Small court

With the sprawling campus of the High Court of Judicature at Madras (to give it its proper title; some parts of Chennai are still Madras!) literally around the corner from this building, few people pay attention to the processes of justice carried out here. Even within the pecking order of the subordinate courts, the Metropolitan Magistrates come pretty low down - in fact they are 17th on the list of Subordinate Courts in Chennai, coming in after the Court of Small Causes. No great legal razzle-dazzle happens here, for the Magistrates Courts deal with the minutiae - affidavits, remand orders, minor warrants and suchlike things.

Moreover, the Metropolitan Magistrates Court at George Town is the smallest collection of these magistrates in the city, with only 5 of the city's 26 MMs operating from here. And yet, this building manages to hold its own, mainly by being quite different from its neighbours on Rajaji Salai. While the buildings of the General Post Office and the State Bank of India's Main Branch are rich with architectural flourishes, this one just sits there as a regular, 3-storied, boxy structure, with just that little kink in its facade.

It still has some vanity; what I had earlier mistaken for patches of white plaster, or bits of handbills stuck to the building, are actually mosaic tiles, forming beautiful patterns, and even going as far as to sport a 'photographic negative' effect along one line on the top floor!

Local bank

Ever since I learnt that the man's first job was with this firm, I couldn't pass this building without thinking about Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. One reason could be that it was definitely more English looking than its neighbours, being in the Edwardian style rather than the Indo-Saracenic which is more common along Rajaji Salai. The effect is heightened by the gleaming white exteriors, contrasting with the red-brick of its neighbours, especially the Chennai GPO and the State Bank of India buildings.

Though the building was completed in 1923, HSBC got its hands on it only in 1959, as part of the takeover of the Mercantile Bank of India, which had its offices here. The site itself has an older provenance, having been the offices of 'The Mail', one of the earliest daily newspapers of Madras!

Solid housing

In front of Singaravelar Maligai, the office of the Chennai Collectorate, is this incongruous structure. The arrowhead-tipped bars blocking its entryways reinforce the first impression of this being a cage of some kind, though what it could have held within it escapes the first level of deduction.

It is in fact a specially constructed cupola, designed to house the 14.5-foot high statue of Lord Conwallis. It was built in 1925, in front of Bentinck's Building, which was the then home of the Madras Collectorate. The statue, in its cupola, had pride of place right in front of the building. But it was a very short stay there for the statue; exposure to the salty sea-air was corroding it and so it had to be taken away to the Connemara Library. The cupola continued to remain there, even as Bentinck's Building was left to rot and later demolished to make way for the 'modern' office of the Collectorate.

It is anybody's guess how long it will be allowed to stand - maybe it will take that strangler fig growing on it to bring it down!

From Headquarters to Main Branch

It is said of this building that it bears some similarity of forms with the Mughal buildings of Fatehpur Sikri. That should not be a surprise because the architects of the Indo-Saracenic era borrowed heavily - and in quite a motley fashion - from various building forms across India. In the case of this building, it should be even less surprising because its initial plans were drawn up by Col. Samuel Jacob, who was at that time the Chief Engineer of the then state of Jaipur.

It was built in 1896 as the headquarters of the Bank of Madras, which was one of the three Presidency Banks (the others being those of Bengal and Bombay) at that time. Befitting the stature of the bank, this building cost Rs.300,000, with the contract being executed by Namberumal Chetty. Col. Samuel Jacob's initial designs were modified by Henry Irwin, buthe north Indian influences were allowed to remain. Much of the woodwork and the stained glass in its windows date from the early 1900s. When the State Bank of India was formed in 1955, this building was designated the SBI's Madras Presidency headquarters. Since then, it had become the 'Local Head Office' and today, is just the 'Chennai Main Branch', a title that it continues to hold more out of courtesy!

Letters, anyone?

The first formal postal services - maybe it is better to call them the Company's first postal services - in Madras were fairly rudimentary, with a dak runner to carry the Bengal mail. Madras got its first Postmaster General only in 1774, which was also the time when the company mail began to carry, for a charge, private letters also. Over the next few years, the public was likely fleeced with erratic charges for their private letters - and they were subsidising the expense incurred by the government, for all letters of Company employees were carried free. Mr. John Philip Burlton, a "junior civilian of eight years' standing" (now, what does that mean?) first wrote to Lord Macartney and then to the acting Governor of Madras, Alexander Davidson, in 1785, with a proposal to "establish a regular Tapall or Dauk upon a Plan similar to that at Bengal". It found favour with the authorities after a few rounds of consultations with civil servants of Bengal.

Meanwhile, Governor Davidson was succeeded by Sir Archibald Campbell - he wanted his private secretary A.M. Campbell to be in charge of the Post Office, with Robert Mitford as his deputy. That was not acceptable to the Company headquarters, since neither were Company employees; they favoured Burlton as the chief of the Post Office. As often happens, a compromise was struck and on June 1, 1786, the General Post Office opened near the Sea Gate of Fort St George with Mr. Richard Legge Willis as its chief. For the next 70 years, the GPO worked within the Fort. It was only in 1856 that it moved out to Garden House, in Popham's Broadway.

Nearly 30 years later, in 1884, it moved to this building on North Beach Road (now Rajaji Salai). The architect was Robert Fellowes Chisholm, who incorporated elements from Travancore, Bijapur and Gujarati architecture to come up with this building, which continues to be Chennai's General Post Office today. Though a fire in 2003 ravaged the rear of this building, the facade still stands as a striking example of Indo-Saracenic architecture!

A bit of France?

Having posted a few pictures taken from the top of this building (the docks, Esplanade and the High Court), it is time that I revealed the building itself. So here is a shot of Dare House, the corporate headquarters of the Murugappa Group, one of India's oldest and most respected business houses. There was a time 250 years ago, when the French under Thomas Artur, comte de Lally, apparently camped at this site. That was during the siege of Madras in 1758, when the site was used as a base to mount cannon attacks on Fort St. George. But that's not the reason why the location is named 'Parry's Corner'. And it is not a corrupted spelling of the French capital city, either.

The story of Thomas Parry and his businesses, most notably in partenership with John William Dare, and how those businesses came to the family of Dewan Bahadur AM Murugappa Chettiar is far too rich and fascinating to be contained in this post - so I'm not even going to try. While Thomas Parry's name lives on in the name of one of the companies of the Murugappa Group, his partner is remembered in this building.

But all this history does not stop several people from referring to the junction of NSC Bose Road and Rajaji Salai as 'Paris Corner' - or sometimes even insisting that it is 'Paree Corner'!

Two epics and a long life

I don't know about others of my vintage, but the first time I read the Ramayanam and the Mahabharatam, it was in English. Maybe some of the charm of the epics was lost in the reading; but having had to listen to grandmothers reciting them in the vernacular, a verse a day (or so it seemed) one was impatient to find out What Happened, rather than listen to discourses on How To Behave. And Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) was the man who helped me in that quest. He translated both those great works into English, keeping the essence of each canto but going off on his own interpretation of how they defined / prescribed correct behaviour.

But that was only to be expected from one who was Gandhiji's sammandhi*; this man, the only native Governer-General that India had. After India became a Republic, he was a minister in the Union Cabinet for a short while, but then came to Madras in 1952 to become the Chief Minister of the (then) Madras state. He was by all accounts a man with several bees in his bonnet. Prohibition, Kulathozhil kalvi (schooling for half-day and learning the family trade during the other half), Hindi as a compulsory language - all of these, imposed by him, were seen by the people of Tamil Nadu as an extension of Northern hegemony and repression of the lower classes. And so, his Chief Ministership was short-lived; he resigned in 1954 and went into a tailspin of sorts; the second half of his life was a story of petty rivalries and pot-shots; certainly not lived in a manner befitting one of the earliest recipients of the Bharat Ratna.

This statue of Rajaji stands half-way along the long road that bears his name. But it is tucked away to a side, just like an old relative whose glory days are cherished by the family, but is today too embarassing to be included in a gathering of the clan!


*Rajaji's daughter was married to the Mahatma's son; that's a rather complicated way of saying they were sammandhis!