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A memorial at The Mount
REACTING TO my mention this past Monday of a monument to William Lambton at St. Thomas' Mount, a veteran from the Geological Survey of India called me up to remind me that The Mount is where another memorial already stands, recalling another pillar of the Raj. And this commemorative monument too was raised long after Independence, he added. Then, as though gently upbraiding me, he softly concluded, ``We do occasionally remember.''
The memorial I was reminded about (see pictures) was one I did not discover till around five years ago, despite numerous trips over the last three decades to The Mount to show guests the serene little Portuguese chapel atop the hill, said to have been built on the site where Doubting Thomas, the Apostle of India, was martyred in 72 A.D.
Erected by the Geological Survey of India in as far back as 1975, the monument proclaims the commemoration of `Charnockite,' the name proposed by Sir Thomas Holland for ``the rocks at St. Thomas' Mount''. The granite had till then and much later been called Pallavaram gneiss, but was given its current name 200 years after it was shipped to Calcutta and used for the building of the tomb of Job Charnock, who founded that city 50 years after Madras.
Holland, who was head of the GSI at the time, read a paper at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1893 on `The Petrology of Job Charnock's Tombstone.' He concluded by saying, ``As this is a new type of rock.... I would suggest for it the name of Charnockite, in honour of the founder of Calcutta, who was the unconscious means of bringing, perhaps, the first specimen of this interesting rock to our capital.'' That was the first use of the term `Charnockite' — on the 200th anniversary of Charnock's death. Also to be noted is that it was two years after Charnock died that the mausoleum he had envisaged as a family vault was erected. All of which makes me wonder why the memorial stone on The Mount was raised in 1975; what anniversary does that date mark, or was the monument just an afterthought, when the GSI built a new regional office nearby?
Charnock of Calcutta has a place in Madras history too. Arriving in Madras in 1656, he headed straight for Bengal where he was under orders to serve in Cossim Bazar. He later served in Patna and then, in 1686, became the Agent of the Company in Bengal. Ousted by the Mughal satraps in 1689, Charnock fled to Madras, where Governor Elihu Yale gave him refuge for 18 months, then men, money and material to return to Bengal and take those first steps that led to the founding of Calcutta in 1690.
While in Patna, Charnock had taken as his `wife' an Indian woman — romance has it that in true superhero style, he went in with guns blazing and rescued her from the pyre of her late husband before the fires consumed her. She, in time, bore him three daughters. He was true to her, romantic legend again has it, till he died, long after she had passed on; he would every year on her death anniversary, it is also narrated, sacrifice a cock at her tomb, now part of the Charnock mausoleum.
More authenticated is the fact that their three daughters were baptised in St. Mary's in the Fort in Madras. Mary, Elizabeth and Catherine — all of whom grew up to marry pillars of the John Company Establishment — were baptised in a font of black Pallavaram granite that had been in use in St. Mary's since 1680. Did that gleaming font, still to be seen in the Church, have anything to do with Charnock's interest in that stone from Pallavaram that shone brighter when polished than even the black-painted granite pillars that now mar the Secretariat?
An excellent little anthology about Job Charnock was compiled by P.Thankappan Nair, that indefatigable chronicler of Calcutta, in 1977. Published by an obscure little Calcutta publishing house, neither the book nor Charnock got the attention they deserved. It's still not too late for a bigger publisher to take another look at the book and do justice to it.
Which leads me to my question of the week: Why are the best known chroniclers of Bombay (Gillian Tindall), Calcutta (Thankappan Nair), Delhi (William Dalrymple) and Madras (your columnist) all writers whose roots are not in the respective cities, even if a couple of them did settle in them in later years? Don't the people OF a city care for THEIR city enough?
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