Madras Miscellany

S. Muthiah

Through library corridors

IT WAS yet another of those monthly meetings of the Heritage Committee convened by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority. And with the Heritage Regulations still to become part of the CMDA's rules after nearly three years of talking about them and their alternative, a Heritage Act, we had enough time on our hands to talk of cabbages and kings while sipping coffee and nibbling at biscuits.

With a representative of the Archaeological Survey of India present, the talk turned to what was happening to the restoration of the Connemara Library with its magnificently ornate reading room, created by Henry Irwin.

Progress was being made, we were assured, but the usual snags bugging any government effort were slowing it down, it was added. The person supervising the project had been transferred and a replacement was awaited. Timber was in short supply. It had to be procured from the Forest Department and no one else, it was pointed out - and that was proving a slow process.

But, plenty of imported timber of better quality is freely available in the open market, it was pointed out by one of the listeners - or why not ask Veerappan, suggested the irreverent soul that this writer is. Despite all this, it seemed likely that you will see, sometime next year at the Connemara Library, an interior restored to its former splendour.

That once-splendid interior is the subject of the striking black and white photograph that accompanies this piece. It is a picture by Delhi-based Cyrille Desombre, who 'shot' the majority of the 40 pictures of the "libraries of India" featured in a slim, beautifully produced book, Gum and Calico, sponsored by the Alliance Francaise. The title is derived from the words of R.K. Narayan, in his piece 'On Libraries' that appeared in The Hindu in September 1951. They read, "The faint aroma of gum and calico that hangs about a library is as the fragrance of incense to me."

I wonder 50 years later, how many feel the same way about libraries; the Internet, many seem convinced, provides all the answers a person needs to know to get on in the world.

A brief history of Tamil book publishing by A.R. Venkatachalapathy, a scholar-historian, and a piece on printing and the spirit of Calcutta by Nikhil Sarkar, are included in the volume and succintly tell the story of how printing and publishing developed mainly on the Coromandel Coast first, and in and around Calcutta, later, after it had withered where it had put down roots, on the Konkan and Malabar coasts.

The significant Tamil role in printing and publishing calls for greater attention to be paid to the libraries in our State - not leave them virtually derelict for years on end, as we had done the Connemara till the decision to restore it was taken a couple of decades ago.

Passion for information

SOMEWHERE UP there, S.N. Kumar will be chuckling once more over this spiel of mine about the Madras Book Club. About how it was founded by a few book lovers a dozen or so years ago who met at the canteens of a couple of publishers. About how it was no wonder that the 'membership' and audience at meetings dwindled to just the three or four of us. How Kumar talked the Connemara Hotel into helping support an interest in culture and literature. And how the Madras Book Club has gone from strength to strength over the Connemara tea, its roots now sunk deep thanks to its having no office-bearers, no elections, no letterheads and only gentle reminders for nominal nourishment. I can still remember him asking me at the end of every meeting, "How many more ways can you tell that story?"

Sadly, he'll be there no more to hear the new versions in person. But I'm sure his spirit will be there in whichever Connemara hall that story is told or where his even greater love, the S. Ranganathan Centre for Information Studies, holds it meetings.

The active patron of the Centre was C. Subramaniam, who passed away just a couple of weeks before Kumar. The centre was an offshoot of the Madras Library Association, which had been nurtured by Susheela Kumar, the first librarian of the British Council in Madras which Kumar joined a year after her, as Education Officer. The Council got a bargain when they decided to marry, for every programme it put on could always be sure of two hands when one was expected to cope as best he could.

What constantly amazed me was the passion which C.S., Susheela and Kumar brought to the new field of Information Studies. Not for them the old world library, even if they and most of the other members of the Centre, belonged to that world.

They were constantly organising lectures and other programmes to provide windows on the new era of information access and slowly they got the membership to view that future with a more open mind. I think I'm the only one they failed to convert. But in the end they got me to at least listen in on a couple of occasions. And the happiest man to spot this Philistine was Kumar.

Kumar was the nuts and bolts man of the Ranganathan Centre and the Madras Book Club, whose revival was entirely due to him, for both of which he helped organise some of their best programmes.

Contacting speakers, informing members and guests, making arrangements for meetings, were all Kumar's contributions to both the organisations - and both will miss that contribution greatly now. But we'll miss Kumar's softly spoken anecdotes more, his gentle but pointed comments and that perpetual smile broken so frequently by a chuckle.

Cholamandalam to Sri Lanka

BUMPING INTO film historian Randor Guy the other day, I caught up with all the news about the Cholamandalam Film Festival he had recently curated in Sri Lanka, where the seven Tamil 'golden oldies' he had taken to Colombo and Kandy, had run to packed houses throughout a festival that held three shows a day. The theme of the festival was 'Building Bridges' and if the mixed Tamil and Sinhalese crowds were anything to go by, bridge- building was indeed a success, from all reports.

The audiences were a reflection of the mixed crowds that would form serpentine queues for every Tamil film screened in Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known, in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties.

I remember as a schoolboy seeing what seemed like a queue that lasted a year and more outside the Elphinstone Theatre in Colombo. "Chinthamani", made in 1937 with Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, K. Aswathamma and Serukalathur Sama and with music by Papanasam Sivan, was the hit that drew such crowds as had never before been seen for a film in Ceylon. Sixty years later, Randor Guy tells me, the songs of "Chinthamani", the film that 'made ' Thyagaraja Bhagavthar, still influence Sinhala film music not infrequently.

The other films shown at the festival were "Mangamma Sabatham", "Rajakumari", "Chandralekha", "Velaikari", "Apoorva Sahodarargal" and "Manthiri Kumari". I was rather struck by the fact that there were NO "Sivaji" Ganesan and Gemini Ganesh starrers at the festival - and both had not only been popular in Ceylon but were, in a view once expressed by Randor Guy, two parts of "the Triumvirate of Tamil Cinema in the Fifties and Sixties", the third, of course, being M.G. Ramachandran. Gemini Ganesh, who made over 200 films during his 56-year career, was popularly known as 'Kadhal Mannan' (King of Love), yet his first major role was as a villain in "Thai Ullam" in 1952. From villain to hearthrob was a meteoric rise for the man who celebrated his 80th birthday as December dawned.

Another who attended the festival from Madras, was 76-year 'young' Anthony Bhaskar Raj (A.B. Raj), the well-known Malayalam film-maker who in the Fifties, directed many of the first Sinhalese films to be made. He left Sri Lanka in the Sixties, but, narrates Randor Guy, he never forgot his Sinhalese and stunned the crowds at the Festival by speaking to them in Sinhala, keeping them in good humour with his wit and recall of those early days.

It was in 1952 that he made his first film in the Island, "Banda Comes to Town", 'shooting' in the only studio Ceylon boasted at the time, where it was always a fight for time and space, I recall, with several film-makers clamouring for both.

Raj, however, would not have recognised the Elphinstone Theatre when he went back, so run down as it was in his time after the crowds, it always attracted for Tamil films, left it rather the worse for wear.

It was taken over by the State and renovated a few years ago , a splendid job of conservation done to make it one of the Government's premier halls used for a variety of the arts, something that needs to be done to our Town Hall (Victoria Public Hall).

The Elphinstone was built by J.F. Madan's of Calcutta who had, in 1914, taken over one of the first cinemas in Madras and renamed it the Elphinstone; this was in the Misquith Building on Mount Road, round the corner from Curzon & Co. In 1932, Madan's built, across the way from it, Madras's posh cinema, the New Elphinstone, sadly now no more. But in their time, the Elphinstones got the best films and the biggest crowds.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Bharati, a class apart
Next     : Between you & me