The month of August in Chennai is earmarked for the celebration of a city steeped in culture and heritage, a city slowly becoming the hub for art and culture. Chennaites responded in tandem, to an unuttered call to celebrate its 369th birthday on 22 August.
This year, people on an ad hoc basis, organised events that went on from 17 to 24 August - marked by heritage walks, quizzes, exhibitions, stories, marathons, etc. ‘Madras Week’ is now a reality. Notably, most events celebrated a city that was. Heritage was writ large in Chennai’s mind.
Instantly, the name ‘Madras’ conjures up nostalgic visions of the city – of a leisurely lifestyle, of balmy afternoons, independent houses, carnatic music, Tamil drama, Bharata Natyam, temples, the Marina beach, lush green avenues, and more. Utter the name ‘Chennai’ and you are on a different bandwidth altogether. When did the metamorphosis from Madras to Chennai happen?
Madras to Chennai - a train of thoughts
According to a report in The Hindu, a sliver of land around the present Fort St George area was handed over to the British East India Company by the local Nayak rulers in 1639. Fort St George was the nucleus, a trading warehouse that the British built. Settlements sprung around it and the ripple spread to form the city of Madras.
At the time of Madras Week, with several heritage talks and walks going around, this insight into the origin of Madras, however realistic, strikes as a trifl e placid. Surely there has to be something more dramatic than that? A foray into the wired grapevine, the Chennai blogs, revealed some interesting possibilities.
Excuse us Shakespeare, everything’s in the name
How did the name ‘Madras’ come by? Venkatappa Nayak gave away a piece of
this land around the St George Fort area to a British agent Francis Day. He wanted the British to establish a township and name it after his father Chennappa Naik. There is an offi cial record of this transaction. The British called the land Chennapattinam and cocktail discussions often centered around this topic. “What a mad arasan (Tamil for king), to give away land for free, just to be named after his father!” The mad arasan’s pattinam (town) project became known as Madras and the name stuck, at least with the
English. The British made Madras their Southern base merging Chennapattinam and a small coastal fi shing village and called it Madraspattinam. Another flight of imagination emerges - maybe this town was the place where rebels were kept in detention, the place where all the Indian ‘mad rascals’ were confi ned in prisons and that’s how the evolution of the name Madras came about. Yet another twist points to the small fi shing hamlet Madraspattinam, linking the name to Portuguese origins.
Whatever the reason, mad arasan’s pattinam that came for nothing to the British, benefi tted from the architectural grandeur of the Colonial era – the pattinam’s luscious green avenues became dotted with several English mansions, hidden and cooled by the greenery and space around. The British left behind these mansions and of course the Queen’s English which to this day, many South Indians savour.
Symbolically, the official name change in 1996, from Madras to Chennai brought about the metamorphosis. Chennai is no longer as ‘heritageous’ as it was in the garb of Madras.
The economic liberalisation of that time brought the bulldozers into this land. Chennapattinam’s efforts to become singarapattinam (beautiful town) razed to the ground some of the mansions or kept them hidden behind huge hoardings, glass and steel of the high-rise modern structures. The city’s skyline (if there is one) today is as confusing as the people living in it, a melting pot of northern, southern and overseas cultures, trying to be a concrete jungle of a metropolis when in truth, it’s heart is not. Chennai’s heart is still beating to the heritage of its past, of its traditions and of its truly Southern flavour.
The heritage pulse
Chennai is characteristic of two seasons - the hot season and the music season. Come December, hordes of music fans from everywhere clog air-traffic and make it to the traditional music festival. November-December pulsates to the rhythm of classical music, dance and drama with the recent inclusion of Western classical music and theatre. Chennai loves its tradition, its culture and its history, and, the people who created it - truly, an obsession with the past.
A heritage walk around the city would unveil the heritage landmarks but adding on a history walk with eyes focused on the roads is a new revelation. The revelation has nothing to do with God’s grace that is bestowed on pedestrians, gingerly eschewing the vehicles on the road by the skin of their teeth but more to do with the road names honouring the luminaries of Chennai – eminent people who gave colour to Madras and some to the nation. We have, Anna Salai (Salai is Tamil for road), MGR Road, Uthamar Gandhi Salai, Dr Radhakrishnan Road, T T Krishnamachari (TTK) Road, Rajaji Salai, Kalki Krishnamoorthy Road (Lattice Bridge Road alias LB Road), Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar Salai (erstwhile Chamiers Road), Sardar Patel Road, Kamaraj Avenue, Besant Avenue, Avvai Shanmugam Salai, Dr Renga Road, Vellayan Road, Gopathy Narayana Chetty Road (GN Chetty Road) and so on.
The British set the trend in borrowing people’s names for roads-Binny Road, General Patterson Road, Turnbulls Road, Edward Elliots Road, Mowbray’s Road, Conran Smith Road, etc., and it continues to this day. Blame it on the old habits’ diehard persistence, some old names refuse to go away to make way for the Tamilian twist. No matter what, Anna Salai in popular parlance is still Mount Road and Chamiers Road refuses to be called by any other name. The point is, everything is indeed in the name.
Yet another finger on the Chennai pulse reveals the inclination towards ‘acronames’. Names are often shortened to their bare initials and the acronames stick, such as, MGR, EVR, DMK, Thiru vi ka, TTK, etc. Now what does this imply for the future?
Gadgets are getting smaller and the English language which sadly the Queen seems to have lost hold on has become acronym-ised by the gadget savvy SMS generation. Will the names so carefully selected be cut short to symbols and letters? Would Foreshore Estate be reduced to 4SHR S8, Chennai dwarfed to Chn I or in the typically Tamilian ‘acroname’ – CNI? One wonders how the up market metropolis with its skyscrapers, fl yovers and interchanges of the future will evolve - Madras to Chennai to what?
Can keeping Madras alive bring back its old world charm to Chennai? Should we let sleeping charms lie? Should Chennai reserve a heritage corner for Madras in its heart? There is so much in the name; MAS-2 B or not 2 B is D ? (Madras - to be or not to be, is the question).