Madras History :The autorickshaw’s ancestor

The state government is involved in yet another struggle to bring the autorickshaw drivers of our city under control. 

All this brings to mind the two-century-long battle that Madras fought against another transport operator — the Masulah boatman. And the two struggles are remarkably similar to each other.

Our city did not have a natural harbour with the surf near the coast being particularly dangerous. Between 1639 and 1875 or so, all ships dropped anchor beyond the surf, at a distance of almost two miles from the coast. 

This spot came to be known as Madras Roads. The only vessels that could brave the surf and ply to and fro between the ships and the coast were the native masulah boats. Passengers and goods had to use this form of transport when they landed at Madras or embarked on a sea voyage. Over time, given this monopoly, the boatmen became a law unto themselves.

The two-mile ferry service on the native boats to the shore was fraught with risks. As an account put it, “the boatmen waited for a big wave, came in on the crest of it till it was spent, paddled hard to get past the breaking place of the next wave so as to be carried by it right up to the beach. 

And as they waited outside the surf for a good wave they bargained with their passengers”. Those who did not accede to the boatmen’s demands could be pushed over by means of an accidental rocking of the boat and their goods could also be roughly handled.

For years, the government tried its best to rein in the boatmen but as a writer put it, “they were a gang of rapacious scoundrels who knew themselves to be indispensable and traded on it”. In 1839, the government tried to end the monopoly of a few boatmen who controlled the service by throwing open the supply of boats to public competition.

 But the boat cartel ensured that no newcomer came forward. In 1842, the government passed an Act by which it was compulsory for boats to be licensed. None of the boatmen applied for it and went on a strike! They “defied the law and plundered property under the very eyes of the watching peons”

. The government kept enhancing the rates and also published rate cards to bring some control but to no avail. In the 1860s, it even enacted a rule that every boat should have a policeman on board, no doubt to ensure safety of the passengers and goods. It all sounds terribly familiar doesn’t it?

It was finally technology that put an end to the boatmen.

 The ships became bigger and steam driven, enabling them to brave the surf.

 And the harbour works began in 1856, concluding in the early 1900s, enabling ships to dock safely. The boatman and the masulah boat became a thing of the past.

 Perhaps effective public transport alternatives can control the autos as well.

Sriram .V, H 23 Nov 2014

Madras History :Remembering the Co-operator

 Sir Frederick Nicholson 

The invitation I received recently read, “On account of 61st All India Co-operative Week Celebrations conducted from November 4, 2014 to November 20, 2014 in commemoration of the architect of the Co-operative Movement in India Sir Frederick Nicholson and the Co-operative Pioneers in Nilgiris such as Thiru H B Ari Gowder, we have programmed a seminar on 15.11.2014 at Nilgiris District Plantation Workers’ Co-operative Society, Coonoor …”

I hadn’t heard of any celebrations in Madras recalling Nicholson, but I can understand the Nilgiris interest in him. After retirement in 1904, Nicholson and his wife Catherine settled in Coonoor, where he played an active role in helping found the Coonoor Urban Co-operative Bank in 1916 and remained associated with it till his death in 1936. He and his wife and their son Major T B Nicholson are buried in the Tiger Hill Cemetery in Coonoor. 

On November 15, wreaths were placed on their graves and a portrait of Sir Frederick was unveiled in the Nilgiri History Museum. Frederick Augustus Nicholson arrived in Madras as a 23-year-old member of the Indian Civil Service in 1869. He was, in time, to serve as Collector of Tinnevelly, Madras and Coimbatore. It was while serving in the last-named post that he fell in love with the Nilgiris.

In the aftermath of the great Madras Famine of 1876 – which killed an estimated ten million people and virtually wiped out farming in the Presidency — the Government in 1892 set up a Famine Commission to study how such a disaster could be prevented in the future. Nicholson’s report was published in 1895 and the Indian National Congress, then in its first flush, insisted on its implementation, but it was to be 1904 before the co-operative movement began getting under way, with such recommendations as the establishing in the districts of co-operative agricultural credit societies and co-operative banks being implemented.

Nicholson, following in the footsteps of Dr. Francis Day of the Madras Medical Service, who is considered the father of India’s fishing industry, now turned his attention to fisheries in the Presidency. 

In July 1905, he presented the Government a report on the need to not only increase fish production in a Presidency that had the longest coastline in India, but also improve fish curing methods (helping inland areas get a hygienically better quality of cured fish) as well as those of making fish manure badly needed by the plantations whose constant complaint at the time was the poor quality of fish guano. 

Requested to investigate how these improvements could be made, Nicholson visited Japanese and European fishery centres and on his return was made the Honorary Director of the Bureau of Fisheries, Madras Presidency, which was established in 1907 on his recommendation. The Bureau, the first in the country, was the nucleus of today’s Departments of Fisheries in all the Southern States. 

One of the first things the Bureau did was to establish in 1908 an experimentation centre, the first in the country, in Ennore. The techniques of fish curing it developed became standard practice not only in India but in all Britain’s tropical territories.

Oxford-educated Nicholson became the First Member of the Board of Revenue in 1889. In 1902, he was appointed to the Madras Legislative Council and was knighted that year. In between, in 1897, he was made a Member of the Imperial Legislative Council. 

Some years later, in 1905, he was to make yet another significant contribution to Madras. Teaming with the Rev. Canon Sell and Sir S Subramania Aiyar, all members of the Syndicate of the University of Madras, they recommended to Government “that there should be for so ancient and important a language, with a classical literature of so unique a character, a dictionary worthy of its subject.” 

The seed was sown for the University of Madras’s Tamil Lexicon (Miscellany, March 28, 2011).

 Even that is a forgotten contribution of a man who dedicated himself to making life better and people more knowledgeable in the Madras Presidency

.S.Muthiah,  H 24 Nov 2014

Builders of bowstring bridges

Keeping on the trail of Napier Bridge (Miscellany, November 3) has been reader V.Viswanathan and he has come up with the fact that work on the first bowstring bridge began during the governorship of Lord Erskine and that the bridge was declared open by Governor Sir Arthur Hope. 

The bridge was constructed by Gannon Dunkerley & Co, a major construction company at the time, and the work was supervised by the Madras Port Trust. Who built its clone, inaugurated in 2000, reader Viswanathan is still trying to find out.

Henry Gannon and J H Dunkerley had separate trading establishments in India from 1895. Whether these were in Bombay or Delhi is not very clear, but they were merged in 1918 to become Gannon Dunkerley & Co. (GDC). 

The firm was incorporated as a private limited company in 1924. It passed into Indian hands in 1946 and two years later become a public limited company headquartered in Bombay.

It was in the early 1930s that GDC moved from trading into civil engineering and was particularly active in the South. There it became known for the RCC bowstring bridges it built to its in-house design. 

It also built several other bridges, aqueducts, and civil requirements for irrigation and hydroelectric projects, besides numerous factory buildings. One of the firm’s best known projects was the first ghat road from Tirupati to Tirumalai. During World War II it built several airstrips and runways. 

Then, in the 1950s, it constructed numerous bridges for the Western and Central Railways.

Today, its branch offices in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Calcutta handle assignments in their respective regions. But there was in the 1950s a Gannon Dunkerley (Madras).

S . Muthiah, H: 24 Nov 2014

The Sister from Madras

Sister Eucharia nee Julia Gunnigan

This week, it’s the New Yorker that’s noticed Madras, I’m told by reader Kiran Rao. And it’s the journal’s food columnist, John Lanchester, who has been responsible.

His article ‘Shut up and eat’ begins with his remembering the first recipe his mother, Julia Gunnigan Lanchester, wrote for him, the one for spaghetti Bolognese, ‘spag bol’ as he calls it. And that takes him to his mother and she leads to this item today.

Born in a rural home in County Mayo, West Ireland, in 1920, Julia Gunnigan was the eldest of seven girls and a boy. The church was a haven for many a girl from a large, poor Irish family at the time and Julia became a nun as did three of her sisters. She joined the Union of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, better known as the Presentation Order founded by Nano Nagle in 1771 in County Cork, Ireland. Nano Nagle, from a well-to-do family, had also sought the Church – but with a mission: 

To provide a good Catholic education to the poor children of Ireland. From these beginnings, the Order established schools around the world, arriving in Madras in January 1842 to establish the first Presentation Convent and School in India.

Over the next 75 years, the Order established half a dozen schools in Madras. One of them, which opened its doors in 1909, was the Sacred Heart School, better known as Church Park, near the Horticultural Society gardens. It was to this school that Julia Gunnigan came after her ordination when she took the name Sister Eucharia. 

She was to serve the School from 1943 to 1957 when, while heading its teacher-training college after she had done her London University B.A. and M.A. by correspondence, she suddenly resigned and sought to leave the Order. It was a step that quite scandalised Madras at the time.

Sister Eucharia, says the New Yorker writer, “left (Madras) wearing her nun’s habit, with no possessions apart from a plane ticket to London, a city she had never visited, and ten pounds in cash.” It was to be October 1958 before she could formally shed her robes.

 She was nearly forty when she met her husband-to-be, William Lanchester, in London, where she was a teacher. He was with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, and she moved with him to his various postings, to Hamburg, Calcutta, Borneo, Burma and Hong Kong. And over all those years, she became a mother, learnt cooking and began to enjoy it. Writes her son, “She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after working in a convent school in Madras.”

Julia Lanchester might have learnt to make beef Stroganoff, but her son will always remember her for her spag bol. He writes, “I’m making spag bol for the zillionth time. Through the years I’ve experimented with all sorts of variations… (But) the one I always come back to is the simplest and best of all, my mother’s: onion, ground beef, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, wine, thyme, salt, a minimum of three hours’ cooking. My kids love it. Cooking it reminds me of my mother: it always does…. And she knew that …. was part of the process by which she saved herself.”

About why she needed to save herself was in a book John Lanchester wrote, Family Romance, that came out some years ago (Miscellany, April 7, 2008)

. I read it, but have forgotten what it said about why she felt she had to give up the robes while at Church Park. I don’t think jogging memories is necessary in this case.

S Muthiah, H : 24 Nov 2014

Mother Dairy to enter Chennai soon

Working on a unique home delivery model to deliver milk to customers at the door-step at no extra cost

New Delhi-based Mother Dairy Fruit and Vegetable Private Ltd. is planning to enter three major Southern cities in a big way soon.

Mother Dairy, a subsidiary of the National Dairy Development Board, has been on an expansion mode by spreading its wings to other metros. It will enter Chennai within a month followed by Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

As per the plan, the company will firm up distribution network, and have 6,000 outlets (own and franchisee) in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai in the next six to nine months to sell its entire range of products. 

Besides, it will have its own retail outlets (10) in each city. Tirupathi-based Balaji Dairy will supply milk to Hyderabad and Chennai.

 Initially, the residents of Chennai and Hyderabad will have access to milk and milk products. But, those residing in Bengaluru have to wait for some more time for Mother Dairy milk. Briefing reporters,

 Mother Dairy Fruit and Vegetable, Business Head Milk, Sandeep Ghosh said: “We are going to storm Chennai in a month’s time with 20 products ranging from milk to lassi, yoghurt, milkshake and to flavoured milk.

 All these three cities account for milk consumption of 66 lakh litres per day, and we want to capture at least 10 per cent of it.” Mother Dairy is working on a unique home delivery model to deliver milk to customers at the door-step at no extra cost. “Even then, we will be cheaper than others. We do not want to increase the price at least for the next three-four months,” he said.

In 2013-14, Mother Dairy clocked a revenue of Rs.6,500 crore.

The milk division accounted for Rs.4,500 crore, milk products Rs.900 crore, frozen foods Rs.700 crore, and horticulture Rs.400 crore.

 The company has set itself a target to reach Rs.10,000 crore-mark by 2017.

H Nov 23 ,2014

Delhi-Chennai bullet train project: RVNL team to visit China

New Delhi: In line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to introduce bullet trains in the country, a team of Railway officials will visit Beijing on November 24 to take forward the Delhi-Chennai high-speed corridor project, the longest in India.


A high-level team of officials from Rail Vikas Nigam (RVNL) will make the visit to complete formalities with Chinese counterparts for the project's feasibility study, a senior Railway official said.

The 1,754 km-long Delhi-Chennai route is being given to China for conducting feasibility study and is proposed to be developed jointly with China, which is home to the world's longest high-speed rail line between Beijing and Guangzhou.

Officials of the Rail Vikas Nigam today made a detailed presentation of proposed high speed train projects, including the Delhi-Chennai route before the Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, the official said.

Besides, the Minister was also briefed about the progress of the 534-km-long Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed corridor project, estimated to cost Rs 63,180 cr, for which the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is currently conducting a feasibility study.

The Delhi-Chennai route, part of the proposed Diamond Quadrilateral project, which aims to build a high-speed train network between different cities, including Delhi-Mumbai, Mumbai-Chennai, Chennai-Kolkata, Kolkata-Delhi and Mumbai-Kolkata, is likely to cost Rs 2 lakh crore.

Currently Rajdhani covers the distance between the two cities in 28 hours and as per the plan, the proposed bullet train at 300 km per hour speed will reduce the travelling time to six hours.

While the cost of construction of a normal railway route is Rs 5 crore per km, the estimated expenditure on the high speed railway line will be Rs 120-126 crore.

PTI November 20, 2014 - 23:56

7 days, 9 murders: is Chennai safe?

4 cases cracked; acquaintances of victims are said to be responsible for others

Nine murders, including four for gain, in the last one week alone have sent shockwaves among residents of the city. Is this city safe anymore, residents wonder, and question the efficacy of policing.

Four cases have been cracked with the suspects behind bars while the rest are believed to be the work of acquaintances of the victims, who committed the crimes for gold and cash, police say.

On Friday evening, homemaker Manju Devi (48) was found lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of her first-floor home in Kalathiappa Street, Choolai. The house was ransacked and gold jewellery and other valuables were missing.

“We have obtained CCTV footage in which a man is seen arriving outside Devi’s building on a Scooty in the evening. He seems calm and knows his way into the house. He is clearly a family member. We are probing the lead,” said an investigating officer

.

However, the murder of the woman in a densely-populated neighbourhood has left residents deeply unhappy with the way the police are going about maintaining law and order. “If policing was effective, there would not be such crimes, and cases wouldn’t need to be resolved,” a resident said.

In the Kolathur murder of G. Hemavathi (49) on Thursday afternoon, police suspect the hand of a close relative who is believed to have slit her throat at her flat on Girija Nagar 5 Cross Street.

She lay unconscious and bled profusely in the drawing room before a neighbour spotted her and rushed her to a hospital where she succumbed to her injuries.

“The suspect had dined with her at home and they seem to have had an argument after he demanded money, leading to her murder. We have identified the man and a search is underway to nab him,” added an officer with the Kolathur police.

On November 15, Chennaiites woke up to the shocking story of the murder of a woman and her six-year-old son and the death of a medical representative in Manadi. In both the murders, police are yet to apprehend the suspects who are said to have committed the killings over personal enmity.

However, police have cracked the murder of octogenarian S. Veliappan in Choolaimedu on Tuesday afternoon. The culprits are a gang of youths who attempted to snatch the ornaments he was wearing, police said.

Suspect Vinod alias ‘Pambu’ Vinod (25) of Pudupet who often hung out near the elderly man’s home joined hands with a teenager and another youth to pocket the gold but ended up stabbing the 87-year-old to death.

Vinod and the teenager were apprehended on Friday night. Their aide is on the run.

H : Petleepeter : November 23, 2014 01:20 IST