Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91
Vol. XXXI No. 3, May 16-31, 2021
Heritage Watch
From Capper House to Kalai Maligai
Our Old is a hazy picture of Capper House, a 19th Century building, once the home of Col. Capper, and the earliest private residence on the Marina, discounting Chepauk Palace of course. It later became a hotel and finally the core of the Queen Mary’s College campus, when that institution came into existence early in the 20th Century. The arched front of Capper House was the inspiration for several other buildings constructed along the beach.
Wilfully neglected once the plan to take over the QMC campus to build a new secretariat failed, Capper House collapsed early in the new millennium. It was then replaced by what was known as Kalaignar Maligai, a building that vaguely copied the arched front of the original but for some reason topped it with a dome that always reminded S. Muthiah of cricketer Harbhajan Singh’s turban. Our New is this structure.
The building’s construction and naming happened when the DMK was in power. When the AIADMK swept to office in 2011, the college authorities realising that their campus, never the favourite of the new CM and on her daily route to Fort St George, removed the ‘gnar’ in Kalaignar and renamed the building Kalai Maligai. Now that a new regime is in place we wonder if the missing letters will stage a comeback.
