Madras Heritage and Carnatic Music

Category: XS Real Campaign

  • Onward, on a note of hope

    My concluding piece for the XS Real blog … We began this series a year ago with the birth of the city. The first piece was on how Chennai or Madras began. Madras Week was being celebrated then and as I come to the last piece in this set of writings, Madras Week is once…

  • Some heritage along OMR

    When the Madras Christian College shifted to the Tambaram-Selaiyur area in 1930, it was recorded by Alice Barnes, wife of Professor Edward Barnes, that the 390 acres of the college campus had just a few Palmyra trees. Bird and wildlife however abounded thanks to numerous water bodies. It was all open space with very little…

  • The old and new on OMR

    Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) or Rajiv Gandhi Expressway as it is now known, is not all that old. Several accounts of visits to what was called Seven Pagodas have survived from the 1850s. The only route was via Guindy-Chromepet-Tambaram-Chingleput-Tirukkazhukundram. The last stage involved taking a boat somewhere near Sadras to cross the Buckingham Canal. This…

  • The Madras Mail

    Madras has had a long journalistic tradition, the first publication dating back to the 1780s. In the 1830s, two new papers made their appearance – The Spectator and The Madras Times. The latter took over the former and was in turn acquired in 1859 by Justinian Gantz, who ran Gantz & Son, booksellers and printers…

  • How Chennai got a port – 2

    The Harbour had been completed with an eastern entrance in 1895. Almost immediately a discussion began on whether the entrance ought to have been at the northern side. This was because the eastern opening was parallel to the surf and was therefore silting up rapidly at the rate of one foot a year. The problem…

  • How oil came to Madras

    One of the most fascinating sidelights of the Port story is the arrival of oil in Madras. The first phase in the development of the Port ended in 1895 and within a decade of this, the first motor cars had begun to roll off the ships that called at Madras. The first automobile dealer was…

  • How Chennai got a Port – 1

    The Chennai Harbour extends along the entire eastern side of First Line Beach (Rajaji Salai). If you had been visiting this city in the early 1800s, you would have scoffed at the idea that Madras could ever have a decent port. The surf was notorious and so was a strong current and the old ships…

  • First Line Beach – part 1

    First Line Beach, or Rajaji Salai, is the road that starts off from Fort St George and carries on to Royapuram. It is a long stretch, with a series of impressive buildings on the left and the port on its right. In its time, it was THE most important road of the city, for its…

  • Some early building contractors of Madras

    This article appeared in XS Real’s blog – http://xsreal.com/blog/?p=185 T Namberumal Chetty may have been the biggest, but he was certainly not the only name to contend with when it came to execution of public buildings in the city. Unfortunately, there is not much biographical detail available about the others though some sketchy bits do…

  • When Mylapore comes alive …

    This was written for XS Real’s blog – http://xsreal.com/blog/?p=152 The Kapaliswarar Temple is a very important shrine of this city and its ten day annual festival in the Hindu month of Panguni (Mar/Apr) is all about participation. On all the days, five deities, Ganesa, Kapaliswara, Karpagamba, Singaravela with consorts and Chandikeswara are brought out in…