Tucked into the bustle of College Road is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it red building — Chennai’s oldest existing library — the Madras Literary Society. Home to 1,50,000 books, a thousand of them from between the 16th and 19th Century, 30,000 from the 19th Century itself and the remainder from the 20th and 21st Century, the library, today, sees little footfall but remains a curious repository of the city’s history.
It’s these stories that history enthusiast V. Sriram hopes to mine for a heritage walk around the 202-year-old Society, which he will conduct as part of The Hindu Lit for Life 2015 festival on January 17.
The walk will begin by contextualising the Society’s origins, founded as an auxiliary to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1812, as part of the College of Fort St. George, which existed on College Road and lends the road its name. It will traverse through the old college building that still stands, an ornate, large gate along the Cooum riverside, which was the entry point into the compound for boats coming down the river and is today a well-maintained surviving piece of early-East India Company architecture. The walk will close within the Society itself.
Once the haunt of those like Subhas Chandra Bose and Annie Besant, the Library still keeps up its traditions of home-delivering and collecting books for its members. Originally the training stop for East India Company employees in administration, customs, religion and law, the library still hosts hundreds of those rare books, which, of course, aren’t for rent. Its more recent substantial collection of modern books is for the taking. It’s the abundant documentation of the Cooum river and the building of the Buckingham Canal though, that are the historian’s delight.
Although the Society itself moved into these quarters only around 1906, (it was earlier housed in the Connemara Library), Sriram says the architecture of the building itself makes for interesting observation. A recently well-restored structure, the building is a “splendid heritage piece” similar in its Jaipur-Jaina style to the Connemara Library, and the Museum Theatre, and was thus probably designed by Henry Irwin, muses Sriram. “What it needs for its survival is young people, with fresh ideas for its restoration to flourish here. It could potentially become a local hub of literary activity and that’s what I hope the walk will initiate.”
The one-and-a-half hour walk can accommodate 50 participants and registration is on a first-come-first-served basis. To register, SMS LFLHW<space>Name, Age to 53030. Participants must assemble at the Directorate of Public Instruction on College Road at 8 a.m. “Bring along drinking water, a cap, sunblock and goggles, and wear comfortable clothes and sensible shoes,” advises Sriram.
