STORY OF MADRAS

PREFACE

This little book is not a "History of Madras," although it contains a good deal of Madras history; and it is not a "Guide to Madras," although it gives accounts of some of the principal buildings in the city. The book will have fulfilled its purpose if it helps the reader to realize that the City of Madras is a particularly interesting corner of the world. This fact is often forgotten; and even many of the people who live in Madras itself, and who are aware that Madras has played an important part in the making of India's history, are strangely uninterested in its historic remains. They are eloquent perhaps in denouncing the heat of Madras and its mosquitoes and the iniquities of its Cooum river; but they have never a word to say on its enchanting memorials of the past. Madras has memorials indeed. Madras is an historical museum, where the sightseer may spend many and many an hour—in street and in building—studying old-world exhibits, and living for the while in the fascinating past. Madras is not an ancient city; its foundation is not ascribed to some mythic king who ruled in mythic times; it has no hoary ruins, too old to be historic and too legendary to be inspiring. But Madras is old enough for its records to be romantic, and at the same time is young enough for its earliest accounts of itself to be—not unsatisfying fables, but interesting fact. The story of Madras fills an absorbing page of history, and the sights of Madras are well worthy of sympathetic interest—especially on the part of those whose lines of life are cast in the historic city itself or within the historic presidency of which it is the capital.

In the following pages certain places and events have been briefly described more than once with different details; any such repetitions are due to the fact that the Story of Madras has been told in a series of vignettes, appertaining to particular buildings or particular conditions, and each vignette had to be complete in itself. It is hoped that such repetitions will be of familiar interest, rather than tedious.

In respect of the facts that are recorded, apart from general history, I am indebted principally to the valuable Records of Fort St. George, which the Madras Government have been publishing, volume by volume, during several years, and which I have studied with interest since the first volume appeared. Of other works that I have consulted, I must specially mention Colonel Love's "Vestiges of Madras," which is a very mine of information.

G.B.

Madras, 1921.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

ERRATUM

On page 1, for 'Madraspatnam' read 'Madraspatam.'

CHAPTER I

Such was the scene in 1639, the year in which our story of Madras begins. The Portuguese had already been in India for nearly a century and a half; and under their early and able viceroys they had made themselves powerful. The stately city of Goa was the capital of their Indian dominions, and they had settlements at Cochin, Calicut, Mylapore, and elsewhere. But the influence of the Portuguese was now on the wane. For nearly a century they had been the only European power in India and the Eastern seas; but merchants in other European countries had marked with jealous eyes the rich profits that the Portuguese derived from their Eastern traffic, and competitors appeared in the field. First came the Dutch, who in India established themselves at Pulicat, some twenty-five miles north of Mylapore. Holland had lately thrown off the yoke of Spain, and was full of new-born vigour; and Dutch trade in the East—chiefly in the East India Islands—was pushed with a rancorous energy that roused the vain indignation of the decadent Portuguese. Six years later, in 1600, came the English. The English traders were employees of the newly-established East India Company, and were sent out to do business for the Company in the East; and they had to face the opposition of the Dutch as well as of the Portuguese. Their earliest enterprise was in the East India Islands, and it was eleven years before they gained their first footing in India, at Masulipatam. Here they established an agency and did very considerable business; later they formed a fortified sub-agency at Armagaum, a good way down the coast, not far from Nellore. At first their fortunes went well; but local rulers exacted ruinous dues, and at Armagaum in particular the local ruler, alarmed at the influence that the English merchants had gained, set himself so seriously to the work of handicapping their trade that Mr. Francis Day, the Company's representative at Armagaum and a member of the Masulipatam Council, proposed to the Council that he should be allowed to seek a field for commercial enterprise more favourable than either Armagaum or Masulipatam. To Mr. Francis Day was committed the business of finding a suitable spot for a fresh settlement.

It was an important commission. The East India Company's existence depended entirely upon the profits of their trade. The Company's enterprise at Armagaum was hopeless; at Masulipatam it was very unsatisfactory; and Mr. Francis Day was appointed to find a place where the commercial prospects would be bright.

It should always be remembered that the East India Company was established purely as a commercial association, with its head office in London, and that its employees in India were men with business qualifications, appointed to carry on the Company's trade. The prime concern even of an Agent or a Governor was the making of good bargains on the Company's behalf—and sometimes on his own—getting the best prices for European broadcloths and brocades, and buying as cheaply as possible Indian muslins and calicoes and natural produce, for exportation to London, where they were sold at a large profit. Any fighting in which the Company's servants engaged was merely incidental to the pursuit of business in a land in which the ruling sovereigns, as well as the many small chiefs, were constantly at war. It is a maxim that 'Trade follows the Flag;' but in the case of India the Flag has followed Trade.

It is as a commercial man, therefore, that we must picture Mr. Francis Day setting out on his commercial mission; but it can be imagined that the English merchant, starting on an expedition in which he would be likely to seek personal interviews with rajas and nawabs and bid for their favour, set out in such style as would do the Company credit. In our mind's eye we picture Master Francis Day, Chief of Armagaum, standing on the deck of one of the Company's vessels lying at anchor in the Armagaum roads, and receiving his colleagues' farewells. His garb is that of a substantial merchant in the days of King Charles I. It has none of the extravagances that were the fashionable affectations of gay Cavaliers, but its sobriety makes it none the less smart. He wears a purple doublet and hose, a broad white collar edged with lace, and a gracefully-short black-velvet cloak. Curly hair falls beneath his broad-brimmed black hat, but not in long and scented ringlets such as were trained to fall below the shoulders of fashionable gallants at King Charles's court. He is in every way a fitting representative of the Honourable Company.

The bo'sun has piped his whistle, and the last good-byes have been said. The anchor's weighed, and the white sails are spread to the breeze. Master Day waves his hand to his colleagues in the surf-boat which is taking them shoreward, and the ship is headed to the south. The expedition is important—yes, and it was much more important than Master Day imagined; for something more serious than profits on muslin and brocade was on the anvil of fate.

CHAPTER II

It was in winter that Mr. Francis Day arrived—a time of the year when Madras looks its best and when the sea-horses are not always at their wildest tricks; and Mr. Francis Day landed without accident, and was pleased with the scene. There are always breakers, however, on the Coromandel Coast, and Mr. Day found the landing so exciting that in his report to the Council at Masulipatam he wrote of 'the heavy and dangerous surf'. But after an inspection of the surroundings he was satisfied with the conditions; he considered that at the mouth of the Cooum river there was an advantageous site for a commercial settlement; and the local ruler, the Naik of Poonamallee, following the advice of the Portuguese authorities, encouraged him in the idea of an English settlement within the Poonamallee domain.

It is not surprising that Mr. Francis Day was pleased with what he saw; for Madras is not without beauty. In those idyllic days, moreover, the Cooum river, which was known then as the Triplicane river—and which even to-day can be beautiful, although for the greater part of the year it is no more than a stagnant ditch—must have been a limpid water-way; and to Mr. Francis Day, seeing it in winter, in which season the current swollen by the rain sometimes succeeds in bursting the bar, it must have appeared almost as a noble river, rushing down to the great sea—a river such as might well have deserved the erection of a town on its banks. The fact that the Portuguese had been at Mylapore for more than a century showed that a settlement was full of promise—and the more so for men with the energy of the English Company's representatives; and the conditions were such that Mr. Francis Day felt himself justified in entering into negotiations with the Naik for the grant of an estate extending five miles along the shore and a mile inland.

The negotiations were successful: but the Naik was subordinate to the lord of the soil, the Raja of Chandragiri, who was the living representative of the once great and magnificent Hindu empire of Vijianagar; and any grant that was made by the Naik of Poonamallee had to be confirmed by the Raja if it was to be made valid. Two or three miles from Chandragiri station, on the Katpadi-Gudur line of railway, is still to be seen the Rajah-Mahal, the palace in which the Raja handed to Mr. Francis Day the formal title to the land. The palace still exists, and it is a fine building, though partly in ruins. It is constructed entirely of granite, without any woodwork whatsoever; but its abounding interest lies not in its structure but in the fact that it was in this palace that the British Empire in India may be said to have been begotten.

There is no little interest in the thought that it was the Raja of Chandragiri that delivered the deed of possession to Mr. Francis Day. The Raja was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire of the past; Mr. Francis Day was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire that was yet to be; and the document that the Raja handed to Mr. Francis Day was in reality a patent of Empire, transferred from Vijianagar to Great Britain. It was at Chandragiri that the British Empire in India was begotten; it was at Madras that the British Empire was born.

Mr. Francis Day had fulfilled his mission. He had secured territory where the conditions seemed to give promise of success; and his work was approved. His superior officer, Mr. Andrew Cogan, Agent at Masulipatam, came away from Masulipatam to take charge of Madras, and with the co-operation of Mr. Francis Day he set about the development of the Company's new possession.

Of Mr. Francis Day's personal history we know little or nothing except that he was one of the Company's employees, and that he founded first an unsuccessful settlement at Armagaum—represented to-day by no more than a lighthouse—and afterwards a successful settlement at Madras. Later he was put in charge of the second settlement that he had founded, but he was relieved of, or resigned, the office at the end of a year. He then went to the Company's head-quarters at Bantam, in Java, and afterwards to England. What finally became of him is apparently unknown.

It would probably be difficult to say whether Mr. Francis Day was a great man with great ideals, or was merely a shrewd man of business, reliable for an important commercial mission. Remembering that the Company was strictly a commercial concern, we may think it likely that, in fixing upon Madras as a site for the Company's business, he was guided almost entirely by the question of trade-profits, and that in his mind's eye there were no prophetic visions of imperial glory. And it has been asked indeed whether or not he really chose well in choosing Madraspatnam by the Triplicane river as the site of the proposed new settlement; for there are those who have argued that the prosperity of Madras has been due to dogged British enterprise and placid Indian co-operation, not to natural advantages, and that Madras has prospered in spite of Madras. We must bear in mind, however, the limited geographical knowledge of the times and the limitations to Mr. Francis Day's choice; and, whatever the verdict may be, the fact remains that the Madraspatnam of Mr. Francis Day's selection is now a vast city, and that the Empire of India which was born at Chandragiri is now a mighty institution.

CHAPTER III

'Madras was a sandy beach ... where the English began by erecting straw huts.' So says an old-time chronicle,[1] the work of an early resident of Madras; and, if we take the word 'straw' in a broad sense, we can easily conceive the scene. In Madras the bamboo and the palmyra grow in abundance, furnishing materials for the quick provision of cheap and commodious accommodation; and we can picture the pilgrim fathers of Madras camped in palmyra-thatched mat-sheds on the north bank of the Cooum river, near the bar, the while that the houses within the plan of the fort are being built.

The 'sandy beach' has been waked from its longaeval placidity. Trains of bullock-carts are lumbering along new-made tracks, bringing stone and laterite and bricks and timber from various centres; and endless files of coolies, with baskets on their heads, are bringing sand from the summer-dry edges of the bed of the Cooum river. In the foreground of the picture, scores of chattering village-labourers, from Triplicane and other hamlets hard by, are working under the directions of the mechanical employees of the Company, chipping stone, mixing lime, sawing timber, carrying bricks and stones and mortar, or laying them adroitly in place, with little dependence on line and level.

In the course of a few months the buildings were sufficiently advanced for occupation. The main building was the 'factory,' which formerly signified a mercantile office; and it was here that the Company's chief officials, who were styled 'factors' (agents), assisted by writers and apprentices, transacted the Company's business, and were also lodged. Included amongst the buildings were warehouses for the Company's goods, and also barrack-like residences for the Company's subordinate British employees, civil and military, according to their rank.

From the very beginning the settlement was called Fort St. George, but it was several years before the buildings were surrounded by a high and fortified wall. It was in no spirit of military aggression that the Company's agents enclosed their settlement with a bastioned rampart, from whose battlements big cannon frowned on all sides round. The Company's representatives were 'gentle merchaunts,' to whom peace spelt prosperity; but the times were lawless, and the gentle merchants were wise enough to recognize that days might come when it would be necessary to defend their merchandise and themselves, as well as the town of Madras, from the roving robber or the princely raider or the revengeful trade-rival, and that military preparedness was a dictate of prudence. The days came!

On such occasions the excitement in Fort St. George must have been great. We can imagine the anxiety with which, when the sentry gave the alarm, the gentle merchants climbed upon the walls and looked out at the horsemen that were to be descried in the distance, and asked one another disconsolately whether it was in peace or in war that they came. A brief notice of some of the occasions on which the Fort was in danger will be interesting.

Some fifty years after the Fort had been founded, a party of soldiers under the Commander-in-Chief of the Mohammedan King of Golconda pursued some of the King's enemies into Madras, "burning and Robbing of houses, and taking the Companies Cloth and goods," whereupon the Governor of the Fort sent them word that "he would use means to force them out of the Towne: Uppon which they retreated out of shott of the Fort." They returned, however, with additional strength, and for eight months they besieged the stronghold, but without success; and then they wearied of their hopeless endeavour, and marched away.

Later, a Dutch force, supported by Mohammedan cavalry, besieged San Thomé, which was then in the hands of the French; and for the purpose of the siege they occupied Triplicane village, mounting their cannon within the walls of Triplicane Temple, which they used as a fort. During the several weeks of the siege of San Thomé a powerful Dutch squadron blockaded the coast of Madras; and, as Britain and Holland were at war in Europe, there was constant anxiety in Fort St. George; but the Dutchmen contented themselves with the capture of San Thomé, and were prudent enough to let Fort St. George alone.

In the days of Queen Anne, Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic, at the head of a large force, was reported to be marching to Madras. In Fort St. George there was much anxiety as to the purpose of his visit, and 'By order of the Governor and Council' various protective measures were immediately proclaimed. The proclamation is to be found in full in the Company's Minutes; and we find an amusing reminder of the Company's mercantile raison d'être in the fact that immediately after the military edicts comes the order 'That all the Company's cloth be brought from the washers, washed and unwashed, to prevent its being plundered.' The Nawab came, and he uttered threats, but he was mollified with luxurious entertainment. Inviting himself and his dewan and his chamberlain to dinner with the Governor and Councillors in the Fort, he was received with imposing honours, and was feasted in the Council Chamber at a magnificent banquet. The minutes relate that after dinner he was "diverted with the dancing wenches," and finally he got "very Drunk." At breakfast the next day in the Company's 'Garden,' His Highness again got "very drunk and fell a Sleep;" and a few days later he marched his army away. In his sober moments, however, he had been slyly measuring the Company's strength; and six months later he came back with a larger force, and blockaded Madras. He plundered all that he could, and on one occasion his spoil included "40 ox loads of the Company's cloth." For more than three months the blockade continued, and the Company's trade was entirely stopped, and provisions in Madras were exceedingly scarce. Da-ud Khan, eventually wearying of the unsuccessful siege, named the price that would buy him off; and the Council, fearing the wrath of the Directors at the loss of their trade, were glad to come to terms. The Company's Minute on the occasion is a brief but exultant record: 'The siege is raised!'

In 1746 there was a siege of a more serious sort. England and France were at war in Europe, and suddenly a squadron of French ships appeared off Fort St. George. After a week's siege, the English merchants capitulated to superior force, and they were all sent to Pondicherry as prisoners, and the French flag waved over Madras; but by the treaty which ended the war, Madras was restored to the Company. Twelve years later Madras was once more besieged by the French, but unsuccessfully, and eventually the French leaders marched their forces away, quarrelling among themselves over their ill-success.

On several occasions, bodies of horsemen in the service of the adventurous Haidar Ali of Mysore, raided the country almost up to the Fort ditch, and were sometimes to be seen shaking their spears in defiance at the sentries on its walls.

These were not the only occasions on which Fort St. George was assailed, but they suffice to show how necessary it was that the Company's employees and their wares should be housed within the walls of a fort.

Fort St. George in the beginning was very small. Its external length parallel with the seashore was 108 yards, and its breadth was 100 yards. When White Town, which grew up around it, was fortified, there was 'a fort within a fort' (vide Map, p. 10); but eventually the inner wall was demolished. At various times the outer wall has been altered, but the Fort as we have it to-day is the selfsame Fort St. George nevertheless, a glorious relic of bygone times, and verily a history in stone.

The gates of Fort St. George open towards main thoroughfares of Madras, and it is permitted to anybody to pass in and out; but it is not visited nearly so much as its historic associations deserve. Let us pass within, and see if we cannot catch something like inspiration from the scene where so much history has been made, and where a great Empire was born.