Mistaken Idea of Rural India

As rural consumption outpaces urban demand, has the hinterland actually turned the corner? Pradyot Lal & Kajal Basu analyse the paradoxical idiom:

For long, it was the almost solitary exception of a certain Hiware Bazar, the extraordinary village of 1,350 in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, which has some 60-odd rupee millionaires.

The success flattered to deceive the wide world about the real nature of the Indian hinterland’s growth story, or the absence of it. The picture has since had a marked shift — not marked enough to constitute a nationwide trend, but still notable enough for the rapid changes in consumption patterns in the countryside.

Make no mistake about it. The number of those with deep pockets in the hinterland is on the rise, even when the phenomenon may be limited in terms of reach and extent to primarily seven states: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Punjab. The pockets of conspicuous affluence that are mushrooming in these key states have helped change the big picture in a significant manner.

However, a caveat is necessary to comprehend the dimension of the shift. It is not the call of financial inclusion of the government that is leading lenders and corporates into the Indian hinterland, but the sheer opportunity to make profits. For long told by increasing sales of shampoo sachets and low-end motorcycles, the great Indian rural story is having a paradigm shift. Bankers, especially the private ones, who always look for the big ones, are now joining the scramble to capture the rising ranks of the rural rich.

Five years ago, Kotak Mahindra Bank, which was more of a broker-lender than a traditional banker, showed agricultural lending as part of its retail portfolio. At that time, it constituted 15 percent of the total Rs 16,200 crore retail portfolio. According to figures available now, agriculture forms part of Kotak’s commercial banking group, and constitutes 40 percent of the Rs 21,452 crore of such assets.

That one example speaks volumes of the growing importance the non-descript and clichéd countryside now plays in the lives of men driving around in fancy imported cars.

Renowned for taking the cream of the clientele, Kotak has found a new target — the rural rich. As can be empirically established, the confluence of affluence in rural India and saturating business as far as the urban rich are concerned, is forcing several banks to fan out to less-privileged rural India. The banks have an additional incentive: they have the chance to convert the increased savings that lie in physical assets, such as gold, into deposits. Rural India has famously distrusted formalised banking (the savings-in-themattress phenomenon), but the scenario is changing.

Wealth in the countryside is growing, which has made the proposition of being in rural India interesting for lenders, bankers and corporates. Financially more remunerative farming and the real estate boom in parts of the country over the past 15 years have put many farmers in the league of at least rupee millionaires, making them an attractive proposition for bankers.

A case in point are the strides made by HDFC Bank, which started moving into the rural market only five years ago, but now has almost 55 percent of its more than 3,500 branches in rural and semi-urban areas. In 2013, it opened a majority of its 520-odd new branches in the preceding year in rural and semi-urban pockets.

Although the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandates banks to open a quarter of their branches in villages with less than 10,000 population, reports indicate that Kotak Mahindra plans to do more as the cost of setting them up is just a fraction of what it takes in an urban area or city.

Banks are fast realising that rural branches are not necessarily loss-making and unviable. They are making special efforts to keep them slim and efficient, which will translate into greater profits for them. A banker with HDFC explained that most of the rural branches are profitmaking, especially if the need to keep the costs low is kept in mind. The banks offer almost everything from a plain savings account to loans for businesses — they also provide ready wealth management advice. No longer is it the monopoly of a State Bank of India to woo rural targets with comparatively deeper pockets.

As an expansion strategy, many lenders lean on the village sarpanch who, according to most, is probably the best pr person or salesman the banks could have. With his network, the sarpanch could also act as a credit information bureau by suggesting who are trustworthy and who are not. It is no longer rare for rural bankers to carry a micro atm with them, which can do multiple transactions at a time, including cash withdrawal, deposit, fund transfer and balance enquiry.

This scene is being played out practically every single day in the interiors. Many sincerely believe that rural India, with 68 percent of the country’s population, is evolving rapidly and changing character with growing incomes, rising literacy and aspirations. It has the potential to be a sustainable growth engine of the Indian economy.

Multinational companies are using the growing network of mobile phones and Internet to offer products and services to the rural 

Two years ago, credit-rating agency Crisil had attributed the growth in consumption in rural India to non-farm job opportunities and State-initiated employment generation schemes. The study noted a shift in spending patterns in rural areas with consumers moving beyond necessities such as toothpaste and soaps to so-called discretionary products such as television sets and mobile phones. One in every two rural households in the regions studied had a mobile phone and even in the country’s poorest states such as Bihar and Odisha, one in every three households had a mobile phone.

Some 42 percent of rural households owned a television, according to the study, up from 26 percent in 2009.

Consumers in rural areas are using products that once sold largely in urban areas: skin and personal care products are showing substantial growth, according to a recent study by ASSOCHAM. Even when it comes to consumer packaged goods, semi-urban and small towns are leading growth in terms of value.

The RBI has reported that consumer prices in rural India rose 8.7 percent in 2012-13, while rural wages jumped by some 18 percent. The extra cash in the hands of the rural population has fuelled demands for several such products that were considered to be almost the exclusive domain of urban areas and metros. However, the question that remains largely unanswered is whether real wages in the rural areas are also increasing, given the nature of the limited employment provided by State-run schemes such as MGNREGA. The majority of the government- run schemes are short-term income boosters and the need to replace them by sustainable job schemes is largely paid mere lip service. The upbeat rural story will come under stress if sustained inflation continues.

Figures reveal that growth in sales of scooters and motoRBIkes slowed by 5 points or more last year to end just a point or so below 10 percent. That is the alternative rural story that could quite easily overtake the upbeat one if inflation and other variables remain high, warn experts.

The changes have been bewildering indeed. Even the smallest village store today offers customers the choice of a dozen soap brands, toothpastes, shampoos and the like — striking outward manifestations of a fast-changing consumer marketplace.

Probably, nothing illustrates the transformation of the marketplace better than the oft-cited success story of one of India’s largest consumer products maker, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL). According to a study, two years after India embarked on its ambitious reforms journey in 1991, the country’s largest consumer goods company had revenues of around $400,000. By 2013, HUL was not just reflecting the new reality of the Indian marketplace — that of a globally integrated economy — in its name alone. Its revenues had also grown more than 11-fold to more than $4.6 billion.

Several conscious decisions helped the HUL advance. Its ability to spot the changes in the marketplace and adapt to them has been an abiding factor, claim its managers. For instance, HUL was one of the early entrants into the rural marketplace, where rising growth, better technologies and supportive government policies in a few states were combining to transform the traditional rural economy. Now, with half of India’s estimated consumption market for packaged consumer goods and durables, that rural bet has paid off. HUL retained its numero uno status in the consumer goods segment until the cigarette manufacturer ITC successfully rode the reform wave to transform itself into a food, consumer products, packaging, hospitality and information technology conglomerate.

Even the smallest village store today offers customers the choice of a dozen soap brands, toothpastes, shampoos and the like 

In the durables space, the transformation has been equally dramatic. The incredible growth in mobile telephony has transformed India, making it the world’s second biggest marketplace with more than 800 million connections.

Rising prosperity in select states is indeed luring India’s big business to the hinterland, prompting heavyweights such as Tatas, Birlas and Godrej to devise fresh strategies to enlarge their farm portfolios. Without exception, all these companies believe that the farm sector provides them with big growth opportunities as rural consumption outpaces urban demand.

A recent survey by Crisil revealed that for the first time in 20 years, additional spending by rural India at Rs 37.5 crore was significantly higher that that of urban dwellers at Rs 29.94 crore.

“Underpinning this growth in rural consumption is a strong rise in rural incomes due to rising non-farm employment and the government’s rural focus through employment generation schemes,” the report said.

There is a trend towards specialisation and value addition. Consider this. Rallis has compiled a digitised database of more than 700,000 Rallis Kisan Kutumb farmers whom it contacts regularly using mobile phones, Internet, newsletters or through its field staff to offer products and services. This data gives them the kind of raw market intelligence necessary to create new offerings. Farmers in some regions are given a toll-free number to discuss their issues with an agricultural expert. They aspire soon to reach out to 1 million farmers, and capture a larger share of their wallet.

Mahindra & Mahindra has built the world’s largest tractor business by volume. It achieved this a couple of years ago.

The steady and consistent performance of automaker Maruti Suzuki provides another dimension to the upbeat story. Its rural sales grew 16 percent in 2013-14. At 336,463 units, this segment comprises 32 percent of the car market leader’s total sales spread over 93,500 villages, up from 44,374 villages where the company sold its cars in 2012-13.

According to company honchos, Maruti sees its non-metro push as the drive to the future. Maruti chairman RC Bhargava says that the future growth of the automobile industry will be driven more and more by non-metro cities and rural areas.

The rural focus comes on the back of Maruti’s strategy of hitting sales of 3 million units in the longer term. Analysts say Maruti has managed to “crack” the rural market thanks to its focus on fuel efficiency and network expansion. Maruti, which has 3,000 rural service outlets, is planning to expand that network by 200 this year. It is also planning to double its 1,000-strong mobile service vans across rural markets.

Maruti’s rural thrust commenced tepidly in the slowdown of 2008, but really came good in 2013 when the car market saw its worst slowdown in a decade. While the rest of the market ground to a negative growth curve, Maruti saw its smaller and rural markets — with populations of less than 10,000 people — growing around 14-15 percent. Until 2007-08, only 4 percent of Maruti’s total sales came from rural markets. In six years, that share has multiplied to 32 percent.

“The rise in commerce in rural India is a symptom of how villages in the vicinity of urban ateas are also changing,” wrote sociologist Dipankar Gupta while analysing the 2011 Census.

The point is further elaborated by Jawaharlal Nehru University’s research associate Dilip Mohanty who has closely studied the spurt in the number of rural rich in selected pockets. “According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there are 352 million mobile connections in rural areas,” he says. “Nearly every big village in relatively developed states is aping urban areas, both in terms of choice of non-food consumer goods and spending. In fact, there is a definite trend of rural spending on consumer goods fast outpacing urban demand.

Last year, disclosures about how more than 100 village headmen in Bihar siphoned off MGNREGA funds to line their pockets and became millionaires overnight had caused a huge furore. There are new acquisitive categories that are taking advantage of cheap institutional credit, if they can afford it.

{Cover Story of Tehelka, Vol. 11, Issue 35, 30 August, New Delhi}

Programmed To Survive: The Idea Of India Redux

{This essay is the new Introduction to the fifth edition of The Idea of India, published as a Popular Penguin on January 20. Professor Sunil Khilnani is Avantha Chair and Director, King’s India Institute, London.}

That the nation persists is what has lent the India story such gravitas: an idea that’s taken strong root. But will the march of history leave us behind? 

-Sunil Khilnani

Why India? Why, of all post-colonial nations, is India the country that gets taken most seriously by the very powers it once struggled against? Whether it is corporate Britain wooing Indian money by throwing Bollywood bling parties at London’s Claridge’s Hotel or European luxury houses like Hermes launching special sari lines for India’s glamorati or US President Obama choosing the Indian prime minister as the guest of honour for his first state banquet—the world wants a piece of India. Not since nineteenth-century America has an ex-colony moved so fast into prominence on the world stage.

Plenty of people have answers that purport to explain this phenomenon—India’s scale, its software and smartness, its strategic location. But I think the real answer is at once more subtle and more obvious. It has to do with the fact that India is still here—that, unlike many new states created after the end of the age of European empire, it has not self-destructed. What if India’s current prominence has more to do with what it has avoided, steered around, than with what it has done?

When I wrote The Idea of India in ’97, I wanted to show that the founding idea of India is anchored as much in resisting certain powerful seductions—the temptations of a clear, singular definition of nationhood, of the apparent neatness of authoritarian politics, of the clarities of a statist or pure market economy, of unambiguous alliances with other states—as it was in realising declaratory visions.

***

History moves fast these days—faster that it did when nineteenth-century America began its climb to world power, faster than when Gandhi and Nehru brought India to independence in the mid-twentieth century, and faster still than in the years since I wrote The Idea of India. In India, what were once gradual changes—the upswing of economic growth, the movement of Indians from the countryside to the city, the sabotage of the old hierarchies of the social order, the renegotiation of India’s place and status in the world—now turn at dizzying pace.

Such historical fast-tracking has taken India to a point where it is now possible to envisage a real change in the chronic conditions of deprivation and injustice that have so long entrapped most Indians. Actually altering those conditions for the better will, however, require a run of political judgement and action as momentous as that accomplished by India’s founders in the mid-twentieth century, when that remarkable generation broke India free from an authoritarian, oppressive past and set it forth in pursuit of liberty and democracy.

The grand tasks of the years ahead are daunting: managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition under democratic conditions; developing the human capital and sustaining the ecological and energy resources needed for participatory economic growth; contending with powerful competitor states and containing a volatile neighbourhood; defining what sort of power we wish to be in the world. It is an agenda that would test any society at the best of times. But in India’s case, these tasks will have to be achieved under severe constraints of time and choice.

Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience. And internationally, India must navigate a fluid arena: one where global power is rearranging itself in as yet undefined ways, where capital is restless, and where new, unforeseen threats and risks are facts of life. India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to seize its chances. After all, the faster history moves, the more likely one is to get left behind.

Political imagination, judgement, action—the capacities that birthed India—seem to have deserted us when we need them.

The policy choices we make over the coming decade—about education, about environmental resources, about social and fiscal responsibility, about foreign affairs—will propel us down tracks that will be difficult to renounce or even revise in years to come. The aptness of those choices will depend not on India’s entrepreneurial brilliance or technological prowess, or the cheapness of its labour, but on politics. Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems are crowding in, the transformative momentum of India’s politics seems to have dissipated.

Although the nation’s founders saw political freedom as their great goal, decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many. For India’s business leaders eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up by corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who’ve taken up arms against the state, democracy in India is a story of deflating illusions, of obstacles and oppression. Democratic politics itself is seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.

It is a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement and action—the capacities that brought India into being—seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power as well as the dusty streets of protest, just when it needs them. The distinctive source of modern India’s legitimacy has, to many, become an agent of the country’s ills.

India’s democratic discontent echoes a wider disaffection. Across the globe, democratic politics is in distress and disrepair. It is being challenged in its homelands, from the US to Europe to Japan, while in Russia and China, it stands summarily dismissed. As citizens grow ever more contemptuous of their leaders, leaders readily return the compliment—complaining that they are hamstrung by the short-sighted, unrealistic demands of their citizenry. Just a couple of decades after democracy was proclaimed as the universal future—the riddle of human history solved—it seems fragile, ineffectual, contingent.

In India, the impatience with democracy is perhaps not unreasonable, given how quickly we have moved in such a short time, and how much further we wish to get. But one way to understand the possibilities that democracy alone can underwrite is to remember the context that existed in India at the time that I wrote The Idea of India.

***

I was motivated, then, by a different kind of concern about India’s democracy: a kind of majoritarianism, it seemed, might threaten our foundational commitment to diversity and pluralism.

In the mid-’90s, India had emerged from a deep economic crisis, only to be ensnared in battles over identity. What sort of a nation were we? Which groups or cultures had the right to claim special privileges? Religion, caste, region: all were vigorously advanced as answers.

These answers seemed bent on blurring, even dissolving, the idea of India—the constitutive idea of this “unnatural nation”. It was that idea that I sought to recover, in hopes of showing how it had made India and kept it going. Part of the burden of my argument was that India’s politics was proliferating a variety of ideas about India, some in contradiction and collision with one another. The Indian idea had itself become a proudly plural one—a measure as good as any of the original idea’s success. And amidst that plurality were, perhaps inevitably, some conceptions that sought to singularise India’s many religious and cultural identities and make it a narrower place.

Today, in many parts of the country, those battles seem to have played themselves out—so much blood under the bridge, or down the Sabarmati, as it were. The conventional view is that India’s economic surge has stilled those fights over identity. And although there is some truth in that explanation, it is too partial a perception. It does not address, for instance, why one of India’s most developed and fast-growing states, the calendar girl of big business—Gujarat—is also the purveyor of India’s most chauvinistic and poisonous politics.

It is the capacity of India’s democracy to articulate and incite its diversity that has saved it from civil conflict.

In fact, what has at least for an interval calmed such politics has been the workings, however rickety, of democratic politics. It is the capacity of India’s representative democracy to articulate, and even to incite, India’s diversity, to give voice to differing interests and ideas of self, rather than merely to aggregate supposed common identities, that has saved India from the civil conflict and auto-destruction typical of so many states. Many of those states have been in fact smaller and less diverse than India. Consider for a start, the ragged history of India’s regional neighbours. The desire to impose a common identity has broken them down.

What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness. Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy established by its founders. That constitutional democracy has prevented monolithic outcomes in India. It has stalled zealots in their tracks, penned demagogues to their corrals and taken the wind out of populist sails—just as it has also frustrated and slowed more positive or desirable outcomes. But that is the crucial, under-recognised value of such a system: its capacity not to achieve the good, but to prevent the worse.

***

Democracy’s singular, rather astonishing achievement has been to keep India united as a political space. And now that space has become a vast market whose strength lies in its internal diversity and dynamism. It is that vast market, of considerable attraction to international capital, that is today one of India’s greatest comparative advantages—and one that makes India a potential engine of the global economy.

In the years ahead, whether the old battles over identity stay becalmed will to a large extent depend on the capacity of India’s political system to sustain and spread the country’s new growth. Rising disparities in income, wealth and opportunity are a global fact, but they can be particularly acute in growing economies. For twenty-first century India, as economic growth spreads unevenly over the productive landscape, the big questions will turn onto the disequalising effects of economic transformation. This isn’t a question that any society, democratic or despotic, has been able to solve, let alone any rapidly growing society—and certainly not China.

The project of devising workable alternatives to market capitalism has animated much of the politics and history of the past two centuries. But that project did not on the whole fare impressively. The collapse of revolutionary dreams symbolised by the events of 1989 and immediately after has been followed by slow punctures in the wheels of Western social democracy. And yet, the lived conditions that gave rise to such political hopes—revolutionary or reformist—remain as intense and painful as ever, not least in the world’s two major growth economies, China and India. Part of what it must mean, therefore, for states like India and China to take their place as major world powers must rest on their ability to invent better alternative models of market capitalism.

For India, developing such alternatives must be a priority in coming years. It is imperative for India’s economic future that the global disaffection with market capitalism does not take wider hold in the country. We shall need, somehow, to strike a balance between, on the one hand, redistributive social policies and regulation and, on the other hand, the need to keep the economy open, markets functioning, and incentives alive.

Most people in India remain hopeful that their turn will come. Yet as I write this, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets and squares of the world’s financial centres, from NY and London to Frankfurt and Hong Kong, hoping to change the skewed order of global capitalism. Such dissidence is a reminder that the tolerance for disparities, for inequality, can shift sharp and sudden.

In India’s case, just as six decades and more of democracy have broken down age-old structures of deference and released a new defiant energy, so too years of rapid but uneven growth may, before we are quite ready to acknowledge it, dismantle the intricate self-deceptions that have so far kept India’s grotesque disparities protected from mass protest. As the Indian political classes exercise their populist instincts, corporate India, heady with new opulence, lately comports itself like a well-plumed sitting duck. Without renewed political imagination and judgement, the disaffection and alienation of those who are being left out or actively dispossessed by rapid growth could change the course of our history.

Can India’s democracy rise up to the task of rectifying this sorry state of affairs—accommodate the dispossessed and channel discontent into political forms? Most importantly, can India’s democracy be rescued from its current function as an acclamatory mechanism to instal new leaders? Is it possible to turn that democracy into something that makes political responsibility more legible, and also enables those who hold power to invest in the country’s long future?

In the twentieth century, India was a striking example of post-colonial reinvention. We might now, in the new century, turn our thoughts to practising a more effective democracy and a more inclusive market capitalism—in contrast to China, where wealth amasses and democracy remains a bad coin.

The transformational opportunities that India confronts today have their origins in the life and story that unfolds in my book, The Idea of India. As India moves forward in coming years, ever more forgetful of its history, those origins and that story will matter more than ever. For, even when nations pride themselves on their freedom from the past, it is often in fact their beginnings—their founding spirit and imagination—that remain, in very altered worlds, their greatest resource.

{Originally in print, Outlook, Essay, on Feb 06, 2012}

'Madras' The colonial city: T.S. Subramanian

The colonial city now called Chennai turns 375 on August 22. A survey of its growth and transformation from the time Fort St. George came up. By T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

AUGUST 22, 2014, will mark the 375th birthday of Madras, whose modern history begins on August 22, 1639.

On that day, Francis Day, a factor of the English East India Company, received a grant from Venkatadri Nayak of Wandiwash, who ruled the region under the Vijayanagara empire, to build a fort on a tongue of land on the seafront between the Cooum river in the south and the “Elampore river” in the north. When the first stone of the Fort was laid on March 1, 1640, the seeds of Madras, the first city of modern India, were sown.

Madras appeared on the stage of world history when the French attacked Fort St. George in 1746, captured it from the English and held it until 1749. Also in 1746, a small contingent of French troops on the banks of the Adyar river, aided by artillery fire, chased away several thousands of sepoys of the Nawab of Carnatic. Egmore, in the heart of Madras, saw some deadly action, too. To quote the late N.S. Ramaswami: “In the 18th century, Hyder Ali’s cavalry ranged over it and in the previous century, the Dutch sacked it” (Indian Express, June 13, 1983). San Thome was also a seat of war, but in much earlier times. In 1558, Ramaraja, the Vijayanagara ruler, led a big army to San Thome and crushed the Portuguese forces after he heard that Portuguese Franciscan friars had destroyed several Hindu temples in San Thome and Mylapore.

Pioneering role

Madras was a pioneer in several fields. As S. Muthiah, the passionate chronicler of Madras, is proud of saying, it was in Fort St. George in 1664 that India’s first Western-style hospital was established. That led to the founding of the General Hospital in 1835. The founding of the Governor’s Bank in 1635 led to modern banking. The first municipal corporation outside Britain was set up in Madras in 1688 when Elihu Yale was the Governor of Fort St. George. “In the 1670s, Governors William Langhorne and Streynsham Master instituted the rules of governance and record-keeping in Fort St. George and laid the foundations for today’s government formalities,” says Muthiah in his article titled “Pioneering Contribution of Madras”, published in 1993 in a volume titled Aspects of Madras: A Historical Perspective, which was edited by G.J. Sudhakar. It was in Madras that India’s first Western-type school, St. Mary’s Charity School, was established in 1715. The founding of the first Government Survey School, that is, the first institution for technical education east of Europe, was in Madras in 1794. The Survey School burgeoned into College of Engineering, Guindy.

The monumental scientific expedition called The Great Trigonometrical Survey, led by William Lambton, began from a church in St. Thomas Mount, Madras, on April 10, 1802. When it was completed, the shape and size of India was known. It revealed the Himalayas as the tallest mountain range in the world. Michael Topping established the first astronomical observatory in India in 1792 in Madras. The genesis of the Indian Army was in Cuddalore and in Madras after Major Stringer Lawrence raised a native infantry regiment to repulse the French attacks in the late 1740s on Fort St. David in Cuddalore. Muthiah has recorded in Madras Rediscovered that the “first rail track in India was laid for demonstration purposes near Chintadripet Bridge in 1836”. As Muthiah says: “By the time the second half of the 19th century came along, there was little left for Madras to introduce in India. But it continued to make its contribution. There was Indo-Saracenic to be left for architectural posterity in many parts of the country through the efforts of Robert Chisholm and Henry Irwin….”

How it all started

After receiving his “firman”, the document of authorisation from Venkatadri Nayak and his brother Ayappa Nayak to build a fort, Day left for Masulipatnam to persuade Andrew Cogan, his superior and the Agent of the East India Company from now on) there, that his decision to build a fort was sound. Cogan readily accepted the idea.

What first led Day to that strip of land on the beach in July 1639 was the availability of “excellent long cloth and better, cheaper by 20 per cent, than anywhere else”, including at Masulipatnam, then the rich emporia of the kingdom of Golconda. The English had already established a “factory” or a warehouse in 1611 at Masulipatnam to store the area’s famous “painted cloth”, cotton fabric with hand-painted designs. Trade in painted cloth was very lucrative and several European countries sailed the high seas to scout for sites on India’s eastern coast where they could buy and store painted cloth, and then export it.

Before the arrival of the English at Masulipatnam, the Portuguese were at San Thome in Madraspatnam in 1522, the Dutch at Masulipatnam in 1605 and at Pulicat, and the Danes at Tranquebar in 1620. The French founded Pondicherry after the English had settled in Madras in 1639. The Dutch were also at Sadras, 60 km from present-day Chennai, where weavers made excellent cloth. The English were already in Surat in 1599.

N.S. Ramaswami, in his book The Founding of Madras, first published in 1977 by Orient Longman, says: “This cotton cloth, which carried elaborate designs, was unique of its kind in the century. India was still ‘the only country in the world which could dye vegetable fibre (that is, cotton, as distinct from linen) in fast and luminous colours, so that when the fabric was washed, these colours increased rather than diminished in beauty and subtlety. Moreover, such Indian fabrics had the additional advantage of being extremely cheap in terms of contemporary trade values.’” The hand-painted cloth was made at many centres on the east coast, but Masulipatnam was preferred for its finish. Its bright colours resulted from a mordant extracted from the madder plant, which grew near the mouth of the Krishna river.

At Masulipatnam, the English had to face not only the harassment by officers of the Golconda ruler but also the hostility of the Dutch. The English bought an old fort at Armagon (present-day Durgarayapatnam in Nellore district) and rebuilt it, but no cloth was manufactured at Armagon. Besides, the local Nayak harassed the English there. The Dutch did not allow the English to settle at Pulicat.

So Day was hunting for a site on the eastern coast where cotton textiles were manufactured. During his first landing at Madraspatnam on July 27, 1639, he met Venkatadri and Ayappa, weavers and painting artists, and was happy to find that cloth was cheaper in Madras by about 20 per cent than elsewhere on the east coast. He received the firman to build a fort there, in August that year.

Chennapatnam and Madraspatnam already existed to the north and the south of the site respectively. Venkatadri and Ayappa had set up a small town a few years earlier and named it Chennapatnam, after their father, Chennappa. Venkatadri’s brother-in-law was the Vijayanagara king Venkata III.

Whence Madras?

There are several theories about the origin of the name Madraspatnam, later shortened to Madras. The most plausible one is that it was named after a wealthy Portuguese family, Madra by name, which had settled at San Thome in the 16th or 17th century. The Madra family rebuilt the St. Lazarus Church at Mylapore in 1637. A tombstone in the church found in 1927 says in Portuguese that it was “the grave of Manuel Madras and of his mother, son of Vincente Madra and of Lucy Brague” and that “they built this church at their own expense in the year 637” [1637].

Professor K.V. Raman, former Head of the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Madras, asserted: “Madras was a term used only after the Portuguese and the British came here. Earlier, it was a [loose] conglomeration of villages such as Mylapore, Triplicane, Egmore, Thiruvottiyur, Thiruvanmiyur, and so on. Madras city, as a nomenclature, obtained only after these villages joined together and came under European influence.” Cogan and Day dismantled the fort at Armagon and sailed out in Eagle, which was accompanied by Unity. It was a motley group which sailed in the two vessels, comprising 25 soldiers, factors, writers, a gunner, a surgeon, a carpenter, smiths, and so on—all of them Europeans, including the English and the Portuguese. Nagabhattan, the Company’s gunpowder maker, was perhaps the sole Indian. They arrived on February 20, 1640, at Madraspatnam. Thus was laid the foundation of the British Empire.

It, however, was not smooth sailing for Day after the first stone for building the fortified warehouse was laid on March 1. The Company was reluctant to finance the building of the fort. “Spending considerably out of his own pocket, Day built on this barren stretch of no-man’s sand fortifying walls that enclosed a 100 yard by 100 square,” says Muthiah, in his article titled “City begat by Fort St. George”, published in The Hindu on April 30, 1990. “And within those walls, he erected a warehouse and 15 thatched houses. When that work was completed in April 1640, Andrew Cogan, Day’s chief and the Company’s Agent on the Coromandel, christened the tiny settlement, on St. George’s Day, April 24, Fort St. George,” adds Muthiah.

The first building to come up inside the Fort was Fort House, which was the Governor’s residence. It had a dome which has not survived. A “White Town” came up inside the Fort where English and Portuguese traders lived. A “Black Town” came up outside, north of the Fort, where artisans, craftsmen and traders lived. St. Mary’s Church, the country’s first Protestant Church, was built inside the Fort in 1680 (or 1678). The Fort House was pulled down in the 1690s and a new one built. It houses the Tamil Nadu government’s Secretariat and the Assembly now.

“During the 17th and 18th centuries, Madras began to grow within and outside Fort St. George, with the acquisition of several adjoining villages,” says P.S. Sriraman, Superintending Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Jodhpur Circle, who authored the ASI-published pamphlet “Fort St. George”. “Early in the 18th century, the ‘Grand House on Charles Street’, Clive’s house, was built. A 1710 map shows a mint, a hospital, a storehouse and a town hall (next to St. Mary’s). Besides, it indicates the names of the roads within the fort and in the Black Town. A parade ground was added….”

Sriraman says: “From 1756 to 1763, hectic construction saw the fort to its present shape…. In its final form, Fort St. George spreads over 42 acres… and has three principal gates, the two Sea Gates and the Wallajah Gate and St. George’s Gate, and a few minor gates. These gates were strengthened by bastions, ravelins and lunettes. A wet ditch was excavated all round. The walls were casemated (a vaulted chamber built in the walls) and cisterns were built to support about 6,000 men with water supply. The entire construction was done at a cost of Rs.7,700,000 at that time. Of course, this expenditure was not without its share of controversy.”

G. Maheshwari, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, said the organisation’s Chennai Circle has prepared a plan to restore Last House on Snob’s Alley in Fort St. George. A portion of Last House was in ruins. Indian Institute of Technology Madras will help the ASI in restoring Last House, which has a beautiful carved, wooden staircase inside. The conservation effort will be true to the original plan and elevation of the structure, she said. Cement will not be used.

Amid war and strife

When Day began building the fort in 1640, war alarms were ringing everywhere in the region. The Vijayanagara empire was on the decline. Venkata III died in 1642 and was succeeded by Sriranga III, who ruled from 1642 to 1649. There was intense rivalry among the various Nayaks, who were the governors of the Vijayanagara kingdom. The Nayaks had their own private militias. Venkatadri commanded 20,000 sepoys. The Turks had invaded south India in the 14th century and the Sultan of Golconda in the 17th century. The Maratha warrior Chhatrapathi Shivaji and his forces were marching through Madras in 1740.

N.S. Ramaswami says in his Founding of Madras: “The fortunes of the Englishmen at Fort St. George were subject to the political changes on the eastern coast, which were considerable. The region passed first from Vijayanagar to Golconda and thence from Golconda to the Mughals. At every change, the English had to have their privileges confirmed. Fort St. George was involved in an uphill struggle for quite some time in its early career.” A letter from Fort St. George written to the Company directors in London talks about the “country being all in broils….”

Despite this turbulent situation, for several decades after the construction of Fort St. George began in 1640, the British were interested only in trade. The Fort was used as a warehouse for storing textiles, timber and so on. At best, it was a fortified garrison.

French attack

But the French attack on Fort St. George in September 1746 shook the British. The war between England and France in Europe had its fallout in Madras. Although an English naval squadron sent to India reached the Coromandel coast and it could have attacked the French settlement of Pondicherry, whose Governor was Francois Dupleix, it did not do so. But de la Bourdonnais, the French Governor of Bourbon in Mauritius, had no such compunction. He came to the aid of Dupleix. De la Bourdonnais’ fleet appeared before Fort St. George on September 3, 1746, and shelled it from the sea. “Governor Morse [of Fort St. George] and the garrison surrendered. The formal surrender took place on September 10th,” says Vedagiri Shanmugasundaram, in his article titled “History (1600-1900), published in Madras, Chennai: A 400-year Record of the First City of Modern India.

Dupleix carted away merchandise, stores, bullion and ordnance valued at Rs.2 million to Pondicherry. Even the highly polished black pillars of Fort House were taken to Pondicherry. Later, the English brought back the pillars and used them when they rebuilt Fort House. The French destroyed much of Black Town.

The Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwaruddin, the suzerain of both the English and the French merchants on the east coast sent an army under his eldest son, Mahfuz Khan, to confront the French occupiers of the Fort. A small contingent of the French soldiers beat back the Nawab’s army.

Shanmugasundaram says: “When the English lost Madras, Fort St. David (Cuddalore) became the seat of their presidency. Dupleix launched several attacks against it but failed to take it. Meanwhile, the war in Europe had ended with the signing of the Aix-la-Chapelle. Soon afterwards, Madras was to be restored in return for Quebec (Canada). The rendition of the city to the English took place on August 21, 1749.”

The French occupation of Fort St. George convinced the British that they should raise a strong army of their own and that they should fortify Fort St. George in an impregnable manner. Major Stringer Lawrence, who had successfully defended Fort St. David, raised a regiment of native soldiers in Cuddalore and Madras, which metamorphosed into the Indian Army. Soon Robert Clive came into the picture. Meanwhile, the British systematically set about strengthening Fort St. George. Hostilities erupted again. Comte de Lally, the French Governor General of India and a soldier himself, besieged Fort St. George in December 1758. The siege went on for 67 days. The French lifted the siege when a British fleet arrived in Madras. The Fort was in ruins again after the siege. The Company started restoring it with ramparts, bastions and ravelins. The work was completed in 1783 when the Fort’s present shape was reached.

Mysore Wars 

Then, the Mysore Wars broke out. Hyder Ali, the Mysore ruler, attacked Madras. His army defeated the combined forces of the English, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas. Hyder Ali’s army looted San Thome and other villages. Hyder Ali audaciously dictated a treaty within the walls of Fort St. George, by which he gained a lot of territory.

With the death of Tipu Sultan, son of Hyder Ali, in the fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, there was no more any threat to the British in the Indian subcontinent. The British subjugated the local rulers by playing them off against each other and extracted from them the right to collect taxes. For instance, the Nawab of Arcot bestowed upon the English the right to collect revenue from his subjects. Soon, the English found that this was more lucrative than trading in painted cloth, timber or spices!

As Fort St. George grew, and Chennapatnam and Madraspatnam expanded, the three got integrated to become Madras. This involved the British acquiring a number of villages, including Mylapore-Triplicane, using threats, chicanery and blandishment.

Shanmugasundaram says in his “History (1600-1900)”: “As a consequence of Governor Yale applying for additional possessions as free grants, conditional grants were obtained in early 1693 from the Mughal emperor for the villages of Egmore, Purasawalkam and Tondiarpet. The three villages were the earliest acquisitions after Triplicane and the four came to be known in the records as ‘the Old Towns’. In turn, the Governor leased out these villages for an annual rent to the Company’s Chief Merchants.”

In 1708, the Mughal Nawab Daud Khan handed over Thiruvottiyur, Nungambakkam, Vyasarpadi, Kathiwakkam and Sattangadu to the British by a firman. They were called “the five New Villages”. When Daud Khan later demanded, during the Governorship of Edward Harrison from 1711 to 1717, the return of these five villages, “a gift of 400 bottles of liquor to Khan was found so acceptable that not only was the grant of the villages confirmed but 40 acres of land near St. Thomas Mount was given in addition for the construction of a garden house”. Mylapore, San Thome, Triplicane and Egmore came under the English fold.

An ancient lineage

The history of Madras, however, is not limited to just 375 years. It has an ancient history going back to the beginning of the historic period, that is, the Tamil Sangam age (the first century B.C. to the third century A.D.). Sangam works refer to Mylapore. In his book The Early History of the Madras Region, K.V. Raman says: “Mylapore was a port. It has been mentioned by Roman geographer Ptolemy as Mylafa. In the first century A.D., Mylapore was an important commercial centre, attracting foreign traders.” Tamil Sangam literature has mentioned Mylapore as Mylarpil. “Triplicane came under Mylapore. Importantly, it was not merely called Triplicane but Mylapore-Triplicane,” Raman said. Mylapore and Triplicane are noted for their Kapalisvara and Parthasarathy Swamy temples.

R. Nagaswamy, former Director, Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department, attested to the importance of Mylapore in the Madras region. “During the period of the Pallava ruler Nandivarman III [regnal years A.D. 844-866], Mylapore was a port town. The Tamil work, Nandikalambagam, composed anonymously in praise of him, calls Mylapore a port town. Nandivarman was in fact called ‘Mylai kaavalar’, that is, the ruler of Mylai,” Nagaswamy said.

After the first phase of the Sangam Cholas’ rule in the Madras region in the first century A.D., first under Karikala Chola and later by Tondaiman Ilam Tirayan, Madras was under the Pallavas from the fourth century A.D. to the 9th century A,D. “The earliest inscription to be found in Madras is at Pallavaram. It belongs to the Pallava ruler Mahendravarman I [regnal years A.D. 600-630],” said Nagaswamy. Mahendravarman I inscribed 67 titles or cognomens or birudas that he assumed in a Siva temple that he carved out of rock at Pallavaram. The inscription is in the Pallava-Grantha script. The language of the inscription is mostly Telugu and some titles are in Sanskrit and Tamil. The inscription commences by mentioning his name, “Sri Mahendravikrama”. Some of his colourful titles that were inscribed are Mattavilasah, Chetrakari, Vichitra Chittah, Kalahapriya and Lalitankura. The Siva temple in the rock-cut cave is now a dargah.

The second phase of Chola rule in the Madras region was under the imperial Cholas, from around A.D. 900 (Aditya Chola) until the end of the Chola empire in A.D. 1285. Akin to Mylapore, Egmore (Ezhumur) has an interesting history of about 1,000 years. Two inscriptions in the Parthasarathy temple at Triplicane mention “Ezhumur”, said Nagaswamy. The earlier one, dated A.D. 1309, belongs to the Pandya king Kulasekhara Pandya. It talked about “Ezhumur nadu” which fell under “Puliyur kottam” (divison) of “Jayamkonda Chola mandalam”. It mentioned how “Ayanpuram kizhavan” (the chief of the Ayanpuram village, which is the present-day Aynavaram) sold land to raise funds to provide for offerings to the deity of the Parthasarathy temple. The second inscription, belonging to the Vijayanagara period of the 16th century, also spoke about how Ezhumur came under “Puliyur kottam” which, in turn, fell under “Jayamkonda Chola mandalam”.

But Egmore’s 18th century history, after it came under the Company’s control, is not so sedate. “Square mile for square mile, Egmore is the part of Madras which has seen more war and contention than any other,” says N.S. Ramaswami in his article “Fighting Egmore”, in his column “Coral Strand” that appeared in Indian Expresson June 20, 1983. “Among its unwelcome visitors, sword in hand, were the French, the Dutch and the Mysore troops of Hyder Ali. It has been plundered, farmed out, fought for and [it] overenjoyed the doubtful joys of a ‘metta’ or a toll station.”

Indeed, Egmore was both a seat of war and a health resort with a “fine air”. The Company built a minor fort, called a redoubt, in Egmore. The redoubt had a unit for making gunpowder. A choultry, built earlier, had a guardhouse added to it. This choultry was to be a health resort for the sepoys of the Company—it was to provide “a great relief to the poor soldiers when sick and contribute to saving their lives”.

Soon, the British built a Pantheon, or public assembly rooms, in Egmore. Many garden houses came up. Nagaswamy said “the most important point is that the British had a vision” when they systematically developed the infrastructure required for Madras. For instance, “the British built a railway station, a museum, a library, a theatre, a zoo and a record office, all at Egmore”. The small zoo at Egmore featured two tigers. While Dr Edward Balfour was the founder of the Government Museum in Egmore, Dr F.H. Gravely gave it a proper shape.

Fort and away

With flourishing trade and a strong army, Madras boomed. The Englishmen left the Fort to build for themselves bungalows away from the sea, on Mount Road and Poonamalee High Road, and at Egmore, Mylapore, Adyar and Guindy. Egmore was the favourite. Wealthy Indians lived in Luz. These bungalows, known as garden houses, had “high colonnades, projecting open porticos, open corridors and triangular pediments in front”. As William Hodges, who visited Madras in 1781, observed: “The English town, rising from within Fort St. George has, from the sea, a rich and beautiful appearance…. The buildings consist of long colonnades with open porticos and flat roofs and offer to the eye an appearance similar to what he may conceive of a Grecian city.”

Madras had castles too: Brodie’s Castle and Leith Castle. Brodie’s Castle was built by James Brodie, an “outstanding civil servant” of the Company, on 11 acres assigned to him in 1796. It is a beautiful bungalow, built on the banks of the Adyar river, on Greenways Road. It is now home to the Tamil Nadu Music and Fine Arts University. Leith Castle, situated in San Thome, was built by James Leith, another civil servant of the Company. It is a private residential house now.

This is how Steen Bille found Madras when he visited it in 1845: “One can drive and ride as one will. The roads are excellent, one flies one’s way; the air we breathe is balmic and invigorating. We can drive past one villa after another and all are situated in beautifully laid-out and well-kept parks and gardens.”

{Source: Frontline, Commemorative Issue, Chennai at 375, September 5, 2014}

Fort St. Gorge: T.S. Subramanian

FORT ST. GEORGE is now under the control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle. It is a protected monument under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Validation and Amendment) Act, 2010. There are 13 protected monuments inside the Fort under the ASI’s purview. Three of them are under the ASI’s control. They are Clive’s House, St. Mary’s Church and the old British Infantry Officers’ Mess, housing the Fort Museum now.

The Army has occupied the remaining 10 monuments under an agreement with the ASI—the “Arsenal” building; Big Warehouse; Wellesley House; Chaplain’s House; Garrison Engineers’ Depot; Guard Room; King’s Barracks; Last House on Snob’s Alley; Nursing Sisters’ House; and the ramparts, gates, bastions, ravelins with vaulted chambers, moats and glacis.

There is a palpable sense of history in every nook and corner of the Fort. This despite the swirling mass of a few thousand people thronging the Tamil Nadu government’s Secretariat housed there and the Army trucks thundering up and down the narrow streets. Boards announcing the Army canteen are seen almost everywhere. A 10-storeyed building inside the Fort, housing the State government’s offices, incongruously spikes the air. The ASI allowed the Tamil Nadu government to build it right in the heart of the Fort in 1969. There are boards indicating St. Mary’s Church, Clive’s Building, Sea Gate Street, James and Charles Street, King’s Barracks, Fort Museum, and so forth.

The steeple of St. Mary’s Church towers over visitors entering Fort St. George from one of the two sea gates facing the Bay of Bengal. “Do write that services are regularly held in this church. It is a live church, not a dead monument,” a church official tells this writer. It is the oldest Anglican church in India. Reverend Charles Herbert Malden, in his handbook St. Mary’s Church and Its Monuments, published in 1905, says: “It is not only the oldest place of worship built by the English settlers in India and now in use, but it is believed to be the oldest British building of any kind in the whole of India.” It was a chapel that grew into a church. Streynsham Master of the East India Company, who became the Governor and Commander in Chief of Fort St. George and the town of Madrasapatnam, was instrumental in building the church. Its construction began in 1678 and the consecration took place on October 28, 1680. Its architect was probably William Dixon, Master Gunner of the Fort. The first marriage to be solemnised in the church was that of Elihu Yale to Catherine Hymners on November 4, 1680.

Yale started his career as a writer of the East India Company but rose to become Governor of Madras for five years from 1687. Yale University in the United States is named after him because he gave a handsome donation to it. Robert Clive, the clerk-turned-soldier who laid the foundation of the British Empire in India, was married to Margaret Maskelyne on February 18, 1753, in this church. A prized possession of the church is a reproduction of Raphael’s painting The Last Supper. There are marble monuments in memory of the Governors of Fort St. George, their families and the Swedish missionary Frederick Christain Swartz, a portrait medallion of Thomas Munro and paintings of George Pigot, Streynsham Master and Elihu Yale, who were all Governors of Fort St. George/Madras.

In the churchyard are laid a number of tombstones, with epitaphs carved in beautiful calligraphy. But there are no coffins below. Thereby hangs a tale. Glyn Barlow, in his book The Story of Madras, says that the “English Burying Place” in those days was where the present Dr Ambedkar Government Law College is situated. By 1711, these stately tombs were “turned into receptacles for beggars and buffaloes”. When the French under Comte de Lally besieged Madras from December 1758 to February 1759, they used the tombs as a cover for their attacks on Fort St. George. After the French siege was broken, according to Barlow, the English destroyed the tombs but brought the slabs that bore the epitaphs and laid them in St. Mary’s churchyard. Opposite St. Mary’s Church, on Charles Street, is Admiralty House, which is now called Clive’s House. Robert Clive, who went on to become the Governor of Bengal, lived in this building for some time. A circular plaque embedded in the wall of the building says: “Robert 1st Lord Clive lived in this building in the year 1753. Truly Great in Arms and in Council.” The façade of this tall building has Ionic columns. It has a spacious banqueting hall. According to ASI officials, the building was used for holding courts to deal with interlopers and hence it was called Admiralty House. It now houses the offices of the ASI, Chennai Circle. In a corner of the building, the ASI has organised a permanent exhibition on Clive.

On the ground floor of Clive’s House were jail cells and strongrooms. The inner walls of the prison cells are sheathed with steel sheets and the ceiling is made of iron beams. The strongrooms are made of perforated iron sheets with iron grills and sturdy latches. There is a small tunnel too.

The Exchange building, housing the Fort Museum, is also replete with history. Upstairs was the “Long Room” or the Public Exchange Hall for the bartering of goods among the merchants of Fort St. George. On the roof was built the first lighthouse of Madras in 1796. P.S. Sriraman, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Jodhpur Circle, said: “At its peak, the building was a beehive of commercial activity. On the ground floor were the offices, a warehouse, an auction room and a subscription library.” Madras Bank started functioning from this building in 1807. It later became Bank of Madras, and merged with Bombay and Calcutta Banks to form the Imperial Bank of India, now State Bank of India.

The Fort Museum is a period museum. Among the exhibits are uniforms worn by British Raj sepoys, their pistols, rifles, blunderbusses and flintlocks; expensive porcelain from the collections of the East India Company and the Nawab of Arcot; Clive’s letters, written with a wry sense of humour; aquatints of Thomas Daniell and William Daniell on the Madras of the 1790s; and portraits of Streynsham Master and Arthur Havelock, Governor of Fort St. George, done by Raja Ravi Varma.

-T.S. Subramanian

{As in Frontline, Commemorative Issue, Chennai at 375, September 5, 2014}

Making of Madras to Chennai: Geeta Doctor

Chennai turns 375 even as the old and the new stay ‘gridlocked by progress’

 From the air, Chennai—or old Madras—presents itself like a box of Diwali sweets waiting to be savoured. There are houses in cochineal pink, or ‘muttai pink’ (candy pink), as the colour is described, in iridescent greens, indigo blues, Gold Spot oranges, citron yellows, deep purples and many in combinations of one or two of these colours.

The colonial whites, the creams, the deeper municipal ochres on the walls have all been replaced in places where the government fiat runs by marshmallow pinks.

Chennai has now become a rainbow city of many different people, speaking in many tongues. You no longer look for the familiar signs of caste and community affiliations that once upon a time people wore proudly on their foreheads and wrapped around their waists to proclaim their sense of belonging. You no longer believe in the old Tamil saying­—“Every town is our hometown. Every man is our kinsman”—but glare suspiciously at the outsider and ask: where are you from?

There are enclaves now that are billed as ‘Little Korea’ and ‘Greater Japan’; sushi and khimchi are sold in supermarkets; less affluent pockets shelter the young men and women from the Northeast who find jobs in beauty parlours and restaurants trying to parlay their few words of English into recognisable sounds, “You want cold tea with Rhyme juice? No have Rhyme today,” even while others call them “chinky”. There are Thai massage parlours, Indonesian or Balinese spas, foot reflexology centres; and, just as macabre given the number of medical specialties that are on offer at the mecca of modern medicine that is now Chennai, discrete home-stays for the recently dead who may not have survived their treatment i.e. funeral parlours for different communities.

As seekers of old Madras (which turns a full, ripe 375 years this month) reach deep into the ann­als of the city’s past, pecking at the crevices of history like woodpeckers in search of grubs, what choices are there for the average citizen of Chennai?

The City has been gridlocked by progress. It’s currently being laced together by a steel and cement network of raised rapid transit systems of rail and road, tied into knots by the multiple arms of burgeoning flyovers. In a recent episode reminiscent of the more acrobatic efforts of those performing the ‘lungi dance’, a couple on a motorbike collided on a curve of one of the older flyovers (the Adyar flyover) and tragically, in the case of one of them, landed in a hospital; the lady, being more lucky, fell on the roof of a vehicle below, whereupon, in the best of film traditions, she fled the scene. Police sirens provided the background music.

Do you search for that perfect steel tumbler of decoction coffee or head for the latest counter at Starbucks and lick the froth from a global brand of the same stuff? Is this why this year’s Madras Heritage Week has seen a veritable explosion of exploratory walks along the dangerously eroded edges of the River Cooum that snakes its sulphurously perfumed sludge through parts of the city; is that why there are talks about the great and the good and group activities and performances that go way beyond the modest beginnings of what was seen by some as a retrograde hankering for a vanished colonial past? There are now over 150 separate events crammed into one week. Most of these are well attended, even if sometimes the participants seem to be of a certain age group and class.

A.P. Venkatachalapathy, the scholar who writes and speaks eloquently about the group of people he identifies as the “Anglophiliacs”, as if they suffered from some debilitating ailment that was bleeding the red blood corpuscles of the city of Chennai’s true inheritors, has this to say in his volume, Chennai not Madras—Perspectives of the City (Marg Publication, 2006): “The culture of this middle-class elite—its vegetarian food, coffee, the Music Academy, Bharatanatyam etc has come to stand not only for the city but Tamil culture as well. The anglophilia is well reflected in the extant histories of the city and in the skewed nature of conservation efforts.” By way of contrast, Venkatachalapathy avers, “The Dravidian parties, offshoots of the non-Brahmin movements with their agenda of social transformation that would empower backward castes, have been the dominant force shaping the city over the last half century. The Dravidian penchant for revivalist architecture and statue-raising, the spawning of a poster culture and public meetings marked by public rhetoric have given the city a distinct character, even if this has not exactly pleased the middle class.”

“Yes, it was all very much to do with nostalgia,” explains V. Sriram, the energetic co-convenor of Madras Heritage Week. An entrepreneur and writer who has written eloquently on south Indian music traditions, he leads groups of people around the narrow streets and bylanes of Georgetown, once known as Blacktown, or the inner city that serviced the White Town or colonial Madras, next to the what-is-now-called the Fort area, and incidentally still very much the centre of power. The Tamil Nadu government is located here since successive political leaders, while talking about finding a more suitable arena, have never been able to make a decisive shift to another location.

“But it is no longer a maudlin exercise,” Sriram insists. “It has become a celebration—warts of the city and all. Many presentations and talks focus on the positives and negatives of the past and present. The younger generation has taken to it in a big way by bringing in technology—photo shoots, tweets, FB posts, Flickr and Instagram images, mobile apps etc. They think it’s an opportunity to showcase the city in all its glorious colours.” It is still restricted to a small community, but no longer just an English-speaking one. The ratio of English to Tamil events is now 70:30, which is a good mix considering the city itself is cosmopolitan now. It’s also a completely voluntary event without any official sponsor. The very fact that Tamil media is focusing attention on it is a very big sign of change.

No right-thinking person would accuse the Dravidian movement of having run out of steam. Why, even as recently as a few weeks back, when a well-respected judge was turned away from attending a book release function at one of the older clubs run by the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association because he was wearing a white dhoti, or veshti, all the Dravidian parties roared their displeasure. The “sartorial despotism” was seen as a hangover of the colonial era and rou­ndly denounced. With almost immediate eff­ect, a judicial order was passed. Fines amo­unting to Rs 25,000 would be levied on any dissenting club official; office-bearers would face a one-year sentence in jail and the licence of the offending institution can­celled in the more extreme case. Cer­tain clubs were left bleating that the only reason to uphold the pants against the dhoti was to avert what they called “a wardrobe malfunction when in an inebriated condition”.

In this context, it’s curious to note that outside certain Tamil Nadu temples there are signs that say, ‘No wearing of lungis.’ We cannot even imagine what this might mean, unless the discrimination is against the wearing of the colourful variety of woven lungis, the checked and striped designs that were once famous in the region as ‘Madras Checks’ or even Bleeding Madras, a term that became fam­ous in the mid-20th century as exemplifying a fabric, where the colours would be guaranteed to run and therefore satisfying a certain segment of the North American public who sported shirts and dress materials of the same. Maybe some of these temples, conscious of these facts, would not want wearers to enter their precincts wearing ‘Bleeding Lungis’.

“I don’t think the heritage movement is a bad thing,” comments Pramod Balakrish­nan, a noted architect known for his environmentally sound buildings. “Looking after the old is as important for us as citizens of a city like Chennai, as is building for the future. In most European countries, there is an added responsibility in retaining the city centres and their historical buildings. After all, when you visit a new city, you don’t just want to wander through a mall. Unless you are in a place like Singapore or Dubai, you want to experience the older parts of the city to get a feel of what the place is all about. If you go to Georgetown today (old commercial heart of the city) it’s dead, but not so dead that you can’t revive it. It’s still possible. But you need the political will to do that.”

There are two ribbons of intense architectural activity that lead out of the city towards the south. One of them is called the East Coast Road (ECR): it abuts the sandy coastline of the Cor­omandel coast and boasts of the enclaves of the upwardly mobile, the city’s own Chennaifornians, each with at least one swimming pool. The other parallel highway, further inland and separated by an artificial riverway called the ‘Buckingham Canal’ for transporting food and goods in the days of the Raj, is the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR). Both link Chennai, symbolically perhaps, to the old Pallava seaport and now the major tourist destination of the south. OMR is where Madras that was Chennai becomes the Electronic City, neither middle-class, nor Brahmin, nor Dravidian but netizens of the world. They come alive during different time zones, inhabit faceless condominiums and commune with each other in sound bites and eat their chop suey while sitting cross-legged on ergonomically designed chairs. They belong nowhere and everywhere.

How does a planner integrate these different strands of the city? I ask Balakrishnan. There are both extraordinary models of architectural excess to be seen as well as examples of modernistic imagery, a building for instance by the world-famous architect Zaha Hadid at the OMR, with small temples wedged in between them with village communities still raising their buffaloes and chickens. No provisions have yet been made for providing the most basic of amenities, water and sewage, for instance. “I don’t think we are planning for the future. I don’t think we’re able to see the future. We are planning from the past. Yes, it’s true there have been Master Plans but by the time we implement them, the city has already moved ahead of them. The infrastructure requirements are sporadic, not because we don’t have ideas for them but because the city administration does not work together. We are retrofitting our cities.”

But Chennai still frequently comes up as the top city in magazine surveys and opinion polls. So, is there a Chennai model of development that has not been noticed in the clamour for political mileage? “There is a model that has never been talked about,” says business journalist Sushila Ravind­ra­nath, who is researching a book on how the perception of Tamil Nadu has changed after liberalisation. “It is about social reforms, combined with development. We thought of noon meal schemes, reservations, private engineering colleges, healthcare way ahead of others. Enterprise flourished quietly. The Namakkal poultry industry is just one example. Comm­unities like the Gounders and Nadars (traditionally farmers or land-owning communities) helped each other set up enterprises. They have rarely been been celebrated like the Marwaris,” she says.

Madras being the capital of the Madras Presidency whose footprint extended to all the four southern states, the foundation had been laid for it to take off after independence. Once India opened up, there was no holding back. But business practices continue to be low-key, often family-run, until very recently. They do not take major risks, for which reason there has been little labour unrest in the state. While innovation has taken place at a comparatively rapid pace in the IT industry as evidenced by the booming development on Chennai’s IT highway, the OMR, it’s lagged behind in areas like telecom, petrochemicals.

Amongst the groups of Chennai citizens looking at the past is one that is planning to celebrate the ‘Living Statues’ that line the Chennai beachfront or the Marina Beach, the second largest sandy beach in the world as the visitor is often told. Poets and writers have been invited to recite the poems of Thiruvalluvar, Subramania Bharathi, Bharathi­dasan and others. Statues are a popular form of public art in the city, painted in gold and mounted on pedestals at various traffic roundabouts (now public urinals with graphic signs on their swing doors are proving to be a minor competition). It’s extraordinary to find the number of famous women who have made it to pedestal glory. If not for the feisty image of Kannagi flinging her golden anklet filled with rubies at the throne of the King of Madurai, there are images of the old poetess Avaiyar and of Annie Besant to remind us of the role played by women who have stamped their feet, either in anger like Kannagi or in the spirit of dance like the incomparable Rukmini Devi, founder of Kalakshetra and the gentrified, classicised version of the old dance form now rechristened as Bharatanatyam, or the iconoclastic Chandra­lekha who, defying conventions, used them to turn the dance world on its head and live again with the fire of the martial arts. Chennai too, at 375, is trying to live again. It is rewriting its history while reaching out to the next phase of its journey. The Chennai Express rolls on.

{Source: Outlook Magazine, Sep 01, 2014,Cover Story, Chennai 375, 'What Does Madras Bleed For?'}

Beyond controversy: The Hindus: An Alternative History

Before we starts, just a minute on this Controversy:

The Hindus: An Alternative History is a book by American Indologist, Wendy Doniger which the author describes as an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.” The book was initially published by Viking Penguin in 2009 and later in India by Penguin's Indian subsidiary, Penguin India.

In February 2014, it was the subject of litigation in India by the group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi (Hindi, literally, "Committee for Struggle to Save Education"), alleging violations of a law which punishes "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of any religious community." 

The book was criticised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan arguing that the work was "riddled with heresies" and that the contents are offensive to Hindus. Certain content and wordings in the book were challenged by Dina Nath Batra, the head of Shiksha Bacho Andolan in a lawsuit and the publisher Penguin India agreed to destroy all the existing copies within six months commencing from February 2014.

And remember this was year 2009, when Sunil Khilnani was reviweing this book.

Can one tell a history of the Hindus through their stories? That is the challenge that American scholar and Sanskritist Wendy Doniger sets herself in this book, a culmination of many years of teaching and engagement with Hindu thought and writing. One thing those years have made clear to Doniger is the difficulty of defining Hinduism. The term itself lacks any roots within India—only after the seventeenth century can we find the first usage of the title ‘Hindupati’ or Lord of the Hindus—and there is no agreed doctrine, founder, or church-like institution with which it is identified. There is no Hindu canon. Nor do the Hindus themselves form a race, or inhabit a narrowly specified territory.

What does connect them and set them apart, Doniger argues, is the fact that their imaginations, and many of their social practices, are structured by a vast web of stories—texts that spin across and through the languages and cultures of the subcontinent. Doniger calls it ‘intertextuality’, the self-conscious reference to stories that came before, all the way back to the Rig Veda. And from there on, the Brahmanas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Shastras, Puranas, Tantric texts, the philosophical schools whose networks extended from the Tamil South up to Kashmir, the poetry and song of the Bhakti movements. There is no comparable output in any of the other great instances of the moral and religious imagination still available to us today.

Such texts can’t, however, be read as open windows on the societies that produced them. We don’t even know when some of the most fertile Hindu texts were composed. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, for instance, can only be dated to some time between 300 BC and AD 300 and 200 BC and AD 200 respectively. Still, Doniger is interested in the tensions between history (what exactly happened) and what societies tell themselves about what is happening. Her passion is the human imagination.

Doniger calls her book an ‘alternative history’ because she believes the other histories overemphasise the Brahminic wellsprings of Hindu stories. She argues, effectively, that the ‘high’ texts have quite often fed off low tales. She shows in particular how the voices of women, Dalits and tribals have energised many Brahminic scripts. So too, she makes us hear the voices of Buddhist and Jain thought, and later of Islam and Christianity, in dialogue with the Hindu texts. Just as those lower in society sought to Sanskritise and Kshatriyise, so the Sanskrit texts were permeable to what she terms ‘deshification’—the absorption of local, ‘small’ traditions.

Doniger’s capacity for a ‘shlesha’ of empathy and criticism fails in her treatment of Hindutva, though she pokes fun at it.

She draws out the layered cruelties and conflicting natures of Hindu texts with verve, among them the story of Ekalavya, the expert tribal archer in the Mahabharata. He displays his skill by unleashing arrows into the mouth of a dog. Arjuna, outraged that someone of lower caste can do this and threatened by his prowess, tells Ekalavya’s guru, Drona, to put a stop to it. Drona requires Ekalavya to cut off his thumb, which he does. The story reveals and revels in the injustice of caste. But Doniger also cites other versions—for instance, a Jain text in which Arjuna is shown as cruel and vindictive. These constitute what Doniger calls the ‘intertextual’ argument and conversation of the Hindus—with the Mahabharata as a central clearing house for this vast network of disputation. One of her arresting comparisons likens the Mahabharata to ‘an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit...could add a bit here, a bit there’.

But the central insight driving her argument concerns the Hindu way of telling stories, a capacity to make not just art, but ethics, out of ambiguity. It’s a characteristic embodied in the Sanskrit figure of speech known as ‘slesha’. Slesha—literally ‘embrace’—holds together at once two different stories or images, allowing the listener or reader to switch between them. This is essentially a metaphoric capacity: to see something as something else. It also offers a way out of any impasse. As E.M. Forster put it, ‘Every Indian hole has at least two exits’.

In such a universe, meaning is never settled—and so, neither, is authority. Claimants to authority, from the gods themselves to the human scribes who record their doings to modern-day gurus who hold forth on the texts, climb up ladders but also slide down snake chutes. This fosters an internal pluralism: within the individual, the possibility of internal conflict between the demands of society’s moral code and a more universal ethics is never resolved or far from the surface. The recognition of ambiguous meaning also enables, though in more complex and sometimes attenuated ways, an attitude of pluralism towards other moral cosmologies and religions.

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put this capacity for pluralism down to polytheism, a religious view that saw nature as distinguished not by order and beauty, but “by the various and contrary events of human life”. “So sociable is polytheism,” wrote Hume, “that the utmost fierceness and aversion which it meets with in an opposite religion is scarcely able to disgust it and keep it at a distance”. Now, this sociability is hardly one that would guarantee survival in a biological species; and polytheism has been a characteristic mainly of ancient religions, which rarely got beyond the lower branches of the Darwinian tree of human belief systems. Why, then, has Hinduism been able to survive, with some vigour, across such a span of human history? Some, of course, over the past century and more have feared that it possibly cannot—and have hoped to make Hinduism more mono in its theism.

It’s precisely the capacity of the Hindu imagination to keep telling and re-telling stories, rather than to box them up into a single authorised narrative or code, which has kept it in business—and enabled it to flourish within a society at once of great internal complexity and which has also regularly encountered tough external pressures.

Doniger takes an obvious joy in the stories she analyses, and one of many pleasures in the book is her consideration to animals in the Hindu world—as objects of sacrifice, consumption, devotion and protection, sometimes all at once. The idea of non-violence, ahimsa, is first developed in relation to the treatment of animals—a matter of public concern to rulers, who encouraged forms of casuistry to justify animal sacrifice. The cow, of course, figures. But Doniger more interestingly tracks the importance of dogs. The Mahabharata, she notes, begins and ends with stories about justice for dogs. She also brings the horse back to the centre of the Hindu imagination. From the great Ashvamedha sacrifice, described in shudder-inducing detail in the Vedas, to the raging hooves of Kalki, it is the horse—an animal not native to the subcontinent—that has fascinated Hindus.

But for all the delights in Doniger’s scholarship, there is a deeper question she might have done well to confront. How did the Hindu capacity for moral pluralism actually stand in relation to Indian society? Doniger notes and celebrates the presence in many texts of challenges to hierarchy and caste. She shows that caste was not invariably an intellectual or philosophical prison. It was possible to think oneself out of it, to criticise its injustice, mock its absurdities. But she doesn’t probe a central paradox: Why did such critical thoughts and stories gain such little purchase on the social order? The astonishing plurality of Hindu thought—its vast ocean of polydox beliefs—is only matched by its equally staggering orthopraxy, the unchanging rigidity of social patterns and practices. The old Hindus seem to have perfected ‘repressive tolerance’ well before Herbert Marcuse discovered it in California.

Similarly, Doniger sets out but does not fully unravel some of the central dilemmas embodied in texts like the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata poses the problem of the world’s moral irrationality. If the concept of Karma appears to suggest a rational moral economy—that my present action will have a future pay-off—this idea is constantly subverted in the Mahabharata, where one more throw of the dice again and again determines the moral horizon. “The Mahabharata sees a vice behind every virtue, a snake behind every horse, and a doomsday behind every victory,” Doniger writes, and so every moral choice and act is somehow the wrong choice. In fact, the notion of Karma so diffuses the location of merit and de-merit, makes them such mobile and transferable qualities that it is impossible to track causality. Sinners too, can go to heaven, despite their intentions—if they happen simply to be in contact with some salvaging ritualistic practice. What sort of moral universe can be sustained if there is such a weak relation between intention and consequence?

More disappointing in this important book is Doniger’s treatment of recent history. Kipling and Foster are her orienting stars in discussing the colonial period, and she conveys little sense of the intellectual ferment in India at the time—the many experiments with religion, politics, caste, and the different meanings that Hindu ‘reform’ came to hold. This leads directly to the book’s greatest weakness—the absence of any serious explanation of Hindutva. Doniger has a potent—indeed, quite felt—sense of its presence and projectile capacity, and has had occasion to reflect on it. But while she has roustabout fun at the expense of the adepts of Hindutva, she doesn’t stop to ask what it is about the potentialities within Hinduism, and what it is about the Hindus at this point in their history, that have conspired to breathe life into such versions of Hinduism. Her capacity for ‘double vision’, for empathy and criticism, here fails.

Doniger is an unstoppable teller of tales and a brilliant interpreter of them also. Yet, occasionally, one feels that, rather than delve deeper into the contradictions of history, she too, like her subjects stretching back many thousands of years, prefers just to tell one more story.