“This slim volume is as much a historical guide for those who wish to look around Madras, or wish to find out more about their city, as it is a plea to conserve not only its spacious environment but also its cultural and historic relics, be they Indian or European,” wrote S. Muthiah in the December of 1981 as the preface to his first book chronicling the city, Madras Discovered . Then published by K.S. Padmanabhan, founder of Westland publishing house, the book has since grown in pages and content with each revision and addition. This weekend, on the 375th birthday of Madras, Muthiah released the seventh edition of the book, Madras Rediscovered , at an event at Taj Connemara convened by Gautam Padmanabhan, late Padmanabhan’s son and CEO of Westland. Six years have passed since the last edition of Madras Rediscovered , and it stands at nearly 600 pages today, considerably larger than the first 120-page edition that Muthiah hand-wrote and his wife typed out.
Muthiah’s wife Valli was also the reason behind his book Tales of Old and New Madras , first published in 1989. “I was researching the city then to support a T.T. Maps of Madras, and I discovered the lives of Clive and Hastings and realised that there were scores of other contributors to modern India who had the beginnings to their careers in Madras, and went on to achieve fame, fortune or notoriety,” said Muthiah at the launch. His notes from books, paper cuttings and snippets of history grew to occupy large shelves in his home, until his wife decided one day to spring clean the cupboards empty unless he did something with it all. It is these stories of individuals that make Tales… , which contained 35 stories, “one for each decade”, says Muthiah, in its first edition that was released when Madras turned 350.
The second edition also released at this launch, features 38 stories with three new stories added and two older ones replaced. “These vignettes of an untenanted sandy spit that grew into one of the great metropolises of the world, range from romantic nostalgia to crime, from sport to journalism, and from language to modern-day politics,” reads the book’s jacket.
Also present at the launch were historian and author Sriram V., who traced a quick timeline of former chroniclers of Madras, starting with the anonymous author of the Sanskrit work Sarva Deva Vilasa , translator of Madras Rediscovered , and Muthiah’s other works, Karthik Narayanan, Regional Joint Commissioner Dr. R. Anandkumar IAS, and Rear Admiral (retd.) Mohan Raman.
