The cake with which Vivanta by Taj at Connemara celebrated Madras Day.

One of the first authors of a general title for East West Publishers when they moved to Madras, S. Muthiah, the chro­ni­cler of Madras, is fondly called by different names. Biswanath Ghosh calls him ‘The Madras Man’ in his Tamarind City. ­Senior journalist Sushila Ravin­dra­nath called him ‘The Mad Man of Madras’. And to Sriram V., who teams with him at ­Madras Musings, he is ‘The Chief’.

Two books of his, Madras Rediscovered – his first and the Bible of the city – now in its ­seventh edition, and Tales of Old and New Madras, revised and updated to commemorate the 375th year of the city’s founding (it was first published 25 years ago on the occasion of the city’s 350th birthday), were ­released at the Taj Connemara on ­August 22nd, Madras Day. But before their release a huge cake, prepared specially for the occasion by the Connemara, was ­being readied to be cut by Sriram who prepared a detailed index for this edition of Madras Rediscovered, the translator (Karthik Naraya­nan who translated the book for Kizhakku Pathipa­gam), Anand Kumar, ias, Regional Joint Commissioner of the Chennai Corporation, Rear ­Admiral (retd.) Mohan Raman, Secretary of the Madras Literary Society, and the author himself.

After Gautam Padmana­bhan, CEO of Westland, welcomed the audience. Muthiah spoke fondly of Gautam’s ­parents K.S. and Chandra Padma­­nabhan – who when they moved to Madras welcomed his Madras Discovered, then 160-pages long and now 575 pages in extent, as their first general title to be published in the city. The association has continued with East West over the last 25 years and more. Muthiah also recalled the original manuscripts being typed over and over again by his late wife Valli who had chided him for not ­doing something with all the material he had collected ­during his researches in India and abraod and which were ­occupying two shelves of her cupboard. Out of his scrapbooks, the rich wealth of information in notes, and his passion for the city, have been born many books over the years, and he will be completing 40 books by the end of the year, most of them on the city.

Muthiah retains his fondness for Ceylon where he was a suc­cessful journalist and is considered something of an ­authority on its ethnicity and events there from the late 1930s to the late 1960s that shaped the island’s destiny. He came to Madras in 1968 when he discovered that several people in early Madras, who went on to fame, fortune and notoriety, while charting a course that made ­Madras the first city of Modern India, he was on his way to becoming The ­Madras Man. That also led him to becoming a leader of the ­heritage conservation movement.

To the critics who feel heri­tage conservation means preserving only colonial heritage, the Madras Man says the buildings that survive from olde ­Madras are memorials to the ­beginnings of institutions which are now part and parcel of modern India.

Sriram V, another chronicler of the city, particularly of the post-1900 city, spoke on the ­occasion about ‘Books on ­Ma­dras’. The path Sriram has followed into Madras history is different from Muthiah’s. Starting with his passion for Carnatic music and its history, he was “destined” to meet The Madras Man and, now, they are a team two decades old. Encouraged by the Chief, he went about delving into the history of ­Madras and today he is as ­passionate about the city as the Chief. But he has gone further. His heritage walks that are a ­pleasure have gone on to intro­duce many a participant to little known facts of Madras. All this helps him with his writing and he is the latest among the city’s chroniclers, which is a long line. He has a better knowledge than the Chief about 20th Century Madras, drawn from his ­voracious digesting of various sour­ces of information, including the novels and personal recordings of Tamil writers; he felicitously combines the archival sources in English with the lesser known local ­accounts.

The highlight of the evening for many, however, was Joint Commissioner Anand Kumar bursting into a song, a Bharati song.