The past still lingers in an unassuming hall nestled in the corridors of power. The centrepiece of Clive House at Fort St. George is a towering hall approached by elegantly-carved wooden staircases. The building, originally called Admiralty House, bears a plaque which reads, ‘Robert 1st Lord Clive lived in this building in the year 1753, truly great in arms and in council.’
Even though the architectural features of the hall are ordinary, the significance of the hall is intricately linked to the history of the British-built Fort St. George, the genesis of Chennai, and, arguably, British-governed India.
Fort St. George served as a launch pad for the East India Company, a fact often diminished by its conquests in the north. In official letters, the members of the Company often refer to the hall as the ‘Great Hall’. It was also addressed as the banquet/reception hall.
When the British returned to Madras after the French occupation of 1746-1749, the owner of the ‘Great House’, an Armenian merchant, received instructions from the Company “to refrain from selling his property”.
However, the merchant, Shawmier Sultan, otherwise renowned for flamboyantly renouncing his debts, wrote a letter to the Company in 1758 petitioning for the payment of rent.
It is through this letter that we know that the House became the official residence of the deputy-governor of Madras. Robert Clive, the man who laid the foundation of the British empire in India, lived in the ‘Great House’ at the time of his marriage, held at St. Mary’s Church. His son Edward Clive too occupied the house later in the century.
In his book Madras Rediscovered, S. Muthiah writes that the Armenian merchant sold the house to a Portuguese, who in turn sold it to the Company in 1755.
as the 'Great House' served as the Governor's town residence.
The powers-that-were met in the ‘Great Hall’ as it became a venue for state functions until the Banquet Hall (Rajaji Hall) was built in 1802. On occasions such as Christmas or the King’s birthday, the Governor would organize a dinner and a ball there.
“The mayor would signalize his election by an entertainment or a ball” at the hall, writes Henry Dodwell in The Nabobs of Madras (1926). Besides, concerts were a regular feature at the Clive House “at least as early as the 1760s”.
However, the hall didn’t just host functions. As the second Anglo-Mysore war (1779-1784) unfolded, the Company was forced to use St. Mary’s as a granary and storehouse for a year-and-a-half. During this period, the church service was held in the hall of Admiralty House.
Also, in its attempt to put the administration of justice in place, the government chose the ‘Great Hall’ in 1784 to hold the meetings of a three-member ‘Quorum’ of judges every Saturday morning.
“The House is one of the earliest examples of a bullet-proof structure,” says T. Satyamurthy, former superintending archaeologist, ASI, Chennai, who oversaw the restoration of Clive House in 2004. It is no surprise then that during the siege of Madras by the French in 1758, the house was chosen to lodge 200 men.
As part of the ASI office today, the hall serves a bureaucratic purpose instead of being accessible to the public. “The ASI is ensuring that the original hall is maintained. We still hold exhibitions in the hall,” says Sathyabhama Badhreenath, superintending archaeologist, ASI, Chennai.
The hall has a 26-feet-high wooden ceiling which rests on Corinthian columns. The verandah in front of the hall overlooks St. Mary’s Church, the first Anglican church, east of Suez. Light streaming in through the ventilators in the hall falls on glass prisms studded on the wooden floor, giving it a quaint glow.
But Satyamurthy laments the fact that it is not accessible to the public, attributing it to an “excess of military” around Clive House. “At a time in history, the hall was the nerve centre of the Fort. It is the right place for a city museum to come up,” he says.
