Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91
Vol. XXV No. 18, January 1-15, 2016
Pelathope was a vintage Mylapore locality for the early-career advocate. Rather, it was considered lucky to start from there. A well-to-do lawyer moved to one of the Mada streets and on becoming affluent acquired a spacious bungalow in Luz Church Road, Sivasamy Road or other Mylapore surroundings.
In Pelathope Days, G. Ram Mohan gives us a sneak peek into his life from 1942 to 1961, as he grew from a five-year-old boy to an adult. He spent those 19 years in a house in Pelathope, first rented and later owned by his father, G. Gopalaswami, an advocate. Rather than chronologically making it a memoir, Ram Mohan picks up themes that paint a wider canvas of culture, family tradition, nationalism, school life, childhood pleasures, household practices, status of women, closely knit relationships, with discussions on cricket, books and films and a contextual mention of historical events. The period 1942 to 1961, starting from the peak of the Second World War to a decade and half after Independence, witnessed momentous changes in the way of life for an average Madras resident.
Pelathope (anglicised version of pala thoppu in Tamil, meaning a jack fruit grove) still exists. The author says even the Kapaleeshwarar Temple was built on what was once a jackfruit grove, which extended around the temple and gives the street its name. Before your imagination runs wild, Pelathope is just a small lane off Ramakrishna Mutt Salai (earlier Brodie’s Road). It is “arrow straight and runs from west to east,” parallel to North Mada Street. You can enter it only on the western side and “it is about a furlong in length.” Even in the 1940s, it had all modern amenities, such as pavements on either side, electricity, piped water supply and underground sewerage. Though the street was also known as Desikar Swami Street and Vedanta Desikar Street after a Vaishnavite saint whose idol was brought to the street from a Vaishnavite temple and kept in a room at the eastern ‘blind’ end, Pelathope stayed and the other names vanished.
A graphic picture of Pelathope emerges at the beginning. Pelathope should have had 70 to 80 households in such a small stretch, in the author’s reckoning, and three by-lanes branched off the street. The street had a multilingual presence, with Tamils, Telugus, Kannadigas, Marathas and Konkans. The three-storeyed red building facing Pelathope had an Udupi-style restaurant, Dr. R.N. Row’s eye clinic, a paan shop, a general merchant store and a barber shop. A coffee priced two annas did not see any hike for over fifteen years till conversion to decimal currency came into force. When the price was hiked to 13 paisa, there was a wave of protests at the price hike, says the author. When this book was written in 2010, Sathyam Studio (a photo shop) and Murthy Pinmen (launderer) were still around. Though it was (and still is) called a street of lawyers, it had other professionals as well. Income tax lawyer M. Subbaraya Ayyar, civil lawyer A.V. Viswanatha Sastri, his son A.V. Ratnam, who became the Chief Justice of the High Court, general practitioner Dr. V. Jayaraman and the doctor couple – the leading diabetologist Dr. C.V. Krishnaswami and gynaecologist Dr. Prema Krishnaswami – resided in Pelathope.
Ram Mohan was fifth of the arai (half) dozen children born to his Naina (father) and Amma (mother), the others being Chandrasekaran (Chandi), Krishnamurthi (Kittu), Sulakshana (Chuchana), Lakshmipathi and Nirmala. He devotes a chapter each for his parents. His father was open-minded, read Western fiction and later spiritual literature and had a library from which the children read a lot of books. His mother, having brought up in Calcutta, was generous, broad minded and spirited. The home by its ways imbibed a value system that stressed on empathy, large heartedness, affection, respect and bonhomie, but it was not devoid of mischief, humour, leg pulling, marked by an amiable togetherness of not only brothers and sisters but also uncles, aunts and cousins.
Ram Mohan calls SKBB Patashala the ‘Dhadi’ school, mischievously named after its bearded Principal, where he studied till Std. V. Then he moved to P.S. High School where all boys normally landed up. Girls went to Lady Sivaswami High School. School life without cut-throat competition and the poor economic status of dignified male teachers in the P.S. High School, in contrast to well-off women teachers in Lady Sivaswami, conveys the different ambience of schools in those times.
The status of women, told in some sympathetic tone, reminds us of the discriminatory practices of the time against women – widows pushed to oblivion, girls confined to homes after puberty and the atrocious practice of the husband and in-laws ‘throwing away’ the wife at will. Legislation and activism, in particular Dr. Muthulakshmy Reddy’s fight against the devadasi system, sounded a death knell to such gender-biased practices. Independence also breathed fresh air, as women were allowed to pursue higher education.
A day in the life of Pelathope makes for interesting reading. There were ‘beggars’ at your doorstep early in the morning – one chanting slokas, one freely issuing a blessing or a curse with a guduguduppai (a small rattle drum) and the other using a cow as an accomplice. The dawn-to-nightfall account takes you through many nuances of Pelathope life, including relationships with vendors and any scrap being of some exchange value.
Among the festivals, Deepavali and the excitement that preceded it find an elaborate description. Other festivities are given only passing mention. The sacrifice of the kudumi (tuft) was not only a marked change but at times it was out of compulsion, argues the author. His father was the first one in his family to let go of it and he relates an anecdote where his maternal grandfather was forced to slice it off. The attire that blended the shirt with the katcham (dhoti tucked at the back) and the elders at home stressing on the importance of tradition when Lord Macaulay’s system of education was introduced in schools gives the reader an idea of the cultural transition of the times.
The author uses Tamil and Telugu words, and a few Sanskrit terms, in many contexts to convey the cultural or literal meaning of practices, food items, tradition and way of life. An elaborate glossary at the end includes the names and terms. R. Ganesan’s illustrations are crafted well to give a pictorial representation of the recollection.
The author transports the reader back to a distant time, perhaps lost in dark alleys, for the Chennai resident of today.