Potholder

The statutes at Peoples' Park were all originally white - or colourless, with their white paint having faded over many years. Around 2008, when the Corporation got around to re-painting them, they decided to go vivid colour. 

Maybe it was a good decision. The colours don't appear to have faded much over the past six years. The lady's saree looks as bright as it was when she first wore it!

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!

The lady's gardens

Entering the People's Park through its southern gate, you get to see this statue - of Venus, is it? - behaving as if you are an unexpected visitor. It is quite a rarity, for it is not usual to see a bare-breasted sculpture in Chennai, outside of a few temples, in such a public location. Is this the lady of what was once called My Ladye's Garden? Most likely not, for this statue, and a few others around this park were probably set up in the 1930s, at least 70 years after the park was opened to the public. The impetus for this park was provided by Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras between 1859-60, who was clear that the middle class of Madras needed a large, open space for recreation and entertainment. 

My Ladye's Garden was only one part of the People's Park; the entire park covered nearly 120 acres of space. A dozen lakes dotted the park, with boating facilities in at least one of them. Madras' first zoo, which was located on the grounds of the museum, moved here, taking up a sizeable chunk of the grounds. The zoo expanded over the years, adding a cheetah here, a few deer there, a couple of tigers and so on. Until it moved to the Aringar Anna Zoological Park in the mid 1980s, this was where Madras' citizens would come to see wild animals. 

Over the years, the People's Park has been nibbled away. Space for the Victoria Public Hall was allocated. The Ripon Building took up a section. The South Indian Athletic Association was given space for a pavilion and grounds. The Moore Market was accommodated. The Railways expanded, and chewed up some more space. Lily Pond Complex, that replaced Moore Market took up its share. And then the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium came up, along with the indoor sports complex, reducing the People's Park to the My Ladye's Garden. Go too quickly on Sydenham's Road and you might miss the gate to the park. While it still remains a large - and well used - lung for this part of the city, it is certainly a comedown for the feature that defined the area, which continues to be known as Park Town!

Look again

No,  this is not a timeline or a wall. It is just a part of the social media spilling out on to the roads. Sydenhams Road, to be specific. 

Can any social media outfit match the range of merchandise offered by this shop?

New building

That's the new building of the Madras Medical College. Construction was completed last year and it was then waiting for its classrooms to be furnished. Surely all of that would have been done - I hope it is ready to see students at least in the new academic year coming up.

Do you remember what was here earlier? This!

Seats

The People's Park certainly has a lot of space for people to sit and enjoy the greenery. If you click on the picture (or open it in a separate tab), you will notice a half-kneeling gentleman, bare torso, tiara, twirled moustache and all. That was probably the way they sat in the royal gardens of a long time ago.

And then there is the man in the blue suit, sitting on cushioned chair, appearing to be a person of some importance. (He was that, but more about him in a later post). And then, there is the seat for us, the aam aadmi, the wrought-iron bench that we will have to share with our friends. 

We can also choose to sit on one of the several steps that are found at various spots around the park; best of all, we could sit on the grass of a pleasant afternoon!

You can check out any time you like, but...

It does look like a the facade of a nice garden house, with its high-ceilinged verandah on the first floor and the arches almost inviting you to step into the portico. The most famous tenant of this building was probably Veer Savarkar. But this is not a place that you'd try to be invited to - Savarkar was transited through this en route to the infamous Kalapani at Andaman - for, it is was part of the Chennai Central Prison complex, which has now been completely razed to make way for - well, a lot of modernity.

Don't be fooled into thinking that the Chennai prison was a place of leisure; there were only a few buildings like this, which were built to accommodate convalescing prisoners - and the high-profile ones at that. Even that luxury disppeared a few decades ago, when these buildings were converted into study areas on the ground floor and maybe some office spaces on the first floor. Convalescing or not, prisoners had to stay in their cells. Along with all the other buildings of the complex, this one is gone too, and the 11-acre space will soon have a new look.

Replacing the stony blocks of prison cells will be a blood bank attached to the General Hospital, as well as a station of the proposed Chennai Metro. There are a couple of smaller buildings planned, but it seems that a reasonably large part of the space will be given over to a park and some recreational facility - what a change that would be from its previous use!





Some more photos of the former Chennai Central Prison complex are here.

Counting bars

The last inmate walked out of the door a couple of years ago, towards the end of 2006. Well, he may not have walked out, but would have been taken out in a vehicle, being moved to his new home at Puzhal. Since then, the Central Prison at Park Town had been lying empty, waiting for the wreckers. Until a few days ago, when the DGP (Prisons) decided that the gates would be open for public to visit the prison compound and take a look at the prison blocks. The public, of course, came in their thousands. For the vast majority of these visitors, the only image of a jail was a little room in the movie, where the convict with the heart of gold, when being released would tell the warder, "Aiyya, naan poyittuvaren": to which the official would reply, "'Poyittuvaren'nu sollatheppa, 'poren'nu sollu"*. Reality was ghastly - the less said about it, the better.

Built over a 11-acre space in the middle of the city, the Chennai Central Prison was built in 1837. It replaced an older debtors' jail which was itself close to the 'Blacks Town', and was used for almost a century. The prison blocks reflect the thought of those days, the cells stern and unforgiving, the walls high enough to deter climbers and yet not so high as to cut off all view of the free world outside. Later, with the suburban trains passing just outside the western wall of the prison, inmates would be reminded every now and then of the rush of the world outside. The Chennai Central Prison was not the largest in the state, for it was originally intended as a transit remand camp, where convicts would be housed for a few days on their way to one of the larger jails: pre-Independence, it was a holding point en route to Kala Pani in the Andamans. Later, it became a stopping point by itself.

The new complex at Puzhal, covering Central Prisons I & II, has a capacity of accommodating 2500 prisoners; that's double the capacity that the Chennai Central Prison had. But spread over 212 acres, the Puzhal complex would surely have no sight of freedom for the inmates looking out through its bars!

* Transliterated, the dialogue is "Sir, I will go and come", with the jailor replying "Don't say you'll 'go-and-come', just say you're 'going'".... a line that has become hackneyed over decades of use! See more pictures of the Chennai Central Prison complex here.