JOIN USAmid continuity & change
A single rose hardly makes a garden. As the blue screen before the mind’s eye livened, juxtaposing four spatially proximate but fleeting images, it was some comfort for collective memory.
It is 7 pm on a stop-clock on frame one. The mellowed, venerable bungalow on Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan Salai, housing the famous New Woodlands Hotel, lights up to a garrulous variety of guests.
People are already waiting in queue for its sofa-like seats in the midst of a rishi’s kutir-like ambience. From the metaphysics of rebirth and the latest matrimonial hits to fuzzy family prattle, the young and the old happily find their wavelengths, just as their salwar-kameez and jeans do not dilute the impressiveness of traditional dhoti and gleaming Kancheepuram silks.
Founded by the legendary K Krishna Rao, who set up the first ‘Udupi hotel’ in Chennai on arterial Mount Road (now Anna Salai) in the mid-1920’s, synonymous with quality from day one, old-timers say that it was on the lawns of Woodlands – later New Woodlands — that Congress leader Rajaji hosted tea to celebrate India’s birth to freedom in 1947.
Offering a variety of North and South Indian cuisines, its hotelwares are, interestingly, sourced from S Selladurai Nadar, a merchant from a well accomplished community by that name, who may have a tip or two in retailing for Walmart. A budget tourists’ paradise, Woodlands, now a three-star hotel, keeps alive Krishna Rao’s legend.
Dart another 200 m west, your soul has already jumped the gastronomical barrier. Sway into another world, the Music Academy here, as this mother of classicism gets ready for another glorious December Season. In its hallowed precincts where many legendary musicians from ‘Tiger’ Varadachari to M S Subbulakshmi have been ambassadors of the divine, the best of classical Indian music and dance vie for God’s infinity.
Diversities galore
Waft out of its musical clime, cross the road under one of Chennai’s best flyovers that even the irrepressible Jayalalithaa cannot fault, you would run into a cornerstone another 200 meters away.
A plaque there announces that it was once Tilak Bhavan, where Mahatma Gandhi first met Rajaji and spent the restless historic night of March 18, 1919, “when the sad tidings of the (British) passing the humiliating Rowlatt Bills enveloped him.” It was there the idea of an all-India hartal to protest the Rowlatt Act dawned on Gandhiji in a dream-like consciousness. Now the place has given way to a five-star hotel, but still remains a hallowed ground for satyagrahis.
And then the fourth frame crosses past, as a slice of post-independent history manifests on the quiet streets of Gopalapuram, right behind the main road. A quaint Lord Krishna Temple in the heart of the city diagonally faces the street-side house of the DMK patriarch, M Karunanidhi, reminiscent of an agrahara in a typical Thanjavur village.
The atheist politician may not care for prayers. But as he gets into his car, the rationalist leader reflexively ducks his head at the sight of the Venugopala Krishna deity. “Are you silently thanking God daily?” he was once teasingly asked. “Yes, I daily thank my personal physician, Dr Gopal,” Karunanidhi quipped, turning to his accompanying doctor by that name.
These are not just images, but the quintessential warp and woof that weaves any contemporary sociology of Chennai. They are windows to how cities are as organic as their people. No wonder, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of 20th century’s greatest thinkers, likened language to an ancient city.
“A maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods, and this, surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs, with straight regular streets and uniform houses,” as he put it. The more you walk through it, the more the diversity.
Wittgenstein used this analogy to show how a language is as incomplete as a city, dancing to the vicissitudes of time, the fortunes of a few and the toil of the many. But, as I tossed this metaphor to my friend-teacher while in Calcutta recently, its ancientness was hardly embraced with vigour.
“It (Calcutta) is now more a dilapidated city,” was his smiling crystalline reply to convey that one never knew when a building would crumble. And property development is stymied by layers of sentiments and litigation. “Oh! How succinctly a city’s past and present is bridged?” I mused. It lingered for several days as one rustled through the ethnography of modern Chennai.
Looking back
Founded on August 22, 1639, Madras, that is now Chennai, then began its tryst with destiny. Francis Day, a Captain of the English East India Company, looking for a better trading post along India’s East coast, was granted some privileges by Venkatappa Nayaka, a Noble under the fugitive Vijayanagara ruler of Chandragiri and controlling this region then known as Madrasapatnam, ‘for trading and fortifying’. A new history began to unfold.
As documents in the Fort Museum inside Fort St George — the seat of Government here for over 350 years now until the new State Assembly-cum-Secretariat complex on arterial Anna Salai gets fully functional — reveal, a long romantic, but tough journey of the British from London to Madras had many twists and turns to finally make it the place where the Raj all began.
Ironically, after the East India Company was given a royal charter to travel to the east on December 31, 1600, their first ship anchored in Indian waters at Surat on August 24, 1608. They also built their first factory there by 1612. But the high quality painted clothe and cotton fabrics — a craze across Europe those days — in which the company was keen on trading, was being made in the present day Andhra Pradesh and northern coast of Tamil Nadu. Hence, the Company was forced to look to India’s east coast.
Moving first to what the documents say was a ‘fugitive lodgement’ near modern Nizamapatnam, and then to Masulipatnam along the east coast, the British traders, to their grave discomfort, found the Dutch poaching their territory. So Francis Day began to sail south in search of calmer waters, with the backing of Andrew Cogan, who was then the Company’s agent at Masulipatnam.
That was how the duo zeroed in on Madrasapatnam (later Madras) as they landed here with about 50 early settlers. “They were unlikely to have realised that the voyage is going to be remembered in history, as it not only laid the foundation for the mega-city of Madras (now Chennai), but also for a great empire,” records a document at the Fort Museum.
New identity
The shifting of the Company’s trading post itself and the construction of the fort here were mired in controversy. But, with the inception of the fort, their trade flourished. New support structures, including the first Army base that would later play a big role in the Company’s territorial consolidation in the south, blossomed.
The Saint Mary’s Church, built in 1680 and which still is the jewel of Fort St George, is the oldest surviving Anglican Church outside England. At the other end, under the governorship of Elihu Yale, after whom the world renowned Yale University was named in the US later, the Corporation of Madras, the first institution of its kind in India, was inaugurated in 1688.
As years rolled by, Madras, as the Company’s pivotal base, had firmly come to stay. From then, several educational and scientific institutions began to be established in Madras that contributed to “shape the institutions of Modern India,” notes another exhibit at the Fort St George Museum.
With so much history behind it, Madras then heralded a theatre of politics, art, culture et al for a new generation seeking newer avenues.
This dynamics was anchored in a positive idea of Indian self-esteem and Nationalist ethos, shaped by English education and self-rule ideals. Yet, for all the impact of the rationalist ideology of the ‘Dravidian Movement’ and the cynicism of post-modernist Tamil writers, an eased fidelity and respect for tradition on the one hand, and a measured flexibility in accepting changes on the other, continue to be the hallmark of Chennai’s life-world.
But as time moves on, the obverse and seamy side of Chennai are on the ascendant — be it architecture, housing, music, fine arts or lifestyle — contesting its identity even if it never really radically breaks with its past.
From the Pallava-style Sri Parthasarathy Temple, one of the fine survivors of an early architectural style, Chennai has a whole range of it, including the Greek style with big pillars, to the finest specimens of the Indo-Saracenic (mix of the Hindu, Islamic and Gothic revival styles) that dominated the British colonial period with most public buildings designed in that style, says the diligent culture historian V Sriram.
The ‘art deco buildings’ reflecting the modernist style in the large bungalows of old Madras is discerned from the 1930’s, he said. From the more modern smaller houses of the 1970’s, the trend radically changed in the 1990’s with pressure on urban space giving way to huge multi-storied complexes, more so as the urban sprawl moved south-westwards with the new economy IT boom, points out Sriram. “But we still don’t have a sense of history or heritage. We are totally rotten in preserving our architecture and rapidly losing what little we have,” regretted Sriram.
Composite culture
Leaf through the trends in classical or popular film music, you will notice a sparkling rainbow of talent dazzling across the sky. The relatively younger group, be it Sudha Raghunathan, Nithyashree Mahadevan, Krishna, or Gayathri Kamakoti in the Carnatic world, and an A R Rahman or Harris Jayaraj in tinsel town, all are ably adding to Chennai’s composite culture.
“They are all very smart, well informed, hard working and manage their stage very well,” reflects noted Carnatic musician and teacher, Radha Ramji, a disciple of the lot revered gurus G K Govinda Rao and Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer.
There are now many sabhas and a lot more concerts in the December Season all across the city, besides the Tamizh Isai Sangam enriching Tamil music in the Nagarathar’s (the traditional bankers community from Chettinad) inimitable style.
Chennai’s outdoors has seen a lot more opening up. “In the last 15 years there has been a sea change in our social mores, whether it is socialising on the Marina Beach, cinema theatres or in pubs and bars in up-end hotels,” says senior Tamil journalist D Sekar who keeps track of culture trends. “Young couples dating is the in thing while pubs buzz with more women these days,” says Sekar, adding, everything from pulp fiction, biking and tattooing to sporting bindis has changed.
“Girls should have freedom, but we should avoid aping the west; our tradition is equally important,” sums up Anusha Raghu, a middle-level banking sector executive. How Chennai will respond to this new identity crisis and roll on in the coming years is anybody’s guess.