As a few of us sat talking about Madras Week’s programmes and agreed one of the most interesting walks would be Govi Lenin’s Justice Party Trail in T Nagar, someone suggested that it wasn’t too late to do a Subramania Bharati Trail in Madras. That would include his house, the Triplicane Parthasarathy Temple, the Triplicane Beach, the Swadesamitran’s former office site, G Kasturi Iyengar’s guest house, and, most significant of all, the place where The India Printing Press was (a location that’s a mystery to me). That press deserves a place in Indian printing history.
The press was established by a young, ambitious journalist, SN Tirumalachari, who had been working for a publication called Brahmavadin, owned by MC Alasingaperumal and founded on the urgings of Swami Vivekananda. The politically hyper-conscious Tirumalachari found the going there too serene and set up his own printing press to publish a politically-oriented weekly he named India. To be its de facto editor he invited Subramania Bharati who was finding the Swadesamitran, boldly critical though it was on several issues, not quite accommodating for his more trenchant prose. Offered a free hand by Tirumalachari, Bharati jumped at the chance – and he took on the British Government of India loud and clear from the day India started, May 9, 1906.
Going beyond the written word, Bharati took on the role of South India’s first cartoon creator. And India found its popularity soaring with its political cartoons. Its printing press, thus, had the distinction to be the first press in South India to create the printing requirements for cartoons – engraving an artist’s drawings (it’s never been quite clear whether Bharati was the artist or was the person who supplied an artist the editorial inputs) and creating wooden ‘blocks’ ready for the press.
Bharati’s cartoons —in truth, ‘illustrated comment’— gradually roused the tempers of the powers-that-be, but despite warnings he did not slow down. When V O Chidambaram Pillai arrived in Tuticorin with his two ships, Bharati’s cartoon had them “flying the national flag of the day” the Vande Mataram flag, and not the Union Jack. The Moderates in Congress were pilloried in cartoon after cartoon; in one, the Moderates were shown sacrificing a lamb, the Tilak Group in Congress, at a yagna to please the British gods. And, finally, there was the last straw, British ships shown taking grain away from India while Indians were starving. Coupled with his ‘Exhortation to Krishna’ (When will our thirst for liberty be quenched? / When will our love for slavery die? / When will the fetters on the hands of our Mother be removed?/ When will our troubles cease and become things of the past?/ O, Krishna…” That was on August 8, 1908. M Srinivasan, the de jure editor who never even stepped into the press, was arrested in September, by which time, Bharati, tipped-off, had fled to Pondicherry.
By the end of September the press had been smuggled into the French territory and India was at it again, a porous border ensuring its regular delivery in Madras. A ban on the paper by the British made even surreptitious entry a problem and India closed down in March 1910. Bharati then began concentrating on literature, journalism’s loss literature’s gain.
I’ve been lucky to get a couple of Bharati’s cartoons after not finding any in my library. Many moons ago I edited a Bharati Jubilee volume for the Tamil Nadu Government and I vaguely remember seeing a couple of his cartoons in it. But like many a holding in my library that too has vanished with a friend who had said “I promise to return it without fail”. Famous last words. But the Roja Muthiah Research Library has turned up trumps, and so we have today’s offerings.
An imaginative invitation
It’s been one invitation after another I’ve received in recent times. Trying to even lift some of them is a weighty problem. One I received for a wedding was several pages in extent, an invitation for each of half a dozen functions deserving a page and a full-page illustration of the function facing it, all this within a hardback book cover!
As against this was a simple invitation I received for a 90th birthday. And it was produced so imaginatively that I feature it today. It was designed by the celebrant’s daughter who lives in the UK. She had visited the British Library and found a newspaper dating to the day he was born, August 10, 1927. Making it even more special was that it was the main daily of the city where he was born, The Statesman of Calcutta. And in it she had fitted in her father and mother, photographed soon after they were married. But what even she did not spot, and what Papa was thrilled over, was that next to the picture was an advertisement for the company he had worked with for many years, Braithwaite & Co of Calcutta, which was involved with the building of the Hooghly Bridge.
Full marks to the searcher-cum-designer. That’s why she’s my researcher in London. But the point I wish to stress is that it was so easy for her to access the newspaper and send the digital image of the page directly to Madras by e-mail. When will our libraries and archives make that possible?
The chronicler of Madras that is Chennai tells stories of people, places, and events from the years gone by, and sometimes, from today