There have been several activities during Madras Week that I’ve attended and at several of them I kept finding something new. In passing on some of what I thought were the more interesting ‘discoveries’, I hope they will prove new to you too.
On opening day, I first caught up with the extent Walers were a vital part of Indo-Australian trade from the 1860s to the 1930s, most of them arriving in Madras. For the uninitiated, Walers were hardy horses originally cross-bred in New South Wales with Cape of Good Hope stock, that first arrived in Australia in 1788, and thoroughbreds. Capable of going without food and water for 48 hours, these animals were considered the finest cavalry horses, but were also used as artillery horses till the Indian Army phased them out in the 1940s. Between 1861 and 1931, Australia exported nearly 500,000 Walers, a little over 350,000 to India where most of them were landed in Madras. In emphasising this fact while discussing the strategic importance of Madras, Prof. Uttam Kumar Jamdhagni, of the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, University of Madras, offered anecdotally that King George’s V’s favourite horse, ‘Rupert’, was a Waler from Madras that had been left to him by his father, who had received it as a present from the Indian Army.
Later that day, I learnt a bit more about that fascinating connection between Madras and Mandalay, the last King of Burma, Thibaw Min, being exiled from the latter, his capital, in 1885 with his family and temporarily housed in Madras, for four months, till they were permanently settled in Ratnagiri. Where in Madras had he been given a house, I had long wondered and learnt that evening that it had been a garden house called The Mansion , at the junction of Graeme’s Road and Moore’s Road. In this house was born the third daughter of King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat. This daughter, Su Myat Phaya, was called by all Madras Supaya. The Mansion had once been owned by Henry S. Graeme of the Madras Civil Service.
On the second day, I caught up with Biswajit Balasubramaniam’s enjoyable collection of cartoons about mad, mad MADras, over a hundred in number which he hopes to make 375 before the exhibition closes on September 20th. There I heard him say that besides the cartoons he does regularly for several publications, he does a cartoon a day for his Facebook page on a topic of the day. He is now also into sculpture and the centerpiece was one such bit that, as you see here, is a gleeful tribute to everyday Madras. And that Madras he served up as refreshments — verkadalai and sliced raw mango with chilli powder on the one hand and cakes and sandwiches on the other. Society with a capital ‘S’ chose the former combination — and that, as I tell every young journalist who asks, is typical of the Madras that is Chennai today, change, yet no change, daringly clad for discos in the evenings, conservative saree for the temple the next morning.
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When the postman knocked…
* Dr. A Raman, writing from Australia, says that Tagore had composed Jana Gana Mana , “a Brahmo hymn”, a few years before his week’s stay at the Besant Theosophical College at the invitation of James Cousins, then the Headmaster of the College. It was the translation that he did while at Madanapalle (Miscellany, July 28). Raman adds, “I understand that the paper on which Gurudev wrote the translation is framed and hangs in the foyer of ‘the School’.” He goes on to contribute a few facts on what became India’s National Anthem, which he had mentioned when, coincidental to the information appearing in my column of July 28th, he was invited to speak at India’s Independence Day celebrations, organised in Orange, New South Wales, by the local Malayalee association, and he decided to speak about Jana Gana Mana . He writes that if it is rendered using Margaret Cousins’ score “it runs for more than a minute, if done precisely”. He planned to use the longer, slower version scored by Shreya Ghoshal. But the official Indian Government version, he says, runs precisely for 52 seconds. Raman explains, “When adopted by the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1950 as the National Anthem, Jawaharlal Nehru shortened the pace of Cousins’ scoring with direction from the English composer and music director Herbert Murrill.” I know nothing about all this, but over the last year I’ve heard it sung by two well-known Madras-based singers, and they both sang it like dirges. As I have stated before, when an Anglo-Indian group I heard sing it a couple of years earlier, it was a rousing anthem — and that’s the way an anthem should be sung, I thought then and still do.
* That the Maharajah of Travancore donated the Bharati Lakshmi Medal, presented by the Madras Medical College ( Miscellany, August 11), came as a surprise to Dr. M. Krishnan, whose aunt was the wife of Uthraddam Thirunal Marthanda Varma who passed away recently. “None of the family had ever mentioned this even in passing,” says Krishnan. He adds that Marthanda Varma’s son-in-law was the late Lt. Col. K.G. Pandalay IMS, the first Indian Superintendent of the Government General Hospital and who later established the first private surgical nursing home in Madras, in 1927, on Poonamallee High Road, leading the road to being called the ‘Harley Street of Madras’. Sadly, that nursing home is no more.
* With walks in the St. Thomas’ Mount area being listed in the Madras Week programmes, C. Manohar wonders whether they will take in a prehistoric cairn circle and a megalithic archaeological site on the top of the hill, near the Church. They are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. I must confess that I have been to the top of the mount several times and never noticed these; perhaps the ASI should signpost them better.
* Why S.R. Raghuram suddenly remembered Justice Elmar E Mack, about whom I wrote many moons ago (Miscellany, July 9, 2012), I do not know, but he send me a story that reminds us that ‘deficiency of service’ warranted penalties long before Consumer Courts were dreamed of. Apparently Mrs. Mack, while arriving in Madras on an Air India flight c.1948, fell off the ladder and fractured her ankle. The ladder, it would appear, was defective and she, therefore, sued Air India. The Court awarded her damages; Rs.12,000, Raghuram thinks it was. Raghuram adds, Justice Mack graduated from Wadham’s College, Oxford, and became a barrister from Gray’s Inn before joining the Indian Civil Service in 1919. After around 20 years on the administrative side, he was seconded to the judiciary in 1936 and spent the next ten years in Bellary, a very popular person there with both the Bar and the public. A great sports lover, he helped Bellary get its stadium which was named after him.
* Dharmalingam Venugopal of the Nilgiri Documentation Centre, Kotagiri, continues on the trail of John Sullivan of the Madras Civil Service who is considered the progenitor of Ootacamund, the hill resort. Sullivan’s father, another John, was the Resident at the Royal Court of Tanjore in 1781 “with a general superintendency over the Southern provinces of India”. In 1789, he married Henrietta, the daughter of George Hobart, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, whose brother Robert, Lord Hobart, became the Governor of Madras in 1793. Having tracked the father, Venugopal says he found that John Jr. of Ootacamund was born to John Sr. and Henrietta before they were married and, therefore, was illegitimate. Whether it was a major scandal at the time is not known, but John Sr. went on to become a Member of the Board of Control of the East India Company and John Jr. became a member of the Supreme Council of the Madras Presidency, his birth not standing in their way.
