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The Raj Bhavan and its neighbouring VIP guesthouses occupy spacious and beautifully kept surroundings, provided you don't look too hard at its western and southern edges.
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NOW THAT much of its woodland is a National Park, Raj Bhavan and its neighbouring VIP guesthouses occupy truncated but nevertheless spacious and beautifully kept surroundings, provided you don't look too hard at its western and southern edges. To the north and east of its immaculate lawns, there's still much of the tree cover that had once made it a country retreat midst a forest. Something of those early days of the property is known, but little is known of how the Classical style buildings evolved here. Perhaps, an official of Raj Bhavan will one day bring me up-to-date by contributing to this column's `Readers' Corner' — or, better still, some documentation of the campus will be done to leave behind a record of what must be a fascinating bit of architectural history.
The story of the Raj Bhavan campus, as far as I've been able to trace it, dates to Governor Sir William Langhorne (1672-78). When Langhorne arrived in Madras in 1671, it was not as Governor but as a Commissioner to inquire into the first coup in Fort St. George, when Governor George Foxcroft was imprisoned by his predecessor, Sir Edward Winter, in September 1665. While the inquiry was going on, the East India Company decided to recall both Foxcroft and Winter — and Langhorne was requested to take over as Governor. It was during Langhorne's term of office that confirmation of the grant of Madras to the Company was signed by Golconda, and Triplicane was first rented to the Company, then granted to it, its first acquisition outside the original three square mile spit of sand at one end of which Fort St. George had come up. Pay scales for the Company's employees, a school in the Fort and the rebuilding of the Capuchin Church of St. Andrew's in the Fort were some of Langhorne's contributions to the growing town. He also built Guindy Lodge in wooded surroundings, for rest and recreation away from the Fort.
Before he sailed in 1678, he sold Guindy Lodge, its gardens and its woods to Chinna Venkatadri, a younger brother of Beri Thimmappa, one of the founders of the City. Chinna Venkatadri, who must have been Langhorne's dubash, subsequently had problems with the company and, so, sold Guindy Lodge to it. The Company justified its purchase by recording that it was "a very commodious pleasant place for sickly people to recover their healths at". After that, the story of Guindy Lodge gets murky, no doubt the French and Mysore raids — their marauding forces particularly active in this area — had something to do with the gaps in the story I've not been able to fill.
We next hear of Guindy Lodge in connection with a loan a George Ricketts sought against the mortgage of the house in 1813. When he died intestate four years later, Government took over the house — recording it as Guindy Mode (medu = mount) — but suddenly discovered that the impecunious Ricketts, who died insolvent, had mortgaged the property a second time, to a Griffiths! Did I hear someone say there's nothing new under the sun? Be that as it may, the legal tangle was resolved in 1821 in favour of the Bank of Madras, the nucleus of the State Bank of India — and the Bank offered the Government the property as well as a neighbouring one mortgaged to it by the Armenian merchant Joseph Nazar Shawmier. The Company eventually paid Rs.35,000 for Guindy Mode and Rs.8,750 for the Shawmier property. But that's getting ahead of the story.
When Thomas Munro became Governor in 1820, he expressed the view that the Governor's quarters in the Fort and Government Gardens (in what later became known as Government Estate) did not allow him "to transact public business uninterruptedly". And, so, he suggested the Company buy a country retreat for its governors. Between 1821 and 1824 Government bought Guindy Mode and the Shawmier property as well as a third property needed to link both, and so there came into Government possession the extent of woodland and buildings to which Governors retreated whenever they needed a break. This remained the Governor's retreat till Independence, when the Government of Madras and the first Indian Governor felt a Governor keeping his distance from Fort St. George was advisable. And the property became Raj Bhavan.
The main buildings of the Raj Bhavan campus might have had their beginnings in Guindy Mode and its satellite houses, but they took their present Classical elegance when the scholarly Lord Elphinstone was Governor of Madras between 1837 and 1842. One of his pet projects was developing Guindy Mode and its neighbours as buildings fit for a Governor and his guests. Such a campus needed an access avenue worthy of it and so he created what is now mundanely called Taluk Office Road, leading from Mount Road and the Fort to the gates of what should have been called Governor's Retreat. It was an avenue far more tree-embellished that it is today. To build this road, he had a spur of Little Mount that jutted into Mount Road levelled — and got the majestic avenue he wanted.
But even such a sylvan retreat was not enough for Lord Elphinstone during the Madras summers. He introduced the practice of going up, together with his Government, to Ootacamund for the April-July `season'. The practice, started in 1840, continued till shortly after Independence, but Governors still have an Ooty Raj Bhavan too, where they take a summer holiday. That, too, is a magnificent building — and must have its own story to tell.
A few months ago, the Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, Gopalakrishna Gandhi, put together a very readable and much-illustrated record of India House in Colombo, featuring a well-researched history and the recollections of the High Commissioners (or their family) who had lived in it. Perhaps Raj Bhavan might adopt a similar idea, including in it all its bhavans in the State.
S. MUTHIAH
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