… they may not, as in Flanders’ fields / between the crosses row on row, at the immaculately kept War Graves Cemetery just outside St. Thomas Mount, but row on row stand white plaques, each commemorating a serviceman who died around here during World War II. Drawing attention to the way this cemetery is maintained, Air Marshal S Varthaman pointed out at a recent talk that there were 2,500 more such cemeteries in 154 countries, all maintained by the UK-based Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). All of them have the same spick and span look due to close monitoring by the Commission, which ensures its maintenance manual is strictly followed. That manual insists on uniformity down to the permitted height of the grass and how trees must be pruned!
Varthaman, speaking on the forgotten Indian contribution in the Great War (First World War), where more soldiers died in battle than during the Second World War, recalled the tributes paid annually on November 11 (Armistice Day) in the French town of Neuve Chappelle and Ypres in Belgium to the thousands of Indian soldiers who died in the fields around them where poppies grow.
During his three years as Air Attaché in Paris, Varthaman participated in numerous commemoration functions honouring the Indian dead. He can’t help but wonder why India doesn’t, in a similar way, honour those who died in India’s later wars. India Gate in Delhi, modelled on Menin Gate of Ypres, was a British one to Indian soldiers who died in the Great War. Now, as Amar Jawan Jyoti, the eternal flame, it is India’s memorial to its servicemen who died in all wars since 1914. But India’s dead came from different parts of India. Shouldn’t there be local memorials and public remembrance functions at these locations?
Of the 1.7 millions graves the CWGC maintains, there is a solitary one in the village of La Lande, in Normandy, France. It is that of Pilot Officer SD Thyagarajan of Madras, who joined the Royal Air Force and died in action during the Normandy invasion. ‘Tiger’ Rajan, a ‘Typhoon’ pilot, is also remembered by former ‘Typhoon’ pilots in their memorial to those who died flying those fighters.
When the postman knocked…
* Whether Madras University’s Tamil Lexicon project is continuing or not, I have not heard as yet, but S Arunachalam of the Tamil Valarchi Manram, Washermanpet, points me to a more comprehensive work done over the last 40 years: An Etymological and Comparative Lexicon of Tamil Language (ECLT). Published by the International Institute of Tamil Studies (IITS), Taramani (established by the Government in 1970), work on the dictionary started in 1974 under the leadership of the Rev. S Gnana Prakasar of Jaffna, who planned it in two volumes. Reprinted from 1999, it is now in 11 slimmer volumes.
Acknowledging the immense contribution of the Tamil Lexicon to his team’s work, Gnana Prakasar, in the preface to the original Volume I, however, states, “The present volume justifies its publication by its etymological and philogical treatment of words, on which sufficient stress was not laid (earlier)”. In other words, not enough information was in the Tamil Lexicon on the origins and historical development of words. Gnana Prakasar goes on to highlight the two special features of the ECLT dictionary: Tracing the roots of all Tamil words and, those of other Dravidian dialects, besides including more complete references to forms of Dravidian words from Kanarese, Telugu, Malayalam etc.
This search led me to discovering another museum in Madras. The IITS in 2016 opened a cultural centre for a permanent exhibition recreating “the 5,000-year-old history of the Tamils” in word, picture and artefact.
* I stand corrected. Film buff Ramesh Kumar writes that MR Santhanalakshmi did not act in Sathi Leelavathi , her film debut was in Radha Kalyanam in 1935, but she became a star with Ambikapathy . The heroine Leelavathi, he adds, was played by MR Gnanambal, wife of the male lead MK Radha. Gnanambal accepted the role only after other leading actresses had refused it because the story called for her physical abuse through most of the movie. She too was a stage star and had played the same role on stage with Radha. Then came films, but she retired after marriage, coming out of retirement to play the film role.
Ramesh Kumar also writes that Sathi Leelavathi was not NS Krishnan’s first film. It was Menaka (1935). But the former was the film he was first hired for. Its legal tangles had Menaka being released first. And, Theodore Baskaran, explaining why MGR was called ‘Vadhiyar’, states it does mean ‘teacher’ but it also means, and in this context, the ‘director’ or ‘conductor’ of a play.
The chronicler of Madras that is Chennai tells stories of people, places and events from the years gone by — and, sometimes, from today
