There it was! I had been driving in circles for 30 minutes up the Stanley viaduct (opposite Central Station) and round the war memorial looking for an elusive milestone. Beyond Fort St. George, the driver had spotted a stone marked #2 and we had noticed a stone with NH-45-1 painted on it in black. If that marked a point one km from Chennai, zero should be somewhere around. Keep going, I said. What is it that you are looking for, he asked a sixth time. “The zero point,” I said. “It is on Muthuswamy Bridge.” Only, no one had heard of it. Let's follow the footpath with the #2 milestone, the young man said. Then we crossed this bridge with coloured tiles and the zero milestone appeared! Mathematician Brahmagupta (7th Century AD) would not have been happier when he announced shunya as a digit with null value and used small dots under numbers to mark its place. The zero point had haunted me for a while. Like a lot of people, I too thought distances from Chennai were calculated from the GPO, till historian Vakula Varadarajan asked me to check out zero point. There is a stone with the number zero on it, he said, and gave me directions. Of the three main gates of Fort St. George, NH 45 (GST) came out of the Wallajah Gate and now marks the beginning of EVR Salai, he said. NH 4 (Western Trunk Road) came out of Saint George’s gate and marks the beginning of St. Thomas Mount Road. The Muthuswamy Road/Bridge connects these two roads and the zero point is located at its centre. Distances are calculated from here, he said. You'll find the zero mark on platform 5/6 of the Central Station, he added.
Zero point for the city as a whole? Not quite, said a PWD official. The Highways Department had a zero point for every road. It was placed on the road where it didn't overlap with the other ones nearby. This was a technical requirement. The milestone on Muthuswamy Bridge is the technical zero point for the three main roads of Chennai: NH-45 to Tiruchi, NH-4 to Bangalore, NH-5 to Kolkata. Distances on these roads are calculated from zero point. For NH-205, the zero point lies in Tiruttani.
Then, there are those who believe the zero point of Chennai is the flag post at Fort St. George. It is the highest such post in India and the most important spot for the British, they point out. From a historic perspective, the zero point of Madras was within the walls of Fort St. George, and the convention then was to measure distances from the gates of the Fort. “Technically, zero point should be Fort St. George — the birthplace of Madras!” said the message-board comment. The driver had his view as well. “If I make the distance meter zero, start from a milestone saying 10 km to Chennai, drive down along Anna Salai towards Broadway, and stop when the meter clicks 10, that should be Chennai “0”, right?” he asked. Ha! “The zero point is in the middle of the Reserve Bank subway near Parry's Corner-High Court Judges' entrance; find the stone displaying “0” there,” cracked a friend. And come summer, we await news of another zero point. Has the water from Andhra Pradesh released into the Kandaleru-Poondi canal reached the zero point, we anxiously ask. When it crosses the inter-state border at Uthukottai — the zero point — we sigh in relief. At the Muthuswamy Bridge, I take pictures of my “monument” and the 0/0 stone on the opposite side. The paint has worn off the milestone, and that is sad. To me, it's a milestone in history. Even the name “Muthuswamy Bridge” is difficult to locate. The zero point bridge is named after Sir Thiruvarur Muthuswamy Iyer KCIE (January 28, 1832 to January 25, 1895). Raised in poverty, he studied under a street lamp and went on to become the first Indian to be appointed judge of the Madras High Court (in 1877). He also served as the acting Chief Justice of the court in 1893. You will find his statue on the court premises. “Junior advocates pray here before taking up their first case,” said Varadarajan.
