As the New Year begins, may I suggest to the Government, which wanted governance returned to Fort St George from what has now become a super-specialty hospital, that it considers celebration of the 375th anniversary of work beginning on the Fort?
Last year, August 22nd marked the 375th anniversary of the land grant to the East India Company where today’s Fort had its beginnings. After several visits to the site from the time of the grant, Andrew Cogan and Francis Day arrived on February 20, 1640 with about 100 or so men to lay the foundations for a settlement neighbouring a fishing village or two. The party included two factors, Humphrey Tompkins and John Browne, two writers, a surgeon, a gunner (at the time considered an all-round engineer of sorts), Lt. Jermin and Sergeant Bradford in charge of 25 aged soldiers, sundry carpenters, blacksmiths and coopers, and some domestic staff, all English. There were also a few Portuguese merchants and the only Indian appears to have been Nagabatthan, a gunpowder-maker. They landed from the Eagle and the Unity , both 100-tonners and each with a crew of 25 Europeans who pitched in with the early work, which comprised building temporary accommodation with local wood and palmyra thatch. Work began on March 1st to a plan drawn up by Cogan, Day and the gunner.
On April 23rd, 375 years ago this year, the construction underway was dedicated to the patron saint of England, whose Day it was, and named Fort St. George. The plan was for an almost square enclosure, with walls about 100 yards on each side, bastions in each corner and a central building diagonal to the square. All this was to be built without any foundations. By the end of 1640, the southeast bastion was completed. Work was far from complete when Cogan decided to transfer the seat of Agency from Masulipatnam to Fort St. George on September 24, 1641 and Madras became the chief factory of the Company on the east coast of India.
With delays for one reason or another — no doubt the example followed to this day when Government construction or restoration is involved — the final wall, the sea wall linking the eastern bastions, was put in place in 1653. The centre of the Fort at that time was 190 yards from the Bay of Bengal on the east and 110 yards from the North River, which in time was to become the Buckingham Canal, on the west. This fort, with what was called ‘The Castle’ in the centre, survived till 1714.
The completion of what later became known as the Inner Fort was during the Agency of Henry Greenhill. During his second Agency he built the far better defence-oriented outer walls round the Inner Fort, the work being completed in 1657. In an aside it may be said that Greenhill who succeeded to Day’s mistress in San Thomé completed what Day had started when the first sods for Fort St. George were turned. Within these walls lived the Europeans of early Madras, the Indian settlers outside them, in Chennapatnam.
In the light of this, if April 23rd gets officially celebrated as Fort St. George Day, could we hope for a couple of nearby roads being named after Andrew Cogan, Francis Day and Beri Thimmappa who negotiated it all?
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A welcome for medicare
The recent Union Government’s announcement of its intention to relax visa norms for people from the SAARC countries, and a couple of others, to seek medicare in India (unfortunately labelled ‘medical tourism’) reminded me of something I’d read in a book not so long ago.
Anglo-Ink is an Anglo-Indian publishing house in Madras that’s done well for itself within 18 months of starting in Anna Nagar, bringing out almost as many titles, reprints or new ones focused on Anglo-Indian life and times. One of its recent titles, A Legacy of Memories , recalls the life of a family in India over a few generations and has an addendum on a much later visit to Madras by a member of the family.
This young couple from Canada spent two months in Madras in 2008 while she underwent surgery and recuperation at a leading medical facility in the city after discovering that it would take her over a year to get it done at home. Her husband’s narration of the experience in the book reads:
“The facility is world class and the doctors are mostly U.S., Britain and Canadian-qualified. The surgeon who operated…had practised for several years in Britain…He was a very nice man and gave us a great feeling of confidence. The nursing was personal and outstanding.
“Now for the really unbelievable part! The cost of the surgery, the ten days’ stay in the hospital in a ward (sic) the size of a large hotel room with an extra bed for a caregiver, a settee, a desk, a fridge, a fully outfitted bathroom, the drugs, the MRI, X-rays, ultrasounds, the whole works, was roughly equivalent to the airfare! We also met the surgeon twice (for checks before leaving) at no extra cost.”
Now I’m not sure every patient from abroad will get that kind of treatment or whether as the numbers increase hospitals will be able to offer the same kind of facilities this couple enjoyed. But for the present, it would seem possible and the hospital should be pleased with this kind of ‘advertisement’. So should Madras, generally, with the write-up he has given the city in the rest of his story.
There is, however, a postscript to the recounting in the book. A year later, the narrator writes, his wife “was obliged to have a repeat of the surgery done in India in a Canadian hospital.” He makes no comment.
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When the postman knocked…
* After seeing in this paper about a couple of weeks ago that splendid picture of blackbuck taken in Guindy National Park, Shanthi S. wants to know whether they are native to the scrub jungle found in this part of the Coromandel hinterland. If I remember right, wildlife enthusiast Theodore Baskaran once told me they were a native species and the spotted deer in the Park were an introduced species. It has, however, been stated that the blackbuck were introduced here in 1924 by Governor Lord Willingdon from elsewhere in what is now Tamil Nadu.
The blackbuck in the Park number about 400 and they were added to c.1950 when the then Governor, the Maharajah of Bhavanagar, introduced the albino species, whose strain still survives. The spotted deer, now around 2,600 in number in the Park, were introduced there around 1840 from Government Estate by Governor Lord Elphinstone. They in turn had been introduced in the Estate probably sometime during the Governorship of Thomas Rumbold (1778-80).
* How did Wall Tax Road get its name and does the name still survive, asks L.M. Ratnam. The name still survives in usage, but the official name now is VOC(hidambaram) Road. The story of why it got its original name goes back to the origins of Madras when it was thought that the Bay of Bengal, the Cooum River and the North River on three sides and a thorn hedge on the north linking the sea and the North River would be enough to protect the settlement. But when Hyder Ali made nonsense of the hedge on two occasions in the 1760s, it was decided to build a wall in the north along the line of the hedge and another wall on the west, just to the east of the river. Work started on the wall in 1770 and was completed in 1772. After the north wall was completed and before work started on the west wall, the Council thought of taxing the citizenry for the building of this wall; after all, it was for the protection of the residents of Black Town, the Councillors argued. But petitions by the leading citizens of the area and protest demonstrations by others led to the abandonment of the proposal. It was, however, decided to commemorate the Council’s thinking by naming the road Wall Tax Road. The road runs from the western end of what should really have been North Wall Road (east to west, Ebrahim Sahib Street-Old Jail Road-Basin Bridge Road) to E.V.R. Periyar Salai (General Hospital Road), the two roads forming the northern and western boundaries of Black Town, now George Town.
