To any superficial ear, it would have sounded like an oral history project. But it was collecting voices not to enhance an existing, neatly-documented chronicle, but to put one together — almost from the scratch. Though history was being built account by account, history was not the primary goal. The exercise was seeking to recreate a whole voluntary organisation whose spirit had been hollowed out by time’s underhand stab, oblivion. Station Vigilance Committees (SVC) were born within a handful of years from Indian Independence, and would function as a prop to local police stations to keep the order.
A Mylapore division of SVC had been in existence since the early 1950s, first having been registered with the Teynampet station, according to Shankar KS, who got on its trail and seems to have recaptured its essence with a reasonable degree of success.
“Even as late as 2016, the true significance of SVC eluded us. I was part of SVC Mylapore Division, and with a handful of other members, would go to the Panguni festival for crowd management. That was just about it. There was certainly more to it, and I started looking for the missing pieces that would give a complete and meaningful picture of the voluntary group,” discloses Shankar, who operates as a convenor of SVC Mylapore Division.
Shankar and the similarly curious found themselves on a circuitous route, one that required them to back out of cul-de-sacs.
Information was as hard to crack as igneous rock, as the organisation had fallen into a soporific lull for decades. Scraps of information included the fact that a resident of the locality Marthandam was helming the voluntary group for many years, after he passed on, there was no one to take the baton and run the good run. The persistent search led them to one Raghavan, an ex-general secretary of SVC.
“Raghavan had been associated with the pioneers of the SVC movement; and we learnt from Raghavan that after the 1980s, they had brought out a souvenir to mark a milestone year. For two months, Raghavan would keep me on a wild goose chase for the documents and other material that would lay bare a substantial period of SVC’s history — all the while sussing out if we were sincere about running the SVC or had been taken up with it as a passing fancy.
“He would ask me to come to Mylapore to discuss SVC. The meeting would have been fixed for 10 a.m., and I would show up at 9.45 a.m., but he would have arrived at 9.30 a.m., just to see how sincere I was about the cause. I would not know him by sight.
- The role of a Village Vigilance Committe (VVC) — the precursor of the Station Vigilance Committe, a modern example of which throbs to this day in Mylapore — is somewhat evident from its self-explanatory name. However, the finer features of the entity are largely lost on us.
- Pages out of The Hindu Archives travel some distance towards spotlighting the significance of VVCs by preserving anecdotes of how members of VVCs assisted the police in crime prevention and detection, during the British era.
- A report dated May 30, 1936 from Trichinopoly, pictures V. Rajagopala Thamban, District Superintendent of Police addressing a gathering of members from 36 VVCs at a theatre. Through the theatre was hosting just a meeting, it did come alive on account of the DSP’s speech, punctuated as it was with accounts of derring-dos by ordinary citizens.
- He recalled the “brave capture of a desperate criminal by a woman of Uppidimangalam while in the act of committing robbery”. The singular act by a regular citizen had “led to the unravelling of the activities of a gang of about 75 desperate criminals who had ravaged the district.”
- An account of a meeting at a Corporation school in Choolai (April 29, 1952) presents a snapshot of a post-independence Madras and an era when the VVCs had shed their old skin — a fact reflected in its new nomenclature, Station Vigilance Committee (SVC) — and slipped into another that sported almost identical scales. Under its new name, the entity was doing what it was known to do best: work alongside the police.
- Sub-Inspector Dhanraj of the Vepery Police was cheerful about “the increasing co-operation” extended by the Vepery division of Station Vigilance Committee to them.
- Memebers of the Vepery SVC would not leave the meeing without scooping rewards — given away by J. Devasagayam, Commisaioner of Police — for cracking crimes.
After doing this multiple times, one day, he asked me to come to Sai Baba temple at 7 p.m., and handed over a couple of documents, which gave us the confidence to wipe off the dust that had accumulated on SVC and make if functional again, in a meaningful manner. We realised what was at the heart of this organisation,” says Shankar.
“We learnt that during the 1980s and 1990s, at Panguni Utsavam in Mylapore, a camp would set up. Two shamianas would be pitched, one for the police department and the other for SVC. The Commissioner of Police would inaugurate the camp.
At that time, the size of the SVC team was 123 members, and they were equipped with walkie-talkies. Even jeeps would be extended to SVC members to enable them carry out their assistive role effectively.”
There is not much documentation about the early years of SVC — not that there was much later — but history about the voluntary exercise handed down to the current generation has it that PG Gopalakrishnan, an ex-army man who had served in the military under the British, was a pioneer in the movement, having served as president of SVC Madras & Chingelpet. Shankar notes that that when he started out, Gopalakrishnan had the counsel of a five-member core team.
From handed-down accounts and slim documentation, it is said that the Mylapore division had first been registered with the Teynampet police station. Besides, there is evidence that in 1980, the division had received a camp number.
As the division had been running in fits and starts, and considerable time had elapsed since the last time it was active, and details about its registration were hazy, the current crop of SVC volunteers decided to have it registered afresh. They had it done last year under the Society’s Act.
