If you enjoy the pursuit of the past through sketches, paintings and maps, invite yourself to V. Narayan Swami’s elegant house in Kalakshetra Colony, as I did recently. Not because his collection is an engaging visual tour of the southern regions of the country from the 18 century to the early part of the twentieth, primarily against the backdrop of British influences. Nor for the reason that each drawing is etched with details that evoke the spirit of those times.
His house, whose light-coloured and sophisticated walls are adorned by these historical memorabilia, is worth a visit just for the commentaries with which Narayan Swami would resurrect the past, endowing the lifeless images in watercolour paintings with pulsating flesh and blood.
An interest in his hunt maps, especially a hardy, foldable Madras Hunt Map from 1913, printed at the Government Survey Office in Madras, has taken me to his doorstep. It is just one of 50 copies. Fifty copies were also made of an earlier edition of Madras Hunt Map, dated 1911.
I don’t complain when I realise he wants to walk me through his entire collection, saving the hunt maps for the last.
The landscape drawings come first. Most of them dated between 1780 and 1910 and directly linked to the country’s colonial past. “These pictures I collect are real landscapes of real places and people. They have a context in time and space. You have to ask some questions. Who drew it? Why was it drawn? Because there is always a background to a landscape drawing. Many of these drawings are about enemy forces, battle scenes and topography,” he says, explaining how landscape drawing was encouraged in the Britain of those days, with a landscape drawing department established at the Addiscombe Military Seminary.
Narayan, 63, is a financial executive for a group of power companies and travels frequently, which gives him an opportunity to look for souvenirs of the past.
He cannot resist paintings that showcase history. Even more so, those that hide it. “Often, these drawings and maps do not yield their secrets. It takes diligent research and a close study of the materials themselves to unravel them,” he says
He explains how he cracked the long-elusive identities of the subjects in Madras artist Simon Fonceca’s water colour drawings of 1849 and 1853 – businessman William Urquhart Arbuthnot, his wife and son – through a sustained study of the internal evidence in the works.
The maps come next. No, not the hunt maps – not yet. He looks at a 220-year-old map, his eyes flickering with wonder. He has peered into it a trillion other times, but it continues to hold a fascinating and incredible message for him.
“Can you believe this? In 1794, the East India Company had only so much land in its possession, on the Coromandel Coast,” he says. As revealed by this James Rendell map, the land around Madras belonging to the company is bounded on the north by Erikans Lake (Pulicat Lake) and on the south by Allumparva (Cheyyur).
And then, finally, it is time to discuss the 1913 Madras Hunt Map and the scanned copy of a chromolithograph. As the documents chronicling the history of the Madras Hunt Club – once lodged with the Madras Hunt Club – have been irretrievably lost, this map and the old lithograph are extremely valuable pieces of paper.
Especially because, outside of these documents, very little information is available about the hunting traditions of the British in Madras. Narayan says that from a short description of the Madras Hunt in Somerset Playne’s Southern India (1914), it is learnt that jackals, found in huge numbers, were hunted widely. The silver-haired fox was an occasional target and English hounds were cross-bred with Poligar hounds just for the Hunt.
The hunt map of 1913 shows the landscape of Madras as overrun with banana and coconut groves, not to mention paddy fields. Spots of bushes and brambles and woody patches made it the ideal terrain for hunting the jackal and the sliver-haired fox,” he says.
Looking at the number of water bodies depicted in the map, Narayan Swami says, “Whatever the problems faced by Madras then, water scarcity was not one of them.”
The lithograph, dated 1865, depicts a meet-up of the Madras Hunt Club at the grounds of the old Madras Club on Express Estates, Mount Road. “I received the scanned copy of the lithograph from Harry Miller, a photographer of the Indian Express who spent his last days at the Madras Club,” says Narayan.
“Those in the picture include Sir William Dension, then Governor of Madras and Alexander J. Arbuthnot, chief secretary of the Madras Presidency.”
For more details about his collection, visit >Narayan Swami’s blog , where he is identified by his family name Sudarshan.
