This Madras Week talk was at a home where a large number of Americans and other nationals had gathered. Amongst them was Dave, a long-time CEO of a Ford unit in Madras.
And, when the long connect Ford had with Madras was mentioned, taking him by surprise, what he had to say about the city would have been balm to the establishment’s ears — if there is such an expression. Ford’s not going anywhere, he said, and went onto add that Ford has had a great experience in Chennai and was now pouring in hundreds of crores to establish a huge research and development facility on the OMR that would be working on the Company’s models for 2020 and beyond, by which time all Ford units in Madras would be employing over 30,000 persons. I hope some Ford archivist is storing all this information about how Ford came looking for a site in the newly ‘liberalised’ India and found Madras in the 1990s, and what has happened since.
But, I also hope he delves into the past and preserves a Ford-in-India story that none of today’s Americans in Madras know. Ford set up an assembly plant for vehicles in Bombay as early as 1926.
In 1954, not happy with Indian policies, it decided to shut the plant down. With it at the time were 300 CKD packs, and its South Indian distributor George Oakes of the Amalgamations Group decided to take them over. The second phase of Ford assembly in India began at Graeme’s Road. This connection enabled Amalgamations to, in 1979, negotiate a joint venture agreement to manufacture Ford trucks in Madras. The latest model Ford 7 1/2-tonner came out from a factory near Tiruvallur.
It was a beauty in the age of the early Tatas and Leylands, but it wasn’t long before it was discovered that beauty and latest technology were not enough for Indian truck drivers, who would load a vehicle registered for a 10-tonne payload with 15 and 16 tonnes. The Amalgamations’ Fords were willing to accept up to 12 tonnes, but after that they began to go nose up. And so, Amalgamations, after a modest run, exported the vehicles they had to the more law-abiding trucking companies in Sri Lanka or converted them to other uses and, once the stock was exhausted, closed shop and decided to focus on tractors. All this was part of the talk that evening, which left the Americans rather surprised about the long connections Madras has had with the Americans.
Later in the evening, a VIP guest had a story to narrate about another Madras-American connection. Paul C Sherbert, who was Cultural Affairs Officer of the U.S. Consulate General in Madras in the early 1960s, had become friendly with C. Rajagopalachari and visited him often to dig into his archives.
Observing a common occurrence, CR seated on an easy chair, book perched on raised knees, and straining to read small print, PCS presented the then octogenarian man of letters a badly-needed reading aid. This came in the shape of a rectangular magnifying glass that could be slid down or up a page.
Not only did CR use it every day thereafter, but he kept it safely in its own aluminum case, wrapped by him in a khadi-handkerchief, with the covering note from PCS fixed to the receptacle’s base.
What better diplomatic gesture could a Cultural Affairs Officer in Madras make than this, the narrator asked me. Sherbert, he added, went on to become the first Director of the Asia Society in the US.
There was mention in the columns of this newspaper a couple of weeks ago of how Ramanujar Moulana and his Cycling Yogis had brought out a little booklet on a hundred years of cycling in Madras, 1877-1977, to celebrate Madras. I just had to add it to my library that produces much of the material for this column. And that’s when I discovered why the booklet had chosen 1877 as a starting point and why its addendum looked at more recent cycling activities from 2007.
The choice of 2007 as the start of the postscript is because in January that year the first International Cycle Race on the East Coast Road was organised. On the other hand, the choice of 1877 as a starting point for the booklet was the fact that that was the year Major Charles Bowen of the Royal Engineers imported into Madras the city’s first bicycle from a firm in Paris called Michaux. Bowen, it is stated, had in 1867 written to the firm that he’d travelled “round the Cape (on) a good two-wheeled velocipede. (a Michaux’s?)”
The first person to manufacture (read ‘assemble’) bicycles in Madras, indeed in India, was SAA Annamalai Chettiar whose Swan brand bicycles began to be available from 1925. Cycling in Madras is full of such little-known facts. A few I picked out were:
Charles Digby Roberts, who was born in Madras (1834), set up in that hub of the bicycle industry, Coventry, in 1873 a bicycle manufacturing unit: Wyatt & Roberts Ltd.
During the Great War (1914-18), the 1/25 London Regiment had a unit called the 25th County of London Cyclist Battalion.
One of the ships that the Emden sank in the Arabian Sea carried a large cargo of bicycles for India.
The Anna Nagar Tower has a bicycle ramp and you can cycle to the top (I don’t know if it is permitted now);
The RBI Subway, 1345 feet long, was designed with a cycle track when work began on it in 1963.
P Orr’s, Spencer’s and Oakes all sold bicycles in the 19th Century.
R. Nataraja Mudaliar, who released the first silent South Indian film, Keechakavadam , was a cycle retailer, his business house known as Watson & Co. It later sold American cars.
The legendary photographer of the tribals of South India, Philo Irudayanath (1916-92) (Miscellany, September 12, 2011) travelled everywhere on his work, including the Nilgiris and Western Ghats, on a specially-equipped bicycle.
• Several readers were quick to point out that my typist’s devil had got M. J. Gopalan all wrong last Monday and had him as M. J. Gopinath. I’m afraid that in this case I must forgive him; he couldn’t read my handwriting, which most of the time even I can’t.
• While on the subject of hockey and Gold winners from Madras (Miscellany, August 22), S. R. Sundaram points out that I had forgotten Ranganathan Francis, “without doubt the greatest goalkeeper India ever produced”, who helped Indian win Gold at the 1948 Olympics. In fact, he did so at the 1952 and 1956 Games as well. Mea culpa. But in the case of the other name he mentions, Govind Perumal (left half in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics), I had, as in the case of Dhanraj Pillay of a later era, never put him down as a Madras product and thought of him only as a Bombay hockey player.
• I have read recently, midst all that has appeared in the Press during Madras Week, that the Chennakesava Perumal Temple and the Kalikambal Temple in the first Black Town were “demolished and rebuilt on NSC Bose Road and Thambu Chetty Street, respectively. Is this information correct?” asks K. Arumugam. The Chennakesava Perumal Temple was certainly in the first Black Town and dated to the 1640s. It was demolished after the French siege of 1758-59. There is a tradition that sometime after this ‘Town Temple’ had been built, there had been built next to it the Chenna Mallikeswarar Temple which was also demolished. The East India Company then gave an equivalent area in the new Black Town (now George Town) and some financial compensation for a new temple to be built. The Manali Muthukrishna family led the rebuilding and a twin temple, the Chennakesava Perumal and Chenna Mallikeswarar Temple, was built and consecrated in 1766. This temple is between Nyniappa Naicken Street and Devaraja Mudali Street off NSC Bose Road, but its official address is Ayya Pillai Street, the street to its south. As for the Kalikambal Kameswarar Temple, it was never in the first Black Town and, so, did not suffer demolition. It was first built where it still is, on Thambu Chetty Street in new Black Town, and where, legend has it, Sivaji worshipped in 1677.
• The Governor’s Bungalow, Tranquebar (Miscellany, August 15), had been his home in 1959-60, writes S. Satyanidhi Rao, when he was in charge of the Government of India’s Salt Depot. The building was both office and residence, Rao occupying “the residential portion of the first floor.”
