|
Metro Plus
The college on College Road
IT WAS at a dinner the other night that
a former student of Women's Christian
College told me how wrong the piece
she had been reading was. College Road,
she angrily insisted, was NOT named after
the `Seththa College' (the Museum) but
after WCC. Now at a safe distance, I can
say the road got its name from neither
institution, but from a venerable one long
forgotten.
What is now the campus of the
Directorate of Public Instruction was once
the home of the College of Fort St.
George. Established in 1812, long before
the Museum and WCC, the College was
founded to train British civilians, just out
of the British Isles, in the vernaculars. I
am not sure whether it was founded
before Haileybury, the East India
Company's college, but it certainly was
closed down in 1854 when it was felt that
a Board of Examiners testing the
Haileybury graduates would suffice. During
its brief life of 42 years, however, the
College of Fort St. George's Board did
yeoman service in "pursuing in depth"
Dravidian language studies.
The College's students, the munshis and
other scholars subsidised by the Board
teamed together with the institution's
press and publishing house to bring out
an imperishable body of work on the
Dravidian languages. Men such as Charles
Brown, the Telugu scholar, and a host of
others made an immense contribution to
the South Indian languages. Miron
Winslow's Tamil dictionary,
A.D.Campbell's Telugu grammar, T.C.
Morris' Telugu dictionary, M.C. Kerrel's
Kanarese grammar, Reeve's Kannada
dictionary and C.M. Whish's Malayalam
grammar and dictionary were only a few
of the publications the College brought
out.
By getting them into print, the College
made available to a larger audience what
had hitherto been oral traditions or palmleaf
inscriptions. Father W. Beschi's `Low
Tamil' Grammar was probably the
College's first publication and was
followed by A Brief Exposition of Tamil by
Chidambaram Pandaram, the head Tamil
Master of the College, and Andhra Dipika,
a Telugu dictionary by Mummudi
Venkayya of Masulipatam, the copyright of
which was acquired by 1000 pagodas
(about Rs.25,000 in today's money).
I don't know whether the College's
buildings still survive, but I'd visited one
some years ago, a splendid, red brick
building that once housed the CARE
offices and then was occupied by some
wing of the Education Department. The
College's two splendid entrances, however,
still stand tall _ the one on a College
Road curve just before the Pantheon Road
junction better noticed and the other, little
known and hardly noticed by anyone, on
the Cooum bank. The latter, the more
striking construction, was the gateway
through which the Governor entered the
Convocations; he would be rowed up the
Cooum from the fort and then make his
entrance in state through this magnificent
gateway, truly a heritage landmark, at least
to the memory of the Cooum being
rowable!
The College of Fort St. George and the
Madras Literary Society, founded as India's
first subscription library, the same year as
the College, both shared a library and
museum. The books were tended by the
Library Society, but its museum collection
was in 1851 handed over to the
Government Museum founded that year
and which began functioning on the first
floor of the College. With Literary Society
and Museum and College all sharing space
here, it was obvious the College was
looking at an impending end to what had
been a short but glorious era focussed on
linguistics. Certainly, that era deserved
remembrance in the road name that still
survives, but it's a pity the origins of the
name are attributed to other surviving
institutions.
S. MUTHIAH
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
|
