Grant Duff, the Governor of Madras was to arrive by train. “Tiger jumping about on platform. Staff much alarmed. Please arrange.”

This article appeared in The Hindu under the Hidden Histories Column

When Mark Twain visited Madras

Yes, the great humorist did visit our city, even though it was for just a few hours. It happened in 1896 when the author (real name Samuel Taylor Clemens), his wife and daughter embarked on a world tour, an account of which was written by Mark Twain and published as More Tramps Abroad in England and Following the Equator in the USA. The trio spent the bulk of their time in India up north. Madras was en passant, between Calcutta and Colombo when SS Wardha, the British India Steamship Company vessel they were travelling by, docked at the harbour here for a day on 31 March. In his book, Mark Twain does not give any details about Madras, beyond mentioning that he had stopped here for a day. But we do know of what he did here from an interview he gave a reporter of the Madras Standard, one of the leading newspapers of the day. The conversation was published in the Madras Standard of 1 April and in the Rais and Rayyat of Calcutta on the 11th.

The interview did not go very well. Mark Twain did not measure up to the expectations of the reporter as to how a celebrated author and humorist ought to look. He was pale in countenance and did not give the impression of an eager tourist with “an active desire to know all about everything around him.” He was lounging in a deep cane-bottomed chair on the saloon deck, “buried behind the pages of a Madras paper.”

It did not help that Mark Twain was suffering from a bad cold and the conversation was repeatedly interrupted by bouts of coughing. At one stage, the author remarked that he “was killed with this cold since morning.” He and his family had gone ashore early that day and breakfasted “at the hotel near Spencer’s shop.” This must have been the Connemara, known even then by that name and acquired just five years previously by Spencers. They intended to drive around the city after that but Mark Twain “wasn’t equal to the heat with this cold” and left his wife and daughter to go by themselves around the city.

“By the way, who is that Roman General on horseback on one of your broad roads?” he asked of the reporter. On being told it was Munro, he remarked that had read about him. He also commented that unlike Munro, the most recent Governor, Lord Wenlock had not been a success, at least from what he had read in the newspapers. From where they sat, Mark Twain could see the old lighthouse (the Doric column in the High Court campus) and the then newly built High Court. He felt that it was a “telling structure, pleasant to see. It has a proper look, as if it belonged to the country.” Not so fortunate was the GPO, also visible from the harbour. He opined that it struck a false note, being “too European altogether.”

This article appeared in the Hindu’s Hidden Histories column

PS: I must have nodded off typing it. KV Ramanathan, my mentor called me to say Mark Twain was Samuel Langhorne Clemens and not Taylor. I was of course confusing him with Samuel Taylor Coleridge!

One year of the Heritage Conservation Committee

The Heritage Conservation Committee appointed by the Government of Tamil Nadu following a specific directive of the High Court of Madras, completed one year in July 2011. The Committee has recently been very much in the news, following its successful representation to the Chennai Metro Rail Limited regarding the alignment of railway lines and stations that are planned to be in close proximity to heritage buildings in the city. That is definitely a positive development but the general working of the Committee has left much to be desired. This may be the right moment to critically evaluate its functioning.

When the High Court passed its judgement, it had on hand a list of a little over 400 heritage buildings. This was a list prepared for an entirely different matter, a case involving outdoor hoardings and was put together mainly for the purpose of enumerating structures that ought not to be hidden behind hoardings. It therefore largely listed heritage structures on arterial roads and did not look at buildings that are in side streets. But it was still a list nevertheless and when the High Court ordered that a Heritage Conservation Committee ought to be formed, it also added that the listed buildings had to come under the Committee’s purview.

The Committee when formed largely comprised government bureaucrats who toed the official line. It took its own time to send out letters to the owners of the listed properties. It is reliably learnt that several owners of heritage properties never received the letter. The Committee is yet to visit most of the heritage sites that were listed. It is therefore not in touch with what is happening in most cases.

Taking advantage of the delay in communications, some owners went ahead and demolished their buildings. The Government was the biggest culprit for in its hurry to build the new (and now unwanted) Assembly, it merrily destroyed five listed buildings, with no explanations being asked. Others were not so lucky. It is reliably learnt that the Church of South India, which demolished the Bible Society Building on Memorial Hall Road, has been asked to come up with plans to build a structure that is aligned to what was done away with. But the old structure is no longer there nevertheless. That some action has been taken is small satisfaction. A bigger success was in getting those in charge of St Teresa’s Church to give up ideas of demolition. No action was however taken in the case of the Anderson’s Church on NSC Bose Road, where extensive ‘renovation’ work was undertaken in the interior, without any competent authority overseeing the effort.

The one and only communication that the Committee ever sent out was vague in the extreme. Beyond stating that the owner could not demolish or alter the structure, the letter did not have anything constructive as to what could be done with the buildings. This tied the hands of the owners and lack of maintenance efforts has ensured that at least two heritage structures – the GPO on Rajaji Salai and the Madrasa-E-Azam on Mount Road have partially collapsed. To what purpose is any action now on the matter when the damage is done? Added to this is the sheer apathy of other Government departments. It is now understood that the Committee is sitting in judgement over whether the historic Mint on the eponymous street needs to be demolished. The Government it is believed, is all for it.

It is in the light of the rather lacklustre performance that the successful representation to Metro Rail appears a major breakthrough. The Committee has managed to get the Metro Rail to prepare revised drawings and plans for its stations at locations near the Law College, Higginbothams and a couple of other places. It is significant however that none of these revised designs have been made public and we have only the Committee’s word for it.

Taken over all, the performance of the Committee is below par. But as we still have a significant bit of heritage left in the city, any improvement by the Committee in its functioning will go a long way in saving what has survived thus far.