Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91
Vol. XXVII No. 7, July 16-31, 2017
Our Readers Write
The true picture?
The back story which appeared in MM, June 16th doesn’t match with happenings.
The 70th session of the Indian National Congress was held at Avadi in the second week of January 1955 under the presidentship of Dhebar. Prior to this, a Reception Committee was formed under the Chairmanship of Ambujammal, a noted freedom fighter and the daughter of Seeman Sreenivasa Iyengar who presided over the 58th Congress Session at Gauhati in 1928.
The well-known landlord of Vadapathimangalam, S. Thiyagarajan, Indian Express Ramnath Goenka, then Chief Minister Kamaraj’s Prithvi Insurance partner S. Parthasarathy were other important members of the Reception Committee. After the Session was completed, Parthasarathy got a part of the land and built a Vaishnavi shrine and become Sadhu Parthasarathy.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed and the President of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito, attended the Session as special invitees. Khrushchev and Bulganin did not attend the conference. In June that year Prime Minister Nehru visited the USSR and invited them to India and asked them to develop heavy industries in the public sector. It was only in August-September 1955 that Khrushchev and Bulganin visited India.
Around 1950, when N. Gopalaswamy Iyengar was Railway Minister, a plan was conceived to build a coach factory in Madras. In 1952, Lal Bahadur Shastri became Railway Minister and he continued to support the venture, allotting more funds and deputing his deputy O.V. Alagesan to monitor the progress of the construction. In 1955, on Gandhi Jayanthi Day, the Shell Division of the Integral Coach Factory was inaugurated by Prime Minister Nehru in the presence of Lal Bahadur Shastri, O.V. Alagesan, Chief Minister Kamaraj, R. Venakatraman and other dignitaries.
The temporary Furnishing Sheds were constructed between the southern bank of the ICF Tank and the northern side of Konnur High Road. A feeder line was also constructed from the Shell factory along the western bank of the same tank. In 1962, on Gandhi Jayanthi Day, the Furnishing Division was inaugurated by the then Railway Deputy Minister, Ramaswami. A new feeder line was constructed linking Villivakkam Rly Station, Villivakkam Lake, and Otteri Nullah. When Moorthy was Railway Minister in the 1990s, Anna Nagar Station was opened on this feeder line.
Gopalaswami Iyengar and Venakataraman may have played major roles in industrial development after the Congress session and enabled utilisation of a vast stretch of land. But in the construction of the Furnishing and Feeder Line, they were not in the picture.
As for the mention of a siding from Perambur Railway Station to take the guests directly to their place of stay, there was no need for this, because exactly 100 years ago, when the first train started on August 11, 1855 from Royapuram to Wallajah, a station at Avadi was constructed.
Konerirajapuram
K.Ko. Sastrigal
7A Ambedkar II Street
Villivakkam, Chennai 600 049
Singapore example
Visiting Singapore and fre-quently travelling on the Metro, I cannot help comparing the CMRL with the MRT here. As Tamil is one of the official languages in Singapore, others being Mandarin, Malay and English, announcements on the Metro are also made in Tamil.
Though Chennai Metro Rail is far newer than the Metro in Singapore, the trains and the stations here are still spic and span 30 years after the services opened. The MRT is the backbone of the transport system. The metro card is also accepted in the city’s bus network.
There are some lessons for Chennaivaasis, especially metro users, to learn from the system in Singapore. The first being giving way to those getting off, not leaning against the door while riding the Metro, giving older people, pregnant women, those travelling with children and those nursing injuries a seat to show you care, and while taking the escalator standing on the left to allow those who climb the stairs a clear path on the right.
Little India is one of the stations on the Blue line and needless to say that walking around there you get a sense of being in India with lots of Indians, especially Tamils living and working there. Incidentally, Tamilians make up more than 50 per cent of Indians in Singapore. Tamil-speaking people includes those from Sri Lanka.
T.K. Srinivas Chari
20, Oxford Road
#01-22, Singapore 218815
The authors
The article Tamil across the oceans, that appeared in MM, July 1st, was by K.R.A. Narasiah and the Charivari series, which will now appear every other fortnight, is by Sriram V. We regret the omission.
The Editor
A rich mãmul heritage
As I was looking for details on the evolution of the ‘Land Customs’ Department, which in principle controlled salt movement and sale in colonial Madras, the term ‘bribe’, also referred as mãmul, kept repeatedly appearing in the documents I was looking at. That prompted me to write this short note on one ‘fascinating’ and ‘fabulous’ practice of ours, which richly deserves to be formalised and legalised today, so that our present governments need not change the designs of currency notes and, thus, shock the ordinary and less-than ordinary people.
I looked for the etymology of this term. I gathered it arose from the Arabic term ar-h-ma’mul, intended to mean ‘custom’, ‘customary’. I believe that this term should have entered into our vocabulary via Urdu (Hindustani), similar to many other ‘classical’ and oft-used terms, such as nãstã, and should have prospered in our culture more as a demand-based ritual than as a practice. The other curious element I tripped on was a suggested entry in the Collins Dictionary website in recent years (i.e., pending approval) of a definition to mãmul as the “unofficial collection of money from petty vendors or shop keepers by Police, Revenue, Municipal, Excise officials or non-officials or politicians on weekly or monthly basis”. I recalled the chaste Tamil word kai-ûtû and the day-to-day use of kai-k-kooli in Malayalam, which too has a strong chaste Tamil shade. I have never heard Malayalees using mãmul as much as we do. I am not sure how much mãmul is used in interior Tamil Nadu; but my gut feeling is that it is a unique word accepted by those living in Madras city!
A couple of points on mãmul as a practice in the early decades of 19th Century Madras. The Government of Madras dismissed one Audenarrain, a manager in the Sea-Customs Department, from service for bribery in 1810. A British senior official and many Indian staff too were dismissed for similar behaviour at this time (see pages 150-151 in Neil Brimnes, 1999, Constructing the Colonial Encounter, Curzon, Surrey). In the same pages, a specific example occurs: one Seeringa, an appraiser in the Land Customs House, was accused of receiving bribes from textile merchants in 1819. In return for the bribes he would tax the cloth coming to Madras at a lower rate. The narratives of the prosperous dubashes, I need not recount here, I imagine.
To know more about this ‘fascinating’ heritage of ours, read Aparna Balachandran’s chapter in Time, History and the Religious Imagery in South Asia, 2011, edited by Anne Murphy, Routledge, Oxford, UK.
Madras Musings (MM) strives hard to preserve Madras’s heritage, considering mostly buildings and other immovable edifices of Madras. Here is one practice, which we the readers and supporters of MM, do not need to strain ourselves to preserve at all! It preserves itself and will perpetuate perennially, similar to the H1 virus. We have been fighting for the preservation of the bullfight as a heritage element; here is one more for us to think about as a glorious dimension of our rich culture. Viva mãmul and our rich mãmul heritage!
Dr. A. Raman
araman@csu.edu.au
