Back to a favourite haunt – Fort St George
I have led heritage walks at Fort St George numerous times but last week’s, thanks to The Hindu’s lit fest was unique. Asked by Karthik Nagappan and team at the paper as to what can be done by way of a curtain raiser for the Lit Fest, I suggested a heritage walk at Fort St George, entirely dedicated to books written on it and to people who lived in it. This is of course not the first time I have themed walks based on books. In earlier editions of the Lit Fest, I have done walks dedicated to books published by the College of Fort St George and the rare collection of the Madras Literary Society, a literary trail at Mylapore (co-curated by Karthik Bhatt) and another at Thiruvallikeni.
To tomes well travelled
This time the difference was that I carried the books to the Fort. A total of eighteen works was selected. Volunteers from The Hindu held aloft the volumes when needed by me and I can only sympathise with them for carrying these tomes from place to place. A report has already been published on the event and I will restrict myself to the books that were brought. They after all, were the stars of the show.
Of course, I had to begin with S Muthiah to whom the Fort was hallowed ground. Most of his books begin with this precinct but by way of visual appeal there is none better than his Madras, Its Past and Present, with plenty of black and white photos from the Vintage Vignettes collection, depicting how the Fort looked early in the 20th century.
Of Wheeling in Love for Fort St George
If there was an author that Muthiah venerated when it came to city history, it was HD Love. Taking all four volumes of his Vestiges of Old Madras (1913) was impossible and so we had just the first volume. But before Love there was J Tallboys Wheeler, who incidentally came from a great bibliographic tradition. His parents were book sellers in London and Wheeler himself was editor of the Madras Spectator before entering Government service. His Madras in the Olden Time (1882) was therefore included. The Church of St Mary’s in the Fort has as many as three books on it and I had the Rev de la Bare’s 1921 account of it brought in.
Some of the finest and insightful works on Fort St George
What is a heritage walk if you cannot include fun elements in it? The Nabobs of Madras by Henry Dodwell (1926) is a class by itself when it comes the quirkier aspects of the British. Two others in that category, by themselves serious studies, are the Life of Thomas Pitt (Cornelius Neale Dalton, 1915) and Elihu Yale, American Nabob of Queen’s Square (Hiram Bingham, 1939). And how could I not include Lt Col DM Reid’s Story of Fort St George (1948), which is fashioned as a heritage walk at the place?
Dubashes and names etched in stone
For the lives of the dubashes we had the books of Sinnappah Arasaratnam (Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast,1650-1740) and Kanakalatha Mukund (The View from Below). The sole woman to be honoured with a book at Fort St George, though plenty of others were mentioned, was Lady Elizabeth Gwillim, the pioneering ornithologist. She died in Madras in 1806 and her memorial stone is inside the Church of St Mary’s. For her we had Patrick Wheelers A Tale of Two Sisters.
There were some other books as well. The biggest challenge was taking them there and bringing them safely back. Most of these are of a venerable age and prefer a life of quiet retirement on a shelf.
List of Books that made it to the walk
1. Arasaratnam, Sinnappah, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast,1650-1740, Oxford University Press, 1986
2. Bingham, Hiram, Elihu Yale, the American Nabob of Queens Square, Dodd Mead & Co; New York, 1939
3. Brown, Hilton, The Sahibs, The Life and Ways of the British in India as Recorded by Themselves, William Hodge & Company Limited, London, 1948
4. Cotton JJ; List of Inscriptions on Tombs or Monuments in Madras, Madras Records Office, Madrs, 1945
5. Dalton, Sir Cornelius Neale, The Life of Thomas Pitt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1915
6. Davies, A Mervyn, Warren Hastings, Maker of British India, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, London, 1935
7. Davies, A Mervyn, Clive of Plassey, A Biography, Nicholson & Watson, London, 1939
8. De la Bere, Rev C, The Oldest British Building in India, a Brief Sketch, Indian Science Congress Handbook, Madras Diocesan Press, Madras 1921
9. Dodwell, Henry, The Nabobs of Madras, William & Norgate Limited, London,1926
10. Love, HD, Vestiges of Old Madras, John Murray & Sons, London, 1913
11. Mukund, Kanakalatha, The View from Below, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2005
12. Muthiah, S, Madras, Its Past and Its Present, Ranpar Publishers, Chennai, 2011
13. Penny, Mrs FE, Fort St George, Story of Our First Possession in India, Swann, Sonnenschein & Co, London, 1908
14. Reid, Lt Col DM, The Story of Fort St George, Diocesan Press, Madras, 1945
15. Singh, Durai & Lakshmanan, Helen, The Church in the Fort, A History of St Mary’s, St Mary’s Church, Fort St George, 2002
16. Stein, Burton, Thomas Munro, The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989
17. Wheeler, J Tallboys, Madras in the Olden Time, Higginbothams & Co, Madras, 1882
18. Wheeler, Patrick, A Tale Of Two Sisters, The Letters of Elizabeth Gwillim and Her Sister Mary Symonds from Madras 1801-1807, Oxford, 2021
This article appeared in The Hindu on January 16th, 2024.
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