The Story of Madras Part 4

In his capital at Arcot, Nawab Walajah, who had many factionary enemies, would a.s.suredly have found himself in a dangerous centre of intrigue; but he was wise in his generation; for as soon as he had gained his independence he sought and obtained from the Governor of Madras permission to build a palace for himself within the protective walls of Fort St. George. Arrangements for the work were made; and one of the streets of the Fort--the street which still bears the name of 'Palace Street'--received its name because it was the street in which the Nawab's residence was to be built. Eventually, however, the scheme was set aside; and in the following year the Nawab acquired private property in Chepauk, and engaged an English architect to build him a house. Chepauk Palace thus came into existence. The grounds of the Palace, which the Nawab surrounded with a wall, formed an immense enclosure, which included a large part of the grounds of Government House of to-day and a great deal of adjoining land.

Chepauk Palace was the scene of some grand doings in its time; and soon after it was built the Nawab entertained the Governor of Madras and his Councillors, one of whom was Mr. Warren Hastings, at 'an elegant breakfast;' and, when the feast was over, he divided some Rs.

30,000 among his guests. The Governor got Rs. 7,000, and, on a sliding scale, the Secretaries, who were last on the list, got Rs. 1,000 each.

The relations, however, between Nawab Walajah and a later Governor of Madras were not so cordial. In 1780 Haidar Ali with an immense army suddenly invaded the Carnatic, and annihilated a British force that was sent to oppose him; and Tipu, his son and successor, continued the campaign. The Company's treasury at Madras was straitened with the expenses of the war, and the Nawab, whose capital was in the hands of the enemy, was unable to contribute thereto; but when Tipu was eventually defeated, the Nawab was induced to a.s.sign the control of the revenues of the Carnatic to the Company. A few months later the Nawab felt that he had made an unwise bargain, and he declared his renunciation of the agreement; but Baron Macartney, the newly appointed Governor of Madras, kept him strictly to his word. The Nawab wrote various official letters, complaining in one that Lord Macartney had 'premeditatedly' offered him 'Insults and Indignity,' and in another that he had shown him 'every mark of Insult and Contempt.' The Directors in London, expressly declaring their desire to content the influential Nawab, decided in his favour; whereupon Lord Macartney, who in the opinion of his friends had been set at naught for the sake of the wealthy potentate, indignantly resigned the Governorship of Madras, and went home. Friendly relations between the Nawab and the Madras Government were thereupon resumed, and when Nawab Walajah died, at the age of seventy-eight, he was eulogised in an official note in the _Fort St. George Gazette_.

The career of his son and successor, Umdat-ul-Umara, was less auspicious. Although his accession was the occasion of friendly letters between himself and the Government of Madras, the Nawab's rejection of the Governor's suggestion that the financial arrangements between himself and the Company should be made more favourable to the Company irritated the Governor, and the Governor's efforts to induce the Nawab to change his mind irritated the Nawab. Meanwhile Tipu Sultan was preparing for another war with the Company, and when, after a brief campaign, Tipu was killed while fighting bravely in defence of his capital, it was declared that an examination of Tipu's correspondence showed that the Nawab of Arcot had been guilty of treasonable communications with Mysore. It was accordingly resolved that the Company should a.s.sume control of the Carnatic; but, as the Nawab was seriously ill, nothing was done until his death, when British troops were sent to occupy Chepauk Palace.

The Nawab's son refused to recognize the Company's right to control his father's dominions, whereupon the Company set him aside, and put his cousin on the throne in his stead. The Company were now the actual rulers of the Carnatic, and the future Nawabs were styled 't.i.tular Nawabs.' In 1855 the third of the t.i.tular Nawabs died without any son to succeed him. Lord Dalhousie was Governor-General of India at the time, and it was Lord Dalhousie's declared policy that if the ruler of any native state died without issue, his dominions should formally lapse to the Company. On this principle the Carnatic now became a formal part of the British dominions, and the dynasty of the Nawabs came to an end; Chepauk Palace, which was the personal property of the Nawabs, was acquired by the Company's Government for a price, and was eventually turned into Government offices.

The many thousands of Mohammedans, however, who dwelt in the crowded streets and lanes of Chepauk, and who had looked upon the Nawab as their religious chief, would have been afflicted at the cessation of the Carnatic line; and after the Indian Mutiny the Government of India, respecting Mohammedan sentiment, recognized the succession of the nearest relative of the late Nawab and obtained for him from the King of England the hereditary t.i.tle of Amir-i-Arcot, or 'Prince of Arcot'--an honorary t.i.tle but higher than that of Nawab. A sum of Rs.

1,50,000 per annum--(not an excessive sum in relation to the revenues of the Carnatic, which are now collected by the Madras Government)--is expended annually in pensions to the Prince and to certain of his relatives; and he lives in a house called the 'Amir Mahal' (the Amir's Palace), which was given to him by the Government. The Amir Mahal stands in s.p.a.cious grounds in Royapettah. At the princ.i.p.al entrance, the gate-house is a tall and imposing edifice in red brick. At the gateway, sentries, armed with old-fashioned rifles, stand--or sometimes sit--on guard; and the Prince's Band is often to be heard practising oriental music in the room up above.

Regarded in relation to its history, Chepauk is something more than 'one of the Government buildings on the Marina.' Let us remember that, when it was enclosed within the walls that are now no more, it was the home of Mohammedan potentates--sometimes a scene of gorgeous festivity--sometimes a scene of desperate intrigue. In imagination we may people the front garden with the gaily-uniformed Body-Guard of the Carnatic sovereign, mounted on gaily-bridled steeds; and we may see the Nawab himself coming magnificently down the front steps and climbing into the silver howdah that is strapped on the back of a kneeling elephant. A blast of oriental music, and the procession goes on its way; and we may wonder at which of the tiled windows on the upper floor the bright eyes of the Lalla Rookhs and the Nurmahals of Chepauk are slily peeping at the spectacle. The vision vanishes. The procession now is a procession of clerks to their homes when their day's work is over; and the music is a ragtime selection by the Band of the Madras Guards on the Marina, close by, with ayahs and children around. We are in the twentieth century; but for a moment we have lived in the past.

CHAPTER XI

GOVERNMENT HOUSE

In the early days of Madras all the employees of the Company, from the Governor down to the most junior apprentice, lived in common. Their bedrooms were in one and the same house, and they had their meals at one and the same table. The house stood in the middle of the Fort, and was the 'Factory'--a word which, as already explained, was used in former times to mean a mercantile office, or, as Annandale in his dictionary defines it, 'an establishment where factors in foreign countries reside to transact business for their employers;' and the Factory in Fort St. George was both an office and a home.

The community life, with the common table, was maintained for many years, but in course of time, when the number of the employees had greatly increased and some of the senior officials had wives and children, one man and another were allowed to live in separate quarters, within the precincts of the Fort; and eventually the common table, like King Arthur's, was dissolved. Even then, however, and right on until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the junior employees had a common mess, and were under something like disciplined control.

Like all the other buildings inside the Fort and within the walls of White Town, the Factory--which was sometimes spoken of as 'The Governor's House'--was without a garden; and it was only to be expected that the resident employees, most of whom were young men, should wish for a recreation ground to which they could resort in their leisure hours. Some of the wealthy private residents of White Town had shown what could be done; for they had acquired patches of land outside the walls, which they had enclosed with hedges and cultivated as gardens, with a house in the middle of each garden, in which, as either a permanent or an occasional residence, the owner and his family might hope to find relief from the stuffiness of the streets of the rapidly developing city. In the 'Records' any such villa is spoken of as a 'garden-house' and even now in Madras the term 'garden-house' is occasionally used in Indo-English as signifying a house that stands within its own 'compound,' as distinct from houses that open directly into the street.

The Company's agents in Madras realized the desirability of laying out a garden for the recreative benefit of the Company's employees.

Outside the walls, therefore, of White Town they hedged off some eight acres of land in the locality in which the Law College now stands, and they cultivated it as a 'Company's Garden;' and within it they built a small pavilion. We may imagine that in the cool of the evening it was common for a goodly number of the Company's mercantile employees to leave their apartments in the Fort and stroll beyond the walls the short distance to the 'Garden,' which in those early days was refreshingly near the seash.o.r.e. In our mind's eye we can blot the Law College out of the landscape and can see a party of youthful merchants engaged as energetically as was suitable to the heat of Madras in the then fashionable game of bowls--or, less energetically but much more excitedly, gathered in a ring round two c.o.c.ks that are tearing each other to pieces--a particularly popular form of 'Sport' in old Madras; and, although the Directors in London appropriately forbade to their employees the use of cards or the dice-box, we can espy a tense-visaged quartet within the shadow of the pavilion with a 'pool'

of 'fanams' (coins worth about 2-_d_.) on the table, or possibly, rupees or paG.o.das, absorbed in a round of ombre or one of the other card games that were in fashion. The sun has set, and the shadows are lengthening. A bugle sounds from the Fort; and the employees stroll back to supper, which, according to an old account, invariably consisted of 'milk, salt fish, and rice,' but which will be privately supplemented afterwards with potations of arrack-punch by those who can afford nothing better and with draughts of sack or canary by those who can.

In the course of a few years the 'Company's Garden' was spoiled. Black Town had been springing up close by; and, when a wall was built round old Black Town, the Company's Garden was unpleasantly included therein, and the Garden was now in the north-west corner of the Indian city. Moreover, a part of the Garden had begun to be utilized as a European burial-ground, and huge funeral monstrosities of the bygone style had begun to dominate the enclosure.

The Company's agents in Madras felt that a new recreation ground was a necessity; and they were agreed that there ought to be not merely a 'Company's Garden,' but a 'Company's Garden-House.' They wrote to the Directors saying that there were occasions on which the Company in Madras had to entertain 'the King (Golconda) and persons of quality,'

and that they had no building that was suitable for any such ceremonial proceedings. True there was the Council Chamber in the Fort, but the Council Chamber was the place where the Company's mercantile transactions were discussed; and the Chamber, as well as all the other buildings in the Fort, was closely identified with the 'Factory;' and the Company's chief officials in Madras declared--not, we may suppose, without regard for their own convenience--that a stately 'Garden House,' una.s.sociated with ledgers and bills of sale, ought to be built, in due accord with the stateliness of the Company itself. Their application for permission to put the work in hand was met by the Directors in London with the typically frugal reply that the work might be done but care was to be taken that the Company should be put to 'no great charge.' Possibly the representatives in Madras were able to provide additional supplies on the spot, but, however that may have been, the house was 'handsomely built,' yet 'with little expense to the Company.' The new garden seems to have comprised the area within which the Medical College and the General Hospital are now situated. The grounds, which stretched down, even as now, to the bank of the river, were well laid out, and the Company's first 'Garden House' was a fine possession.

In 1686 Master William Gyfford, Governor of Fort St. George, had a fancy for using the Garden House as a private residence for himself.

It is not to be wondered at that he did so; for Master Gyfford, after twenty-seven years' residence in Madras and more than twenty-seven years in the East, was in poor health, and lately he had been taken ill with a 'a violent fitt of the Stone and Wind Collick.' The gardenless 'Factory' in the Fort was a gloomy apology for a 'Governor's House,' and the crowd of employees that were accommodated there must have been a serious infliction upon the invalid Governor; and he found the Garden House an agreeable retreat. In his new quarters he got better of his illness; and he dwelt there a considerable time, till in the following year he left Madras for England for good. The story is interesting, for it records the first occasion on which a Governor of Madras lived in a separate house outside the Fort.

On various occasions the Company's 'Garden House,' with its extensive grounds, was used for public purposes, justifying the plea for its construction. For example, when the Company received the news of the accession of King James II, the event was celebrated with brilliant proceedings at the Garden House. Similarly, at the accession of Queen Anne 'all Europeans of fashion in the City' were invited to the Garden House, where they 'drank the Queen's Health, and Prosperity to old England.' In an earlier chapter we have related how a young Nawab of Arcot who had just succeeded to his murdered father's throne was entertained at the Garden House with great doings. Governor Pitt made great developments in the Gardens, and was another Governor who liked the Garden House as a residence. An Englishman who was living in Madras in 1704, when Pitt was Governor, has left an interesting account of the Garden House as he saw it:--

'The Governor, during the hot Winds, retires to the Company's new Garden for refreshment, which he has made a very delightful Place of a barren one. Its costly Gates, lovely Bowling-Green, s.p.a.cious Walks, Teal-pond, and Curiosities preserved in several Divisions are worthy to be Admired. Lemons and Grapes grow there, but five Shillings worth of Water and attendance will scarcely mature one of them.'

Before long it had come to be an unwritten regulation that Governors at Fort St. George might reside at their choice either in the Fort or at the Garden House. There came a time, however, when the Governor had of necessity to betake himself to the Fort; it was the time when the French were besieging Madras. During the siege the enemy used the Garden House as a vantage-ground for their big guns; and afterwards, when they had captured Fort St. George and were in occupation of the city, they pulled the Garden House down, lest the English, trying perhaps to recapture the Fort, should be able to use it as a vantage-ground in their turn.

Thus, when Madras was restored to the English, the Garden House had disappeared, and the only house for Governor Saunders was the original residence in the middle of the Fort. Governor Saunders, however, was not content with the walled-in accommodation that the Fort provided and was unwilling to forgo the residential privileges that his predecessors had enjoyed; so a private 'garden-house' in Chepauk was rented in his behalf. It belonged to a Mrs. Madeiros, a rich Portuguese widow, whose husband, lately deceased, had been a leading merchant in White Town.

Mrs. Madeiros's house was 'Government House, Madras,' of the present day. The house, however, has been enlarged and the grounds have been extended since Governor Saunders lived there as a tenant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE, MADRAS]

Governor Saunders liked his residence, and, before he had been there a year, the Company acquired it from the widow, who had no use for it now that her husband was dead; and the Governor was careful to leave on record the reason of the acquisition:--

'It having been always usual for the Company to allow the President a house in the Country to retire to, and Mrs.

Medeiros being willing to dispose of her House, situated in the Road to St. Thome, for three thousand five hundred paG.o.das (say Rs 12,250), Agreed That it be purchased accordingly, The Company's Garden-house having been demolish'd by the French when they were in Possession of this Place, and Mrs. Medeiros's being convenient for that Purpose, and on a Survey esteem'd worth much more than the Sum 'tis offer'd at.'

The Company always enjoyed a good bargain, and Governor Saunders was justified in thinking that he had made a very good one in respect of the house; for, a few years later, the house, with certain extensions and improvements, was written down in the Company's books at a valuation of nearly four times the price that was paid for it.

We have brought our story down to the acquisition of Government House, but it remains to relate some of the historic events in which Government House has figured since it was acquired.

During the second siege of Madras by the French, under Lally, the besiegers occupied the Garden House, and during their occupation they did a great deal of wanton damage before they ceased their vain endeavours. Two years later, however, the English had the enjoyment of a delicate revenge. They captured Pondicherry and brought Lally to Madras, where they imprisoned him in the Garden House till a vessel was available to take him to England. The damage that he had done had not yet been repaired; and a contemporary Record says that 'Mr. Lally was lodged in those apartments of the Garden House which had escaped his fury at the Siege of Madras,' and that in respect of his table he was allowed to give his own orders 'without limitation of expence,'

with the result that he 'seemed to have intended Revenge by Profusion.'

A few years later Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, at the head of a body of hors.e.m.e.n, made a sudden raid on Madras; and the troopers scampered about the well-laid-out grounds of the Garden House, looting the villages on either side. According to accounts, Governor Bourchier and his Councillors were there when the raiders came, and they would a.s.suredly have been caught had they not managed to make their escape in a boat that was conveniently tied up on the bank of the Cooum river.

More than one Governor of Fort St. George has died at Government House, and it was there that Governor Pigot died in extraordinary circ.u.mstances. The tale has been told in a previous chapter, that Lord Pigot was arrested by his Councillors, with whom he had quarrelled, and that he died in confinement in the Garden House.

The reader has yet to be told how the Garden House was finally transformed into the Government House that we see to-day.

In 1798 Lord Clive, son of the great Robert Clive, was sent out to India as Governor of Madras. Within the first six months of his arrival there was the excitement of a war with Mysore, in which the terrible Tipu Sultan was killed during the a.s.sault on his capital.

During the tranquil remainder of his five years in India, Lord Clive turned his attention to domestic reforms, and amongst them he resolved that the Garden House should be improved. In an official minute he wrote:--

'The garden house, at present occupied by Myself, is so insufficient either for the private accommodation of my family and Staff, or for the convenience of the public occasions inseparable from my situation, that it is my intention to make such an addition to it as may be calculated to answer both purposes.'

Lord Clive thereupon, in 1801, developed Government House at a cost of more than Rs. 3 lakhs; and two years later he built the beautiful Banqueting Hall, at a cost of Rs. 2 lakhs. The recent fall of Tipu's capital of Seringapatam was an event that the Banqueting Hall could appropriately commemorate; and Lord Clive, with pious respect for his dead father's memory, coupled Pla.s.sey with Seringapatam, and ordered that the fine figure-work on the facade of the hall should be a commemoration of both victories. In England the Directors of the Company complained of what they called 'such wasteful extravagance;'

but the developments were a real want, and it is a matter of present-day satisfaction that the Madras Government have no need to be acquiring a site now and to be building a new Government House in these expensive days. Lord Clive was certainly no miser with the Company's money, for he built also a second Government House--a 'country residence' at Guindy. The 'country residence' was developed and improved some forty years later by Lord Elphinstone, who was Governor of Madras in the middle of last century. It is a truly beautiful house, standing in beautiful grounds; and it has lately been a proposition that the house at Guindy should be the Governor's only residence, and that Government House, Madras, should be used for Government offices.

'Government House, Madras!' To most people it is suggestive of dinner parties within and garden parties without; and the Banqueting Hall is suggestive of dances and levees and meetings for good causes. But to people who can look at Government House, Madras, with an historic glance it rouses other memories. Within its original walls more than two centuries ago a belaced Senhor kept Portuguese state. It was here that Frenchmen were encamped while their guns were fruitlessly hammering at the walls of Fort St. George. It was here that Lally lived sumptuously in prison, till he was sent to Europe--eventually to be executed in Paris for having failed to capture Madras. It was within these grounds that Tipu's hors.e.m.e.n were scampering about on a September morning, looking for houses where money or jewels could be commandeered. It was here that an enn.o.bled Governor of Madras lived in gilded captivity till death set him free.

CHAPTER XII

MADRAS AND THE SEA

Madras is now a seaport of considerable repute; but it is interesting to recall the fact that less than forty years ago the city was without a harbour, and that ships which came there had to anchor out at sea.

In the days of the Company, pa.s.sengers and cargo had to be landed on the beach in boats; and, as the waves that chase one another to the sh.o.r.es of Madras are nearly always giant billows crested with foaming surf, the pa.s.sage between ship and sh.o.r.e was not without its discomforts and also its risks.

Warren Hastings, when he was senior member of the Madras Council and was in charge of Public Works, wrote it down that he thought it 'possible to carry out a causeway or pier into the sea beyond the Surf, to which boats might come and land their goods or pa.s.sengers, without being exposed to the Surf.' At various times different engineers devised plans for such a pier as Warren Hastings proposed, but nothing was actually done, and it was not until the sixties of last century that a pier was actually made. It was not a stone causeway such as Hastings seems to have had in his mind, but was a lighter and likelier structure of wood and iron; and it did excellent work, making it easy for pa.s.sengers and cargo to be landed in fair weather. Madras was still, however, without a harbour; but before many years a harbour was taken in hand, and in the summer of 1881 its two arms, enclosing the small pier, were practically finished. There was much rejoicing; but the congratulations were short-lived, for on a certain night during the winter of the same year there was a cyclone off Madras, and the next morning the citizens saw that their harbour had been wrecked by the devastating waves. It was fifteen years before the harbour had been restored, upon an improved plan; and even then it was a poor apology for a haven; for when a storm was expected, ships were warned to put out to sea, as the cyclone had shown that a stormy sea was less dangerous than the storm-beaten harbour. Within recent years, however, the harbour has been so much altered and strengthened and developed that it is regarded as a splendid piece of engineering, and shipping business in Madras has benefited greatly. Large vessels can now lie up against wharves, to discharge or to load their cargo, and pa.s.sengers can embark and disembark in comfort, and the increase in trade has been great. Much watchfulness, however, is still very necessary; for, on an exciting night a few years ago, part of the extended harbour-wall was washed away by a storm.

Yes, Madras is an important seaport; yet it is a fact that, except to men whose business is with the sea, Madras is much less like a seaside town than it was in its earlier years, and many of the people who live there seldom see the briny ocean--even though they may sometimes be reminded of its nearness when in the stillness of the night they hear

'The league-long breakers thundering on the sh.o.r.e.'

For one thing, the greater part of Madras is not so near the sea as it was in former times; for the southern wall of the harbour has acted as a breakwater, causing the sea to recede a very long way from the original sh.o.r.e; and houses in the thoroughfare that is still called 'Beach Road' are now a very long way from the beach, and it is only from upper stories that the sea in the distance is visible. Southward, moreover, the magnificent road that is still called the 'Marina' is fast losing its right to the name; for it is only across a broad stretch of ever-extending dry sand that the dark blue ribbon of tropical sea is beheld therefrom.