History of the City

Over the past week, I have really grown in stature. That is to say, I have been growing fat on home food and the contents of our well-stocked refrigerator. So the Madras Day celebrations that I wrote about in my last post represented a good way for me to locomote a little and use some of that stored energy.

I called a friend from college (who’s relaxing at home and getting ready to embark on research on some extremely complex area of physics), and we were off to Fort St. George, where it all began 369 years ago (see previous post). We followed the signs to the Madras Day exhibition of maps, coins and old photographs and arrived at the Clive House, where Robert Clive had stayed when he was in Madras. (At this point we were still busy chatting about old times and the future – we hadn’t met for a very long time – and so it was only when we saw one of the labelled photographs in the exhibition that we actually consciously noted that this was Clive House!)

The exhibition at Clive House

We walked up one flight of broad wooden stairs and arrived at a large pillared hall, where a sizable crowd was milling around. We began to go around the exhibits – and in typical tourist fashion, spent a lot of time viewing the first few exhibits and progressively less time on the later ones. There were a number of prints of old black and white Madras photographs – including ones of Central Station (with a tram outside sporting an ad for Ovaltine) and Egmore Station. Which brings us to a nice anecdote. 

The photograph of Egmore station had a caption that mentioned that it was opened in 1908. A gentleman was arguing with his friend in Tamil about how there could possibly be a Standard (a taxi) standing outside the station in 1908, until he was cheerfully reminded by my friend and another member of his group that nobody had claimed that the photograph itself had been taken in 1908. Whereupon he cheerfully guffawed. That somehow signified the spirit of the event: people came in good numbers and with a healthy dose of curiosity and humour to educate themselves about their city’s history.

Anyway, to get on with my description. There were several maps dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the languages of the many colonial powers of the day, showing Madras and South India in general. My friend noticed that there was no mention of any civilisation south of the Adyar river in those maps, indicating Adyar’s (the locality) more recent vintage. There were several pictures: Mount Road in the late nineteenth century, unrecognisably relaxed and uncrowded, a balloon saying ‘8 anna sale’; Mowbray’s Road when it seemed little more than a jungle track; Presidency College and other beachfront buildings. There were also ancient letters written in beautiful handwriting, English and Tamil – one of them bore a stamp whose value was printed in English and Urdu.

We emerged from the exhibition, and noticed the staircase once again. There was a little architectural idiosyncrasy that was quite intriguing; between the floor we were on and the next one, there was a door at an intermediate level, and it had its own little staircase leading up to the higher floor. How, my sister asked later when I mentioned this to her, did one get to the intermediate level then? Somehow that didn’t occur to us.

It is probably pertinent to mention here that the interior of Fort St. George is like a little model town. Barracks, a government house, Clive House, an army warehouse, and even named streets. There is also a church, probably the anchor of the British community that stayed in the fort, and certainly the keeper of many of its records. Thither did we proceed.

St. Mary’s Church

St. Mary’s Church has a simple, solid structure; a tower and a spire (now under renovation), and an attached hall. In what seems like a synthesis of Indian sensibilities with British tradition, visitors to the church leave their footwear outside before proceeding to the calm interior. Near the entrance, there are photographs from visits of British royalty to the Church – Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1961, Prince Charles in the 1980s and Prince Edward in the late 1990s, booklets about the history of the church, and envelopes bearing an Indian stamp issued on the tricentenary of the Church, which began functioning in 1680.

At the back is a glass display case with various records from the history of the Church. A book of baptisms stood open at the pages for January and February of a year in the early nineteenth century. There was also one very interesting 1852 letter from Sir Vansittart Stonehouse, Accountant General, to the Reverend Dr. W. Powell, Chaplain of Saint Mary’s. Aside of the beautiful handwriting (it is indeed fascinating that every literate person in those days seems to have been blessed with one), it is the spelling of a particular word that stood out. For the Accountant General writes at the end of his letter, “I have the honor to be…” (italics mine). Elsewhere in the letter too, the word in this or other forms (like ‘honourable’) occurs without the ‘u’, as it does now in American English. And yet there is no reason to believe that Sir Vansittart was American. Perhaps, then, there was some sort of shift in spellings over the years within British English itself.

Fort Museum

We proceeded to walk to Fort Museum, mulled over the fact that we were paying five rupees apiece for tickets while non-Indians would pay two dollars, and made a relatively quick tour of the exhibits. There were army uniforms (imagine the poor soldiers who had to wear those thick woollen suits in the Madras heat – no matter that it may have been milder in those days), chinaware, a huge statue of Lord Cornwallis (‘Karanvalis Pirabu’ said the Tamil inscription), large portraits of assorted Kings, Queens and Nawabs (or ‘Nabobs’) as they were then called, and a large number of engravings and sketches of scenes from Madras and other parts of South India during the Raj, and original letters written by Robert Clive, written at a time when English seems to have required the first letters of nouns to be capitalised. The portraits, among other things, show a marked improvement with time in matters of sartorial elegance on the part of the subjects (starting with Newton-style long, curly wigs in the seventeenth century, progressing to less ostentatious wigs in the eighteenth, and finally arriving at the no-wigs-required policy of the twentieth century), while some of the engravings showed a penchant for the exotic in terms of their atmospheric elements – an elephant or a snake in the foreground, mountains in the background. 

I am sure there must be a lot more to Fort St. George than what we saw, and perhaps we will be able to go on one of the Heritage Walks this coming weekend to learn more. For the moment, I am amazed at my laziness in never having visited the place before (as far as I can remember), and have come away with a renewed awareness of how little I know about my hometown. Perhaps I will get to write more about it in the near future.