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Vol. XXXI No. 1, April 16-30, 2021

Madras Discovered… Madras Rediscovered… Madras Miscellany … & The Madras Man

Outsider’s View

Biswanath Ghosh

It was always the Chief’s view that it was the outsiders who made the best chroniclers of a city. Keeping that maxim in mind, he really took a shine to Bishwanath or BG, as I always refer to him. Having come to Chennai to take up his assignment with The Hindu, BG turned author, his first book, Chai Chai, detailing the railway junctions of India that we always pass through but never get off at, earning the Chief’s praise. But what delighted him was BG writing Tamarind City, on Chennai. And in that book appears the passage we feature alongside, where the Chief is the hero. Since then BG has written several more books, from Kolkata, where he now lives.

– Sriram V

…’Did you speak to S. Muthiah?’

I’ve lost count of the number of times this question was put to me by well-wishers once they learned I was doing this book.

In Chennai, you don’t ask back, ‘S. Muthiah who?’ Its English-speaking population knows him as the historian who has been educating them about the city’s heritage for the past eleven years through his weekly column in The Hindu called Madras Miscellany.

Then there is Madras Musings, a paper reaching out to readers who request it, which he started two decades ago. Even though small in size and circulation, it showed, to those who cared to see, the path leading to the rich past. Till then, the path had remined hidden by shrubs and bushes of ignorance and indifference. Muthiah’s modest journal managed to nudge the local newspapers out of their obsession with politics into looking at the goldmine of stories that lay in their own backyard. Not to mention the definitive Madras Rediscovered, first published in 1981 and which keeps expanding with every reprint – it counts among the thirty-plus books that he has either authored, co-authored, ghosted or edited so far.

If it is Madras, it has to be Muthiah. So I rang the bell at his house in Teynampet one Sunday morning even before a word of my manuscript was written – it was like smashing a coconut or visiting a temple for the blessing of the goddess before beginning a venture.

I found Subbiah Muthiah sitting at the head of his dining table, under the glow of a reading lamp whose peeling paint was testimony to its long years of loyal sevice. The table was laden with books, files, bunches of papers – they seemed to have been sitting here untouched for months. Right in front of him, where his lunch was soon to be served, lay a small heap of manuscripts.

‘Would you like to have a drink?’ he asks me. I decline at first – more out of the Indian instinct to not drink in the presence of an elderly person whom you know. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, ‘because I am going to have one’. Muthiah gets up and from a cabinet pulls out two glasses and a bottle whose label I am unable to read. He pours the drinks and returns to his seat. I take a sip: it is brandy.

….But the turning point, as far as Muthiah securing his reputation as the Madras Man is concerned, came in 1981.
..By then, he had gathered plenty of material about the colonial history of Madras. Also by then, he happened to become friends with K.S. Padmanabhan, a partner in the Delhi-based publishing house Affiliated East West Press, which brought out scientific and technical books.

Affiliated East West Press was set up in 1961 as an Indian arm of D Van Nostrand, the American publishing house. In 1974, Padmanabhan who had lived in all other metros except Madras, happened to pay a visit to the city and he liked it so much that he decided to set up a branch of the company in Madras. His friendship with Muthiah, whom he first met in Delhi, went on to grow. When Affiliated East West Press decided to diversify into general books, Muthiah’s Madras Discovered became one of the first to be published by it, in 1981 – a slim volume, priced at ten rupees.

Much later, in the mid-1990s, Padmanabhan amicably separated from the parent company and started his own publishing house, East West Books (Madras), the predecessor of Westland Ltd., which owns the Tranquebar, Westland and EastWest Books imprints. In July 2011, Padmanabhan aged seventy-five, formally retired from the business of publishing to play with his grandson.

On the other hand there is Muthiah, the Colombo-hardened journalist now known as the Madras Man, who shows no signs of slowing down even at eighty-one. Madras Discovered, rechristened Madras Rediscovered after the 1981 edition, is today not only larger in format but 450 pages thick. It is expected to get heavier when the seventh edition comes out in 2012.

Madras Discovered not only changed Muthiah’s life but also changed the way the city looked at its history – a rich one at that. ‘Sometime in the late ‘80s, I was asked to write the history of Parry and Co. for its 200th anniversary. From that time I’ve been writing one or two books every year – corporate histories, biographies, books on Madras. There have also been books on the Chettiars and on Ceylon.

‘Madras Miscellany’, the column I write for The Hindu, started in 1999. I have never missed one column except when the paper’s been on holiday. I belong to an era when we didn’t even get a byline. Till I started writing for Aside, I never used a byline. It was always a staff reporter or a special correspondent or The Corner Flag or something like that. Today you join a paper and tomorrow you get a byline. The first time my picture appeared in a newspaper was with the Hindu column.’

‘Madras Miscellany’ firmly established Muthiah’s reputation as the Madras Man. The column made him a household name. If it is Madras, it has to be Muthiah…

Extracts from the book: Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began.

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