A couple of weeks ago, speaking to a group at a club in Madras on the connections the Province/State had had with Americans, colonial and thereafter, I mentioned Yale and Cornwallis, the Scudders, Myron Winslow and A.J. Chandler, and Harry and Marie Buck among others, all of whom I have written about in these columns. I wish I had heard of Henry Phipps before that talk, but I caught up with him only the other day when Dr. A. Raman sent me an article he had written on the Pasteur Institute of India, Coonoor, which before 1977 was known as the Pasteur Institute of Southern India (PISI). The Institute, I found, owed its existence to the generosity of Phipps.
Phipps and Andrew Carnegie, both early 19th Century migrants to the U.S. from Britain, grew up as friends in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were in their 20s in 1861 when Carnegie persuaded Phipps to join him in investing in a steel-making operation. Forty years later, they sold the plant to J.P. Morgan and it grew into U.S. Steel. The sale left them both rich. Both firmly believed that those “who acquired great wealth should return it for public good and create institutions dedicated for that purpose.” The Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, was one of Phipps’ contributions to that belief.
He also contributed to India. In 1903, Phipps holidayed in India and became a friend of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon. At the time, India was recovering from the devastating 1899-1900 famine and Phipps, known for his pragmatism, gave Curzon £30,000 (about $100,000 then) to be spent on improving agricultural conditions in India. This enabled the further development of a cattle-breeding farm and an experimental tobacco-growing facility in Pusa (then in Bengal and now in Bihar). To the existing facilities were added a college, a research laboratory and an experimental farm, set in nearly 1,300 acres through Phipps’ munificence. All that has grown into the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi.
Later in his holiday, while visiting Kasauli (in Himachal Pradesh now), Phipps discovered that the Indian Pasteur Institute there (established in 1900 and now known as the Central Research Institute) was the only one in the country that could treat people with dog bites and bites of other animals and reptiles. Phipps promptly donated another $100,000 to Curzon to establish such a facility in South India – and so was born, in April 1907, the Pasteur Institute of Southern India in Coonoor with Dr. John W. Cornwall as its first director. Its first Indian director was Dr. K.R.K. Iyengar, I.M.S., appointed c.1930.
Research and production of anti-rabies vaccine and treatment of rabies victims is still a priority of the Coonoor institute, which reported in 1931 that it had issued 130,821 doses of anti-rabies vaccine and treated 545 patients at the Institute and 8056 at other centres. Of these, 67 died, less than a one per cent mortality rate. Nevertheless, the report pointed out, “Hydrophobia is still very prevalent in the Madras Presidency, no less than 661 deaths from this disease being reported during 1931.”
The Institute is housed in a striking Gothic building with domed Indo-Saracenic towers. The domes, reflecting stylistically those of the Mysore Palace, make me wonder whether Henry Irwin was the architect.
Further American support for public health management in Madras in the 1920s is attributed to the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Board. The Foundation funded a demographic study of the guinea worm disease that had been initiated by the Madras Health Council. It also sent out two doctors, George Paul and John Kendrick, to work with the Madras team.
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Rehabilitation or reconciliation?
This past Monday, I attended the release of a book titled ‘The Prabhakaran Saga.’ I thought the book by S. Murari, a recently retired journalist who had closely followed the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict for nearly 30 years, would have been better titled ‘The Struggle for Eelam.’ For that is what the book is all about, being as it is a painstakingly detailed account of everything that’s happened in Sri Lanka since 1983 -- in Colombo, the North, the East and points in between. In its detail, the book is almost encyclopaedic in the recording of the ethnic conflict and should be a must read for anyone interested in the one issue that prevented the island becoming, despite the head start it had, a ‘Singapore.’ To Murari’s credit, it is one of the most objective accounts of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that I have read, his opinions straying only occasionally and without being particularly emphatic.
More than my peripheral interest in the subject, I went to the release function because I knew I’d catch up there with a heap of journalists whom I’d known as young men and women and who had grown middle-aged focussing on the Sri Lankan situation. And sure enough, there were, besides Murari, Nirupama Subramaniam, K. Venkatraman, Bhagwan Singh, G.C. Shekhar and Sam Rajappa, among others. I missed Anita Prathap, P.K. Balachandran and Shyam Tekwani, who took a famous magazine cover picture that made its way around the world of Sikh soldiers gunned down when they landed on the University of Jaffna campus.
Listening to the speeches on the occasion, the one thing that struck me was the sharp divergence of views, on the way ahead, among Sri Lanka watchers. One view was that rehabilitation, restoration of normal life and regeneration of economic activity in the North and East should be the fast track and negotiations on a political future the slower second track. The other view was that political reconciliation must be the focus and meaningful negotiations must be fast tracked to meet the aspirations of the Tamils. The different views seemed as irreconcilable as the views of the two groups on the ground in Sri Lanka.
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When the postman knocked…
As I said this past week, this column gathers some of the oddest information around. This time it is marine engineer K.R.A. Narasiah who is providing additional facts about the Naval vessels called Coromandel (Miscellany, June 25). He writes that the second Coromandel was one of five convict ships that sailed from England for Port Jackson, Australia, on February 12, 1802. She, he tells me, was a teak-wood ship India-built in Chittagong, then part of India! More significantly, she was the first convict ship to sail non-stop to Australia, making the journey in 121 days. That places near Adelaide were named Coromandel was not unusual, adds Narasiah, who thinks it was the practice at the time for those aboard a particular ship to settle in one place in Australia or New Zealand and name it after the ship that brought them. As an example, he cites a place called Bombay 30 miles from Auckland; it was so named after the ship Bombay that brought them to New Zealand.
* Reader Bharath Yeshwanth tells me that the broken bridge across the mouth of the Adyar river (Miscellany, June 11) was very likely constructed in 1967. It was meant to connect the fishing hamlets on either side of the mouth and provided enough width for one three-wheeler at a time to cross it with a load of fish. He thinks that it was badly damaged in a cyclone in 1977 and with nothing done thereafter to repair it, it only deteriorated further. But for many years after that, it was one of the best places in the city for bird-watchers.
* ‘I was at the Quibble Island cemetery recently and wondered how it got its name,’ writes Derek Mendes. A map of Madras dating back to 1798 shows four fairly large islands in the Adyar Estuary, one close to the south bank and the other three tightly grouped together near the north bank and just below the large marshy tract to their west. One of these islands was called Quibble Island – why, I haven’t the faintest idea – but that’s where, when the islands, rich with palmyrah trees, were, in a reclamation project, added to the San Thomé mainland, the cemetery was developed in due course. The islands, in fact, caused the Adyar to enter the estuary in two branches and it was reclaiming the northern branch that added the islands to the mainland and created the backwaters seen by Foreshore Estate. A map of 1816 shows one of the islands marked Quibble Island. A Colonel James Brunton who had a house – Brunton Villa – at the south end of the river mouth was granted seven acres on Quibble Island in 1804 but what he did with it is not known. Nor do I know when the reclamation was built on, but I would guess it was some time in the late 19th Century when Somerford was built. This garden house was redeveloped in the 1930s as Chettinad Palace. Surrounding the building much heavy upmarket construction has come up, particularly to the north of it, and gridlock is a real possibility ten years down the line given the vehicular traffic likely there.
