An affection for Chennai

Excerpts

‘Once a stranger came to the door. He was lost,’ recounted Indu. ‘As he held out the paper with the address, I saw a scorpion near his foot. Had I warned him, he might have stepped back on it. So without saying a word, I held his hand and pulled him in. He was alarmed! Then I pointed to the scorpion and he got even more scared. When I called Krishnan, instead of shooing it away, he got out his camera while the great botanist Dr. Swamy, who was visiting, said it was so magnificent he would take it home. Mrs. Swamy said, “I am not coming home with you if you do that.” Then I asked Krishnan, “Were you not surprised to find a trembling young man?” He replied, “It’s hardly an unusual thing to find here”!’

Those of us who love Chennai know that it is unique. It is like no other Indian city in that, despite being a metropolis, it displays none of the extremes or eccentricities of the average metro. It is a level-headed space that allows you to grow (or regress or remain in one place) at your own pace. You can go pubbing, party, lead a frenetic social life. You can, on the other hand, be your conservative Madras self – drinking filter coffee, reading The Hindu, listening to cutcheries, or visiting temples. Nobody is judgemental about either lifestyle. It is a reasonably safe city, as many settlers from elsewhere will vouch. Its drawbacks are its humid weather, lack of civic aesthetics, and the increasing madness of its traffic. Despite that, ask any sweating, puffing, cursing Chennaiite whether he would like to live anywhere else in the world, and the answer would be an unequivocal ‘no’.

There are many ways of describing a city. Tulsi Badrinath’s Madras, Chennai and the Self describes the city through its people. A string of profiles of well-known, and not-so-well-known residents of the city cleverly threads descriptions of Chennai through her own memories and experiences of the city and those of the people she has interviewed.

Madras, Chennai... is also about the changing face of this 375 year old city. Tulsi portrays this change by seeing the city through the eyes of the people she has interviewed and observing how they have coped with these changes. Take K. Seshadri, the amiable priest of the Ashtalakshmi temple in Besant Nagar.A small-town boy, he had been trained by his father from childhood to serve as a temple priest. Yet, after he moved to Chennai to serve in the Ashtalakshmi Temple, Seshadri, always fitness oriented, became curious about karate after watching a demonstration on TV. He found a teacher and practised with him in gruelling sessions that eventually paid off by getting him a Black Belt. His father was aghast, people around him were tickled by the idea of a vegetarian priest mastering the art of self-defence. The fisherfolk in Besant Nagar began affectionately addressing him as Japan Iyer, and he was suddenly the darling of the media. Seshadri continues to serve as a priest in the same temple and still practises his Karate. That makes sense in a city where, ever since the dawn of the rationalist movement, Brahmin priests have often been the victims of casteist attacks.

There is also the story of Saravana Sakthivel, who struggles to run his family’s snuff factory in an atmosphere that is distinctly hostile to tobacco use. Known as ‘Patnam Podi’, snuff was once the most popularly used form of tobacco in Chennai. Not that many use it any longer – it’s pretty messy to begin with, and, with increasing governmental taxation on tobacco products, it is no longer profitable to manufacture it. From a remarkably lucrative business, snuff-making has shrunk to the level of a cottage industry and Sakthivel continues with it only to keep up the family tradition.

Integral to the history of Madras are the Nawabs of the Carnatic, who began ruling over much of this area when it was bestowed on them by Emperor Aurangazeb. Their present-day representative, the Nawab of Arcot, however, presides over a territory that has shrunk to the compound walls of the Arcot Palace, his elegant home in Chepauk. The British took away most of the land under the Arcot Nawabs’ command. “Sab cheen liya. They looted us and left us with nothing,” the present–day Nawab says sadly. A courteous and elegant man, he talks fondly of the excellent Hindu-Muslim harmony that existed and, to a great extent, still does in Chennai.

Everyone knows how cricket-crazy Chennai’s residents are. In the profile on cricketer, writer and editor V.Ramnarayan, Tulsi acknowledges the city’s passion for this sport in nostalgia-soaked reminiscences of cricket in the city before the advent of IPL and Twenty-Twenty matches.

In profiling the renowned late photographer, M. Krishnan and his wife, Indu, Tulsi recalls a Chennai that was slower of pace, more gracious and where people had time pause, observed Nature and chatted leisurely over cups of filter coffee.

Tulsi’s affection for Chennai is obvious and so is a steady element in all her writing. Her language is simple and evocative and perfectly suits the personality of the city she describes – multi-layered and unadorned. In describing the personalities she has profiled, the author also brings in the history and topography of the places they inhabit so that the reader gets a complete package – environment and inhabitants.

If there is anything at all to complain about in this delightful book, it is the lack of material about North Madras, the bustling and dark underbelly of the city. But, then, that is a subject for a whole new book.

– J.V.
Madras, Chennai and the Self by Tulsi
Badrinath (Pan Macmillan).