The builder of Yerolyte
Writing about Yerolyte , once a house in what is now the Andhra Mahila Sabha campus (Miscellany, March 2 & 16), I had given the impression that it was a British-owned one. No, it wasn’t, it was built c.1930 by A. R. Rangachari (ARR), writes K. R. S. Ram, the grandson of ARR. My impression, however, is that the name Yerolyte dates to the late 19th Century when many of the garden houses on this stretch of the Adyar were built and, if that is correct, the 17.5 grounds property may originally have had that name and ARR retained it when he pulled down an older house and built this one. Perhaps reader Ram can trace some documentation on this.
Be that as it may, ARR appears to have been rather an enterprising man, probably one of the first incubators of small businesses. ARR, born into a Trichinopoly family of weavers, moved to Madurai as a young man and persuaded a well-to-do family to set up a business distributing dyes and chemicals for the textile industry. He ran the business as a working partner and, once Chari & Ram was up-and-running successfully, he moved to Madras to expand the business. Setting up office in George Town, he moved into Bell Bungalow on the Theosophical Society campus. Not long afterwards he built Yerolyte , which he embellished with his art collection and photographs. He even had a dark room in the house to fulfil his hobby, photography.
Further south, he acquired land on Lattice Bridge Road, not far from the Travancore Maharajah’s palace. And on this land he developed what might be called an “industrial estate”, encouraging young members of the weaving community to set up small businesses that he mentored, emphasising honesty in business and quality products. Once he passed away in 1953, the family moved into the house he had built there; it was called Pankaja Vilas and later renamed Gawoja . Was this where Andrew Yule established its branch that was recently pulled down?
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Some Madras trees
After reading my item on the living landmarks of Madras, what we might call heritage trees (Miscellany, May 18), a well-wisher sent me a treasure, a small book titled Some Madras Trees . I call it a treasure because it was published over a hundred years ago, in 1911, by the Methodist Publishing House, Madras, and priced at only Rs.3 for a 200-page hard-back pocket book.
It was written by Alan Butterworth of the Indian Civil Service, Madras, and was “intended only for the purely ignorant and especially for my younger brethren in the Civil Services.”
The book, Butterworth says, deals only with trees he found in Madras and Madura and not with forest trees; in fact, it is “mostly confined to those trees one is likely to see when pottering about the compound or trotting precariously over the fine surface (!) of our Local Fund Roads.” Not a scientific work, “it is intended merely as a help towards identification.”
Whereupon I promptly went to look up a tree that was mentioned at the recent release of Living Landmarks of Chennai as being found in the hundreds, particularly in the Guindy National Park and the IIT campus, namely the banyan.
The banyan is one of half a dozen trees belonging to the Ficus family and is specifically the Ficus Indica according to Roxburgh and Butterworth and Ficus Bengalensis according to the Nizhal book. Of it Butterworth writes, “It is the most characteristic tree of India… the finest banyans I know are both in Madura District, one at Melur and the other in Madura town. The latter overshadows an area with a circumference of 300 paces. The former has a smaller spread but in some ways is still more striking. As an avenue tree it is incomparable, but the grand century-old banyans of the avenues are giving place too often to such wretched substitutes as the rain-tree.”
The Ficus Indica (Bengalensis) is the aalamaram in Tamil. The other impressive tree in the Ficus family, Butterworth says, is the Ficus religiosa , the Sacred Fig tree in English, the Peepul – also now part of the Indian-English vocabulary deriving from the Hindi – and the arasamaram in Tamil. The largest specimen of this tree that Butterworth had seen had a girth of 34 feet.
The two Tamil names mentioned above are commonplace. But Butterworth makes a rather insightful comment on the Tamil and Telugu names of trees. He says, “Both Tamil and Telugu possess copious and exact botanical vocabularies, but except among tribes such as Yanadis of Nellore who know every blade that grows, the majority of people know only a few names and through ignorance often give incorrect ones.”
Acknowledging the help of a Dr. C A Barber, S Ramalinga Nayakar, Maistry of the Agri-Horticultural Garden, and A K Appaiya, Forest Range Officer, Butterworth says his most frequent reference source was Indian Trees by Sir Dietrich Brandis, the German who founded the Imperial Forest School in Dehra Dun. A Madras connection with that institution was Patrick Stracey, DGP Eric Stracey’s eldest brother. He joined the Imperial Forest Service and went on to become Director of Forest Education, Dehra Dun, and later Chief Conservator of Forests, Assam (then virtually the whole of the Northeast). Acclaimed internationally as a forestry and wildlife consultant, he was the author of five books, a founder of the Wild Life Preservation Society of India, and on the Honour Roll of the World Wild Life Fund.
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When the postman knocked…
• A possible answer to Prof. S. Kannan’s query on the origins of the area name ‘Kolakaranpettai’ in Royapettah (Miscellany, May 4) comes to me from Australia. Reader A. Raman says “my strong guess” is that it was ‘Kollukaranpettai’ that got corrupted over the years, the ‘kollukaran’ being a person (karan ) who sold horsegram (kollu) . The area may well have been where horsegram sellers had once set up shop. Just as Kosapettai might have been where the potters (kusavar ) were. Adding the suffix karan to a product is common Tamil practice to indicate the seller of a particular item, says reader Raman.
• Also from Australia comes mail from Rosemarie Mason seeking more information about the maternal side of her family. I was particularly interested because her maternal grandmother, Kathleen Louise (Lulu) Kathleen Lopez (nee Lynsdale) won the gold medal topping the final year at Madras Medical College at a time when there must have been few women at MMC. Her husband James William Clement Lopez was an Indian Army doctor (Indian Medical Service?) who won a Distinguished Conduct Medal during the Great War. Their son, William Alexander Lopez, was also an Indian Army doctor and won a Military Cross during World War II. His sister, Dorothy Kathleen Sommer (nee Lopez), too became a doctor after being a prize-winning medical student like her mother. She won in 1932 the Viceroy’s Medal for topping the final year at Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi. Accompanying this search for information came pictures of a heap of the family medals that are now in Australia. I would be glad to receive any information about Lulu Lynsdale from MMC or Madras University.
• Another quest for information comes from Nina Varghese of Coonoor. After my mention of the Stanes house in Coonoor, Fernhill (Miscellany, May 4), she tells me that Robert Stanes appears to have had another house in Coonoor called White Lodge and it survives today as Shelwood . She had heard that the house had later become the property of Lord Sinha and was lived in by Lt. Col. Dr. K.R.K. Iyengar, the first Indian Director of the Pasteur Institute and first Indian President of the Coonoor Club. It is at present occupied by the Tea Board, which has renovated the old building, but painted it “a rather lurid green” though it has brought more order to the “wild ramble” of the gardens. While wondering whether Christopher Penn’s book with its pictorial focus on Coonoor (Miscellany, May 11) has any information on Shelwood that was the White Lodge that overlooked the Coonoor Club (it hasn’t), her more focused question is who EWF was, initials etched on one of Shelwood ’s windows. She thinks they refer to an E. W. Fritchley and wonders whether he is the same person after whom ‘Fritchley House’ in Stanes High School, Coonoor, was named. There was also an E. W. Fritchley who designed the Lalith Mahal Palace that was opened in Mysore in 1930. And, she writes, that there is also mention of an E. W. Fritchley connected with church/mission activities. Were all of them one and the same?
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