 Tamil politics makes a point of celebrating its heroes. And how! In the past week a grandiose memorial has been inaugurated to M. Karunanidhi, who spent almost twenty years over four spells as chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu. He died in August 2018 at the age of 94. His son, Stalin, is Tamil Nadu's current chief minister.  The memorial-cum-resting place-cum-shrine is on a spectacular scale and, as is customary here, is on a large plot alongside Marina beach in the centre of Chennai. The design makes much of Karunanidhi's hallmark - the dark glasses he always wore. The partly translucent white marble is from Vietnam. Stalin, at the inauguration, said the memorial to his father was a 'first wonder' on what he described as the second longest beach in the world. When I visited on Saturday, there was a stready stream of people strolling around - many of them families, and some picnicking in the grounds.  Karunanidhi began his career as a scriptwriter in the Tamil film industry. His great rival Jayalalithaa - who spent fourteen years in Tamil Nadu's top job and died in 2016 - started off as an actor. Strikingly, her similarly OTT memorial is on an adjoining plot, again overlooking Marina beach. I suspect, though I can't say for certain, that quite a few of those promenading round Karunanidhi's memorial also paid a call at Jayalalithaa's while they were in town. And then, I'm sure, they made for the beach, which is crammed with food stalls and lots of other excitements.
And of course, the new memorial is quite the place for selfies and group photos - a pity I didn't take one myself.    Unlike the memorials to national political leaders in Delhi, Chennai's monuments are neither flyblown nor particularly solemn. You go there with a smile on your face not a tear in your eye.
And then, of all things, I came across the old man himself on Marina beach - and, yes, I have a photo to prove it. 
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 What a place! This is the unkempt, desolate beauty of St Mary's burial ground in the Island district of Chennai. It's not the oldest Anglican cemetery in Chennai - but it is, I believe, the biggest of the Raj-era Christian burial grounds in the city. As you can see, much of it is overgrown - some of the monuments are in deep disrepair, and have been for a while, and there's a problem with vandalism and trespass. BACSA, the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, is supporting conservation work here. But this astonishing, sizable site - surely the most important colonial-era burial place in India after Park Street in Calcutta - gets next-to-no visitors. That's in part because hardly anyone knows it's here - even some of those who know of it, can't find it - and when you do reach the place, it's not exactly welcoming for visitors.  This is the entrance to the cemetery - on a slip road off a very busy flyover (in the distance you can see the gateway to a Catholic cemetery and church). There's next-to-no signage outside, only a small plaque saying there are Commonwealth War Graves here. Inside, there's no signage at all - no map, no note of significant burials, nothing.  The gates to the cemetery are permanently padlocked. You enter through an unmarked pedestrian gate - the red metal gate you can just spot on the far left of one the photos above. This video may help you to find the place and navigate your way in to the burial ground. Intitially the British used a guava garden as a burial spot - that's on what is now the site of Chennai's High Court. Many of the old gravestones were moved to the fairly cramped grounds of St Mary's church in Fort - a beautiful church, still very much in use, and the oldest Anglican church in India. This overspill burial ground in the Island opened in the 1760s, and for the next sixty years - until the opening of St George's Cathedral - was the main place of burial of the British elite here. By the end of the nineteenth century, the number of burials here started to fall away. On the far side of the cemetery from the entrance, there are two well-kept Commonwealth War Grave compounds. The burial ground is still used for occasional interments. I understand it continues to fall under the jurisdiction of St Mary's church, which is now part of the Church of South India. The main focus of the current conservation work is the Anderson memorial, the burial place of the distinguished botanist and physician James Anderson (1738-1809). The memorial desperately needs a helping hand.   The work so far has included repointing the exterior, a new application of lime mortar wash to the interior, and remaking the steps up to the memorial. The granite slab in Latin is badly damaged and also urgently needs conservation work. The big problem is the tree growing out of the upper part of the memorial, and the shrubs and trunks which have become completely entwined with the structure. This mingling of the living and the dead is of course itself elegiac, and the task is to conserve rather than to restore the most notable memorials. But the vegetation makes it impossible to replace some of the stonework which has been displaced and lies around the memorial, and it also may frustrate installing a glass canopy to protect from rainwater seepage. One of the more remarkable aspects of the memorial is the name 'Anderson' which appears on all four sides of the memorial, in four different languages and scripts: English, Urdu, Tamil and (we think) Telugu. Quite a statement of acculturation!  As part of the conservation work, the broad main path through the cemetery is being cleared and resurfaced in stone. This photo shows a narrower, unmarked path off to the left. It heads towards the war graves - two plots, broadly one from the First World War and the other from the Second World War.
One disappointment: the plaque marking the grave of Adela or Violet Nicolson, who wrote transgressively as Laurence Hope, is lost under this sea of vegetation. I have visited this grave in the past and placed flowers, but for the moment it's submerged. She deserves better.  My thanks to Sravani Naraparaju, architect and conservator, who is leading on the conservation work and very kindly showed me round. And to Anil Mahto, who is the supervisor of the small team who are doing the heavy lifting.
 Labour under no illusions - Chennai's pavements are not designed for pedestrians. If you try to promenade along the pavement, you have to watch out for trees taking up the entire width ... parked cars making the sidewalk all but impassable ... stray scooters, parked or deserted or somewhere inbetween ... mounds of excess building materials ... and then there's the press wallah stalls (for the ironing), the sabzi wallah stands (selling vegetables), the roadside shrines (selling, well, you decide) ... the heaps of discarded vegetation ... the hazard of cracked, or missing, manhole covers ... and of low-hanging electricity wires ... and then the sleeping dogs, the starving dogs, the mating dogs. I'm not complaining - OK, I am complaining, but not too loudly. Because in Chennai so much of life - rest, recreation, retail, labour - happens outdoors, there's always something to see, even in a stroll around manicured middle-class parts of town. I like that. But to walk - regarded here as a little bit of an eccentricity - you have to take to the road. And that really is hazardous. In the food chain of Chennai road users, pedestrians are right at the bottom, They are given no quarter. Walking the streets of Chennai, cyclists and scooters often quite literally brush past. So too on occasions do impatient cars and autos. And let's not talk about the buses.  But now I've come across another obstacle ... what looks to be a mini landgrab, a pavement privatisation, a sidewalk denied to walkers, on a street close to where I stay. A wire fence has come up, complete with sturdy metal posts, annexing part of the pavement to the adjoining house. Remember the enclosures in England which turned common land into private fields - well, it seems to be happening here with sidewalks. I haven't examined the issue in great detail. I am not accusing aynone of wrongdoing and would never dream of using the term 'encroachment' - perhaps this stretch of the pavement is indeed privately owned, or permission has been granted to put up the fence. All I know is that for the pedestrian, it makes a stretch of sidewalk even more inaccesible.  At first I wondered if the wire fencing was intended to stop scooters parking on this stretch of pavement, and was designed to help rather than hinder the walker. But no, the fence is capped off at one end. No through sidewalk! I know this is not the most pressing issue facing the city. But please, can I plead for sidewalks that we can walk on!!   Chinese dentists are still quite a thing in India. I went for a heritage walk in Chennai this afternoon - and came across three Chinese dental surgeries. But then, we were walking along China Bazaar. We gathered, thirty or more heritage enthusiasts, at one end of Evening Bazaar. This broad avenue is at the landward side of Fort St George, the initial British settlement in what was Madras.  This was initially known as Thieving Bazaar- a thieves market, reselling all the stuff that conveniently fell off the catamarans which brought ashore the cargo from seagoing vessels. 'Thieving Bazaar' became the altogether more poetic 'Evening Bazaar'. That has subsumed stretches of what was, and to some still is, China Bazaar. And then the street turns into Rattan Bazaar, taking its name from the flexible palm wood which is so versatile for furniture and flooring.  It's largely coincidence that there's a cluster of Chinese dental practices on China Bazaar. The old street name was probably derived from a market in ceramics rather than the place.. And the name long predates the Chinese dentists who started coming to India perhaps a century ago - initially dominating the upper echelons of dentistry in Calcutta before branching out to other Indian cities.   There's not a lot beyond the old street lay-out which takes us back to the original bazaar. But some of the surviving buildings from the first-half of the last century have more than a bit of style.   We started the walk close to the Memorial Hall, still owned by the Church of South India but clearly in deep disrepair. It was built in 1857. What was it memorialising?  1857 ... ring a bell? The hall was built to give thanks for Britain's victory in the great rebellion of that year, what was once called the Indian Mutiny and is now sometimes known (equally unreliably) as the First War of Independence.  At the other end of the walk, we encountered the statue of King George V, who visited Madras in 1911, the year of the great Delhi Durbar. The king bestowed his name to what was once known as 'black town' - to distinguish it from the township where the whites lived inside the walls of Fort St George. It's now Georgetown.. A pity that a bush is growing up the royal leg - that people piss here in the morning - and get pissed here in the evening. But these are the hazards that befall forgotten emperors.  The king looks out on what was once the leading school for local boys - built about 1850, its architecture influenced by classical Greece, and now about as stranded on the tides of time as classical Greek  The rosewood furniture and fittings are said to be still in place inside. But as the door is firmly locked, we'll have to talk our guide's word for that. The walk was organised by Chennai Past Forward and led by the incomparable, legendary, Sriram V. Thank you, Sriram!
 The urban cowkeeper is an occupation which is dying out in much of India. Once it was entirely normal to see a cow strolling through city streets and snacking on the rubbish which accumulates in the gutters. Now the press of vehicles, and the meagre economics of small-scale cowkeeping, have made the big city cow, and city cowkeeper, something of a rarity, at least in the country's principal urban centres..  Near the college where I teach, in an area of Chennai where the roads are quiet and where there's a bit of greenery, it's still fairly standard to see cows and their keepers. It's usually a job for older men - they often are just caring for a couple of cows, and I suspect they are doing the work out of custom and habit as much as to earn a living. These two cows caught my attention because they are so clearly well cared for - with painted horns, and in one case a necklace to match.  I asked what the cows were called. But my query, in basic Hindi (yes, I know the cowkeeper was almost certainly a Tamil speaker), drew the one word response: 'cow'. In English! And I never discovered the name of the cowkeeper himself.  There's a little bit of grass for the cows to graze, but they also stick their noses into a lot of the rubbish which, alas, is strewn along the roadsides. Not very appetising! At least not for me - it seems to work for the cows. The two cows took divergent routes -within sight of each other but not exactly close grazing companions. But I finally managed a shot which included both beasts and their keeper.   My first day back in Chennai, a wonderful city where I'm teaching for an eighth successive year. And what do I come across just outside where I am staying? This unholy trinity: Ambedkar, Periyar, Marx.  They were on the back of Ganesh's auto-rick. And he was very happy to get out of his auto - I confess I interrupted his snooze - to be photographed with his political icons. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) is the great political hero of India's Dalits and a distinguished jurist who was the main figure in the drafting of India's constitution. Periyar (1879-1973) is regarded as the founder of the Dravidian moverment in Tamil Nadu, and renowned as an opponent of caste privilege and as a crusading atheist. And Karl Marx (1818-1883) is the German-born political philosopher who gave his name to Marxism and is regarded as providing the ideological foundations of communism. The quote in Tamil which accompanies the three stylised portraits is from Ambedkar.  When you think of communism in India, Kerala springs to mind - the only state which currently has a communist chief minister; and also West Bengal, which was for decades a CP stronghold, though not any longer. But of the five seats in the directly elected house of the Indian Parliament currently held by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its rivals the Communist Party of India, four represent constituencies in Tamil Nadu. That's not because Tamil Nadu is inclining to the hard left, more a result of both parties' place in an alliance led by the DMK, the centre-left party which currently dominates Tamil politics.
To be honest, there's not much to suggest that either Marx or the hammer and sickle is making much of a mark in politics here.
But it's heartening to come across this gathering of the historical greats in an unexpected place - on the back of a Chennai auto-rick!
Introducing one of the most beautiful birds I've ever seen - the Indian paradise flycatcher. These are not my photos, alas. But I have had the good fortune to glimpse this elusive bird while in Chennai in both colourings. The birds pictured are both males. Alongside the college I teach at in Chennai is a piece of land which has largely reverted to jungle. It's said that there's a haunted guest house hidden behind the foliage. There, on about a dozen occasions, I've seen the white version of this magical bird. It's sometimes perched under a dense canopy of branches, biding its time. Then it moves in staccato fashion, catching the eye with the flash of its amazing tail feathers. It rests for a moment, and then it's gone. Al least, that's my excuse for not managing even a passable photo. I did get a couple of hurried shots on my phone. Here they are, as taken and then zooming in on this little dash of paradise.
No, I know they won't win any prizes. Nor will my video clips, but you do get a sense of the vivid splash of colour when it flits around And there's another touch of it here - that tail must be 40 or 50 centimetres! And then at the Theosophical Society's headquarters here the other day, I had the great good fortune to see, albeit fleetingly, the rufus-coloured version of this same species. Spectacular! Once again, my photography didn't quite live up to the moment - but here goes -  I did say it was just a glimpse of paradise - but what a joy!
 T Nagar is the beating commercial heart of Chennai. It's where the big silk and sari shops are, and the glitzy jewellery stores, and where Pondi Bazaar pulls in the punters. The locality's full name - which absolutely nobody uses - is Theagaraya Nagar and it was developed from the 1920s, though even the older commercial buildings now standing don't date back beyond the 1950s. I went for a heritage walk round T Nagar this morning with Madras Inherited, looking at - among other things - the more traditional shops and businesses and the signage they use.  Pandian Coffees are traditional coffee roasters, producing the filter coffee for which South India is (justly) famous. The signage is in enamel - a sign of something close to antiquity in this bustling, fast evolving neighbourhood (if it doesn't look all hustle-and-bustle in this photo, that's because it was taken at half-past-six in the morning).
Almost next door is a traditional men's hairdressers, complete with old style barber's chairs and mirrors. The signage here is striking - it's wood, with each letter (in Tamil and English) made individually.  The adjoining khadi store - selling goods made from home-spun cotton - has signs in three languages. The one in the middle in purple is Telugu, principally spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but once widely spoken here by newcomers to the city from elsewhere in the south.  This is the most elegantly signed shopfront - the original business premises of Nalli's the famous sari shop. It has a massive store just next door. The lettering is in an Art Deco style font. Although the business was established in 1928, this shop and frontage dates from the early 1950s.  Gama Pens, famed for their fountain pens, no longer trades in T Nagar - though it still has a branch in George Town not too far away. But the electric signage remains in place, for the moment at least.  Salam Stores was still firmly shuttered when we went past, but it retains a loyal - if ageing - clientele.  Here's Ashmitha from Madras Inherited holding forth outside a shutter which invites the passer-by to have a cuppa - a pity that when the shutter is down, there's no cuppa on offer.  And if you are wondering what sort of people get up before dawn on a rain-soaked Saturday morning to walk round a range of shuttered shop fronts, here's your answer!   This is Annie Besant - one of the most remarkable, and complex, figures in the annals of British radicalism. She was in, the first halfof her life, a renowned and outspoken freethinker, advocate of birth control, Fabian socialist and campaigner for women's rights. Then in about 1890, when she was in her forties, she came across theosophy, a spiritual movement which sought to syncretise the best of the principal global religions and which drew particularly on Hinduism and Buddhism. Besant moved to Madras (now Chennai) in South India, the global centre of the theosophist movement, and it became her principal home for the rest of her life. She remained a radical, becoming prominent in the Indian nationalist and home rule movements, and she was an ardent supporter of women's suffrage.  This excellent portrait - which I had never seen before - is in the small but well-kept and recently refurbished museum at the theosophists' international HQ at Adyar in Chennai. You can feel the sternness in that gaze! Adyar is where Besant died and was cremated in 1933. The theosophist HQ also has a bust of Besant.  What I hadn't realised until I visited the museum was that Besant was also a very active freemason. One of the display cases exhibits dozens of engraved plasterers' trowels presented to Besant by women masons in India. When I said to the German theosophist who presides over the museum: 'Besant was a mason?!', he replied - very reasonably: 'What wasn't she?'  The sprawling Adyar campus, and the theosophists' headquarters building, looked serene - better cared for than on my previous visit and altogether a wonderful place to spend a couple of hours. I was a little underwhelmed by the Giant Banyan Tree, but the roosting fruit bats were something else!   The rail station at Egmore is an Indo-Saracenic architectural masterpiece. It's huge, glorious and a throwback to another era. Some of the detail is simply stunning. Take a look above the portico - there's an ornate elephant, the symbol of the South Indian Railway Company (now Southern Railways which explains why the 'I' has been painted out). The station was inaugurated on 11 June 1908, almost forty years before India gained independence. In a city which has some spectacular buildings, this station is certainly among Chennai's highlights. 
My visit this morning was prompted by a newspaper article extolling the majesty of Egmore station - and disclosing that it's about to undergo a three-year redevelopment programme. While this will respect the original structure and design, the rail station will, once spruced up, 'wear the look of an airport', according to Southern Railways. This doesn't strike me as hugely reassuring. I hope INTACH and other organisations which have a marevllous record in safeguarding's Chennai's architectural heritage can ensure that the spirit, elegance and charm of the original building is maintained.  The detail in and around the entrance hall is entrancing - you don't get any of this at Euston or Waterloo, more's the pity.     The station's upkeep isn'tperfect - but it is a much used, and loved, terminus. And generally, it's not in too bad a state.     Egmore has some of those institutions which are such a hallmark of an Indian railway station, though they do sometime alarm foreign visitors ...
And from the walkways you can catch a glimpse of an even more elegant and historic Egmore building, St Andrew's Scots Kirk (the rear entry to the station is just alongside the Kirk)  While at the station, I saw a sign pointing up a sturdy wooden staircase to the retiring rooms, so that's where I went ...
These rooms which passengers can hire for a few hours or overnight open onto a light, spacious outdoor corridor - which has the feel of one of the oldest and least changed corners of this magnificent structure  And a terrace on top of the portico offers a marvellous vantage point on the station's sumptuous frontage  Let's hope that the splendour of Egmore station is enhanced rather than diluted as the redevelopment work gets underway.  |
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