The past week’s been one when I’ve had a couple of scholars calling on me for answers only to find they knew more about the subjects they were quizzing me about, than I did. But between us we also found that we had no answers to many of the questions that had cropped up during the course of their research.
The most interesting visitor that I had was Simon Schmidt from the famed Leiden University in The Netherlands, once well-known for its Tamil Studies programme but which, I was sad to hear, was winding down next year. He had found in the Cape Town Archives 50-plus letters in Tamil written between 1729 and 1737 to Nicolaas Ondaatje, a ‘Chettyar/Pillai’ from Colombo who had been banished to the Cape of Good Hope for ten years by the then Dutch East India Company’s government in Ceylon for the crime of extortion. Schmidt is transliterating the letters in the English alphabet, trying to understand them from the transliteration and the original archaic Tamil that is mixed with derivatives from loanwords, not only to make them meaningful but also to get a word picture of Nikolaas Ondaatje and his family. His first question was where did the Ondaatjes come from.
In school in Colombo I’d studied with Ondaatjes and they’d considered themselves Burghers (the offspring of Dutch-Ceylonese unions). It was only in more recent times — in fact from the time of Booker Prize-winning Michael Ondaatje and his billionaire brother and fellow author, Sir Christopher, that there emerged the fact they had Colombo Chetty links. But the Colombo Chetties I’d known in school and while in the dentist’s chair, persons with names like Casie Chetty, appeared to think of themselves as Sinhalese. It was less than ten years ago that there appeared a couple of books and a few articles in Colombo recording a Thanjavur coast Dhanavaisya (Ayira Vaisya?) Chetty connection. The Ondaatje letters that Schmidt is working on only strengthens that belief.
It was during this past decade also that I came across mention of Michael Juric Ondaatchi, who was a physician in the Court of Thanjavur in the 18th Century, and his son, possibly born of an European mother, Dr. Peter Philip Juriaan Quint Ondaatchi, who was described as “the first Asian to figure prominently in European history.” Dr. Peter Ondaatchi, a lawyer in Holland, served on Napoleon’s Imperial Court of Prizes in 1811 and was later a justice of the High Court of The Netherlands (‘Oland’ in the letters). It was around the time I caught up with these two names that I learnt more about a name I’d known for years but had paid little attention to. Simon Casie Chetty I’d heard of as being the first Ceylonese member of the Ceylon Civil Service but I had not known that in 1838, when he was a member of the ‘legislature’, he was “the second Tamil member” to be nominated to the Governor’s Council. More significantly, I found that he had written prolifically in Tamil on Tamil castes, culture and literature in Ceylon in the first half of the 19th Century — work which has gone out of print.
The second question was what the name Ondaatje/Ondaatchi meant; in the letters, it is written in Tamil as ‘Ukantatchi’. Now Padaiyaatchi is a common enough name in southern Tamil Nadu and I have always considered it as deriving from someone who takes care (aatchi) of the army (padai), so a ‘commander’. But what does the ‘ukant’ in ‘Ukantaatchi’ take care of? I wonder whether readers have an answer to that poser.
The final question was why no Tamil Nadu scholars have done research on the Chetties taken by the Portuguese and Dutch from Porto Novo and Nagapattinam to Ceylon, Malacca and Batavia (Djakarta) to serve as kanakapulles and overseers. Many of them, like Nicolaas Ondaatje’s family, became dubashes. Nicolaas Ondaatje himself, Schmidt says, was a trader, accountant, physician, interpreter and schoolmaster, whose accomplishments made the Dutch allow him to live as a free man at the Cape, where he died shortly before his exile was due to come to an end.
The furniture makers
My second visitor was virtually a neighbour in Madras but who had studied and was lecturing in Ahmadabad. He was working on how inner spaces in buildings in Madras that is Chennai had developed over the centuries. We talked of the old Indian houses in Mylapore and Triplicane and George Town, the garden houses of the British and the gabled and monkey-topped houses of the more affluent Indians, the early Classical architecture and the move to Indo-Saracenic, then to Art Deco and now to modern glass, steel and concrete towers. But how many of the older forms of architecture in the city had retained their use of inner space as it was, I had no idea.
Inner space, however, means furniture and I wondered whether old furniture makers would have any clues. And that’s when, looking back, I had to tell him that virtually none of them was in business today. Perhaps the best known of the old furniture makers — who supplied Government Houses, the princely families, the leading agency houses and the homes of the rich — was Spencer’s. Today, it is out of the furniture business.
Spencer’s Furniture and Furnishing Department used to import its furnishings, but its furniture of teak and rosewood, walnut, white cedar and satinwood, was always made on its premises from the time it got into the business in 1924, when it took over Oakes & Co’s furniture factory dating to the 19th Century. Some of the encomiums paid to Spencer’s furniture were, “The finest table I have ever seen”, “Wonderful workmanship, seldom seen in the world today”, “What a magnificent piece of work, our rosewood dining table”, and “Craftsmanship still exists”. Till the 1960s, the master carpenters came out from England, but it was traditional aasaris who did the work.
Other leading furniture makers included C.M. Curzon & Co., founded in 1898 and still in business — its speciality has long been library furniture — and T. Batchacharry of Triplicane. The latter was a building contractor but had a team of first-rate carpenters who did exceptional furniture and woodwork, examples of which were in the Madras Christian College buildings on the Esplanade’s northern edge and in the Secretariat, its Library and offices in the Old Council Room in Fort St. George. Batchacharry’s, which was started in 1894, has vanished from the scene.
Perhaps there are readers who can remember other furniture makers of the early 20th Century who embellished interiors in Madras. Meanwhile, I’m trying to remember a French-sounding name.
