Away from my desk for a couple of weeks, I’ve returned to find a heap of mail waiting to find space in this column. And space they’ll have aplenty today.
* ‘ >The first cars in the South ’ (Miscellany, January 12) kept the postman busy bringing in much information about the early vehicles on Madras roads. Two out-of-the-ordinary messages were from Shankar Sundaram and Ramineni Bhaskar.
Sundaram refers to Samuel Green who dominated the Madras engineering scene from 1902 to 1936 when he was with Simpson’s. Besides the steam-driven car he developed, he built in 1910 at Simpson’s a biplane, perhaps the first Indian-built aircraft, which D’Angelis (Miscellany, December 1, 2003) flew near St. Thomas’ Mount as well as at the Island Grounds. After aviation arrived in Madras, Simpson’s serviced and repaired aircraft for many years. Sundaram also reminds me that Simpson’s, originally coach-builders, built special bodies on Rolls Royce chassis for the Maharajas of Pithapuram and Alwar in 1910-11.
Ramineni Baskar writes that it was reported in a Calcutta newspaper sometime ago that “Bipin Bihari Das was the first Indian to make a car. He died in 1938 at the age of 35.” The report also states that Das “was the country’s first manufacturer of cars”. No further details are provided, but I am inclined to wonder whether, if Green’s car was on the road in 1903, Das had a car on the road (if you do your sums) when he was barely 20.
Other readers have mentioned a host of early car dealers in Madras and the Districts. Simpson’s and Addison’s, both now with the Amalgamations Group together with two other names sent to me, Oakes & Co. & T. Stanes & Co., seem to have dominated the car scene in the South. Other dealers were the Elphinstone Company, Jones & Co., R. Patel & Co., Freudenberg & Co, Byram Shah & Co., The Presidency Motors, G.H. Booley & Co. and The Union Co. The brands mentioned include Dodge, Buick, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Willys- Knight, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Ford, Graham Paige, Nash, Oakland, Wolseley, Opel, Citroen and Standard — a preponderance of American cars! One Simpson advertisement proudly proclaims, “Mr. S. Sathyamurthy’s 1937 elections tour of 9000 miles in South India was made easy with the help of his ‘Pontiac’ car.”
* Referring to my story in Miscellany, December 22, that the University of Madras was the first to introduce Australian Literature studies, a retired Professor of English from Nagarjuna University, R. Rangan, has sent me a lengthy letter “to shed some light on the history of Commonwealth Literature in Indian Universities.” As Prof. Rangan sees his letter as “a correction” of what I had stated and wishes to “set the record straight and show the right perspective”, I pay heed to his request even though he does not contradict what was a reference specifically to Australian Literature.
Prof. Rangan’s contention is that Commonwealth Literature was introduced, together with American Literature and Indian Writing in English, by Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in Andhra University in the 1960s. Nagarjuna University, born out of Andhra University, continued the tradition “when Madras University was still circumspect about the new areas”. Mysore University’s Prof. C.D. Narasimhaiah in the 1970s began to introduce studies in ‘global English’, in the 1970s, “breaking away from the conventional British Literature which was then still the staple of the Madras University English Department.” And in the early 1990s Prof. K.S. Rama Murti, “a pioneer in the new areas in Tamil Nadu”, was looking at Canadian Literature at Bharatidasan University, Tiruchirappalli. I’m delighted to hear that these universities have pioneered or paid special attention to White and Black Commonwealth Literature as well as to ‘global English Literature’. But in all this, Australian Literature is only a part of the whole, not the sole focus as Madras University appears to have made it. The occasional papers on Patrick White (Prof. D.V.K. Raghavacharyulu) and on the poetry of Judith Wright and A.D. Hope by others does not indicate a university English department’s focus on Australian Literature.
But what seems obvious from what Prof. Rangan writes is that the newer universities have been more open-minded and venturesome in English studies than what might be described as the ‘Mother University’. An old Presidencian, he concludes, “Having been brought up in the highly conservative atmosphere of old Madras University when it would not touch even American Literature, leave alone R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Kamala Das etc., all these wonderful writers clubbed under Indian writing in English, the atmosphere in Andhra University’s Postgraduate Centre, where the entire faculty were engaged in new areas, was exhilarating as well as intimidating (for an English postgraduate from Madras).”
* Another Professor of English, Dr. S.S. Kumar, formerly of Presidency, is a second contributor to the column this week on a literary matter. He is translating Samuel Johnson’s Life of Milton (1779). He wants me to “throw more light” on a reference he found to “Fort St George in the East Indies” in Johnson’s book whose editor for an Indian collegiate text has added the note: “Fort St George: Formerly the official name for the city and presidency of Madras.” Being a reader of this column, which he states he is, he will find any number of references to Fort St. George in it over the years, the latest being on January 5, if he checks this paper’s archives. I therefore need not add anything to all that except to state that in the 17th and 18th Centuries India was often referred to in Britain as the ‘East Indies’ to differentiate it from the region Columbus ‘discovered’ and which it was venturing into, the West Indies.
But what warranted space in this column, I felt, was a reference found in the photocopied pages from Johnson’s biography that Kumar sent me. And that was to Deborah Clark, the third of Milton’s three daughters. It was one of her seven sons, Caleb, who “went to Fort St. George in the East Indies.” But what Caleb Clark, grandson of the poet Milton, did in Madras I have not been able to trace.
Another literary reference in the biography has a Madras connection too. It reads, “To this gentlewoman (Deborah) Addison made a present and promised some establishment, but died soon after.” The Fort St. George connection here is that the Addison mentioned in the biography was Joseph Addison, the essayist, whose brother Gulstone Addison, who with another brother had been working in Fort St. George, became Governor of Madras in 1709. The Governorship, it has been stated, came to him largely through Joseph’s political influence in London. When Gulstone Addison died within weeks of accepting office, he left his property to brother Joseph and that, writes Madras chronicler Talboys Wheeler, “came at an opportune moment and enabled Joseph to marry the Countess of Warwick with whom he had fallen in love.”
A third English literary connection with Madras was William Makepeace Thackeray whose kinsman St John Thackeray belonged to the Madras Civil Service and was Collector and Political Agent in the Kittur Kingdom in the rebellious Southern Mahratta region where he was killed in 1824. William Thackeray himself was born in Calcutta to Richmond and Anne Thackeray in 1811. It is recorded that a painting of him (as a two-year-old) with his mother was done in Madras by George Chinnery in 1813.
* The lack of comment I mentioned in my item on welcome medicare in Madras (Miscellany, January 5) had the postman bringing me the necessary comment from Harry MacLure, who had heard from the couple in Canada. They wrote, “She had a bad fall soon after returning home which undid the surgery done in Madras. The Indian surgeon (for whom we have the greatest respect) did not use screws to fuse her vertebrae as she suffered from severe osteoporosis. In the second surgery (in Canada) the surgeon used screws which came loose in less than two days and necessitated a further surgery.”
* D.B. James points out that in writing about the Dutch on the Coromandel (Miscellany, January 19) I had not mentioned their presence in Bheemunipatnam, Masulipatnam and Kakinada, all Coromandel ports. Indeed they deserve notice, for all three still host Dutch cemeteries, Dutch towers and a Dutch home or two. But the author of the book I had referred to had placed all three towns in his North India section and the Coromandel connection slipped my mind.
