The forgotten chemist

In her article on the Big Temple restorer K.R. Srinivasan (MM, December 1st) Dr. Chitra Madhavan justifiably laments that this outstanding archaeologist was not even mentioned in the din of recent celebrations of the millennium year of construction of this great temple. She has also written that chemical conservation of the Chola paintings in this temple was initiated by him.

Unfortunately, credit has not also been given to the chemist of the Department of Archaeology, S. Subbaraman. He was the person who painstakingly restored the Chola paintings after removing the Naik paintings which were plastered over the Chola paintings. Only once, if I remember right, has he been mentioned in a newspaper article – and that was by eminent archaeologist Satyamoorthy.

Subbaraman, after joining the Department, was sent to Tirumalai, a well-known Jain centre in the erstwhile North Arcot District, to restore and conserve the paintings in a cave in the Jain temple. Incidentally, the great Raja Raja Chola himself had given manyam-s to this temple. These paintings can be seen even today.

After completing this work, Subbaraman was sent to Italy to study, further, conservation techniques. On his return, after a stint in Calcutta, he was sent to Cambodia to do chemical restoration work in the famous Angkor Vat temples. He was the only chemist (or one of the chemists?) drafted for restoration work in the Senate House conservation in Chennai. But he was not even invited to the reopening function by the organisers when, if I remember right, President Dr. Abdul Kalam graced it!

My association with him goes back to 1953 when he came to Tirumalai – a village next to ours – and I was one of a few in the village with whom he could spend his spare hours. He was also a great fan of P.G. Wodehouse and presented me a copy of Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, which is still with me! He now lives in Bangalore and the paintings in the Big Temple will remember him for having restored them literally to life.

Dr. G. Sundaram, i.a.s. (rtd.)
A-601, 'Dugar Apartments', Keshav Perumal Puram
Greenways Road, Chennai 600 028

Chennai mosaic...

‘All roads lead to Chennai’ (MM, November 16th) omits mention of the many Gurkhas from the Northeast who have made Chennai their home. Quite a few of them are in North Chennai. They speak Tamil fluently and function as night watchmen. All of them are called ‘Bahadurs’ (brave men). Actually they are not so brave because they advertise their presence in the ungodly hours by banging their lathi on the road so that if any thief is plying his trade he will lie low and resume after Bahadur passes by!

Among the upper-middle/ upper classes, there are the Sardarjis with their patkas. Many of them are in the automobile parts business and are at home in Tamil.

... & horsing around

Reference Ranjitha Ashok’s take on children’s birthday parties in Chennai (MM, Dec. 1st) conducted by society Moms who wear the pants in the house.

1. The right word for horse ‘mahout’ is ‘groom’ or ‘ostler’.

2. The reason why the Moms want the terrified kids to sit on the terrified mounts is symbolic. They wish the child will be in the saddle in future domestic and official life.

It all goes to show that Madras conservatism is vanishing. Moneybags and those with money love to horse around.

C.G. Prasad
9, C.S. Mudali Street
Kondithope, Chennai 600 079

More on crows

Crows (MM, Oct. 16th), are ubiquitous social birds, always associated with human haunts. They are clever, cunning and, at times, rougish. They are also good scavengers and are often seen removing garbage from public dust bins. Crows have a biological clock in them. It is the first bird to herald the dawn of a new day.

There is an elder cousin of the crow which is bigger, uniformly black and much rarer and is known as the jungle crow. I have seen an albino crow at Mandapam Camp; it was off-white. The other crows did not take kindly to it and tried to chase it away. The female koel outsmarts the cunning crow by laying its eggs in a crow’s nest, making the crow raise its young ones. Salim Ali reports as many as seven koel eggs in addition to two eggs of its own in a crow’s nest! The male and female crows had to work overtime to feed nine chicks!

My first encounter with a crow was in 1963 when I was a research scholar at Mandapam Camp. I used to keep an aluminium vessel with a lid outside my room for milk. The milkman used to come early morning and pour milk into the vessel. A crow used to push off the lid and scatter the milk on the ground. Later, I used to place a stone over the lid. It was of no use; the crow used to push the stone away and push the lid off, scattering the milk. In sheer desperation I kept a big old mud pot on the lid to scare away the crow. The next morning, the crow had pushed away the lid and the mud pot broke with a big thud. I gave up my fight with the crow. Till today I do not know what devilish pleasure the crow derived in spilling my milk daily.

The crow also remembers a person. Once, a person went up to a crow’s nest and removed its eggs. Whenever that person came out, the crow used to strike him on the head. Whenever a crow’s eggs are stolen, it invites all the other crows and makes the neighbourhood noisy. If a young one accidentally falls to the ground, it calls all the crows to protect the young one from stray dogs.

Though I lived in South Point at Port Blair (Andamans) for three years I did not see a single crow there. Maybe suitable trees were not available there for it to build nests. But I am told that the crow is distributed in the Andamans.

A crow remembers time and place correctly. In Chennai, my mother used to feed a disabled crow daily at 11 a.m. with bits of chapatti-s. It used to sit on a mango tree and call my mother to feed it.

The narikuravas at Ennore and elsewhere have an obnoxious habit of selling dressed crows as partridges! First the head and legs are cut off. The feathers are removed along with the skin and the entrails are thrown out. A few feathers of partridges are stuck to the flesh of the crows to pass them off as partridges! One day, I was horrified to find the heads of a large number of crows along with heads of a few kites behind the Fisheries guesthouse in Ennore.

A large number of crows spend their nights in the trees behind the High Court in Chennai. One day I saw a narikurava bringing down half a dozen crows with a catapult. When the crows fell to the ground due to injury, he collected them quickly and put that in a gunny bag and left. The same crows were sold as partridges in the Ennore market next day! At Tuticorin I have also seen a man feeding crows with boiled rice mixed with a sedative. After eating the rice, the crows become unconcious. He quickly put them in a gunny bag and left to sell them as partridges next day.

Dr. D.B. James
37, Sadasiva Mehta Street
Mehta Nagar
Chennai 600 028