From the air, Chennai—or old Madras—presents itself like a box of Diwali sweets waiting to be savoured. There are houses in cochineal pink, or ‘muttai pink’ (candy pink), as the colour is described, in iridescent greens, indigo blues, Gold Spot oranges, citron yellows, deep purples and many in combinations of one or two of these colours. The colonial whites, the creams, the deeper municipal ochres on the walls have all been replaced in places where the government fiat runs by marshmallow pinks.
Chennai has now become a rainbow city of many different people, speaking in many tongues. You no longer look for the familiar signs of caste and community affiliations that once upon a time people wore proudly on their foreheads and wrapped around their waists to proclaim their sense of belonging. You no longer believe in the old Tamil saying—“Every town is our hometown. Every man is our kinsman”—but glare suspiciously at the outsider and ask: where are you from?
There are enclaves now that are billed as ‘Little Korea’ and ‘Greater Japan’; sushi and khimchi are sold in supermarkets; less affluent pockets shelter the young men and women from the Northeast who find jobs in beauty parlours and restaurants trying to parlay their few words of English into recognisable sounds, “You want cold tea with Rhyme juice? No have Rhyme today,” even while others call them “chinky”. There are Thai massage parlours, Indonesian or Balinese spas, foot reflexology centres; and, just as macabre given the number of medical specialties that are on offer at the mecca of modern medicine that is now Chennai, discrete home-stays for the recently dead who may not have survived their treatment i.e. funeral parlours for different communities.
As seekers of old Madras (which turns a full, ripe 375 years this month) reach deep into the annals of the city’s past, pecking at the crevices of history like woodpeckers in search of grubs, what choices are there for the average citizen of Chennai?
The City has been gridlocked by progress. It’s currently being laced together by a steel and cement network of raised rapid transit systems of rail and road, tied into knots by the multiple arms of burgeoning flyovers. In a recent episode reminiscent of the more acrobatic efforts of those performing the ‘lungi dance’, a couple on a motorbike collided on a curve of one of the older flyovers (the Adyar flyover) and tragically, in the case of one of them, landed in a hospital; the lady, being more lucky, fell on the roof of a vehicle below, whereupon, in the best of film traditions, she fled the scene. Police sirens provided the background music.
Myth builders Tourists at one of Chennai’s iconic temples
Do you search for that perfect steel tumbler of decoction coffee or head for the latest counter at Starbucks and lick the froth from a global brand of the same stuff? Is this why this year’s Madras Heritage Week has seen a veritable explosion of exploratory walks along the dangerously eroded edges of the River Cooum that snakes its sulphurously perfumed sludge through parts of the city; is that why there are talks about the great and the good and group activities and performances that go way beyond the modest beginnings of what was seen by some as a retrograde hankering for a vanished colonial past? There are now over 150 separate events crammed into one week. Most of these are well attended, even if sometimes the participants seem to be of a certain age group and class.
A.P. Venkatachalapathy, the scholar who writes and speaks eloquently about the group of people he identifies as the “Anglophiliacs”, as if they suffered from some debilitating ailment that was bleeding the red blood corpuscles of the city of Chennai’s true inheritors, has this to say in his volume, Chennai not Madras—Perspectives of the City (Marg Publication, 2006): “The culture of this middle-class elite—its vegetarian food, coffee, the Music Academy, Bharatanatyam etc has come to stand not only for the city but Tamil culture as well. The anglophilia is well reflected in the extant histories of the city and in the skewed nature of conservation efforts.” By way of contrast, Venkatachalapathy avers, “The Dravidian parties, offshoots of the non-Brahmin movements with their agenda of social transformation that would empower backward castes, have been the dominant force shaping the city over the last half century. The Dravidian penchant for revivalist architecture and statue-raising, the spawning of a poster culture and public meetings marked by public rhetoric have given the city a distinct character, even if this has not exactly pleased the middle class.”
“Yes, it was all very much to do with nostalgia,” explains V. Sriram, the energetic co-convenor of Madras Heritage Week. An entrepreneur and writer who has written eloquently on south Indian music traditions, he leads groups of people around the narrow streets and bylanes of Georgetown, once known as Blacktown, or the inner city that serviced the White Town or colonial Madras, next to the what-is-now-called the Fort area, and incidentally still very much the centre of power. The Tamil Nadu government is located here since successive political leaders, while talking about finding a more suitable arena, have never been able to make a decisive shift to another location.
“But it is no longer a maudlin exercise,” Sriram insists. “It has become a celebration—warts of the city and all. Many presentations and talks focus on the positives and negatives of the past and present. The younger generation has taken to it in a big way by bringing in technology—photo shoots, tweets, FB posts, Flickr and Instagram images, mobile apps etc. They think it’s an opportunity to showcase the city in all its glorious colours.” It is still restricted to a small community, but no longer just an English-speaking one. The ratio of English to Tamil events is now 70:30, which is a good mix considering the city itself is cosmopolitan now. It’s also a completely voluntary event without any official sponsor. The very fact that Tamil media is focusing attention on it is a very big sign of change.
