Rukmini Devi (Arundale) once wrote, “I brought a small sapling of the great Banyan in the Theosophical Society and on the 1st January 1951 we had a small ceremony for planting it in our new campus. Many friends from different parts of the world brought earth from their own countries for this ceremonial planting. The land was bare except for small saplings that we had been planting from time to time. It was a vast sandy beach with not a speck of green and only the sea to make us feel cool under the hot sun. But I had a great feeling of benign presence and in my heart I felt hopeful.” And with that hope in her heart — and that banyan sapling’s promise — there began the growth of the verdant campus in which Kalakshetra has now sunk deep roots.
Today, a rich forest has grown on what was barren land. And to celebrate it, the Kalakshetra Foundation has recently brought out a book rich with the pictures of trees, flowers and fruit, insects and birds in all their brilliant hues: Pidhana — The Canopy of Life . What it reveals could not have been imagined by people like Prof. Janardhanan when he arrived at Kalakshetra in 1958 and saw “a largely empty campus, with a four-roomed cottage and a L-shaped studio the only construction.” It was a sea of barrenness that almost merged with a sea of “roaring waves”. To bring life to such barrenness was Rukmini Devi’s aim and when she had succeeded she would say, “From the harmony of environment — life, thought, philosophy and nature — with the creative spirit within, inspiration is born and art is the expression.”
Supplementing the striking photographs by R. Prasana Venkatesh, Sai Archana and Sreedhar Vaidya is the textual tree species documentation by Nizhal. It was Nizhal, twenty this year, that sowed the seeds for the book. A ‘Tree Walk’ it organised at Kalakshetra in 2013 led to it suggesting a documentation of the trees on the campus — and a book was born. It’s a book that will have many wanting to follow the nature trails Kalakshetra could add to its offerings. It is also a book that needs cloning by such Nature-rich campuses of institutions like the Government Museum, the Theosophical Society, the Madras Christian College, the Madras Club, and the Kotturpuram Tree Park.
The Kotturpuram Tree Park is another signal contribution to the greening of the city by Shobha Menon-led Nizhal. From wasteland on the northern bank of the Adyar River, near the Kotturpuram end, Nizhal led a movement of the citizens in the neighbourhood into creating and tending this Park, which now is also supported by the Corporation of Madras. Almost every tree in the Park bears a plaque announcing its species, deer roam where they have long meandered, a paved track has citizens of every financial status discovering the joys of walking, scores of benches provide space for those who want to enjoy fresh air while they gossip, a gazebo houses the story of the Park, and, best of all, there’s virgin forest at the eastern end of the Park with trails in it for those seeking ‘nature-in-the-raw’. The Park’s still a work in progress, but in 10 years’ time, if cared for, will be another ‘forest’ in the city. It’s a model to be followed in other parts of Madras that is Chennai if we are to make a green city greener.
*****
When the postman knocked…
* Once again readers have virtually taken over this column. I look forward to still others participating.
P. Sabanayagam, a former Chief Secretary with a fund of tales to narrate, but which he refuses to record, recently sent me a note to state that several of the houses on the south bank of the Adyar that I had recently referred to ( >Miscellany, March 2 ) are still there, with some additions and subtractions, and are occupied. Only, they have new names and new users. Sabanayagam was himself, when in service, associated with all the houses he lists. They are:
Riverside , now called Ponni and occupied by the Iyalisai Nataka Mandram.
Hovingham , now called Thamarai and occupied by a High Court judge.
Greenway , now called Anbu and occupied by a Minister.
Cherwill , now called Kurinji and occupied by a Minister.
The Grange , now called Kanchi and occupied by the Anna Institute of Management.
I wonder whether there are any other readers who can bring me up-to-date with the other buildings I had listed.
* Besides the houses mentioned above, there was Yerolyte which I had mentioned on March 2. K. V.S. Krishna tells me that Yerolyte , at the time of its sale to the Andhra Mahila Sabha, was owned by C.R. Rangachari, who owned the Neepa soap factory on the way to the Lattice Bridge. In his large garden Rangachari had several big enclosures hosting a variety of exotic birds. His daughter, a student at the Besant School in Krishna’s time, was a good artist and she often used to take several of her fellow-painters in school in the family’s Nash to sketch and paint in Yerolyte’s garden.
* “The credit for being the oldest school in Madras should go to St. Paul’s High School, Vepery,” writes reader M. Jayaraj, an old boy of the School. “It was a school meant for all poor children from the time it was started in 1716,” he adds. St George’s, considered the oldest and which celebrates its 300th birthday this year, he says, was an asylum for a particular group of orphans.
I am afraid Jayaraj is not quite right. St. Mary’s Charity School was started in St. Mary’s Church in the Fort in 1715 by the Rev.William Stevenson, chaplain of the Fort, and the next year moved to The Island, near where the Munro statue later came up. It remained there till 1871-72, when it merged with the Orphans’ Asylum, moved to its present site in 1904 and in 1954 took its present name, St. George’s. In fact, the Rev. Stevenson’s formal school was preceded in the Fort by one started on the Council’s orders by schoolmaster Ralph Orde in 1678.
Jayaraj adds further information about the Vepery school. Referring to a Miscellany item of September 5, 2005, he says that the “Lutheran school in Vepery” that I had mentioned in connection with Serfoji of Tanjore’s education was really St. Paul’s where the Rev. Gericke of the Tranquebar Mission (and the CMS representative) was Principal from 1767 to 1803. Following this lead, the sons of rajahs and zamindars in the Madras Presidency attended the school till Newington College (Princes’ College) was started early in the 20th Century.
Recalling his days at St. Paul’s, reader Jayaraj states there were two hostels on the campus, Gericke and Sathya. The latter took its name from the first Indian Principal of the School, Joseph Sathya. A later Principal was the Rev. D. Chellappa (1937-55), who was in time elected the first Indian Bishop of the Madras Diocese of the CSI. The Principal’s residence, a heritage building, still stands, but the main building of an earlier period, a domed construction, was demolished. Jayaraj recalls that inside that building there was a locked and sealed door some 7 feet below ground level. In his time at the school, this door was inside a locked room in the building. It was spoken of as an entry/exit door to an underground passage that led to and from the Egmore Redoubt. I wonder whether the passage still exists.
* Dr. N. Sreedharan thinks Bharath Yeshwanth’s explanations for Pinjrapole (Miscellany, February 23) is “not quite correct”. Pinjra, he writes, means ‘cage’, generally for birds. It also means a trap for stray cattle. Cattle, however, were not caged. They were kept in fenced enclosures. As for pole/pola, it could also mean an open space. So pinjrapole would therefore mean a ‘pen’ in modern English, a goshala .
* Where does the name Washermenpet (or is it ‘Washermanpet’) come from, wonders Soraya Bai. It comes from ‘washermen’, men who washed cloth. The story of those men — and there must have been women too — goes back to almost the beginning of the city. When Francis Day negotiated and obtained for the East India Company the strip of ‘no man’s sand’ that was to grow into Madras, he justified the acquisition on the grounds that textiles, the Company’s chief export at the time being cottons, could be got cheaper in this area than in the vicinity of Masulipatnam where the Company had put down roots in 1611. But in fact there was no manufacture of textiles anywhere near the new settlement. Day had to get his dubash Beri Thimmappa to bring in weavers, ‘washers’, and dyers from the Masulipatnam hinterland and his own Nellore area. The ‘washers’ were settled well north of the Fort to bleach and dye the cloth using the water of what was then the North River which in time became integrated with the Buckingham Canal. And, so, we got the settlement of the ‘washers’, Washermenpet.
