In search of the beginnings of Chepauk’s Walajah Road End

The Walajah Road End is to Chepauk what the Vulture Street End is to the Gabba. (Source: Express Photo)

Under a clunky bright-blue aluminum signage, which has displaced the city’s once quintessential hard-painted yellow stone boards, a pair of street-kids are busy fastening the ends of a lungi. They successfully accomplish to make a swing, but before they could enjoy their piece of ingenuity, a couple of middle-aged men shoo them away, spewing the choicest of expletives in the vernacular. The men then hurriedly haunch down behind the thick board, briskly uncork a bottle of cheap local-made liquor, empty it in no time and casually part ways.

The desolateness of Walajah Road, stretching from the Bell’s Road intersection to the Marina, has made it a convenient rendezvous for Triplicane’s tipplers. So much so that whenever they crave for a drink, they merely tell their friends, “Vaanga Walajah Road polama (come, let’s go to Walajah Road). The spot, invariably, is one behind the shining blue signage, which blares Walajah Salai, where they can avoid the instant gaze of the prowling police cars as well.

Somehow, the word Salai, the Tamil equivalent of road, never rolls off their tongues, as if they’re oblivious to the very evident renaming. Just like Anna Salai is still Mount Road, the city’s landmark stretch. Just like the V Pattabhiraman Gate End is still the Walajah Road End, the MA Chidambaram Stadium’s most romanticised bowling end, perhaps even of the country, most of which either betray corporate patronage or ho-hum names like the pavilion end or the press box end. The Walajah Road End has remained immune to all these, and even its renaming.

The romance bit can be attributed to the novelty of the original. Much before the end was rechristened, and much before the locals grew aware of the renaming, it was called the Walajah Road End, for decades. Moreover, it was through the unfenced Walajah Road that the middle-class locals accessed the stadium, while the gentrified Madras Cricket Club members entered from the Bell’s Road End. “So naturally, it became the most popular (and the most populated) part of the stadium. Tamil Nadu bowlers too preferred bowling from the end because the crowd would get behind them,” explains Abdul Jabbar, a popular Tamil cricket commentator of the 90s. Even the batsmen, especially Kris Srikkanth, liked hitting sixes in this direction so that he could get a louder applause and see the crowd going berserk.
“Bowlers would beg the captains to let them bowl from the end, so they get to bowl with the crowd singing their names. Just as rival bowlers feared bowling from there, because they’d be booed,” he reminiscences.

For those who tuned into the creaky radio sets, it was perhaps about the inherent musicality of the name, “Walajah’, unlike Pattabhiraman, that struck and clung on subconsciously. So in the pre-television era, when descriptive radio commentators fuelled the imagination, you’d form your own picture of the stadium, crowd and city you haven’t visited, or the way a bowler bowled or a batsman batted. So Walajah
Road End created an impression that the bowler was steaming in from an ornately-carved medieval minar.

So over time, it embroidered itself into the Chepauk’s cultural fabric, became an invisibly omniscient character of its narrative. Like the Vulture Street End at the Gabba or the Blue Mountain End at the Sabina Park.

They would readily recollect that it was from this end that Malcolm Marshall nailed Mohinder Amarnath or Greg Mathews trapped Maninder Singh to complete the second-ever tied match in Test history. Understandably, the renaming took time to register. And no one’s even quite sure when exactly the end’s name was changed, for the V Pattabhiraman Gate was around the time the stadium was walled in the 70s. Bizarrely, though, they immediately lapped up the changed name of the Bell’s Road End, now the Anna Pavilion End.

Still, it hasn’t quite registered in the consciousness of old timers. “We didn’t even realise it for a long time, until someone informed us during the commentary. I don’t know when, in the late 90s perhaps.”
Anyway, the name-change was only of academic relevance, as most of the vernacular commentators and players still refer to the end as the Walajah Road End.
Paradoxically, they know the whereabouts of Pattabhiraman, a venerated cricket administrator who was instrumental in installing the MJ Gopalan Trophy. Most of them, even the city’s informed fans (not to say the tipplers), are ignorant of who Walajah was. It can be safely assumed that there’s no cricketer or a cricket administrator, or a politician, poet, saint or actor who bears that name. Or if Walajah was a person at all, or whether it was a place (there in fact, is a railway station before Katpadi of the same name).

To dig the history of Walajah, you need to explore the mosques around the stadium. Even there, you should be lucky enough to stumble into someone elderly. Mohammad Razzaq, who resides in the mosque, is surprised at the history-digging intruder. “I have been here for some 20-25 years, but no one’s quite asked me about Walajah. Well, I haven’t seen him either, but I know he was the eighth Nawab of Arcot, who shifted to Chennai sometime in the mid-18th century,” he dusts up his knowledge bank.

Arcot, famous for its biryanis, lies in Vellore district, some 100-odd kilometres from the city. The dynasty was headquartered in Arcot, but one of the nawabs, Mohammad Ali Walajah, helped the British in fighting the French and was duly granted the permission to build a palace in Madras. He relocated to the city because he wanted to maintain his proximity with the British. “As his ties with the East India company expanded, he built several mosques and palaces in the city,” he says.

One of them was the Chepauk Palace, which he built sometime in the late 17th century. He was benevolent and promoted Sufism, promoted Hindu architecture, appointed Hindu ministers and donated money to local temples. “But he was too generous and became bankrupt. To pay off the debts he had accumulated, his successors sold the property to the British government. From then, it has housed several offices, first by the British and then the Tamil Nadu government,” Razzaq says.

The palace, which faces the Kamarajar Salai, had a huge backyard, which the MCC leased for cricket matches. Later, the TNCA acquired permission to build a stadium on it. “If you look carefully, you still can find remnants of the palace. The V Pattabhiraman Gate has a couple of pillars with Indo-Saracenic carvings. It was originally part of the palace walls. But much of the original parts were demolished by time,” he laments.

The Public works department, which operated out of the palace, is assiduously restoring its old grandeur. But the destiny of Mohammad Ali Walaja is to be not remembered for his secularism or patronage, but through a game he must not have even heard of and as a convenient den of local tipplers.