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Another old building to go?
THE OLD bungalow on what is now called Sundaram Avenue, alongside Rani Seethai Hall, is the Gramophone Company of India's HMV Recording Studio, reached by a steep zigzagging stairway on the side. A handsomely pillared foyer in it leads to the offices of the South India Film Chamber of Commerce, born in 1939 incorporating the Madras Film League founded in 1929. The building once housed the Film Institute and the South Indian Film Federation. Soon, this rather striking building, what must have once been a garden house — known by what name I know not — is to vanish and a multi-storey building, no doubt, is to take its place.
The inaugural function of the Chamber, whose first home was on Wood's Road, was chaired by Pammal Sambandam Mudaliar and its first president was the then Mayor of Madras, S. Sathyamurthy, who long before the Dravidian Movement's message-bearers, saw the potential of the film as a bearer of messages that would woo the masses. It was the subsequent efforts of film stalwarts such as K. Subramanyam, B. Nagi Reddy, Al. Srinivasan and T. R. Sundaram that enabled the Chamber to get larger office space in the HMV premises.
The Chamber felt the need for a preview theatre in 1943, but for all the industry's growth, it could not raise the necessary funds.
It was the drive of T. R. Sundaram of Modern Theatres, Salem that helped in finding the money necessary to buy the neighbouring plot and build the theatre, which finally opened its doors in 1959, 16 years after it was first mooted. In recognition of Sundaram's contribution, the once private road on which the theatre and Chamber were located was named Sundaram Avenue.
Among the Chamber's major contributions to the film industry are the roles it played in pushing the idea of an All-India Film Federation to regulate the industry nationally and care for its interests, and in representing the need for a Central Board of Film Censors. Both were created in 1951.
Postscript: Ramakrishnan of Cre-A Publishers tells me that he still has a few copies of Theodore Baskaran's splendid book, The Message-Bearers (Miscellany, December 24, 2001).
S.MUTHAIAH
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