Have the Law students who have been protesting against moving out of their heritage building been doing so because they would be moving out of a building that is reasonably accessible or because they are concerned about what would happen to this splendid bit of 19th Century construction now threatened by the Metro? In the case of the Queen Mary’s girls some years ago I’d always thought it was the former reason, because they had not raised any protest when the only heritage building on the campus, Capper House , was pulled down earlier. Be that as it may, a word or two about the Law College building — that might resonate with a sensitive would-be lawyer or two — might not be out of place as events unfold at present.
The Law College opened in 1891 with classes being held at Presidency College, where Law had been taught from 1855. The first Principal, Reginald Nelson, felt his College should have premises of its own and Government agreed to his suggestion. No sooner the High Court building, designed by J.N. Brassington and re-designed by Henry Irwin, was completed by Namberumal Chetty in July 1892, Irwin was asked to design the Law College buildings and Namberumal Chetty got that contract too. The building, completed for occupation in 1899, was designed entirely by Irwin in a style that harmonised with the Indo-Saracenic of the High Court building.
The site assigned for the Law College was at the other end of the High Court campus, the northwestern corner which had been part of the ‘Guava Garden’ cemetery meant for the residents of Fort St. George. The sole reminder of that is the Hynmer’s Obelisk, associated with Elihu Yale who raised it in memory of his friend and his wife’s late husband beside whom was buried Yale’s son David. That memorial too is a listed heritage monument. Is that too under threat? The Powney’s Vault, its neighbour and the only other remnant of the cemetery, has vanished, no one the wiser for the disappearance.
Irwin was not an architect by profession. He had some civil engineering qualifications and came out to the Public Works Department, Ceylon, as a 27-year-old in 1868. Transferred to India, he was posted to Pachmarhi, where he built the striking Pachmarhi Catholic Church. Moving on to Simla he designed the Viceregal Lodge (the Viceroy’s summer home), St. Michael’s Cathedral and the famed Gaiety Theatre building where summer gaiety was most enjoyed in the summer capital of India.
Then this Irishman was transferred to the Madras PWD and with it he took off from where Brassington had left things. He thereafter completed some of Madras’s best known heritage buildings, mentioned in these columns often enough, and which still survive, only calling for greater care. Irwin appears to have been a man constantly on the go. He not only sired twelve children, but besides official work he built an enviable reputation in sport. He owned a string of horses which he rode at the Madras Races, equestrian events and polo. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Madras Hunt. He played competitive tennis, squash racquets, golf and cricket — and also swam and took part in shooting competitions. He obviously was an exceptional sportsman. To enjoy his last years in more relaxing surroundings he retired to Ooty and died there in 1922.
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The Government and the Bishop
My mention of Bishop Gell being the first President of the Madras SPCA had a couple of readers drawing my attention to the missionary side of his long tenure (1861-99).
When he arrived in Madras, as the fourth Bishop of the Diocese, his predecessor, Bishop Dealtry, had been called back because he had been “too little in Madras”, preferring to spend his time in the cool of Ooty, which was also a more congenial place for Europeans. His superiors had also frowned on his appointing his son as his Archdeacon.
Bishop Gell, a bachelor, took his Episcopacy far more seriously and travelled throughout the Madras Diocese, which at the time included the Tinnevelly and Dornakal districts besides the Berars (now Nagpur), to add to his flock. In this, he was very successful, but it also led to concern in the Government of the Presidency.
When, in a letter, he urged the Europeans of the Presidency to participate in or help missionary activities, the Governor, Lord Hobart, pointed out to him that the letter went against the spirit of the Queen’s proclamation. Hobart’s letter also held out the vague threat that the Government might have to, if this continued, intervene in missionary activities. Bishop Gell replied, “I am much obliged to your Lordship for telling me of the light in which my Pastoral is regarded by the Government. I have not understood that religious enlightenment and persuasion are forbidden by any Order, but only interference with anyone in the exercise of his religion, favouring or disfavouring on account of it, the use of official power to turn a man from his religion, and similar acts. It is known quite well that we object to such action as strongly as possible, and there is no appearance of anything of the kind in the Pastoral.
“But we do think… (we) should use…discreetly …the instruments of enlightenment and persuasion, not force, to (add to the flock).”
The confrontation on missionary activities died down thereafter, and Bishop Gell continued his activities vigorously. But as age began slowing him down, he consecrated in 1876 two more Bishops belonging to two separate missions, Bishop Caldwell of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and Bishop Sargent of the Church Missionary Society. It was around this time that several in the Diocese felt he should retire, but Bishop Gell kept going till he resigned in his 80th year. He stayed on in India till he passed away in 1899 in Ooty, when he was 88.
Frederick Gell was one of Thomas Arnold’s students at Rugby but there is no record of his having introduced ‘Tom Brown’s game’ to Madras; the honour of doing that went to Alexander Arbuthnot, another alumnus of Rugby, who was less successful in spreading the game than Bishop Gell was the Word.
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Walls that become art
Stone Walls do not a Prison make/ Nor Iron bars a cage… What they do is they become pieces of Art in the eyes of photographer Mala Mukherjee. Indeed, a couple of persons who visited her recent exhibition in Madras described these photographs of hers as “veritable paintings” and “imaginative use of walls as models”. Here were a collection of pictures ideal to hang in houses furnished with elegant minimalism.
These wall ‘photo-paintings’, to coin a description, are a far cry from the pictures Mukherjee took with her ever-present cameras when she transformed from a banker’s wife into an enthusiastic photographer about 30 years ago in Madras. The highlight of those Madras years was when, jumping up to see the action and see the last wicket fall at Chepauk and the India-Australia test end in a thrilling tie, she did not fail to click her camera and capture the only picture in the world of that bit of historic action.
Those were the years during her husband’s Madras posting that she shot several pictures for Madras Musings and for a couple of talks I gave on the sorry state of the city. (I’m sorry I can’t use one here today; they were all transparencies, they have faded, and no one I know seems to know how to make them come alive again.) She still goes around shooting pictures of life all around her wherever she is; in fact, accepting a visit to an orphanage while here for the exhibition, Mukherjee kept shooting non-stop as she played with the children and produced some splendid portraits and action pictures she presented to the institution.
What she exhibited here recently were pictures of little (and some bigger) bits of walls she had captured during her travels from China to Europe, Calcutta to Bombay, each with a little noticed feature on the wall or by it that only an artist’s eye could have spotted as having possibilities of becoming transformed into a ‘photo-painting’. The imaginativeness here leaves the viewer rather dumbfounded, possibly even feeling a bit stupid.
An amateur photographer in the Madras of the 1980s, Mukherjee became a professional photographer a decade later and by 2000 her work was being recognised internationally.
Leaving the exhibition, I spotted an adjoining gallery with a less colourful display. Once an exhibition buff — having been hauled around to chauffeur an artist who dissipated her talent by having a go at every one of the arts possible from dance to cinema to theatre — I stepped in only to be taken back to the days when I used to admire the dexterity with a Rotring pen of the cartographers in the publishing house I was with. Here, Chantal Jumel had used her red Rotring to capture her passion for kolam and eastern religion, creating large, delicately drawn representations that held the viewer’s attention with the intricateness of the drawings.
The contrast between the two exhibitions only revealed how varied and diverse Art could be, yet have viewers absorbed.
