Sunlight peeps through the latticed walls along the dark corridors of the chemistry lab. Bats flit about beneath the high ceiling of the physics lab. The plaster has peeled off the classroom walls, wooden beams are decaying, and the musty smell is overpowering. Wild vegetation grows all over the narrow corridors that connect rooms on either side of open courtyards. And I spot a large snake coiled on the debris of a partially collapsed roof.
The eeriness of the abandoned building can’t stop me visualising what must have been among the most scenic college campuses in the mid-1800s, and one of the most reputed academic institutions of the Madras Presidency during the Raj. History and art are still infused in every corner of the ruins of the government college on the banks of the Cauvery in the temple town of Kumbakonam.
There are old photographs and paintings that show students punting down from the other bank to attend classes. By 1943 they could cycle or walk across the narrow Aranmanai Rama Iyer wooden bridge. The bridge was pulled down in 2006 and replaced with a modern 75-metre long pedestrian bridge, but you can get a glimpse of the old bridge in the Tamil film Sethu.
Started as a school
The 22-acre campus was undoubtedly stunning in 1854 when it was established as a provincial school, with the river as picturesque backdrop. There is a quaint simplicity to the single-storey flat-roofed structures that go on for almost a kilometre along the river.
An 1880 bell from C.S. Bell & Co, Hillsboro, Ohio, still rings every hour to beckon students to class in the new buildings constructed in 1975. Until the 1970s, the college had a canoe club that conducted the annual regatta. “The inter-college Thiruvaiyaru boat race competition was revived briefly in 1999 for three years. We still have six of the old canoes,” says A. Gunasekaran, controller of examinations.
A view of the old buildings | Photo Credit: M. Moorthy
Tagore, Raman et al
Through the sepia photos, old letters, journals and souvenirs, memoirs and stories handed down over generations orally, or penned by alumni, you get a sense of the institution’s history: Rabindranath Tagore visited in 1918, C.V. Raman in 1940; you learn that Srinivasa Ramanujan was offered a scholarship to study here after his headmaster introduced him as an outstanding student who deserved scores higher than the maximum. Ramanujan studied for a year between 1904 and 1905, but intent on mathematics, he failed in most other subjects, and lost the scholarship.
“I tell every batch of students that I am a privileged junior of Ramanujan and so are they,” says the head of the maths department, K. Gunasekaran. The college has a list of prominent alumni, including the statesman Srinivasa Sastri, and the scholars Thyagaraja Chettiar and U.Ve. Swaminatha Iyer.
With visible pride, Gunasekaran opens the lock to the classroom where Ramanujan attended maths classes more than a century ago. “You will find here stories that wow generations of students,” he says, as we remove our sandals and enter the dust-laden room.
The 1880 bell from C.S. Bell & Co., Ohio, that still rings every hour | Photo Credit: M. Moorthy
Long wooden benches with attached desks are propped up by elaborately carved iron legs. Sunlight pours in through a broken glass pane in the high ceiling. An explosion of weeds knocks against two large, locked windows. In fact, uncontrolled vegetation has colonised most empty spaces and even burst through the roof and ceilings dislodging frames and creating cracks in columns and walls.
River view
“You can imagine how the students sitting in these classrooms would have had a magnificent view of the river through these windows,” says R. S. Sundararajan, the head of physics department and the man who played Ramanujan’s father in a Tamil biopic on the genius. “This institution has produced great scholars and it will be a tribute to all of them if we are able to restore the college to its old glory,” he says.
Founded by Dewan Bahadur R. Raghunatha Rao in a mansion donated by the senior Rani of Tanjore of the time, the school first taught English to the children of the rich. Nicknamed ‘Cambridge of South India’, it introduced undergraduate courses in physics, chemistry, maths, geography in 1864. At that time, there were only four other colleges in South India: Madras Christian College, St. Joseph’s College, Trichinopoly; Presidency College, Madras, and Noble College Masulipatnam.
The classroom where mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan studied | Photo Credit: M. Moorthy
More than a hundred years later, new buildings were added to make room for more departments. The entire college shifted to the new campus.
In 2016 the renovation project was set rolling when INTACH (Kodaikanal) member Girija Viraraghavan visited. “My grandfather D.S. Sarma taught here in the early 1900s. Three years ago I visited the place with my brother and found it in a shambles,” she says.
A team of heritage restoration architects joined Sakthi Murugan of Intach (Tanjore) to study the extent of damage and submitted a preliminary report in December 2017 based on which the State government sanctioned ₹16 crore. Last December a detailed project report was finalised, paving the way for the Public Works Department to invite quotations for the restoration work.
Says Chennai INTACH co-convener Tara Murali: “People need to understand that restoration does not mean just breaking and rebuilding. It means understanding the building, the purpose it served during a different time period, retrieving the artisanal work, and traditional building materials. We hope the PWD upholds this spirit and restores it for adaptive use.”
It is not easy to patch up a building that’s more than 100 years old. There’s still a long way to go, but a piece of history has for the moment been saved from being lost for ever.