Short and Snappy dated 16th October 2012

An elegy for Egmore Station

The Man from Madras Musings has always had a soft corner for Egmore Station. MMM remembers a time when he was young (and, may he add, cherubic), and when this stately edifice was to him almost akin to a cathedral. Silence was its dominant feature. Its vast interiors were sparsely populated and almost the only sounds were the steady tramping of feet on the wooden stairs of the over-bridges. Every once in a while, a voice with a respectful intonation as though at a state funeral would announce the arrival and departure of trains. There used to be a drive-in platform where you could simply drive up, drop off your guests and their luggage and drive off. MMM had heard of the wonders of the station’s refreshment rooms, all stained glass, polished cutlery and liveried bearers, with the best of Butler Cuisine to match. The Chief, MMM has noticed, often gets sentimentally maudlin about repasts enjoyed in the past in that hostelry. Sadly, MMM has to record, all this has gone forever.

MMM accepts that noise has to increase with the vastly increased population. He also understands that the number of trains that come to and leave from Egmore has gone up exponentially. The bass voice reminiscent of newscasters at the AIR must have long retired, for MMM overheard a shrill electronic version, probably played out of a computer. That too MMM accepts. He also realises with a pang that wooden stairs are not permanent and wear and tear is a part of life (after all, MMM is no longer the young troubadour that the Chief roped in so many years ago. If he could have frayed somewhat at the edges, what of stairs?). All these are signs of the times and the station has to live with it.

But what he cannot accept is the filth that has come to define this station. The sheer volume of it, for which both the railway conservancy staff and the passengers need to take equal blame, was mindboggling. And the plethora of posters and the copious graffiti inscribed on every wall surface by the railway unions left MMM with equally copious tears in his eyes. Most railways across the world have unions, but none of them thinks it necessary to paint slogans and paste posters in this fashion. It speaks volumes of the attitude that these people have towards the very institution that feeds them.

There was one character in particular who, it appeared from a distance, had achieved something remarkable, for every poster had his face on it. Had he patented some new method of locomotion, MMM wondered. Or had he single-handedly saved several passengers from a burning train? No, it transpired. He had won an election in one of the several unions that exist within the Southern Railway. That was all. And he had a set of demands which, to MMM at least, appeared that, if met, the Railways would need to close down once and for all.

MMM was part of a large group and several were reminiscing about the glorious days of Egmore. And then someone pointed out that the first accessible platform was No 4. What of the first three, they wondered. MMM had no answer. It was only while climbing an over-bridge that MMM located the missing three. They were all on one side, and perhaps now accommodating only suburban or goods trains. But that should not mean water had to stagnate in a greenish pool beside the tracks, rats had to be scurrying around, and garbage had to be piled up. MMM wonders if anyone in authority ever visits these places.

Several passengers were throwing litter on these platforms with complete lack of concern. Used plastic bottles were being collected by urchins. Some of the secluded corners and the platform edges were used as spittoons and also makeshift urinals. It was then that the simple truth hit MMM. We get the cleanliness we deserve.

Sad state of a college

It was also last fortnight that The Man from Madras Musings was invited to visit an educational institution that could be considered the grand sire of our city’s university. It is now a deemed university, though doomed would be a better adjective, given the recent activities around it. It is, to give it due credit, housed in a handsome domed building the city should be proud of, but, sad to say, its occupants are doing damn little about keeping it clean. Perhaps it all has to do with the valueless education that we appear to be specialising in. We the people have more or less done the college in.

MMM and an expert who had gone with him were asked to give their opinion on the building. All that could be said was that the structure was in solid condition and could pull on practically forever. But the maintenance was abysmal. Perhaps the genius that built the edifice had anticipated this and planned for its survival despite the greatest of odds. But what even he could not have really anticipated was the accumulation of muck. Broken chairs and tables were stored in all corners, no doubt in anticipation of a conflagration sometime, in keeping with Chennai’s heritage history. Persons who ought to know better had dumped used paper plates, paper cups, plastic cutlery, scraps of paper and Lord knows what else under the wooden platforms in the lecture halls. Priceless prints and old photographs lay under layers of grime. The garden, of which there is plenty, had not been weeded in years and some of the places in it were practically inaccessible.

What puzzled MMM and the Chief to whom the findings were duly reported was that surely this institution must be having NCC, NSS and other such disciplined service units. What these cadres do is not very clear, but surely they could be requested to do shramadan and clear the muck, wipe the pictures clean and weed the garden REGULARLY. If this institution set an example, others would very likely follow it.

If only college students displayed the same enthusiasm for maintaining their campuses as they do in observing Bus Day! And if only campuses were a little cleaner, perhaps students would turn automatically towards academics and less towards what is keeping them in the headlines.

Historic blunder

If by that heading you think The Man from Madras Musings is referring to the founding of Chennai, you are not even near. MMM was thinking of a recent article in one of the city’s leading newspapers. This was on the 18th Century dubash Pachaiyappa Mudaliar who left much of his wealth for good purposes. The paper claimed that his fortune was initially built on selling plastic goods! Perhaps he paid for his purchases using plastic money as well? Truly, he must have been a pioneer in plastics, this Pachaiyappa!

Grave Matters at Presidency College

This article appeared in The Hindu under the Hidden Histories column on 9th October 2012

Three graves at Presidency College

I was invited to visit Presidency College last week. It is a campus I had always intended exploring, it being the first major work of Robert Fellowes Chisholm in Madras city. Wandering about the place was a fascinating experience but what intrigued me was the presence of three Mohammedan graves on the southern side, almost in the shadow of the main building.

It being evening, there was not a soul to explain the significance of the tombs. Scrawled in chalk on the wall of the enclosure were the names of the three people buried within – Hazrath Syed Zahoor Ali Shah Qaderi, Hazrath Syed Zainab Beebi Saheba Qaderi and Hazrath Syed Shahbuddin Ali Shah Qaderi. All three are in good condition, painted repeatedly and with a roof of recent origins, protecting them from the elements.

Just as I was leaving, there turned up a Muslim gentleman who began making preparations for prayer. He informed me that the three graves belonged to members of the erstwhile ruling family of Arcot and that they had been buried here around 200 years ago. When construction of the Presidency College began, care was taken to leave the graves undisturbed. The trio enjoy saintly status and an Urs festival is conducted each year in their memory during the Islamic month of Rajab.

Who they are is a mystery. But what I did glean from S. Anwar, photographer and heritage enthusiast who researches the Islamic history of this region, was that this was once the garden of Sultan-un-nissa Begum, daughter of Nawab Mohammad Ali Walajah, who in the 1760s, built the magnificent Chepauk Palace.

Sultan-un-nissa was a strong-willed person. Her father’s death in 1795 saw her brother Umdat-ul-Umrah being installed as Nawab. He managed to resist the takeover of his kingdom by the British, and in this he was probably aided by his sister. On his death in 1801, the English forcibly occupied Chepauk and tried to get Umdat-ul-Umrah’s son to hand over the kingdom, citing the infamous Arcot debts as the reason. When he proved a chip off the old block, his cousin, the willing Azeem-ud-Dowlah was installed on the throne. He signed away the kingdom, retaining Chepauk Palace and its gardens alone.

He was strongly castigated for this by Sultan-un-nissa and her son Rais-ul-Omrah Bahadur (after whom a street, now sadly truncated to ROB Street still survives off Mount Road). To which he replied that he may have lost the kingdom but he had at least saved Chepauk Palace without which they would have had no roof over their heads. The response to this was sharp – would it not have been better to lose a home to save a kingdom? Sultan-un-nissa finally settled in Basrah.

Given her resistance, her property must have been among the first to be confiscated. A part was allotted for the Presidency College in the 1860s, and the rest is history.

The House of Love

Col. Henry Davison Love's bungalow, Victoria Hostel Road

Victoria Hostel Road is not a greatly frequented thoroughfare except when cricket matches are played at Chepauk. It runs parallel to the Buckingham Canal, connecting Bharati (Pycrofts) and Wallajah Roads. A serene tree-lined avenue, it is only marred by olfactory assaults, for being a secluded street it doubles up as a public convenience. The buildings on either side are few and far between. On the western side you have the Kasturba Gandhi (formerly Victoria Caste and Ghosha) Hospital and the Chepauk Stadium. On the eastern side, it is one continuous compound wall, behind which is the rear of Presidency College.

In this compound is the Indo-Saracenic structure that gives this road its name. Victoria Hostel was built in 1880 by the great contractor-builder of Madras – Thatikonda Namberumal Chetty. The College of Engineering (later to become the College of Engineering, Guindy and still later Anna University) then functioned from the now gutted Khalsa Mahal in Chepauk Palace and the hostel was built for it. When the engineering college moved to Guindy, the building was made over to Presidency College. Though a grand edifice and listed by the High Court of Madras as a heritage structure, it is in very poor condition now.

Next to the hostel is a bungalow that was once the residence of the Principals of the College of Engineering. The Lodge as it was called, was occupied between 1880 and 1907 by Col. Henry Davison Love of the Royal Engineers. Love, had after graduating from the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, came to Madras where he became Assistant Master at the College in 1876. Subsequently he worked in the PWD, the railways and as under secretary to the Government before becoming acting principal of the College in 1879 and finally Principal in 1880. While resident here, Love indulged in his passion for writing, the first being a Manual of Hydraulics in 1886. He was also President of the Madras Club whose history he went on to write. He also left behind a detailed account of the works of art in the Government House (since demolished to make way for the new Assembly/now hospital) and the Banqueting (now Rajaji) Hall.

After his retirement, Love returned to England and there embarked on his magnum of opus – a history of Madras city. Drawing extensively from Government records in London and Madras and drafting in numerous collaborators, he published Vestiges of Old Madras in four volumes in 1913. It remains the most exhaustive work on the history of the city. First editions are very rare to find, but thankfully, a reprint was released a few years ago. A free download is available from Google Books as well. Love died in 1924 aged 72, at Exeter, England.

The bungalow that should be venerated for having housed arguably the best historian of the city is now not in great shape. It is however busy on many days as a locale for film shooting. Perhaps love stories?This story appeared in The Hindu today – http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/article3248582.ece

Robert Chisholm – the Indo Saracenic Man

If Paul Benfield gave the world its first example of the Indo-saracenic style of architecture with Chepauk Palace, it was Robert Fellowes Chisholm (1838-1915) who made it a complete form and the true architectural statement of the British Raj. Chisholm’s finest works survive in two cities in India – Madras (Chennai) and Baroda (Vadodara).

Not much is known of Chisholm’s early years, though it is certain that he was born in London. By the early 1860s he was in the employment of the Government of Bengal, being Executive Engineer, Puri Division, Bengal Department of Public Works. It was around this time that the Government of India was pressing ahead with the spread of education on Western lines. Universities had been set up in Bombay, Bengal and Madras and it was felt that buildings suitable to their stature ought to be constructed. In Madras, land for the Presidency College and a University Senate House was allotted by 1865. But two years prior to this, the Government of Madras had, for the first and only time in its history, announced an architectural competition for the design of these two buildings. With Rs 3000 being the prize money, it was a prestigious affair and by 1865, 17 designs had been received. The best of the lot, as per the committee that sat in judgement, were those of Chisholm.

He was accordingly transferred to the Madras Government in 1866, his arrival in the city coinciding with that of the new Governor, Lord Napier. The two were to become close friends though in private the Governor was to refer to Chisholm as a “clever little cockney” even while accepting his being “crammed with high art.” Napier was to make Chisholm’s transfer to Madras a permanent one, getting the Government of India to sanctioning a new designation for him – Consulting Architect to the Government of Madras. It was rather significantly, the first time that the word architect was being used in Government circles, at least in the city.

Napier was a man with a high imperial vision and in Chisholm he was to find someone who could translate his schemes into reality. To Napier, the Chepauk Palace, recently acquired in full by the Government from the Nawabs was a symbol of the times when the English had been subservient to the natives. No doubt the palace, rising in all its glory on the beachfront irked him and so among Chisholm’s first contracts was the building of the offices of the PWD, on the eastern face of the Chepauk Palace, hiding it from public view.

Revenue Board building rear, designed by Chisholm

It is significant that none of Chisholm’s early works in the city or in the Presidency, were examples of the style for which he would eventually become famous. In his early years he experimented with the Scottish-baronial (the PWD building), the severely classical (the Madras Club buildings as they stood till recently on Express Estates and the gates of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills at Pulianthope) and the Italianate (Presidency College and the Lawrence Asylum which later became the Lawrence School at Lovedale, Ooty). He was asked to convert the old police courts at Royapettah into Amir Mahal, a suitable residence for the Prince of Arcot and this he did in the style of the Italian villa, copying the design of Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Then came two projects that would transform Chisholm’s ideas forever. The first was a commission from Napier to restore the Tirumalai Nayak Mahal in Madurai. Chisholm was to grumble about the heat and dust of travel by bullock cart but when he arrived at the site, he was to fall in love with the place. Back in Madras, he was to rework his ideas for the University Senate House, incorporating into it several elements from the Mahal. He was to also add ideas and designs that had inspired him in other places such as Bijapur, Mahabalipuram and Ajanta. As a consequence, Senate House, completed in 1878, emerged as a curious but beautiful amalgam of various styles and became a new genre by itself – the Indo Saracenic. A smaller example of this, built at around the same time when Senate House was being constructed, was a tower that connected the two wings of Chepauk Palace – the Humyaun and Kalsa Mahals.

The Tower between Humayun and Khalsa Mahals, built by Chisholm

To fill the interiors of Senate House, Chisholm began working on a bewildering variety of stained glass, mosaics and painted canvases. These were all done at the Madras School of Art (now the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Poonamallee High Road) of which Chisholm became Principal in 1877. He probably lived on the campus from then on and one of the buildings there is said to be his work.

Yours truly leading a heritage tour of Senate House

In 1872, Napier sent Chisholm to Travancore where a museum was to be built. There he saw the Travancore style of roofing and concluded that it was “a very beautiful form of domestic art.” Even as he designed the Napier Museum in Trivandrum he began work on a General Post Office for Madras and this was to incorporate his new fascination – the Travancore roof. The GPO on First Line Beach was completed in 1884.

By this time Chisholm was a very busy man, designing jails, court houses, offices and much more. Some of the other buildings in the city that bear his stamp are the Victoria Public Hall (1887-9), the tower of the Central Station (1880s) and the main offices of P Orr & Sons. Napier had long left the city and Chisholm was to work with his successors. He became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and whenever he went home on leave, he was asked to address the Institute. Chisholm was an avid painter as well and some of his watercolours are at the RIBA while others are in the Madras Museum.

Chisholm left Madras in a huff. He had been lobbying for being made the Superintending Engineer of Madras Presidency but the Government was not keen. There were charges against him of irregularities in accounts. In 1887, he resigned and after completing some more of his private projects in Madras, he moved over to Baroda. The British architect in charge of building Lakshmi Vilas, the grand palace of the Gaekwar, was another master of the Indo-Saracenic – Major Mant. He unfortunately lacked Chisholm’s breezy confidence and obsessed by the fear that the palace would collapse he went mad and committed suicide. Chisholm stepped in to complete Lakshmi Vilas and stayed on till 1902, working on several buildings there.

Then he retired to England, where he passed away in 1915. He was largely unknown in his home country. Indeed, of his works, just two or three are outside India. One is a church in Rangoon and another is a church in London, which has recently been converted into a concert hall. But by the time of his death, his style was all the rage in the entire sub-continent. All the Raj edifices would follow the path he had laid. The construction of New Delhi was to be its grand finale, climax and apogee. But rather ironically, it also marked the end of the British Raj.

This article appeared on XS Real’s blog -http://xsreal.com/blog/?p=133

50 years of Matscience

It is rather ironic that Presidency College,the place where Matscience was born exactly 50 years ago, is in the news today for student clashes!

“So the miracle has happened,” said Professor Alladi Ramakrishnan as he rose to speak on 3rd January 1962. The event was the inauguration of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madas, better known as Matscience today. This took place at the Presidency College, the building in which several educational institutions of the city had taken birth. And declaring Matscience open was Prof S Chandrasekhar, FRS, later to become a Nobel laureate.

It had indeed been a miracle. The idea for such an institute had first come to Prof Alladi Ramakrishnan at Kyoto in Japan where at Yukawa Hall, “young Japanese physicists, the hope and pride of their country gathered together in enlightened leisure to discuss the most abstruse problems of modern physics.” Back in India, he set in motion the process of obtaining official sanction. And when that took its time, he began informally creating an atmosphere for such research at his own residence – the sprawling Ekamra Nivas, from where his father the legendary Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyar had practised his legal profession. A subsequent visit to the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, served to strengthen his resolve.

In this effort he was greatly encouraged by C Subramaniam, Minister for Finance and Education, Government of Madras. CS arranged for a meeting with Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, which took place at the Raj Bhawan on 8th October. The PM asked Ramakrishnan if he really felt that such an institute was necessary and on receiving an emphatic yes promptly agreed to be its patron. And thus Matscience was born.

In his speech Chandrasekhar characteristically decried the Indian tendency to make anything and everything bureaucratic, and hoped that Matscience would remain free of “hierarchical disease.” He hoped that the kind of atmosphere needed for those devoted to research would be obtained there. Soon visiting professorships, in the names of Neils Bohr and Srinivasa Ramanujan were instituted. The Institute also pioneered the concept of a summer school with an international faculty, the first of which was held at the TVS Guest House in Kodaikanal.

Matscience is now a national institution coming under the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India and is located in a verdant campus in Taramani. Several researchers have qualified from here. It would be relevant to point out here that this institution dedicated to mathematics is turning 50 when the 125th birth anniversary of Ramanujan is being observed all over the world.

This story appeared in The Hindu today but I am unable to trace the weblink.