George Town

The edifice that houses K. Natesa Iyer & Co., an 82-year-old jaggery godown in George 

Town, is living its last days. Photo: R. Ragu

The edifice that houses K. Natesa Iyer & Co., an 82-year-old jaggery godown in George Town, is living its last days

The building swallows us in one soundless gulp. The cluck-cluck of tricycles, the yackety-yak of customers and vegetable-sellers at the market, the “vazhi, vazhi” — “Give way, give way” — of sweat-drenched load men heaving jute sacks on their backs outside disappear the instant we travel down its throat. Inside, a man squats on a thinnai by a short wooden table, leaning on a pillar and writing down the order from a customer.

Temperature drops. Crumbling limestone pillars rise like pale white hillocks from the corners; wooden beams of the Madras terrace run horizontally on the ceiling. Surely, we haven’t travelled back in time? That’s the thing with K. Natesa Iyer & Co. on Anna Pillai Street — it has an otherworldly aura that borders on the mysterious.

The jaggery mundi (godown) is over 80 years old. “This property belongs to the Kannika Parameswari Temple,” says P. Suresh, looking up from his account books. “My grandfather took it for rent in 1933.” Natesa ran a wholesale jaggery and tamarind business that Suresh took over. “I get my stock from Tumkur in Karnataka,” he explains, adding that he has customers from all over Chennai, extending to Kanchipuram.

The godown opens out into a pillared courtyard — one with windows at strategic locations to let the maximum amount of sunlight in. Small chambers branch out from the main courtyard; the ceiling is high, rendering the whole place cool. Says Suresh, “Everything here is made of limestone. Construction methods back then were completely different from those of today. They resulted in sturdy buildings that withstood time.”

What did the building function as? Was it a dance-floor? A rehearsal room for temple dancers, perhaps? “I think it was a wedding hall,” says Suresh. “But I’m not sure. The size, the side rooms and such indicate that it could have hosted weddings,” he adds. “You can ask the temple authorities. But the old-timers are long gone; there is no one to tell you what exactly it was. We can only assume what the godown was, almost a hundred years ago.”

But two months from now, it will be razed to the ground.

Suresh says he has been allocated a shop at the Koyambedu wholesale food and grains market and that he is preparing to leave. “I hope to do good business there. Once I shift, the temple authorities are planning to demolish the building,” he says.

From the outside, K. Natesa Iyer & Co. looks desolate — new buildings have come up around it, elbowing it from every direction. It looks out of place in the bustling market place, peepal leaves sprout from its cracks and crevices. The men and women the building housed, their stories that the pillars heard…we will never get to know them.

H 19 Aug 14

Tracing the history of European-built shrines in George Town -Church chronicles

RING IN THE PAST Anderson's Church Photo: R. Ravindran

ESTHER ELIAS traces the history of European-built shrines in George Town

In the numerous churches of George Town lies the story of Madras’ tryst with many nations and a journey down five centuries.

Just across the High Court, extends the slender steeple of the 155-year-old Anderson’s church, named in memory of Madras’ first Church of Scotland missionary, Rev. John Anderson. In the oil portrait of Anderson, the handful of white-marble plaques that detail church history and the two silver communion chalices gifted in 1844, unfold the story of a man who first believed in education, and then faith. Anderson is today remembered as the founder of a school on the Esplanade in a former sailor’s house that grew to become Madras Christian College’s first home. While Anderson lies buried with his wife Margaret in graves at Thana Street, Purasaiwalkam, Rev. Jacqulin Jothi says his warm spirit lives on in the church that’s a haven of quiet for street children, beggars and weekday worshippers.

RING IN THE PAST Broadway Tamil Wesley Church Photo: R. Ravindran

Wander further north-west through George Town, and follow your nose for scents of pulses, spices and coffee along Thatha Muthiappan Street, and you’ll stumble on a cluster of churches, all nearing or beyond their bi-centenaries. Tucker Church, founded by the Church Missionary Society in 1820, and named after its second missionary and minister Rev. John Tucker, was built on land bought from a ‘Mussalman’. Its wooden shutter-windows have long given way to local stained-glass but its 150-year-old, London-made pipe organ still rings loud at Tamil service every Sunday, observes Henry Thomas, whose wife is a sixth-generation member of the church. For the most part, Tucker’s looks just as it did in the detailed pencil drawings that Sarah, John’s sister, drew in the 1840s in letters to her ‘young friend’ Lisa, now collected in the slim volume South Indian Sketches.

RING IN THE PASTSt. Mary's Co-cathedral Photo: R. Ravindran

The church just across the road hasn’t been as lucky though. Last year, the brick-red, 153-year-old Broadway Tamil Wesley Church, grew cracks in its floor and filled with water from underground Metro Rail tunnelling.

Its predecessor right opposite, the Black Town or Broadway Popham Church, experienced something similar nearly two centuries ago. Inaugurated on April 25, 1822, by Wesleyan missionary James Lynch, the church succumbed to cracks in 1844, and the building that stands today is its re-opened avatar.

Time has stilled, though, in the 207-year-old William Charles church tucked away behind the bustle on Davidson Street. Its wooden rafters, low-sloped roof and outward stone structure remain. Beside the altar are chairs that Rev. John Selvaraj says belonged to Tamil scholar and linguist, Bishop Robert Caldwell, who served at William Charles in the 1850s. The furniture now cushions some hefty cats.

Our story slips into the 18th Century with the CSI St. Mark’s church, completed in 1800, which bookends George Town at its north-eastern end on Pedariyar Koil Street. The grave of its first reverend Richard Hall Kerr graces the floor before the altar and a plaque was erected at his death at 40 in 1808. Graves abound within and without the St. Mary’s Co-Cathedral that rises beside the closed door of the 1712 Armenian Church. St Mary’s, first built in 1658, and rebuilt in 1775, springs to life every Tuesday as rows of the sick, aged and dying from various faiths wait for alms and miracles at the feet of the St. Antony’s statue. Among graves of dead priests, prominent men and women of the community and numerous Irish nuns, are the remains of the Armenian Moorat family with memorial plaques and sculptures, that helped build the Cathedral, points out Fr. Bellarmine Fernando SDB. Samuel McCartish Moorat, his wife Anna Raphael and son Edward, known for squandering his father’s fortunes, lie enclosed in the Cathedral’s confession room, their cracked tombstones still bearing the sculptor’s name, P. Turnerelli.

RING IN THE PAST William Charles Church Photo: R. Ravindran

Far from the celebrated areas of George Town, close to where it segues into the street-maze of Broadway, stands a lone church behind garbage dumps that has its origins in 1640. The Catholic church, ‘Our Lady of Assumption’, has its roots in a church built within Fort St. George by Fr. Andrew of the Capuchins in 1640. The story goes that over a century later, after the French invasion of the Fort, the Portuguese and their church were evicted by the British for supposedly plotting with the French. In 1749, the church was rebuilt in the Portuguese neighbourhood on today’s Portuguese Church Street, with a tablet at its roof that read 1640. The Tamils around though, remember it as ‘Mathura Nayagi’, a moniker for Mary, says Fr. John Andrew. It stood its ground until 1993, when it was razed to be replaced with the present swanky structure. As Chennai turns 375 this week, this little church celebrates it 375th birthday too.

H 19 Aug 2014