Madras miscellany

A Japanese look at Georgetown

THE JAPANESE were back in town recently, for their third visit in three years. And they'll be back next year and possibly in 2002, as part of a five-year study project a group of architecture students of Chiba University, near Tokyo, is undertaking. At the end of it all, they would have made the most complete architectural and town-planning study of Georgetown ever, I believe. But their leader, Dr. Masao Ando, is much more modest about it: "I don't know whether you'll say that after you see a copy of the report I'll send you," he self-effacingly responded.

Over these years, the Chiba students have been listing every building in Georgetown and Park Town, preparing detailed maps with this information, selecting about 100 buildings that might be considered heritage buildings, drawing detailed plans of them accompanied by photographs with a view to suggesting how they could be restored and conserved, videographing the whole area and studying how the 'town' grew and what the best way would be to preserve it as a vibrantly alive heritage precinct. Can anyone think of any work on any part of Madras that has been more comprehensive than this?

Ando tells me that this project is only one part of a major one which is looking at colonial architectural development in three countries in Asia. The project is drawing to a close in 2002 and Ando is already looking at what his students should be doing next. Having heard that the Railways in India had set up a heritage group and that each of the zonal railways had a cell looking into the preservation of the beats of the vast amount of heritage constructions the Railways owns in each zone, Ando wonders whether it would be possible to work with the Southern Railways on their next project. That would be nice, but I suppose the Railways can be as bureaucratic as any other Government agency. Ando, however, is as always hopeful; he's been the eternal optimist from the time I first met him in 1998.

This time he arrived with a surprise. Open the box, he urged me, and in it were two lovely little porcelain sauce bowls, the white of both decorated with ribbon-like vertical stripes in varying colours. "Do they tell you something?" he excitedly asked and all I could wonder was whether they were a reminder of that splendid Japanese lunch he had ordered for us at the 'Dahlia' during his last visit. "No," he laughed, "they are a popular design found on kimonos." The puzzle appeared to be getting even more complex. Seeing my puzzled look, out he came with the answer he was bursting to give me; "They're the designs that used to be found on the cloth the Portuguese and Dutch brought to Japan from Machilipatnam, Pulicat and Nagapattinam in the 16th and 17th Centuries. You call the cloth Madras Checks or Madras Handkerchiefs, I think. We still call the design San Thome stripes!"

Now that's showing real sensitivity in picking a gift!

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With Chisholm in Chepauk

I WONDER how many spotted the unfortunate pictorial lapse in this column on October 2. It was the P.W.D. building that was featured and NOT Chepauk Palace. But with Chepauk Palace hardly visible nowadays, certainly hidden from the Marina and in the process of getting hidden from the Chepauk end, it was a mistake waiting to happen. The silver lining was that it is nevertheless located in a part of what was the Chepauk Palace grounds and that it was designed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm.

When Mohammed Ali, Nawab of the Carnatic, was refused permission to build his palace in Fort St. George, it was suggested to him that he build it not far from the Fort's guns. And so Chepauk Palace was built. Work on it was completed in 1768. By 1770, its 117 acres stretched from Pycroft's Road to the Cooum and from the beach, which in those days reached upto what is now Kamaraj Salai, to Bell's Road. Much of Chisholm's early work, which he came from Calcutta to supervise and after which he stayed on, was raised in this campus after it had been bought by the Government of Madras in auction in 1859 for Rs. 5,80,000. The Nawabs had been ou ousted from the premises by the Government in 1855 on specious grounds and the auction was a lot of hogwash.

Be that as it may, it was around 1866-67 that Chisholm raised that symbol of imperialism in the palace grounds, that tower linking the two halves of the palace. To this day I'm still confused about which half is the Khalsa Mahal and which the Humayun Mahal and Darbar Hall, all descriptions proving beyond my interpretation. But that's by the by. To get back to Chisholm at Chepauk, around the same time as the tower, he helped design the P.W.D. building that set this item off. He then started work on the two buildings whose designs not only won him prizes in open competition but also brought him to Madras. Work on the Presidency College building was begun in 1867 and completed in 1870. And work on his masterpiece, Senate House, started in 1874 and was completed in 1879. In between, he did something less Indo-Saracenic; in 1866, he designed the first pavilion for the Madras Cricket Club! When a cyclone wrecked it in 1888, Henry Irwin, in 1891, designed the famous old pavilion that survived till the 1980s as a cricketing landmark.

Chisholm built many more landmarks in Madras in the years that followed, but that complex of buildings around Chepauk Palace will always remain a memorial to his genius. And what a memorial they must have been when they formed a regal Indo-Saracenic cluster whose view was unimpeded by all the hotchpotch of buildings that have come up around them and hide the view!

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The forgotten Americans

BUMPED INTO an old friend the other day who said he was surprised that I'd missed out on a couple of important American connections with Madras (September 4) though I had often enough drawn attention to them elsewhere. When I mentioned that, in at least two of the cases, I had thought that the connections with the institutions were well known, he retorted, "But who remembers the people?"

Certainly I doubt anyone remembers the go-getting David McConaughy who arrived in Madras in January 1890 and got the YMCA going here within a month of his arrival. A year later he had, as General Secretary, helped found in Madras the National Council of YMCAs in India. And in 1895 he got started the work on the YMCA's handsome Jaipuri style building on what was then Esplanade Road (now NSC Bose Road). Inaugurated in 1900, it owed much to another American contribution, $40,000 from the Postmaster General of the US, John Wanamaker.

A YWCA-type organisation was organised by Lillie McConaughy the same year her husband established the YMCA. This became the YWCA in 1892 and owed its spectacular growth, particularly its acquisition of property, to another American, Agnes Gale Hill, who came out as its Secretary in 1894 and went on to become the National General Secretary, after her sister Mary succeeded her in Madras.

Women's Christian College also has an American link, the Mount Holyoke College, Massachusettes, one a strong one from WCC's beginnings in 1915, thanks to its first principal Dr. Eleanor McDougall. Apart from her 22-year contribution to the College, another significant one was by John D Rockefeller, who made it possible for the College to buy in 1916 Doveton House, still the College's main office, and its 11 acres of gardens for Rs. 63,000.

Significant in a different way was the contribution by Michael Lockwood, Professor of Philosophy at Madras Christian College till he retired a couple of years ago. His father taught at Madurai's American College, but Michael Lockwood's interest was and continues to be Mamallapuram.

The book he's written on the ancient Pallava port and open air museum of sculpture clearly show he's one of the greatest lay authorities on Mamallapuram.

There could well be other American contributions too, apart from those mentioned in these columns.

Perhaps some day someone will get around to writing a book about them.

S. MUTHIAH

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