Madras Miscellany

Garden atop a historic wall

FOR YEARS now, it has been an open-air toilet and a dumping ground for waste. I was therefore delighted to hear recently that Maadi Poonga, on Ibrahim Saheb Street at the north end of George Town, had once again been greened and made the attractive terrace garden it had been created in 1957.

While this might be yet another step towards making Madras 'Singara Chennai', not noticed at all is that this has also been symbolic restoration of one of the city's major heritage monuments - an Archaeological Survey of India-protected site that the Survey has paid no attention to at all in the recent years!

The significance of the garden is that it is the longest stretch left of what was built as the 'Black Town Wall' to protect the two pettais of Chennapatnam (now George Town) that developed north of Fort St. George and its protective Esplanade. With the Fort to the south and the sea to the east, the 3-1/2 mile long wall was built to protect the north and west of Madras and Chennai patnams.

Conceived by the company's chief engineer, John Call, it was built by Paul Benfield, who resigned his post as Call's assistant in 1769 to tender for the work and completed most of it by the end of 1770. He was the sole bidder and had bid about what was around Rs. 5,00,000 at the time.

The ramparts had eight bastions, about 300 yards apart, in the north, and eight on the west which were aligned along what is called Wall Tax Road in memory of the company's decision to tax the citizens for the work on the west wall. A citizen's protest saw the Government give up its collection scheme. The north-east bastion was developed in the 19th Century as Clive Battery, sadly demolished a few years ago.

The entrance leading to Maadi Poonga was once called Pully Gate. To its east, where Clive Battery came up, was Boatmen's Gate and to its west were Trivatore Gate and Ennore Gate, with Elephant Gate, Chuckler's Gate and Hospital Gate in the west wall. A look at the thickness of the wall still shows how solidly the ramparts and bastions were built.

Writing in the early 20th Century, Col. H. D. Love, a Madras historian and an early, and for long, principal of the Madras Engineering College, said, "The western face (of the great work) was demolished about the middle of the 19th Century, but portions of some of the bastions and curtains in the north front still remain, to testify to the excellence of Benfield's materials and workmanship." A century later, they are still worthy testimony and deserving of grater care - particularly by the ASI - than mere cosmetic touches.

An architect's Madras mark

IT WAS just a name dropped in passing in the midst of a rather lengthy news report recently, but it did bring back memories of a school of architecture whose beginnings I had witnessed, but whose flowering I was to see only after Geoffrey Bawa became an international name.

I saw his early homes and hotels, which revived traditional Sri Lankan architecture, with its Chera, Chola, Pandya, Portuguese and Dutch influences - sloping curved-tile roofs, lots of woodwork, courtyards, verandahs etc. - but his finest work was to be the Sri Lankan Legislature and Secretariat just outside Colombo. That made him an international figure. Now he is in the news because of a controversy surrounding the Presidential Palace he has designed and which is coming up neighbouring the Parliament House. This too is predicted to be a distinctive building fit to figure in the Thames and Hudson coffee table book, 'Geoffrey Bawa', which features Bawa's best and his thoughts.

But nowhere near this class is the work he did on the Connemara in Madras c. 1970. Its great staircase and the facing on the first landing were the only noteworthy features of that work. The near 7-foot tall Bawa with a passion for Rolls Royces never could put his heart into his work in India, I remember him telling me when we used to meet at home for an evening in those days. Out of one of those evenings, however, came the name 'Kolam', and decor, for the Conemera's coffee shop of the 1970s.

Three young Madras architects of the time, however, have left a greater Bawa impress in Madras than their mentor. Narasimhan, who had worked with Bawa in Colombo, was responsible for the Fisherman's Cove, and its cottages, verandahs etc. were all typical Bawa! Its main block reflects the Bentota Resort Hotel near Bawa's home about 35 km south of Colombo. This work of the late 1960s when Sri Lanka's tourism growth began, was one of Bawa's pioneering creations in the ethnic style on his return to Sri Lanka, and featured in his first major exposure in print in 1968. Jeevan and Venkat were also two young Madras architects who spent some time with Bawa and they have scores of homes in Madras reflecting the Bawa School. But the style never really caught on here, going easy as it does on ornamentation.

Long before Bentota became internationally known as a beach resort and the Taj Exotica upped its class, the Bawas of 'Brief' had made the little of Sri Lankan coastal village famous. 'Brief', the vast family estate, is best known for its hilltop mansion and gardens out of Versailles that the elder Bawa bequeathed to his beanpole sons, Major Bevis and Geoffrey. It's still a showplace.

The sainted queen

DESPITE SEVERAL visits to patients at St. Isabel's Hospital, Luz, over the years, I never gave a thought to who St. Isabel was till a recent enforced sojourn there. I even used to call her St. Isabella! Quite possibly, however, correctly, considering the history behind the name I've had time to find.

Isabel - or is it, as I'd have it, Isabella? - is apparently the Spanish form of the name Elizebeth. But this Isabel was Queen of Portugal in the 13th-14th centuries. A child-bride, she suffered gladly a profligate husband till his death in 1325 after which she entered the Holy Order of the Poor, Clares.

Throughout her married life, she was known as a woman of great compassion, particularly to the poor, the needy and, above all, the sick. Indeed, she was considered a forerunner of St. Francis of Asissi and Florence Nightingale.

It was in Portugal too that the congregation of the Franciscan Hospitaller Sisters was founded in 1871, "to do good where there is good to be done". Its first sisters to India arrived in Goa in 1886 before spreading out throughout the country. In Madras, they founded St. Isabel's in 1949, appropriately in Luz (which should rhyme with 'rus-e'). For it was a ghostly light, that to them was 'Luz', that beckoned the first Portuguese sailors to the Coromandel Coast in the first days of the 16th Century. But it as 1516 before a Portuguese priest built on this legendary site in the jungle what became known as Kaattu Kovil and is now Luz Church, the first church built on India's East Coast. Over 250 years later, philanthropist Coja Petrus Uscan gifted it its magnificent, ornate altar, created, it is said, in China.

Just behind Luz Church, to the west of it, is St. Isabel's, its growth as much due to the medical dedication of doctors like R. Madhavan, M. S. Ramakrishnan, R. S. Rajagopalan and the papal knight O.G.C. Vaz as of a committed and compassionate nursing staff like Sister Mary Mathew. For 40 years a nurse, she may, as Nursing Superintendent, be a martinet, but her dedication to patient care, discipline and cleanliness have made St. Isabel's what it is.

S. Muthiah

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