The Museum of the Word
This column may not agree with the view that the recently-vacated home of the Tamil Nadu Legislature and the shortly-to-be-vacated Secretariat should be used to house the new centre to focus on Tamil as a Classical Language — and we'll come to its reasons anon — but I cannot say this would be precedent-setting. For, Belvedere House in Calcutta, gifted to Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, by Nawab Mir Jafar Ali Khan, and subsequently home to Governors and visiting Viceroys before becoming the National Library, is to be transformed into the world's first ‘Museum of the World', now that the National Library has moved into a new building in the same 30-acre green campus. This, in fact, was a suggestion this column had made when plans were afoot to pull down Government House for the new Legislature; restore it and use it as the library for the new Legislature and Secretariat is what was suggested.
But that's water under the bridge, so let's return to Calcutta. The museum being planned will feature the various methods of the transmission of words, live demonstrations of the different ages of printing, exhibits ranging from historical documents to advertising, sections in each of the 14 major Indian languages, and space for workshops and other interactive sections, among a host of other things. While this is certainly imaginative and welcome use of a heritage building, it is in fact only a spin off from the splendid library that functioned from here for decades. The case of the old Secretariat in Madras is rather different.
In the first place, it has been the seat of government for 370 years. More significantly, it was the seat of government for nearly 125 years of East India Company — read British — settlements from the Red Sea to Manila. And, most importantly of all, during that period it laid the foundations of modern India in fields ranging from municipal governance, education, medicine, and engineering to agriculture, flora and fauna, and meteorology, to civil administration and military power. Such a contribution deserves, as this column has stated before, elevation of Fort St. George and its central complex to a World Heritage Site. And, that is what this column would like both the State and Central Governments to commit themselves to.
For a centre for Tamil as a Classical Language, there can be no more appropriate place than the Director of Public Instruction campus on College Road, which is of greater scholarly significance, having been the home of the College of Fort St. George. The College was the brainchild of F.W. Ellis who first spoke of the Dravidian languages as a set of languages different from the Sanskrit-rooted languages. From 1812, when the College was set up, till 1854 when it was closed, its pundits and the British civil servants they taught did an unbelievable amount of work on the Dravidian languages, work still valid today. This historic campus with a rare tradition of scholarship should be where the Centre of Classical Tamil Studies should find its home, not in a house of politics and administration.
Another typewriter story
The postman's been kept rather busy this past week, and one letter in particular deserves space to itself. Al. Ar. S. Ramakrishnan of Devakottai has another story to tell about an Olivetti after reading mine in Miscellany, May 3. His Olivetti, however, is not a Lettera of my vintage but a Dora that was bought for him around 1967 for Rs. 600 in Malaysia.
What I found of unusual interest was what he had to say about this typewriter of his (see picture) which has “a mainframe made of industrial plastic”. Namely that, “It has not been serviced once and has no repairs to speak of. A few drops of ‘3-in-one' oil is all that it has needed to keep it running smoothly.”
By 1997, however, he was shuttling between Madras and Devakottai and found one typewriter was not enough. Spotting an ad in The Hindu, he was able to pick up a similar model from a journalist for Rs. 1,000. And now, “I depend on my Olivetti Doras to do all my writing, even though I have a laptop and computers in Madras and Devakottai.”
Ramakrishnan's story does not end there. When a cousin of his envied his two typewriters and asked for one, he was not willing to oblige. But, in 2002, he spotted another ad in a local paper and was able to buy another Dora from an “old lady in Mylapore for Rs.1000”. And now, his cousin also does his writing using a Dora.
There's news of a Lettera-22 too. Arunkumar Sadanand says his grandfather, M.D. Raghavan the archaeologist (Miscellany, March 14, 2005), bequeathed him a 1950 model identical to the one whose picture appeared on May 3. Sadanand had done much typing for his grandfather on it, and later used it for a number of years. Now, it remains unused, but is of “great sentimental value”.
More on the Canal
S. Satyanidhi Rao writes to correct me about the location of Pedda Ganjam (Miscellany, May 24). I must confess that in a moment of haste I had carelessly equated it with Ganjam in Orissa. In fact, the Buckingham — or what should it be more correctly called the Cochrane — Canal in its northern reaches got to nowhere near Orissa; it ended at Kakinada! Pedda Ganjam, in the present-day Andhra district of Prakasam, is about 200 miles north of Madras, and lies between Madras and Kakinada.
The place is cited in the History of the Buckingham Canal Project by A.S. Russell, Executive Engineer, Madras PWD (1898), but I've not been able to locate it in the most detailed maps in my collection. I wonder whether the name has changed.
The citation led me to something else I had long wondered about — and that is the history of the canal south of Madras. I've now learnt that work on it began in 1852 from the Adyar River, and by connecting backwaters,reached Sadras (35 miles) by 1857. By 1882, it reached Marakkanam, work having stopped till the 1870s.
M. Ramanathan adds to my information about the Cochrane Canal. Referring to a ‘Memorandum of the Cochrane Canal' published in an appendix to the 18{+t}{+h} volume of the Accounts and Papers for 1852-53, he says the Government planned a canal in 1801 to connect Madras with the Ennore Backwaters and tendered for the work. A.J.L. Heefke's bid was accepted, with Basil Cochrane his surety for the work. It was a build-operate-and-transfer (after 45 years) project. The work was completed in 1806, and the 45 years had commenced from November 1, 1802. It would appear that BOT was in practice 200 years ago, As were benami transactions! The report states that “although Mr. Cochrane was ostensibly only the surety, he was, infact, the principal contractor.”
On completion of the work, Heefke transferred whatever rights he had to Cochrane who became “the sole proprietor”. When Cochrane left Madras, he entrusted the canal management to his agents, Arbuthnot & Co. The report then states, “owing to their negligence reducing the canal's usefulness,” the Government in 1836 negotiated with the Company for the transfer of the canal, and took possession of it on April 1, 1837.
