Madras Week celebrations are in progress. As is usual in such events, we have a plethora of mourners, in whose view, even nostalgia is no longer as good as what it was. Listening to them, you would imagine that the city was a kind of paradise till a few decades back. From what little I have read of Chennai’s history, I would disagree.
It was beset with enormous problems — drainage, sanitation, disease, poverty, and overcrowding, at all times. Just showing a few black-and-white photographs of empty streets and stately homes does not make for heaven. We can blame only ourselves for degradation. If at all any stakeholder is entitled to cry over what is lost, it would be the wildlife that was once abundant in Chennai.
Theodore Baskaran, in ‘A Squandered Heritage – The Wildlife of Madras’, written as part of the INTACH guide Madras: The Architectural Heritage by K. Kalpana and Frank Schiffer, notes that in the early 17th Century, a tropical evergreen forest, where antelopes roamed, covered the area. According to him, “The Quibble Island, with its expanses of swamp and marshes, attracted a horde of waterfowl and was a favourite hunting ground for the British”.
But till the 1850s, there are several reports of tigers at places such as Pallavaram, Vandalur, Adyar and St. Thomas Mount. A probably apocryphal tale is of Edward Winter, Governor of Madras in the 1600s, grappling with a tiger on the beach and ‘crushing it to death’. That, at least, was the story he circulated on his return to England. His memorial, in St. Mary’s Church, Battersea, has a panel depicting the incident.
Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, Governor in the late 1800s and who gave the Marina beach its name, was a wildlife enthusiast, and his journal is full of jottings on the animal life of the city. Government House, later Omandurar Estate and now the Assembly-turned multi-speciality hospital, was where he lived and he documented the snakes, birds and insects that resided in the gardens. He also writes of a member of the Madras Club (then on land where Express Avenue now is) opening a door in the building to see a jackal wandering in the corridor! The patriot Ambujammal writes of jackals disturbing the sleep of the residents of Luz Church Road. In her book, Sir C.P. Remembered , Shakunthala Jagannathan notes that the family home, The Grove, and surrounding Alwarpet/Teynampet had deer, jackal, palm civet, peacock and even leopard, “the last seen on quite a few occasions”.
It would appear that in our attempt at building the paradise that we never got around to completing, we chased away those who could have made it one. The last Cooum crocodile is, after all, a stuffed exhibit in the museum. But then, creatures like it do not speak at symposiums or find space in columns.
