Changeover man

You are probably aware that the Corporation of Chennai is the second oldest in the world, having been established in September 1688. The office of its Mayor, would have had an unbroken 335 year streak had it not been for changes in the way the Corporation was structured and run. 

The first break happened thanks to the French. Between 1746 and 1748, when they had control over Fort St George, the Mayoralty of the city was suspended and for some reason, it was not restored until 1753. And then, for long stretches in the early part of the 19th century, the Corporation functioned without a Mayor. For a while, it was the Justice of Peace who played the Mayoral role, before a committee of three Municipal Commissioners collectively did it. The term was changed in 1886, and the head of the Corporation came to be called President. And then it was in 1933 that the title reverted to 'Mayor'. While that has remained the same, the office itself has been suspended twice since. The long stretch between 1973 and 1996 saw the Mayoralty suspended, as it was again for 6 years between 2016 and 2022. 

But this photo is of a statue at the end of Pantheon Road; it shows Mayor Thamarapakkam Sundara Rao Naidu. Even though his tenure was for a year, as was usual during the 1930s-1960s, Sundara Rao's was special. As Mayor between 1946 to 1947, it was he who saw the transition from the British Raj to independent India!

 

Bring down the lights

Have you ever thought about what it takes to keep the city lit at night? No, neither did I, but watching these two people service the lamps on a high-mast lighting installation at the junction of Mount Road and Adams Road / Swami Sivananda Road, I did wonder about those numbers.

The website of the GCC has been helpful in figuring this out. Although I've not been able to understand how updated it is, this site says the GCC maintains 286,558 lights across the city (okay, there is a bit of a mismatch in the numbers in the text and in the infographic). 

If we were to assume the typical high-mast light to be like this one, that's 8 lights on a mast. The GCC has 426 such high-masts across the city, which makes for, well, a lot of lights!

The man behind the sun

Chennai got back to having a mayor in 2022, after almost 6 years of it being suspended; many believe the current mayor, Priya Rajan is the first woman mayor of Chennai. That honour however, goes to Tara Cherian, who served a term from December 1957 to November 1958. And then there was Kamakshi Jayaraman, who was the mayor of the city during 1971-72. With the post now being reserved for women, it will be a long while before Chennai gets to see a male mayor again, if at all. So here is something about one man who was the city's mayor.

Thamarapakkam Sundara Rao Naidu was born in 1891. A lawyer by training, he involved himself in social causes, joining the Justice Party in the 1920s. He was captivated by the movies, but he seems to have been more interested in their potential for communicating social messages than merely as a business. In the 1940s, he acquired a cinema hall, which continued to function until the '90s, well after Sundara Rao passed away in 1949. 

The Corporation of Chennai, having been established in 1688, is the second such in the world. Sundara Rao's tenure as mayor came a good 30 years after that post was first held by an Indian. However, he was the city's mayor when India became independent in 1947; there is a park named in his honour in Egmore. I am not sure if his statue is in that park, but this one can be seen at Sun Plaza, where he once had his cinema hall!

 

Growing city

This signboard, just past the Guindy railway station, was put in place not very long ago - maybe in the past couple of years. With the Chennai Metro track running over it, it is now just another commonplace sign showing directions to some of the further corners of Chennai. But in an earlier avatar, the signboard here was much more significant. On the side we are facing, it was a "Thank you for visiting" message, while the other side was its counterpart, the welcome to the city. In those days, this sign marked the limit of the Corporation of Chennai.

It was in early 2010 that the Corporation flexed itself and gobbled up quite a few of the local bodies - municipalities, panchayats and town panchayats - from the neighbouring districts of Tiruvallur and Kancheepuram. With that expansion, the area under the Corporation of Chennai more than doubled, going from 174sqkm to 426sqkm. 

The earlier "Welcome / Thank You" sign should have now shifted about 30km further down this road - although the Corporation hasn't got around to putting one such up, I guess!

Transformation

It is difficult to imagine that, 8 years ago, this was a dump yard. Even though it had the grand name of 'River View Park', the Corporation of Chennai had not got around to doing anything about making it a park, as it had done with several of the other public spaces under its control. 

In 2006, Nizhal, a not-for-profit organization stepped in to support the Corporation. With the help of several volunteers, the rubble was cleared, saplings were planted, the area was better demarcated. Each round of effort with the volunteers raised the Corporation's confidence - and some funds through contributions - which helped in adding facilities like walking tracks, a wall around the park and staff for its upkeep. 

Today, the Kotturpuram Tree Park is a wonderful getaway from the city's sights and sounds. The saplings have grown, through the trees are still not so big as to provide great shade, they are all well on their way. The Friends of the Kotturpuram Tree Park (FKTP) have provided signs with the names of the trees - botanical, as well as the local name. The FKTP also helps with the upkeep and in coordinating the efforts of volunteers, many of who are children from the nearby streets and schools. Nizhal continues to be involved, helping the FKTP and the Corporation figure out how to leverage this showpiece of public-private partnership in the cause of general welfare!

Decorating the street

A visit by any VIP of significance will see the area being cleaned up hurriedly by workers of the Corporation of Chennai. Not only does the garbage get swept up under the bins, but the workers go one step further.

Part of their VIP cleaning equipment is a bucket with its bottom punctured with a pattern. Filling it with kolamavu, the worker walks it along the side of the road, dipping it to touch the road every once a while.

So the VIPs go around and see all these clean streets and repeating kolam patterns. If only they get to see the garbage as it is, maybe they will get to see much more intricate and beautiful kolams as well!

Big man

We have seen this man before. Here. He sits in the middle of the Peoples' Park, lording it over the grounds. This is the statue of Diwan Bahadur R. Subbayya Naidu, CIE who was Commissioner of the Corporation of Madras between 1937-40. 

Though there is not much that I have been able to find about his tenure. He seems to have been a civil servant dedicated to the Empire rather than to the people. An announcement in the Straits Times of Singapore on January 21, 1937, informs us that Subbayya Naidu was a former Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya - he certainly did get around. 

Until 2008, this statue, like the others in the park was all uniformly white. Whoever came up with this colour scheme probably thought of this man as a blue-blooded sahib!

Convenient?

Mr. Arun Sundar Thayalan, an IAS Officer of the 2008 batch, was transferred from Madurai to Chennai in December 2013 and took charge as Regional Deputy Commissioner (Central) of the Corporation of Chennai. One of his pet projects has been to reduce people pissing in the open. The earlier toilets, of the pay-and-use variety, were brick and mortar structures, with someone sitting in front of them to levy the toll charges. That model works reasonably well in the residential parts of the city. In other parts, however, even where traffic is heavy, the viability of such toilets seems to have been a problem.

Mr. Thayalan's solution was something that looks like the port-a-loo, but is a lot more stable. Several of them have been installed in different parts of the city (mainly the Central zone, I guess). This one is across the road - Whites Road, that is - from Express Avenue. Can't fault the positioning, for this is one place where people pause to relieve themselves. With this dual toilet booth in place, one hopes that it being used as it is meant to be!

Quiet entrance

That's the rather quiet and unassuming entrance to one of the city's best maintained parks. The Nageswara Rao Park in Mylapore spreads over an area of about four acres. That makes it one of the smaller parks under the Corporation of Chennai, but that doesn't stop it from being put to various uses. Walkers, joggers, tree-watchers, singers, lovers, chess players, all of them can be found here. By the side of the broad walking areas are seats for players wanting a game of chess; there is a stage where you can perform (and do it as a featured programme on the first Sunday of every month is a privilege) and of course, all those little nooks that invite sweethearts to linger a while.

The park is named for Nageswara Rao Pantulu, who was a resident of Sri Bagh, a palatial house near the park. A little to the west of his house was a pond called Arathakuttai; sometime in the late 1930s, when that began to dry up, Nageswara Rao convinced some of his neighbours that it was better to give up the dry lake to the city rather than to expand their residences into it, and so the park was born.

For the past decade or so, the park is being maintained by Sundaram Finance on behalf of the Corporation of Chennai. I cannot think of any other such privately funded public park in the city; but the manner in which the Desodharaka Kasinadhuni Nageswara Rao Pantulu Park (that's its full name) is used in run is surely a strong boost for inviting more corporate bodies to invest in the city's green lungs!

Originals

The streets of Madras were first lit up by oil lamps in 1785. I have not been able to find much information about what kind of lamps they were, but they were surely engineered very well, to be able to continue to burn brightly even through the strong sea breeze that would set into the city every afternoon. 

It was a little over a century ago that street lighting in Madras was electrified. In 1910, when electric lamps were introduced on to the city's streets, they had to replace about 6,500 oil lamps. The lamplighters now had to ensure that the switches were turned on at the right time. Or maybe, like it still happens in some of the semi-urban and rural areas, they had to plug in the fuse carrier at dusk and yank it out again at dawn. 

What you see in the picture (you can click on it to blow it up) are two lamp-posts from the early days of electrical street lighting. No, not the fixtures - as you can see, they have been crudely fastened on to the old posts. But I do not think that all the posts were quite so short, for I have seen at least one that is taller. What with the kind of cherry-picker trucks these days, today's lamp posts don't require the crossbar that you see on these; without that support, the lamplighter would not have been able to place his ladder firmly on these posts!

Precious coral

For almost a hundred years, from 1688 to 1786, Anglo-Dutch Jews moved to Madras and played a major role in the trade of precious stones. Strange as it may seem, the 'natives' were fascinated by coral and were willing to trade even diamonds for it. The Jewish traders typically had an arrangement where one brother was a free merchant near Fort St George, another was based in London and a third in Amsterdam. That helped: coral from the Mediterranean, which was much sought after by the people of India, was shipped to Fort St George through London. (In return, the merchants of Leghorn, Naples and other cities on the Mediterranean seem to have been paid in pepper). Diamonds obtained as payment for this coral were sent to Amsterdam for cutting and polishing.

It appears that the Jews played a significant role in moving the centre of the coral trade from Goa (then with the Portugese) to Madras, which would explain their pre-eminence in this trade in the early days of the city. However, with the discovery of diamonds in other parts of the world, their value fell and the trade became less lucrative. Also, there appears to have been a shake-up in 1765 with the bust of a diamond smuggling ring, in which 3 Jewish agents from Madras (and the governor of Madras) were alleged to have been involved. 

The trade was then taken over by the Nagarathars. Whether they continued to trade coral or not, they took up offices in the street vacated by the Jewish traders. By this time, the street was itself so closely associated with the coral trade that it was called Pavazhakkarar Theru - Coral Merchants' Street. It is likely that anyone commencing trading activities there would be dubbed a Pavazhakkarar, whether coral was part of his bill of materials or not. And in keeping with the fascination for red coral, this gift from 'Coral Naiker Madras' to the city's Corporation, has been topped off with bright red paint!

The book "Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade", by Gedalia Yogev seems to have some fascinating accounts of the Jews of Madras, going by excerpts found here!

White man!

Well, I give up. He has lent his name to one of the better-known roads in Chennai (and also to a locality in Choolai), but I haven't been able to get much information about this man. It is said that he was the first Commissioner of the Corporation of Madras from the ICS - that steel frame of the Raj - but even with that lead, there does not seem to be much information available about this man.

Even his statue, in the main corridor of Ripon Building, where he once had his office, has been painted over so many times that his features have become rather difficult to discern. Just like the man himself, the statue also seems to blend into the wall - only the railing stops you from ignoring it altogether. Complete whitewash, I say!

Loane fountain

Well, don't judge the park by the fountain. That the centerpiece of Sriramulu Poonga on Prakasam Road is dry is no reflection on the status of the park itself. Confused? Well, old timers of Madras would probably understand better if I'd used the earlier names - Loane Square Garden on Broadway.

That garden was commissioned by Samuel Joshua Loane, probably as a bulwark against the space becoming messy and unsanitary once again. 'Once again', because sometime around the mid-nineteenth century, Loane had just finished cleaning up Popham's Market on Broadway. Stephen Popham had reportedly envisaged the market - for meat, vegetables and condiments - being spic and span. After his death, it seems to have degenerated considerably, to the extent of a garden being named after its rescuer.

Fast forward to the end of the 20st century; Loane Square Garden is in pretty much the same state that Popham's Market was, a hundred and fifty years earlier. Being used as a parking lot for trucks carting produce to and from Kotwal Chavadi, the Garden was "a public lavatory masquerading as a park and a startling testimonial to the failure of Stephen Popham's most basic idea - sanitation - to take root". Now, it has once again been transformed into an oasis of greenery in what's otherwise a rather grey and dusty district. I'm not very sure about the connection between Potti Sriramulu and this park, which is now named after him, but as with many other places in the city, it continues to be better known by its old name!

Painted over

It was originally a relief of St. George and the Dragon. Successive coats of paint over the years have left it a mangled mass, with little of the detail visible. This one is on one of the grilles along the northern verandah of the Ripon Building, which is tucked away from the public and the VIP view.

I went across to that side, trying to find out what the design on the grille was; the same depiction along the main verandah was completely unrecognizable!

Images on the roadside

After having all the hoardings on Chennai's streets removed, the next step for the Corporation of Chennai was to clear posters and graffiti from all the public walls in Chennai. Though the hoardings came down more than 18 months ago, there was a long gap before the next step was implemented (guess the elections had something to do with it). Effective August 1 of this year, all random art and pastings on flyover and subway walls have been banned. The ban also extends to any public walls on Mount Road.

Bringing the hoardings down signalled the end of the huge, originally hand-painted but recently digitally-crafted cinema advertisements which were very much part of Chennai. And now, the bare walls would take away another slice of kitschy art: political graffiti. The limited set of colours used by earlier political artists (colours of the parties flags) had given way to bright, multicoloured works a while ago. It was felt that bare walls would make the stretch of road seem dull, so the Corporation kind of let loose a set of artists on those walls. The first stretch to be done was a stretch near the YMCA, Nandanam.

With a variety of themes - buildings and structures of Tamil Nadu, sculptures and cultural heritage being a few - and a good dose of imaginary imagery thrown in, the paintings seem rather unconnected, if one spends the time to look at them. But for the most part, one is whizzing by in a hurry to get someplace and the overall effect is that a riot of colour is passing one by!

Coral-top?

Outside the Ripon building; more details in a while...

Middle school

The Corporation of Chennai runs free schools for children from extremely poor families. Though these schools lack facilities considered rudimentary by those from the more privileged sections, that must not be held against them. Students in such schools come from a mileu where a healthy child not going to work is seen as a loss of revenue - the incentive for parents to pull children, especially boys, out of school is very high. As for the girls, education was seen as a burden: for, according to them, no man would like an educated wife.

With all those factors against them, the Corporation Schools continue to function reasonably well. They get through the basic syllabus and give their students a feel of the opportunities available. At the high school exams, students from these schools have been registering a 'pass-percentage' of over 90% consistently over the past 5 years.

This school - and others like it - together have over 142,000 students in them. When the Corporation began its schools department in 1912, there were 40 schools under their wing. Today, the Education Department oversees 360 schools, including a Urdu High School and a Telugu one!

Justice leader

Any talk about non-Brahmin movements in south India would usually place EV Ramasamy as being at the forefront of the movement. Periyar, as EVR was known, was certainly a tall leader of the non-Brahmin (and later, Dravidian) movement, but in the politics of eroding Brahmin domination, Sir Pitty Theagaraya Chetty was a generation ahead of him. The South Indian Liberal Federation was founded by Sir Theagaraya and Dr. T.M.Nair in 1917 as a body to actively promote the representation of non-Brahmins in civic and political bodies of the time. The Federation brought out a newspaper titled 'Justice', with Dr. Nair as its editor, and thus came to be known as the 'Justice Party'. Dr. Nair continued to serve as the editor until he died in 1919, involving himself in editorial and advocacy matters, leaving Sir Theagaraya Chetty to look after the organizational and political affairs.

Sir Theagaraya thus became the first President of the Justice Party, a post he held until his death in 1925. He had entered politics quite early, and served as a member of the Corporation of Madras from 1882 until 1923. As the head of the Justice Party, he led it to a thumping victory in the Presidency elections of 1920. When invited to form the government, he listened to an inner voice which told him that he was too old and his health too frail for him to be an effective Chief Minister. In any case, he was at that time the non-official President of the Corporation of Madras, the first person to hold this post. Through all this, his struggle was aimed at bringing down Brahmin domination, rather than that of the British. He must have been a staunch supporter of Britain's continued rule of India, for he was one of those awarded the title 'Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India'.

This statue, in front of Ripon Building, does not show the 'Star of India' unlike another statue of Sir Theagaraya Chetty. But then, the latter is inside the Panagal Park, bang in the middle of the locality that is named after him!

Recreation area

I'd said earlier that with the hoardings gone, more of the city's greenery has become visible. Since then I've realized that it is not just the removal of the hoardings, but also some serious, sustained work on the city parks which has kept Chennai's green from fading away. Over the past four years or so, the Corporation of Chennai has been going green with a vengeance. Many, if not all the parks in and around the city have been taken back from the shady citizens who used to be the only users. With several spots of paint, several shrubs, plants and even saplings, these parks have been made much more attractive for the law abiding citizens to frequent.

It's not just in the dormat parks; green borders have been created along the margins of a few city roads, where there was earlier space for dumping garbage. These areas have been cleared of the rubbish and fenced off. It is a pleasant surprise to suddenly come across a patch of green by the road, so one forgives the rather haphazard distribution of such green margins, preferring rather to hope that they will remain there for ages.

Even though the Thiru Vi Ka Park in Shenoy Nagar has not been accorded the status of a 'major park' by the Corporation, it is still large enough for a few badminton games to happen simultaneously!

Let there be light

Street lamps have been around in Madras for more than 200 years. The early lamps were oil-fed, and the luminaires had to be designed in a way that allowed the wick to burn steadily, braving the prevailing winds if not stormy conditions. That must have been a large consideration when the lamps were first installed in 1785, because most of Madras' elite lived near the Marina - or at least close enough for the strong sea-breeze causing lamps to go out, if not properly protected.

For the first 75 years or so after their introduction, there were only 200 functioning street lamps in Madras city. But in the next 50 years, as the city grew, the number of street lamps increased over 30-fold. When the first electric lamps were introducted in Madras in 1910, there were 6,500 oil lamps all over the city. One can imagine that it would have led to a certain amount of hue and cry, with the City Lamplighters' Union (had it existed) protesting the new technology depriving members of their livelihood. Maybe the lamplighters were told that even though they needn't use their long-poled wicks to light the street lamps, they still had a job to do in maintaining the new electric lamps, too. For a long while, therefore even electric lamp-posts (like the one in the picture) continued to have the crossbars as a rest for the lamplighter's ladder.

Today, the Corporation of Chennai spends Rs.1.6 crores every month to maintain the 120,007 street lights all over the city (that's what they say!). That number includes lamps like this one, inside the Independence Day Park, which appears to be there more for reasons of antiquity than its functionality!