Posts
What was Mylapore like in the 1930s, 40s and 50s?
I certainly did not know it, not even during my occasional visits to Madras in those years — San Thomé High Road was the closest I got to it in those years — and, so, was delighted to get a word picture from a little booklet that recently came to me from a resident of East Mada Street who has lived there from 1933.
The author, V. Kedar Rao, a former Deputy Secretary in the Union Railway Ministry, calls his reminiscences of the area The Mada Veedhis of Mylapore
. Brief though the booklet is, it is packed with facts, particularly about those who lived on those streets — including several leading advocates and many Tanjore Maharashtrians — and about life around the temple.
Those wishing to lead Mylapore Walks will find a wealth of information in these pages which perhaps could be got from vkrao1933@yahoo.co.in.
Two stories that caught my attention included one that made me regret how all of us forgot last year a significant event in Indian history that had occurred 125 years earlier on what was then West Mada Street and is now R.K. Mutt Road.
Today, most people in the area only know of the biggest apartment block-cum-commercial complex in the area, its name Vishwakamal .
But it was in the mansion (presumably of the same name) that was on the site of this busy hive that 17 eminent persons good and true met in 1888 and drafted the plan for a national Indian movement.
The proceedings of that meeting and a subsequent meeting sowed the seeds for the birth of the Indian National Congress. Sadly, the plaque stating that bit of history vanished with the house when it made way for the highrise.
Dewan Bahadur Raghunatha Rao, who hosted the meeting shortly after he retired from Government service, lived in that house from 1831 to 1912.
He rose from a Translator to the Madras Government (1856) to Deputy Collector, Town Police Magistrate (Madras), and Dewan of Holkar. Down the road from him (where the Nehru News Mart now is) was an even larger mansion, Madhav Baugh , home of Raghunatha Rao’s cousin and another participant in that historic meeting, Sir T. Madhav Rao.
This palatial home of the Tanjore Maharashtrian who had served as the Dewan of Travancore,
Indore and Baroda between 1857 and 1882, passed on to his eldest grandson, R. Venkat Rao, who graciously lent it to relatives and close friends for weddings.
And a wedding held there brings me to my second story, that of E. Vinayaka Rao, who celebrated the marriage of his daughter there.
Vinayaka Rao, the father of the author of the booklet I received, was a classmate in Kumbakonam of that mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
They corresponded with each other till Ramanujan’s death. Some of those letters from Cambridge are now in the Ramanujan Museum in Royapuram.
Vinayaka Rao studied Mathematics at Pachaiyappa’s College and then taught there for a few years while studying Law.
He later became a leading advocate of the Madras High Court. In 1929, he bought a house in East Mada Street and named it Shivner , the fort where Sivaji was born.
The family still lives at the same address though the old house was replaced by a new one in 1997.
Like other buildings in the area, Shivner was served with DC electric supply. When the supplier, the Madras Tramways and Electric Supply Co., a British firm, began changing to AC supply, Vinayaka Rao was one of the hold-outs — and the Company, because of contractual terms, could not do anything about it.
The English General Manager finally came to meet Vinayaka Rao and tried to persuade him to accede to the change, even offering to replace the DC fans with AC fans. AC finally came to Shivner in 1943.
Vinayaka Rao, a founder of the Mahratta Education Fund in 1912, was also a founder of the National Liberal Foundation, a political party active till 1947, and was closely associated with the Servants of India Society, the South Indian National Association and the Ranade Library. Apart from advocacy, he was known in legal circles for his book on the Transfer of Property Act.
No comments:
Post a Comment