Park Town's days of yore

CHENNAI: British Raj could be all about deprivations and neglect. But there were some officials sympathetic to the living conditions of the natives. Seeing the Indians live in the noisy, smelly and cramped Black Town, an entertainment hub was planned in the erstwhile Hoggs Hill (where there was a dune which locals called Narimedu or the mound of the foxes).

The push for this 120-acre park came from the Governor of Madras Trevelyan, who was convinced that the middle class of the town needed a large, open space for recreation and entertainment within walking distance of the Black Town. The land had 12 lakes, some with islands in the middle to be reached by boats or bridges. It had a bandstand with a musical band playing for the audience daily.

Soon the zoo moved here from Egmore as well. But like a hungry mouse nibbling away a bit of cheese bit by bit in a century, the people’s park has given way to a host of buildings and remains a fragment and a pale shadow of its original self today.

JINNAH AND DRAVIDASTAN

There has been a persistent call for a Dravidian state before Independence. But the closest Dravidistan came into being was in Jinnahbad in Park Town.

The Muslim League’s 28th session in the Madras People’s Park was in an enclosure named after him Jinnahbad. But, to the organisers’ disappointment, Jinnah, who was to preside, was falling sick. Jinnah was ill most of the time and a noble Raja of Mahmudabad chaired most meetings and processions. Jinnah turned up on the final day. He salaamed to the crowd and was treated with loud cheers of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Jinnah zindabad’.

Jinnah gave a 2-hour speech extempore and announced his determination to establish an independent Muslim state. In addition, he threw a bombshell and asked for a trifurcation of the country. The Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and some splinter groups of the Justice Party were in jubilation. However, much to the disappointment of the Dravidian leaders, he would not bear cudgels for them thereafter and did not even mention Dravidastan later.

THE PILLAR OF ASHOKA

The pillars of Ashoka are a series of monolithic columns dispersed throughout the Indian subcontinent, erected by the 3rd Mauryan Emperor Ashoka.

While it was adopted as a National Emblem of India only in 1950, Madras had its own Ashoka pillar two years before it.

For several decades, the My Ladye’s Garden, a surviving part of the People’s Park, was used by the mayors seated in the adjacent building for their civic receptions along with well-attended tea parties. Post-Independence, the Ashoka Pillar was established in 1948 and a lawn around it was named Ashok Garden. Krishna Rao was the mayor who oversaw its installation.

The famous Madras Flower Show would see this pillar covered with flowers that were painstakingly changed every day. This was the first Ashoka Pillar in the city (perhaps the first modern one in the country as well) though others that followed in Ashok Nagar and Ambattur in the 1960s are more famous.

THE TIGER’S KNOCK

Tigers seem to have an affinity for Park Town, other than those at the Park Town Zoo. The corporation stadium, now the Jawaharlal Stadium, hosted nine test matches in the 50s and 60s. Audiences were seated on stands built out of Casuarina poles and shielded by thatches. Many records were set here including a world record of an opening partnership of 413.

The Nawab of Pataudi Mansur-Ali Khan, the tiger, scored his first century here. Not really an earth-shattering event, but when one takes into account that just six months earlier in a car accident a shard of glass from the broken windscreen penetrated and permanently damaged his right eye. The tiger used to pull down his cap to cover his useless eye and still hit balls all around to the boundary. The tiger for long would call this knock one of his most memorable ones.

SHAKESPEARE IN TAMIL

Romeo was called Ramanan and pouted the bard’s sonnets in chaste Tamil. Jwalita as Juliet was called (and played by a male actor) swooned in his arms. Hamlet as Amalidyan orated with a skull in his hand, and Shylock as Vannipurathu Vanigan (Merchant of Venice) fleeced his borrowers of interest.

The bard of Avon lived before Madras was even formed but had mentioned India in five plays. But translating dozens of his plays for the Madras audience was the work of a determined lawyer who himself had written a hundred plays.

Pammal Sambanda Mudaliar, a lawyer and later the judge of the small causes, started the Sugunavilas Sabha. Pammal, de- termined to give respectability to the Tamil stage which till then had fallen into a disreputable level, reshaped the structure of drama, and its timings and even made only graduates act in his plays. The setting of the Indo-Saracenic building Victoria Hall gave more respectability, and so did Shakespeare.

MOORE MARKET

Madras loved to buy used goods, be it antiques, appliances or books and the best place to get them was Moore Market. The market was named after George Moore, a president of the Corporation of Madras, who planned it to ease the load off Black Town, shifting markets and hawkers alike here.

An acre in size, quadrangular in shape and Indo-Saracenic in architecture like its neighbours, this became a landmark used often by the common men. One could buy any machine or materials at half the rate here, but it was best known for its second-hand books. When the Railways wanted to expand across the canal, it eyed the Moore Market.

Very suspiciously to some, the market caught fire and was soon handed over to the suburban rail hub. To mollify the traders, a nearby lake, the lily pond, was filled with rubble and a new market was built. A small model of the building in its heydays is maintained in the parking lot of the Central station.

GANDHI IN THE PARK

Gandhi had a variety of experiences in Park Town. Except for the last few occasions when his train was stopped at some previously undisclosed stations for security purposes, he always arrived at Central station. During one of his earlier visits, the horses were disengaged from the chariot that was to take him to town and students voluntarily pulled it.

When he was still asking for dominion status, Gandhi went on record in 1916 in a People’s Park meeting with many Englishmen in attendance that “nowhere else in the world can one live in freedom as much as in the British empire”. He would correct himself soon thereafter, asking the British to quit India. Gandhi’s critic and a liberal, silver-tongued Srinivasa Sastri was in the general hospital during Gandhi’s last visit in 1946. Gandhi would visit him in the hospital twice though with a cramped schedule.

SHOOTING AT THE ZOO

The museum zoo had been shifted to the People’s Park and the spaciousness made it grow. But World War-2 crept closer to Madras and it became certain that the Japanese could bomb it. But then came a thought. What if a stray bomb lets loose the already hungry animals? The Government of Madras instructed the zoo to shoot them all as a precaution.

Frantic efforts were made to save the animals but the arena of war was too large and everybody foresaw the same issues with wild animals in urban settings and refused. The final culling order from the government to dispose of the animals came and so the Malabar police guns were loaded. Three lions, six lionesses, four tigers, eight leopards, four bears and a black panther were shot in a matter of an hour. For accounting purposes, the animals shot were valued at Rs 4,568.

THE CENTRAL STATION

The busiest railway station in south India, the MGR Central Station is a prominent landmark of Chennai. Though it was only the second station in Madras after Royapuram, Central soon became the city’s gateway for the rest of the country. John Pereira, a Portuguese merchant, was a refugee from the Dutch occupation of Nagapattinam. He bought land on the outskirts of the Black Town for hunting and holidaying. It was on his land that the station was built.

Harding and Chisholm were architects one after another, and in 1959 the building facade was duplicated and doubled when it was widened with more platforms. In 1908, the Madras Railway Company and the Southern Mahratta Railway Company merged as the Madras and South Mahratta Company (M & SM) to operate services from Madras with a combined strength of 3,000 miles of track. Chennai Central Railway Station has been officially named after former state chief minister MG Ramachandran in what is seen as a move to appease thousands of his followers.

THE FLYING DOCTOR

The general hospital at Park Town is nearing its 400th year and is celebrating its 350th year in the Park Town site. This must be amongst the oldest surviving modern hospitals in the world. The wall surrounding the Black Town even had a hospital gate to facilitate patient movement. The Indian medical service was fully staffed by Europeans and it was late that Indians joined it.

Indian doctors often faced racism and nepotism in their daily jobs, and some even quit to start roaring private practices. One of them who passed out as a doctor in 1904 was Dr Rangachari. At the height of his career, he had a Puss Moth plane with which he treated patients as far as Chettinad and was nicknamed the flying doctor. In 1939, Governor Erskine unveiled his statue outside the general hospital. Dr Guruswamy Mudaliar’s statue joined it a few years later.

PRISON THAT HOUSED CM STALIN

One of the oldest prisons in India and called originally the Madras Penitentiary when built in 1837, was initially meant to house transit convicts who were to be shipped to Andaman and its dreaded cellular jail.

The gallows there were used till the early 1970s. MK Stalin, presently the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu was housed in this prison during the appalling Emergency. He was held without trial under the MISA Act and assaulted. When the jail was to be demolished, it was thrown open to visitors. Many of its former residents, including MK Stalin, visited it with their family members. After demolition, the jail campus has been handed over to the Madras Medical College for its extended campus.

THE FIRE IN THE PARK

Much before the Marina became the leading spot for a social congregation in Madras, the extensive People’s Park was the only resort (pun intended) for the Black Town natives. Nearly two decades after the park was opened, in 1887, the whole British empire geared up to rejoice in the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria’s accession. For the common public, the annual Christmas fair was improved and was dedicated to Victoria. On New Year’s Eve, there were around 6,000 people inside the bandstand, when a fire broke out. As many thatched structures were there, it became an inferno in just a few minutes. The fire rapidly burnt itself out, but the panic it triggered among the visitors was deadly. 402 natives died in the stampede that ensued. The loss of native lives, however, did not seem to have any lasting impact, for just a month after the disaster, its Golden Jubilee celebrations were held on a grand scale.

SAVALAI RAMASWAMI MUDALIAR CHOULTRY

With thousands of people going to and fro from the Central station, people needing to stay for short durations between two train journeys felt helpless with no place to stay. The hotel industry was in its nascent stage in Madras. It was then that a choultry (rest house) was built by the millionaire Savalai Ramasami Mudaliar in memory of his first wife, Ranee Thyal Nayagi Ammal. In 1902, Mudaliar, who was an influential dubash, was chosen to represent the city of Madras at the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

Very few could have obtained a privately owned piece of prime land just opposite the Park. The meticulous design of the rest house reflects the disparities in societal strata at the time. The rest house contained separate sections for Mudaliars, Nayudus, and Pillais, a block for Brahmins, separate rooms for Marwaris and Chetties, a section for ‘Muhammadans’, a section for ‘native Christians’ and Eurasians. There were attempts to convert the building into a metro rail museum recently.