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The Lakshmi of Lahore
A friend who had recently visited Lahore came back full of a Lakshmi Chowk and a Lakshmi Mansions he had been shown and wondered whether I knew anything about them. As it happened, I did know a little about them, having visited them as a teenager just entering college in 1945. At that time, it was virtually the only southern link anyone from the South had in the North — a place where you could always be sure of a welcome and a helping hand. It was only some years later I learnt more of the man from Kumbakonam, Presidency College, Madras, and King's College, Cambridge, who was responsible for Lakshmi Mansions not only in Lahore but in Karachi, Delhi and Bombay. He was K. Santanam, better known as Panditji, who was the founding Managing Director of the Lakshmi Insurance Company, which he and a few friends who had been involved in the Non-cooperation Movement had started in 1924.
His Cambridge education completed, Santanam had sat for the Indian Civil Service and on being selected, found himself offered a posting in the Audit Department in India. Turning the offer down, he turned to the Law and was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple. Back in the bosom of Tamil Iyengar conservatism, he found himself accepted neither by fellow lawyers, clients nor even prospective fathers-in-law in `Tanjore'. And so he headed North to Lahore in 1911, where he soon found success, a bride and the campaign for freedom that the Lion of the Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, was seeking committed supporters for. When, subsequent to the Jallianwala Massacre, Santanam defended the Lahore agitational leadership and spread the news of the atrocities in the Punjab to the outside world, he was accepted into the bosom of nationalist Lahore. He gave up the law, joined the Congress and played an important role in civic life, serving cosmopolitan Lahore as its elected Municipal Commissioner from 1921 to 1923.
With the Non-cooperation Movement behind them, it was Lala Lajpat Rai who saw the life insurance business as social service and a means of improving society. He saw it as "cultivating habits of thrift and economy... (while) making scattered surplus wealth available for business and industrial expansion." Pandit Motilal Nehru and Raizada Bhagat Ram were its other founder directors. They picked Pandit Santanam as the man to guide it to success. And within the first year, Lakshmi issued Rs. 23 lakh worth of policies to join Bombay Mutual and New Indian as the three "Indian Expresses" of Indian insurance. He was also to become a key figure in organising as a unity the world of Indian insurance. He was Founder-Secretary in 1928-29 of the Indian Life Offices' Association and later its president. He was a member of the various Insurance Advisory Committees. And he constantly fought to make Insurance Law just.
Today, Lakshmi Insurance may be part of LIC, but in Pakistan many of its buildings still bear its name and the temple motifs on their facades, though not the Lakshmi representations that once adorned them.
S. MUTHIAH
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