Do people make places, or places people? Tulsi Badrinath’s parents were from Uttar Pradesh, but she was “born in Madras and some four decades later find myself a resident of Chennai.” Yet through her growing years, she was always the one considered “from elsewhere, different”. When she went to Delhi for vacations at her grandparents’, she became “even more an outsider”.
Contradictions, in general, are rarely resolved, else why would there be so many books on the same place, sometimes written on the heels of each other? Madras Rediscovered by Madras/Chennai’s best-known chronicler, S Muthiah, is in its 7th or 8th edition. NS Ramaswami’s Madras Diary in the Indian Express in the 1970s had legions of fans, as do V Sriram’s columns in The Hindu . There’s KL Narasimhan’s Madras City: A History of 1968 vintage (which cost ₹4 at the time!), KRA Narasiah’s Madras: Tracing the Growth of the City Since 1639 , An Unhurried City edited by CS Lakshmi, Tamarind City by Bishwanath Ghosh and Degree Coffee by the Yard by Nirmala Lakshman.
Despite the plethora of material about a strip of sand by the Bay of Bengal that grew to become the stronghold of the Portuguese and the British, where a White Town and a Black Town transmogrified from Madraspatnam or Chennapatnam into Madras and Chennai, Badrinath’s book manages to be different by focusing on people, their lives and their worldviews, and consequently their experience of the city — in sharp focus or soft. Recounting the history of the city is not her main concern; instead she weaves her own voice in and out of the subject’s narratives and sometimes maps the distance between her home and theirs with history, landmarks and anecdotes. A combination of listening sandwiched between slices of telling evokes diverse aspects of the city. So, in this casually structured manner, we meet a priest, a writer, a businessman, a title-bearing prince, a sportsman into classical music, a leader of the Anglo-Indian community, a naturalist and photographer, an entrepreneur who has lived the rags-to-riches story, an actor, a gynaecologist, a building contractor, and an IT geek. The list is eclectic, yet representative.
Although the author herself sometimes slips into sentimentality, the subjects mostly reflect on their lives in the light and shadow of the here and now and ponder the way ahead. Most of them have incredible stories to share, quite belying the popular view of Chennai as the city of last resort. K Seshadri, priest in the Ashtalakshmi temple in Besantnagar, for instance, is also a karate black belt holder. His back story is a comment on the challenges of balancing professional commitments with personal constraint.
M Krishnan (the book is dedicated to him and his wife Indumathi) is an iconic Madras personality. Once, when his wife “asked Krishnan for his address in Calcutta where he was going to spend a considerable time”, the naturalist-photographer responded: “You can write to me at the cage number 290, Calcutta zoo.” He has the distinction of writing a column called Country Notebook for 46 years continuously; the last column appearing the day he died.
But the detailed descriptions of the Krishnan residence, which was obviously second home to the author, don’t exactly rivet the reader, even if that was the author’s intention going by the chapter title Thinnais and Inner Spaces . However, the location of the residence on Edward Elliots Road (now Radhakrishnan Salai) affords a comment on the Raja Rajeshwari Kalyana Mantapam next door, once the venue of all page three-worthy weddings.
The seamless way in which information about the city, its landmarks — many unheralded, even unknown — is presented is appealing because it is unselfconscious and the writing clean and upfront. For instance, Beatrix D’Souza (Enriching Cultures), an MP who spoke strongly on behalf of the Anglo-Indians, talks about how she dressed when she was a teacher. “I wore a dress in Pudukottai… Dresses were so much a part of our culture. We followed all the European fashions…” But when she moved to the smaller Namakkal, it made more sense to wear saris. It was a huge cultural shift and ironic in a way. While the author comments: “What was once the mark of the ‘mixed caste’, western attire, has now been adopted increasingly by the younger generation in the city”, D’Souza makes a naughty observation: “Film stars wearing slinky dresses in the morning meant for the night!”
For the most part, though, the author remains with the known, the familiar and the safe, in fact seldom straying too far from south Chennai. She doesn’t dig too deep to uncover what lies beneath and that’s a pity.
Even so, Madras, Chennai and the Self reveals more than it obscures and that’s a good enough reason to read the book. But the question remains: Do people make places, or places people?