Historian Venkatesh Ramakrishnan pieces together the most influential happenings the city bore witness to, including its connect with the Ottoman Empire, Emden, Stamatis, Petrus Uscan, Pitt’s Diamond and many more as Chennai turns 381 and celebrates yet another Madras Day today

Corsican confectioner Giacomo D’Angelis flew the first Asian aeroplane on the Island Grounds in the Cooum, just seven years after the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air machine. D’Angelis, a hotelier, was the official baker to the Governor of Madras but had a wide interest in machines, especially flying. He built the aircraft based on pictures in European magazines on the plane of Louis Bleriot, the first to fly across the English Channel in July 1909. The plane was tested in Pallavaram, having been taken there in parts on a bullock cart. Confident that it flew, D’Angelis advertised for a demonstration in Island Grounds close to his hotel where Madras saw its first flying man ever.

The classical dance of the Presidency was Sadhir. Though well respected in history, Sadhir had denigrated in the eyes of the public in the 20th Century. The sanitised version of the Sadhirattam danced by the Devadasis was formulated by Rukmini Devi Arundale in the 1930s within the Theosophical Society at Adyar. She changed the costume, music and format of Sadhir and replaced erotic movements with devotional gestures. To give it a divine outlook she proposed a story that it had been devised by Bharathamuni a couple of millenniums back. Hence she named it as Bharatanatyam and it soon penetrated all sections of the society.

The Buckingham Canal was a man-made waterway which ran parallel to the Coromandel coast. It was an important route for transport of materials where roads did not exist. Wood, rice, salt and firewood for the city mainly came through this canal from the outlying areas. It was commissioned during the great famine of the 1870s to provide work and relief during the distress. The canal between the Cooum and Adyar rivers was excavated manually and many natural waterways were connected including the North river which originally flowed through the Fort St George during its founding. Named after the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, the canal fell into disuse and boat traffic reduced. Silt and drainage have clogged it and today it is nothing but a drainage ditch.

The Governor-general of French territories in India was the nemesis of Madras. An administrator with remarkable energy and diplomatic skills and a thorough vision of the realities of local politics, he bombed Madras city into submission in 1746. Dupleix would take away its administrators in chains to Pondicherry and ransom them. He ruled Madras for three years and it seemed to be the start of his dream of establishing a French empire in India. But history turned against him and his plans were thwarted by treaties back in Europe. Dupleix was known for his ‘Indianness’. He entered into relations with the native princes and adopted a style of oriental splendour in his dress and surroundings. His wife, nicknamed ‘Begum Dupleix’, had Mylapore origins.

SMS Emden was a German light cruiser operating in World War 1 captained by Kapitan-Lieutenant Karl von Muller, a charismatic and cunning sailor. The cruiser shelled Madras during the Navaratri holidays of 1916. Emden hurled 130 shells on the unsuspecting city from a safe distance of two kilometres offshore, within 10 minutes. Shrapnel hit several parts of the city and four storage tanks of the British-owned Burmah Oil Company containing 3,50,000 gallons of oil were aflame. Not waiting to be challenged, the Emden sailed eastwards. The British chased the Emden to sink it near Australia. 100 years later, Emden is a Tamil word that describes a terrorising person.

Francis Day was a factor (clerk) of the East India Company’s factory at Masulipatnam and he along with others negotiated the purchase of a sandy strip of beach land from which the city of Madras grew. Day, accompanied by a garrison of about 25 European soldiers and a few sepoys, besides a Hindu powder-maker by name Naga Battan, proceeded to Madras and built the English factory which would be named after St George. Francis, is regarded as the founder of Madras mainly because when others objected to the location citing a sand bar in the sea that could prove a hindrance to ships approaching the city, Francis was adamant. Some uncharitably say it was because the place was proximal to the house of his half Indian girlfriend in Santhome.

The Georges in the town and fort are as different as chalk and cheese. Fort St George is named after a Christian saint of Greek origins who lived and was martyred in Turkey. It was thus named because the fort work was completed coinciding with St George’s Day, celebrated in honour of the patron saint of England. Georgetown is however named after a British king, George V. The visit of George V, King-Emperor of India, for the Delhi Durbar was the occasion when Madras remembered him by naming the Black Town after him. Near the southwest corner of George Town, the king was further remembered in 1914 with a statue.

Abel Joshua Higginbotham arrived in India as a stowaway in a ship and was discovered from the hold of the ship at Madras. After working as a librarian in Wesleyan Book Shop run by Protestant missionaries, he managed to buy the shop and renamed it after himself. Started in 1844, Higginbothams is the oldest book shop in existence in the country. It was also the largest bookstore in India until the 1990s. Higginbotham bookstalls were established in many railway stations on the South Indian Railway and the Southern Mahratta Railway. It was the only source of books for Europeans in Madras during Colonial times. Even Indians started patronising it. Amongst them in 1896 was a lawyer from South Africa, MK Gandhi, whose bill is still preserved in his records.

Most people in the city had never seen any ice before. And they invented a new word for it — pani katti (solid mist) — when the meeting between ice and the Madrasi happened. Tudor, a Boston merchant, decided to ship ice to the tropical city. He also built the Ice House on Beach Road and stored the frozen cargo which was shipped all the way from Massachusetts. It was also one of the two buildings in Madras where the American stars and stripes flew in colonial times. The business flourished until it went bust on the invention of the refrigeration. It would be the place where Swami Vivekananda stayed later.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a philosopher whose attributes were identified in the Elliot’s Beach where the Adyar river joins the sea. In his early life, he was groomed to be the new world teacher and projected as the vehicle for the messiah who was about to arrive on earth. At one point, Krishnamurti was honest enough to throw off the mantle and say he was an ordinary mortal. “I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect,” he said to his shocked followers. But then over the decades, he blossomed as an internationally accepted philosopher in his own right.

The most prolific of writers of Madras, Kothainayagi, a legend in her own lifetime, was surprisingly illiterate when she wrote her first book. She would dictate the script of her first Tamil play to a friend who served as a scribe. But when it was published and met with acclaim from all, she learnt to read and write Tamil soon thereafter. Kothainayagi would write 115 books, which included novels, plays and short story collections; ran a magazine Jaganmohini singlehandedly for 35 years. Her writing remains a mirror about a host of societal challenges that the country faced in the first half of the 20th Century.

Madras is filled with buildings of varying antiquity and differing architectural styles and yet it was a concrete cuboid that the city chose to represent itself. For two years, the LIC was the tallest building in the country before being overtaken by the Usha Kiran building in Mumbai. The original plan by British architects envisaged it as an 18-floor building. But after the death of its owner in a plane crash and nationalisation of the insurance business, the plan was changed, as well as the intended name — United India Building. When the LIC building caught fire it also caught the fire services in town unawares. In times of water scarcity, the Cooum water was used to quench the fire.

The Marina beach did not exist before the 1880s. Once the Madras harbour was built, the accretion of sand south of harbour caused it to accumulate and grow to this size of almost half a kilometre in some places. As the Marina grew, it became important in the history with freedom struggles, salt marches and speeches by Gandhi and Bose. It soon became the most popular of the recreation spots in the city, overthrowing the People’s Park, which was ticketed. The tsunami of 2005 was disastrous for the beach as many walkers and tourists were killed by the rising waves.

The Nawabs of Arcot were the last Indian rulers of the Carnatic region in which Madras city was present. The Wallajah family descended from the Caliphs of Baghdad and were made royals by Mughal Aurangazeb in 1692. Though the British annexed the Carnatic Nawabdom, applying the Doctrine of Lapse they were given a title of Prince of Arcot (Amir-e-Arcot). The family has been patrons of music and poetry and religious institutions, including the donation of the Mylapore tank to the Hindus.

The Ottoman Empire’s consulate in Triplicane is the oldest consulate in Madras. The Ottoman Empire, centred in Turkey, was one of the largest empires in the world for nearly 600 years. Since the holy cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina, were under the protection of the Ottoman Empire, the consulate was set up in Madras with the cooperation of the Nawabs of Arcot to facilitate the movement of pilgrims from Madras to do their Hajj. The building is adjacent to the famous Wallajah Mosque and is now a rest house.

Later known as Regent diamond and adorning the sword hilt of Napolean and the headdress of Marie Antoinette, the 141-carat flawless diamond with a bluish fluorescence was originally called the Pitt’s Diamond and was closely associated with Madras and its corrupt Thomas Pitt, the Governor of Fort St George. Pitt reportedly cheated a slave who found it in Kollur mines and secretly dispatched the stone to London, hidden in the heel of his son’s shoe. Pitt family acquired much power with the sale of the diamond, which led to two men from subsequent generations becoming powerful Prime Ministers of England.

Queen Mary’s College was the first women’s college in the city and the third oldest women’s college in India. Started in 1914 as the Madras College for Women, the Queen Empress consented to name the institution after her in 1917. It was earlier a sea-facing vegetarian hotel called the Capper House. Dorothy de la Hey, an English educationist, was reluctant to teach but was convinced by the Governor to take up the assignment and the entire college was built around her acquiescence. She ended up heading the college for 20 years. In her words, “This college is destined to have an influence on the future of Indian womanhood.”

Also called as Puzhal aeri, Red Hills Lake is one of the two rain-fed reservoirs which quenched the thirst of Madras for 140 years till now. It got its name from the reddish-brown laterite rocks with which the bunds were strengthened. Running for seven kilometres, the wide bund helps store a huge quantity of water. In the 1800s, it was a small irrigation tank before the British built the Thamaraipakkam weir to divert the Kosasthaliyar into this lake making it huge. RAF Catalina Seaplanes landed in Red Hills during the World War-2 and there was a prevalent rumour that Red Hills had been bombed by the Japanese which led to the flooding of Madras. Though untrue, the movie ‘Andha Naal’ has its genesis in that rumour.

The year 1966 saw two November cyclones wreaking havoc over Madras. Meteorological reports were misleading and without knowing a deadly cyclone was approaching, several ships were trapped within the harbour. Liberian ship Stamatis was in Madras to distribute wheat under the PL 480 scheme. Jostled violently by the storm, Stamatis was dragged near Marina and beached near the mouth of the Cooum River. Braving the cyclone, a sizeable crowd flocked to see the odd sight of a floundering ship. Ten days later, in fair weather, attempts were made to pull the ship out of the sand, but Stamatis would not budge. The owners sold the ship as scrap for Rs 3.3 lakh. But the wreckage could not be completely removed. For decades, the ruined Stamatis attracted a lot of curious onlookers and turned a 

death trap. Many who swam close were lacerated, often fatally, by the rusting sharp steel girders.

Trams changed the nature of traffic in Madras. Within years of its introduction, it replaced thousands of bullock carts and horse-drawn jutkas and made the roads much cleaner. Travelling at three miles per hour, it was a wonder the trams kept the city of Madras moving for 70 years. The trams were of two sizes, 50 feet and 35 feet. And they could transport up to 150 people comfortably. They moved on rails laid on the roads, using electricity from overhead wires. When the Madras Electricity System, the company that ran the trams went bankrupt in 1953, the trams were stopped once for all and that was the end of an era in urban transport.

The Armenian diaspora had spread all over the world when its parent country was subjugated. Madras had very strong Armenian links. At one point, the richest man in Madras was Armenian trader Petrus Uscan. In 1726, he constructed the steps which led to the Catholic shrine atop St Thomas Mount. In 1728, to provide a safe passage across the Adyar River for pilgrims to St Thomas Mount, Uscan constructed the Marmalong (Mambalam) Bridge across the Adyar River. The bridge and step access to the hill were the triggers to forming the road which later evolved into the Mount Road and fuelled the southern expansion of the city. Uscan reportedly willed a huge portion of his wealth to the city of Madras.

Victoria Public Hall was the original Town Hall of Madras and a classic example of Indo-Saracenic architecture, designed by architect Chisholm. It was built in one corner of the famous People’s Park to commemorate the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. Bharathi, Gandhi and Vivekananda have orated in this August building. Shakespearean plays were staged in Tamil by the Suguna Vilasa Sabha of Pammal Sambandha Mudaliar under names like Jwalita Ramanan for Romeo Juliet and Amalidityan for Hamlet. In 1897, the first cinema show in Madras was screened at this public hall.

Born into one of the oldest business families in India, Bahman Pestonji Wadia surprisingly got involved with the early trade unions to represent the working class in Madras. Wadia had come to Madras after he had a ‘spiritual vision’ while at Elephanta Caves in Mumbai and had turned to the Theosophical Society in Madras. However, actively involved in the city’s politics, he went on to get arrested when the Home Rule Movement was banned by the British and was imprisoned in Ooty, thus becoming one of the first to be arrested in Madras for the freedom movement.

Five years after Roentgen discovered the x-ray, a unit was started at the general hospital in Madras, much ahead of the Americas and Europe. The patient was subjected to prolonged exposure for over 15 minutes to get a good image. In 1920, the government appointed Captain TW Barnard to organise a radiological service. Madras was perhaps one of the earliest provinces in the world to have an official radiologist. In 1933, around 200 x-rays were being taken per day in Madras, which was a record when compared to many parts of the world.

Sailing in Madras started in Ennore and moved to the Adyar Creek before settling at the timber pond area of the Chennai Port. Yachting in Madras was initiated by Sir Francis Spring who was also responsible for the modernisation of the Madras port. The Yacht Club founded in 1911 soon grew in prestige, especially after the King-Emperor, in a warrant, gave his patronage and the prefix Royal was added to its name to make it the Royal Madras Yacht Club.

The zoo in Madras was started by surgeon Balfour at the museum grounds. When people complained of the sound and smell it was shifted to the People’s Park near the Central station. The zoo grew in size and variety of exhibits when tragedy stuck it during the world war. Fearing that a Japanese bomb falling on it would set the animals free, the carnivores at the zoo were shot dead by the Malabar police. The herbivores including ostriches and elephants were transported to Erode. The zoo was stocked post-war to celebrate its centenary but finally, pollution and need for space in the centre of Madras made the administrators shift it to Vandalur.