At the end of a meeting the other day, I was once again asked for my telephone number. When I provided it, my interrogator said in an almost shocked voice, “But that’s a land line! What’s your mobile number?” He made it sound as though I was committing some sort of crime by not possessing a cell phone. A couple of days later, at a family gathering, it was mentioned with regret that I was the only one not connected by App. “What’s that?” I had asked. The silence was as though everyone was in a state of shock. Which got me thinking.
Is what started in Madras about 135 years ago, no longer alive in the city? Are there no more land lines? Do what are left come under the Heritage Act? Please tell me, Madras Telephones or BSNL or whoever is in charge, that land lines are not vanishing, that the old-fashioned telephone system has not gone out of our lives.
The system came into Madras lives with the thought in 1881, just five years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, that Calcutta, Madras and Bombay should have the benefit of the new invention. Thought was translated into action that year with the incorporation in London of the Oriental Telephone and Electric Co Ltd. Managing business for it in Madras was who else but Arbuthnot & Co., at the time faster off the block than Parry’s and Binny’s. Orient, with Arbuthnot’s drive, had the first telephone exchange in South India up and running from 37, Errabalu Chetty Street, on January 28, 1882. There were 25 subscribers with 40 lines. I wonder who those first owners of telephones in Madras were. Governor Mountstuart Grant-Duff must have got the first line, followed by several lines in Fort St. George, but it would be interesting to know who the first private subscribers were.
A second exchange was opened not long afterwards on Blacker’s Road — where the historical connection is still maintained. This was followed in 1893 with Oriental’s first telephone directory. It listed 75 lines, including three for Parry’s. By 1910, there were 350 lines and information about what used to be called “trunk calls”, a trunk exchange having come into operation in 1906.
Oriental Telephones was taken over in 1923 by The Madras Telephone Company, which built itself a headquarters building and space for an automatic exchange.
Both opened in 1925, next to what was once Flower Bazaar with its Fruit Market. I wonder whether the building is still around; it’s been years since I’ve been in that part of town. Making a success of Madras Telephones from the start was its general manager, G W Bromhead. He was offering such an efficient service that in 1934 the Government handed over its Mount Road Exchange to the private operator. The next year, Bromhead was still looking for more business. He was offering Rs. 5 to anyone who brought in a new subscriber and promised a special rate to the subscriber.
But the era of private telephone companies was coming to an end. In 1943, Government nationalised the telephone companies. Madras Telephones, at the time, had 3,200 lines. Wartime exigencies may have led to the nationalisation. But Government ownership of the telephone systems of the country continued till the new Millennium. And then private ownership was back — with the ubiquitous cell phone.
A journal prohibited
My story on April 4 rooted in the Pondicherry Conspiracy and mention in it of Subramania Bharati as a fellow traveller reminded me of another of the conspirators, VVS Aiyar. Finding it impossible to stir the people with his revolutionary ideas, Aiyar began to wonder whether he might not inspire them with the written word.
Aiyar’s first love had been literature and, in 1924, he decided to use it to further his dreams. In October that year there came out from Cheramandevi in the Tinnevelly District Bala Bharati . Explaining the name of his monthly journal in the first issue, Aiyar wrote, that it was chosen “to keep alive in the minds of all our readers the memory of C Subramania Bharati, a gifted friend of ours who twenty years ago started to give a new life to the people and language of Tamil Nadu”. The adjectival Bala was meant to indicate youth and strength. Explaining the purpose of the magazine, Aiyar added, “Competent writers and authorities will write of every branch of knowledge that is worthy of cultivation and make Bala Bharati a new treasure-house of wisdom.” How this content — all in a language better suited to literature — was to stir people when revolutionary action had failed was never quite explained. But, apparently, the Raj thought otherwise.
In nostalgic remembrance of the eight months he had spent in Bellary Jail for his part in the conspiracy that led to the Ashe murder, Aiyar sent a copy of Bala Bharati to the jail with a request that the journal be circulated among the prisoners there. The prison superintendent promptly sent the journal to the Criminal Intelligence Department of the Madras Government. The Department took its time about assessing the journal and then advised, “Unfit for circulation”. So much for Intelligence.
Sadly, what had been described as “a class Tamil literary journal” came to an end 10 issues later, when Aiyar passed away young. But whether it would have survived for long, even if he had lived longer, was doubtful. Before he had started the journal, he had written to friends and well-wishers that if 30 of them each invested a hundred rupees he would be able to sustain the publication he envisaged. During the time the journal lasted, he received support from only four of those he had written to.
The pioneering coffee family
As the Season begins and the annual trek to the hills starts, I wonder how many from Madras give a thought to those who opened up the hills for the vacationers from the plains. There had been tribesfolk in these hills from the beginning of time, but the opening up for the plainsfolk and the investor was done in the 19th Century, mainly by British adventurers and Government officials. Few today realise that perhaps the first hills to be opened up in the South were the Shevaroys, off Salem. And the man responsible for that was M.D. Cockburn (pronounced Coburn), the Collector of Salem District from 1820 to 1829. To this day, little is known of Cockburn and his family, who were to prove pioneers in the Nilgiris too.
After exploring the Shevaroys while on his ‘beat’, Cockburn blocked himself land in the hills and planted apples, pears, loquats, oranges, lime — and coffee. He built himself a hut on the property, the first European dwelling in what was to become the township Yercaud, and had local tribesmen tend his crop. When some of the fruit and the coffee flourished, Cockburn developed his house in 1824 into a home fit for a Collector and his family. And, he welcomed neighbours.
It was around this time he, as Collector, granted land to several other Europeans to grow coffee, which is now the main produce of the Shevaroys. One of them was G. Fischer who is considered the father of coffee planting in the Shevaroys. The ‘natural’ methods he used for cultivation were followed for decades till more-scientific techniques from Ceylon were introduced.
Coffee became a plantation crop in the Nilgiris in the 1840s. Cockburn, who had been posted there as Collector, was again one of the pioneers in coffee planting when he began planting coffee at Balhardah alongside the Kotagiri Ghat. Around the same time, his son George opened up for coffee another acreage in the Kotagiri area, at Chalhardah. It is, however, recorded that it was only after Cockburn Senior opened up Kannahutty estate near Kotagiri in 1843 “that systematic planting began in these (Nilgiris) hills.”
Shortly after this, the Coffee Blight began to take its toll and other crops were experimented with. It was a Cockburn again who was a pioneer. In 1863, Miss MBL Cockburn, the Collector’s daughter, began planting tea in the Kotagiri area. She did it with the help of Chinese prisoners-of-war whose tenure in the Nilgiris I have written about in the past (Miscellany, October 26, 2015).
The only ‘memorial’ to M.D. Cockburn’s contribution is St. Catherine Falls near Kotagiri, named after his wife.
