• Speaking at the release of A Madras Miscellany – A Decade of People, Places and Potpourri, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, former Governor of West Bengal and a heritage enthusiast, called for a Heritage Commission and greater attention to be paid to the Coastal Regulation Zone rules. Leading up to that appeal he stated, inter alia:

Generalisations about Madras are out.

Generalise about music in Madras and you could go dangerously wrong. A single- feather touch on a veena could vibrate Shanmukhavadivu into our consciousness, or Dhanamma out of its reverberating retreat. A double-feather touch, on a thick plectrum held tight, could bring Balachander in and lead Semmangudi Srinivasier, holding a picture of Swati Tirunal, to say ‘Sariappa Gopu, naan kilambuhiren…’

Gopal Krishna Gandhi

Lalgudi and T.N. Krishnan could belong in the same age, but they are not on the same page.

Chennai has ever been about choices, delectable choices for favourites, Sir Arcot Ramaswami Mudaliar or his brother, younger by 47 minutes, Sir Arcot Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, The Hindu or Indian Express, Dinamani or Swadesamitran, Sivaji Ganesan or Gemini Ganesan, P. Suseela or L.R. Easwari, Sankara Nethralaya or Dr. Agarwal’s Clinic, Marina or Elliott’s, Woodlands or Dasaprakash or, now, Grand Sweets or Sri Krishna Sweets, T.M. Krishna or Sanjay Subramaniam, Sudha Raghunathan or Bombay Jayashri. You could go on and on.

Praise Subbulakshmi’s ethereal voice and a Pattammal fan will remind you that there is something called sahityam in music as well.

‘Rajagopalachari’s blue-diamond intellect…’ you begin to say and you will be told, ‘What about the silver-tongued Srinavasa Sastri…?’

‘That is quite all right… He was silver-tongued, all right…’ and you will again be set right... ‘But you do not know that Satyamurti once followed Sastriar in the speaking order after the audience had been mesemerised by the silver oratory and, clearing his throat, simply said, “Sahodara Sahodarigale, Nammudaiya Srinivasa Sastri…avar oru mahaanubhaavar…” And that was that… the audience was with Satyamurti lock, stock and barrel.

The cover of the book recently released by Gopal Krishna Gandhi.

Such is the miscellany of Madras. So  teeming in wildlife in Guindy, you have to wave an arm and you will touch cheetal. So dense with trees is the Theosophical Society, so still, you can hear at Leadbeater’s Chamber a gecko outside Smt. Radha Burnier’s Parsi Quarters going tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk or, at the parking lot near its library, the frenzied biped above Colonel Olcott’s samadhi go ‘Brain Fever, Brain Fever…’

Madras, so thick with vehicles, people, so scarred by graffiti, so marred with hoardings on Anna Salai, you want to mask your nose, close your eyes, plug your ears and would block your nose too, but you are not yet ready to die.

Madras, so calm in Kalakshetra, so gentle with strains of a Chaurukesi being sung from one of the cottages, or the nattuvangam notes of bell-metal punctuating the stillness from another pavilion.

Madras, just outside that oasis, with belching  methane, squelching litter, is also Madras. If Kalakshetra teaches everything but is yet to start an MA course in humour, a brave signboard, not of Kalakshetra but of an optimistic self-employed establishment just outside Kalakshetra’s gate says, ’Carnatic Music Taught Here’. And an istri-vandi, with a sense of humour, announces itself a hundred yards from Kalakshetra, ‘Ironing Here – Yogaskhetra’.

No generalisation can be made about Madras, about Chennai, about ourselves as Indians.

But still, with serious trepidation, I will venture to make the following sweeping comments about us as a people: We Indians cherish our history, but neglect our heritage. We commemorate; we do not conserve. We substitute the responsibility of caring by the exhilaration of celebrating. We decorate where we should restore, we ‘beautify’ where plain cleaning is called for, preferring to renovate, refurbish, rename and even to replace, rather than repair, renew, restore. To the delight of realtors and developers, the Brahma in us remains active; so is the Siva. But not the Vishnu.

Why are we, who take pride in being naturally good and caring to our elders (are we, in reality?), so neglectful of our material heritage? It is said, is it not, that a society is to be judged by how it treats its elders? HelpAge and Heritage are kin.

Someone might justifiably interject: ‘Are you suggesting that the old  Moore Market building was my grandaunt, or the Esplanade Hotel my great uncle? Forget it.’

Well, they have been forgotten.

Buildings, streets and public spaces are integral to our surroundings, which include what we see by way of Nature’s bounty, what we smell, breathe and hear.

That organic collectivity is, I believe, a kind of parentage. When a developer lays his claws on a debilitated house, he does not spare its trees, does not care for its role in the locale. He dances the tandava over all of it. And what his machines crush in their steely jaws is not limestone or brick but living history.

Every balustrade endangered, every spiral stairway threatened, each canvas in oil by pigeons bespattered or antiquarian volume by silver-fish invaded... Heritage conservation does not lie in creating bubbles of protection; it lies in giving to that place a sense of itself, its present and future no less than its past. Not just its future as a set of buildings but as a theatre of life, where human, avian, plant lives exist together...

Some bird species survive miraculously in our cities.  My wife, Tara, has spotted the golden oriole in Kalakshetra and in the gardens around the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, darting across in a flame of shimmering yellow. Old buildings around the Marina are like a golden oriole among our city’s structures. They survive. They  need to do more. They  need to thrive. To help them do so is not to pander to any particular era; it is to keep a part of our tangible memory alive. Not nostalgically, or vestigially, but civilly; in fact, civilisationally. For, to conserve is to be civil; to be civilised. To destroy for ready cash, is to be philistine.

The buildings and, I might add, statues of an earlier period in Chennai and elsewhere in our country were built in the high noon of a self-centred and self-fulfilling generation. But they are no longer commemorative of imperial hauteur or individual hubris today. They are rather mute witnesses to Time and commentaries on their authors’ sense of their place under the sun. But as specimens of architectural masterfulness, they are also showcases of the extraordinary skill and intrinsic self-confidence of Indian workmanship. Yes, Fort St.George is one of the great examples of architecture requiring a high conservation status.

We cannot afford to forget, can we, that the women who helped carry the rock that the men had quarried with which to build were Indian. The hands that raised the structures, stone on stone, brick upon  brick, lintel after lintel, cornice following cornice, were those of hugely talented Indians bringing genius to design, energy to vision, deftness, ingenuity and a DNA of architecture going back to the Cholas here, the Gangas, the Chandelas, the Lodis and Moghuls elsewhere.

Each rib on their columns, each  startled ‘Oh!’  on their gargoyles, each chip on stone, turn of wood, each slice of marble; every note of flourish, each sign of a finish, every bend  on the mould, each curve and plane, from base  to colophon, on these buildings which groan in age and wait, like a guilt-ridden ancestor in the keep of a restless generation, was made by hands as Indian as yours or mine. Only far more supple in their strength, stronger in their suppleness.

Ought we not to conserve them, with every resource at our command, as we would the health of a maestro? They are not buildings but institutions – with a message and an instruction no less urgent than in a raga of music or in a literary masterpiece.

The difference between those hands and the ones that work on buildings today is this: those earlier ones of an age we have rightly dispatched to history, merged beauty with utility, grace with power, dignity with strength. And they were propelled by a certain pride in their work. Today, in the age of re-constituted materials, of stone pulped into slurry and then concretised into cement, of veneers cut by machines, tinted glass, polymers and monotones, whatever the premium be on, it is certainly not on aesthetics. It is on excess, on impact, on size, be it of height or girth – the biggest, the highest, the costliest.

If we do not conserve heritage buildings, what will future generations be left with for tactile archetypes, except the monstrosities of Meccano minds?

We await the benefit of a Heritage Commission ... We must soon have a Heritage Commission. We must give the Ananthasayee Vishnu his morning call. If something has to be stirred, something else has to be encouraged to stay still.

Plans such as those for the raising of a Coastal Expressway literally fly in the face of heritage. To want to assist an already over-vehicled Chennai, a speed-crazed and unsustainably traffic-congested Chennai to find its final lebensraum in the very extremity of the city, namely on the verge of land and sea, is at one level to accept that the city’s capacity for further vehicular augmentation has been saturated. But at another level, it is to ride roughshod and literally fly over the city’s right to breathe, to take the air, while watching what Nature has bequeathed to it, and what Sarojini Naidu in her poem ‘Coromandel Fishers’ called ‘the blue of the verge where the low sky mates with the sea’.

More, it is also to take, abrogate and  abridge the rights of the fishing communities along the coast to use that stretch of sand for all they need to use it for.

The Coastal Regulation Zone is at its heart (if Regulations can have hearts) a conservation enactment, meant to conserve our natural heritage in terms of our coasts and beaches from human intervention.

Chennai should exult in compliance with the CRZ, not lock horns with it.