It was to be the last meeting of the Madras Book Club at the Connemara for a while, a talk about a French Indian family called Prouchandy (Pichandy?), whom the speaker had written about in Tamil Heroes of French India . No surprises were expected from Prof Prashant More of Paris and Pondicherry, but a series of googlies, all delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, had his audience bowled over.
The first surprise was Prof More announcing that V.O. Chidambaram was not the first Indian or Tamil to start a steamship navigation company to take on the ships of the colonialists. Dharmananthan Prouchandy, a contract-supplier to hospitals in Saigon, had got into shipping long before VOC. He bought his first steamer in 1891 and second in 1892, to ply the Mekong River from Cochin China (South Vietnam, today) to Cambodia, carrying passengers, mail and goods. But by 1895 new bureaucrats in French Indo-China made life difficult for him and he gave up shipping to concentrate on his other businesses.
It was to Dharmanathan’s mentorship that his brother in Pondicherry entrusted his son Saverikannu, to whom school was not his favourite place. Before long, uncle and nephew fell out and Saverikannu went his own way which was to lead to him becoming one of the richest Indians in Vietnam and being called ‘The Owner of a Hundred Houses’. To help in his burgeoning business, Saverikannu inducted a young nephew, Leon, giving him the opportunities Dharmanathan had not given him (Saverikannu). Sadly, Saverikannu died in middle age, leaving a young wife — he had married her on the death of his first wife — and four small children. Then came the second surprise of the evening; breaking all tradition, Leon, just then feeling his oats in reformist thinking, married his uncle’s widow who was of his age. Into his hands fell a fortune he was to nurture into great wealth.
But more than nurturing wealth, Leon Prouchandy’s interest was reform once he heard the call of Gandhi. When Gandhi urged Indians working in foreign establishments to resign their jobs, Leon, then a senior official in a foreign bank (a dubash?) must have been one of the few to heed Gandhi’s call. But while he recognised non-cooperation, he disagreed with Gandhi in many other ways. And there we were at surprise three. Leon Prouchandy launched a dress reforms movement. He believed that Indians would earn the respect of the White man only if, like the Japanese and Chinese, they gave up traditional clothes and long hair. Down with the dhoti and other Indian ‘national’ attire, off with the kudumi s, he proclaimed. Wear Western suits and crop your hair, he urged. And many answered his call.
Seen as a nationalist, dreaming of new Indians, it was inevitable that he would come to the attention of Subhas Chandra Bose during his recruitment and collection drives through Japanese-occupied territories. Leon Prouchandy not only became a substantial financial contributor to the Indian Independence League (IIL) and Indian National Army (INA), but he became a close associate of Netaji. His house became the Secretariat of the IIL.
Then came the two biggest surprises of all. When, at War’s end, Bose flew out of Japan, he headed for Saigon and the IIL Secretariat to be closeted with Leon Prouchandy ‘the treasurer’. Three days later, he said farewell and flew out of Saigon — on the day he is said to have died in a crash in what was then Formosa (Taiwan). More showed his audience a rare archival picture — Leon Prouchandy saying farewell to Netaji in Saigon and surmised that Bose must have told Prouchandy where he was going and what to do with all the wealth.
More also felt that Bose had not died in an air crash in Taipei, that he had gone elsewhere. Prouchandy was soon arrested and tortured, then released three months later a broken man. But had he provided the French, the British and the Vietnamese answers, wondered More, who sprang his final surprise stating he was Leon Prouchandy’s step-grandson. And then he advised, “Stay tuned to Discovery Channel in June. They are having a programme which might have answers to all this.”
A bridge no more
Life is full of strange coincidences. The other day, I was looking for a photograph of P.H. Mortensen, then in charge of the Engineering Construction Corporation (ECC), now a part of industrial giant L&T. He had considerably helped the NGO Bala Mandir that has been founded by Kamaraj and Manjubhashini and I was involved in writing a book in which the NGO figured. When I got back home after that search, what should I find but the Ceylankan , a heritage-oriented publication the mail had brought me from Australia. And in it was an article about the bridge over the River Kwai that Mortensen and ECC had reproduced in Ceylon for the shooting there of what has become a film classic.
Said to have been the biggest film set ever to have been constructed till then, the bridge was built over the river Kelani near Kitulgala and had become a major tourist attraction. Now, sadly, it has made way for development. In the process, it has passed into history.
The bridge at Kitulgala was meant to be a wooden bridge like the original, but Mortensen had it built of steel and cladded it with wood from the surrounding forest. The quote for the job had been Rs. 8 lakh but, when completed, it had shot up to Rs.16 lakh. Sam Spiegel shouted that he wouldn’t pay a nickel more than the 800,000 quoted. Toubro, the T in L&T (L was Larsen), said that was fine, but he (Spiegel) wouldn’t be able to blow up the bridge because ECC had got an injunction against it. With a high-power cast and crew standing by on full salary, Spiegel had to finally agree to pay more than a nickel but not quite what Mortensen had billed him.
The real bridge in Thailand was, however, not over the River Kwai. There is no such river. Kwai apparently means river in Thai, so River Kwai would have been River River! But Pierre Boulle, the author of the book on which the film was based, gave it the name — and it stuck. But the river across which the bridge was actually built in the early 1940s was Kwai Yai (Big River). It was further north, on a tributary, the Kwai Noi (Small River) that the film’s action was actually set.
When the postman knocks…
* I bumped into R.N. Ratnam and he reminded me about something I had written about his father many years ago. Sadly, my memory did not recall what I wrote; once I finish a column, I’ve forgotten all I’ve written, thinking only about the next column. In this instance, Ratnam decided to refresh my memory about what I had written in Miscellany, July 7, 2008. At that time I had written about U.S. Ramasundaram, a PWD Executive Engineer who was deputed to construct airstrips in 1942 to meet the needs of war and that he had been given his own aircraft to travel on site inspection. Apart from Coimbatore, Bangalore, Trichy and Tanjore, that I had then mentioned, Ramasundaram, his son tells me, constructed airstrips for the Royal Air Force in Madras, Ulundurpet, Madurai, Trivandrum, Kayathar, Gannavaram (new Bezwada) and Kanadukathan.
Many of these have become a part of airports and aerodromes. Salem was Ramasundaram’s base and his pilot was M.Y. Khan, the Chief Instructor of the Madras Flying Club. The new list particularly interested me because Kanadukathan, a tiny village in Chettinad, is my home town and many have been the appeals that what is now a cattle experimental farm be made an aerodrome to serve Chettinad (Sivaganga District). There’d be no dearth of traffic given the number of times Chettiars keep going back and forth to Chettinad for weddings and other life cycle functions. Ramasundaram’s airstrip will stand the traffic; after all, it was built for Flying Fortresses targeting Southeast Asia. World War II ended before it could be put to use.
* KRA Narasiah, referring to my item on Sadguru Omkar (Miscellany, April 11) recalls a train journey to Bombay in 1956 when he had shared a compartment with an ascetic. They got talking and the Swamiji asked Narasiah about life in the Navy (Narasiah was a Naval Engineer) and told him that he was going to Poona to deliver a lecture. Narasiah asked him how he had become an ascetic and was shocked out of his wits to hear that Sadguru Omkar had been Neelakanta Brahmachari, the same person involved in the Ashe murder case. Sadguru Omkar’s story was written and published as a book by veteran journalist R.A. Padmanabhan, according to Narasiah, a book now not available. But according to Padmanabhan, Sadguru Omkar had been present when Bharati passed away and, when asked, refused to light the pyre.
* R. Madhavan recalling telephones his grandfathers had in the late 1930s, writes, “I vividly remember having to crank the telephone until the operator came on line and connected the call whenever the manual plugging in of calls failed.” He adds, “I still rely entirely on BSNL phone and Indian Postal Service. Mobile phones are a great convenience for people who want to be connected 24x7, but the greatest menace for those who want to be boss of their time.”
