Madras miscellany The man who built 'Madras 350'
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S. MUTHIAH
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A line drawing of Madras 350
Even as it is announced that Madras Day, August 22nd, will be bracketed this year by Madras Week being celebrated from August 21st to 28th, with the celebrations likely to start even earlier and go on into early September, my mind goes back to eight years ago when the annual celebrations began. It was a one-day celebration on August 22nd at Rajaji Hall, once known as Council Hall and then Banqueting Hall. It's quite amazing how the celebrations have grown since, with no sponsorship and purely volunteer efforts.
But even before these celebrations began there was a remembrance of Madras's birth, on its 350th birthday in 1989, by a few individuals and organisations. The Murugappa Group sponsored for the occasion, my first coffee table book, Madras The Gracious City, now out of print but which has developed into several other pictorial histories. The Group also supported a hugely successful Madras 350 quiz with Navin Jayakumar playing quizmaster and promises to do it annually again from this year. But the only lasting memorial to that birth was a one-man effort that year, which still has many people wondering what it is all about.
Frankpet Fernandez came to Madras from Tangasseri 65 years ago this year seeking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow after gold had dried out in that Malabar Coast town that took its name from the fortunes successive European nations made in the port that took its name from the gold (wealth) it generated. After studies at Loyola College he joined the Railways and then, inspired by Ayn Rand's classic Fountainhead, struck out on his own as a builder. During a 40-year career he built over 60 homes, offices and apartment blocks. His Tangy Apartments', its name deriving from his native place', was to prove a benchmark for the burgeoning apartment block industry that grew after such pioneering efforts.
It was as a builder that he determined to show his gratitude to Madras that had nurtured him to prosperity. And when hardly anyone else remembered Madras's 350th birthday, he marked it with a Classical style building, rather incongruous in its setting at the corner of Poonamallee High Road and New Avadi Road, opposite Pachaiyappa's College, which he named Madras 350. It still stands, a proud memorial, but now to the man who passed away a couple of weeks ago, just a few months short of his 80th birthday.
A few years on, he built what was perhaps Madras's first gated community, luxurious homes for expats surrounding his own. That has now developed into the family's Buena Vista Beach Resort, Palavakkam. But even as Frankpet lived outside the city, his thoughts were always on the Madras he grew up in and which he loved enough to mark its 350th birthday out of his own pocket.
When the postman knocked
The postman continues to keep me busy rushing to answer his knocks and with those knocks being so many, this week's column too is greatly contributed to by what he has brought.
Could it be Pudupet?
Several readers have got in touch with me to tell me that New Town (Miscellany, July 4) must be Pudupet, though some do wonder whether it refers to the Pudupet in the curves of the Cooum (Komaleswaranpet area) or the Pudupet next to Gopalapuram. But while they all presume that it is a Pudupet literally translated into English, none of them tells me that he or she has ever seen or heard New Town being used for these or any other areas. Yet, that was a name I was quoting from official documents. New Town, therefore, must have been an official name, but Pudupet is mentioned in the records from the 1670s as the Egmore village of Pudapawca' or Poodoopauk'. In the 1770s there's reference to Poodoopett' on the North bank of the Cooum and the district
from the Government Garden to near Mackay's Garden (Thousand Lights now) is known as Poodoopauk. No mention of New Town in any of this!
The entire Pudupet area of the late 18th and early 19th Century, stretching from Royapettah to Narasinghapuram and the Cooum, had a large Anglo-Indian and Indian Christian population at the time and Christ Church, with beginnings in 1842 and consecration in 1852, together with its school, was raised for them. But of New Town I've found no mention in all this search. Variations of Pudupet was, it would seem, common usage with no need for translation.
An intriguing point in the Smith-Anderson story I narrated last week is that many of them were baptised, married and buried in St. Andrew's Church on the other side of the Cooum. Given their background, why did they not choose Christ Church in the 1860s and later, if their New Town was indeed Pudupet?
The button tree
Dr. A. Raman of Charles Sturt University, Orange, New South Wales and a former faculty member of Loyola College, has long supplemented material that appears in this column. In his latest mail to me he says, as an addendum to the cutting down of an Anogeissus acuminate to help create Vision Divine' (Miscellany, July 4), that Semmozhi Poonga cannot at all be referred to as a botanical garden. He explains, A botanical garden will always be around a research centre, therefore this is just a recreational park.
He goes on to say that he faintly remembers from his days in Madras a couple of decades ago that the Agri-Horticultural Society park here, where Woodlands Drive-In was, had one or more trees of a kindred species, Anogeissus latifolia and these might have been cut down while developing the new Poonga.
Writing about the species, he says: The button tree's common English name comes from the button-like floral clusters it produces. It has a Tamil name? Nunnera which reinforces the fact that our ancestors recognised the tree being of value and gave it a Tamil name. Another common taxon of Anogeissus in Madras is Anogeissus latifolia (Tamil names: Jñemei, Nemei, Ômai). References to Anogeissus latifolia (Jñemei) occur in Tamil literature prior to the Sangam period.
Throughout the world, eight species of Anogeissus are known. They are distributed from South Asia to western Africa. Anogeissus are not only elegant and graceful trees; but they are also of economic significance. These trees yield materials useful in tanning raw leather (refer to a paper by Yelavarti Nayudamma and his team on this aspect {Australian Journal of Chemistry 1964, 17, 238245}).
A fire on Broadway
S. Subbarayulu, a retired member of the Indian Forestry Service, has been doing research on the founder of the Service, Dr. Hugh Cleghorn. He hit pay-dirt when he discovered in St. Andrew's University in Scotland the carefully preserved correspondence exchanged by its student Cleghorn with his father who was a barrister in Madras. There were also other letters that Hugh Cleghorn had received. And in one of them, W. Paplin, a bookseller and a publisher of St. Andrew's, commiserates with Cleghorn on the loss of all his books in a fire in Madras in 1852.
Further search had Subbarayulu discovering that a fire had occurred in September 1852 in Oakes, Patridge & Co, a department store (it was the biggest in Madras at the time) on Popham's Broadway. Cleghorn, a surgeon at the General Hospital at the time, was occupying digs' in the building. This information Subbarayulu found in a brief news item in a foreign newspaper. Now he wants me to guide him to a Madras paper which would provide him a more detailed story of the fire and Cleghorn's loss.
The only two English newspapers of the time that I know of were The Spectator and the Madras Times, both of which got merged with The Madras Mail at a later period. As far as I know, the Tamil Nadu Archives have only a few copies of each of the two papers, and I can't think of any library or archive in India which will have a complete set of this treasure. The British Library, however, might have a fair collection.
The Spectator began as a weekly in 1836, became a tri-weekly in 1846 and a daily in 1850 before being taken over by the Madras Times, which began as a biweekly about the same time as The Spectator and became a daily in 1859 some time after which it took over The Spectator. The Madras Mail appeared on the scene only in 1868 and The Hindu much later.
