Mansions. Merchants and Memsahibs. “The stately bungalow, once an integral part of Chennai, is now more or less a thing of the past.” Thus spake Sriram V in his introduction to the ‘Historic Residences of Chennai’ in August 2008.
With wonderfully evocative pencil sketches by artist V Vijayakumar and short histories by Sriram, it documents the architectural style of the city and the people. Sriram is a walking encyclopedia. On Sunday mornings he takes people on heritage treks around the nooks and narrow by-lanes of the city. There is a companion volume that celebrates the grand old city’s trees. Both have been inspired by Chandra Shankar, the publisher and director of Kalamkriya Limited, who has a passion for keeping the city’s traditions alive.
Down Binny Road
Since that time, heritage has become the buzzword. It’s being consumed, filtered by a strong sense of style and decanted into a dabara of filter coffee. Or an English-style tea served at the iconic Lady Connemara Bar and Lounge at the Taj Connemara Hotel. They call it a “celebration tea” with champagne and salmon sandwiches for those in need of something stronger than the vintage brews from the Tata Estates in the Nilgiris. Lady Connemara has herself been re-invented ever since she left her husband the Governor of Madras, and taken up residence at the original hotel. She’s now a feminist who owns a bar and a retro-chic lounge that carries her name.
It’s somehow fitting that the heritage trail begins at the Taj Connemara Hotel, on Binny Road since this is where the very first and certainly the very best of the Chettinad style food was introduced at The Raintree. Chettinad cuisine is a brand that has travelled across the dabhas, durbars and all the in-between places of the country.
The revival began with the mansions of the merchant travellers of South India, the Nattukottai Chettiars in the Ramnad District. They had left their ancestral lands in the deep South, and found different means of trade and barter in countries such as Burma, Cambodia and even further East. The Nattukottai Chettiars always returned and added to their estates that were being managed by the formidable women of the community. Soon these clusters had become mini-fortresses filled with fabulously carved and decorated teak pillars, magnificent doors, glass chandeliers, Western-style bent-wood furniture, Belgian mirrors, black and white chequered floor tiles, studio portraits, prints and wall-clocks.
The DakshinaChitra story
When DakshinaChitra (the Museum of South Indian architecture, arts, and crafts on ECR or the East Coast Road going South towards Puducherry) began 24 years ago, one of the first houses to be restored, pillar by pillar and floor tile by floor tile was from Chettinad. In much the same way, there are typical old mansions from the other three Southern States, in addition to small dwellings belonging to the artisans and craftspersons from these areas. DakshinaChitra is managed by the Madras Craft Foundation.
Deborah Thiagarajan, an American scholar with a deep interest in anthropology who married into a progressive Nattukottai Chettiar family, explains how DakshinaChitra began.
“In the early 1970s, I spent three years in the villages of western Tamil Nadu. I saw how villagers looked to the urban centres for their inspiration. Cement houses, mass-manufactured items, including for men, western dress were their aspirations. I could see that these lifestyles, the crafts, the handlooms, textiles, the traditional architecture and even the folk performing arts would change as India became more exposed to the outside world. My role as a daughter-in-law in a Chettiar family exposed me to the wonderful mansions of a community which, because of its long history of the men working in Southeast Asia, learned to appreciate the crafts and architectural values of south India and incorporated them into their homes.”
“But even in the ’70s, these houses were beginning to be torn down as the many family owners could not agree to spend the finance to maintain them. As Madras city had lost most of its traditional homes and old world character by the ’70s, I felt something should be done to remind people of their past. And so DakshinaChitra was conceived.”
Chettinad chronicles
This was the seed-bed of ideas for many such ventures. There was a revival of the special Attangudi sun-baked clay tiles made in Chettinad of rich earth colours and designs; textiles and jewellery. Furniture with mother-of-pearl inlays, Burmese lacquerware, ceramic tiles and kitchen utensils made their way into antique shops in the city.
When Visalakshi Ramaswamy recognized the skilled basketry work made by the Chettiar village women, she started the M RmRm Cultural Foundation that took the palmyra basket weave to a whole new level. At the shop Manjal in MRC Nagar a fascinating range of items using the traditional Chettinad basket technique has now morphed into a wide variety of items, in brilliant colour variations, to create objects of everyday use in a contemporary home.
Of gardens & geese
Through the years DakshinaChitra has invited tribal and folk artists to come and work at the museum alongside local artists and scholars. Since that time the characteristic painting of the Gonds, the Warlis, and Madhubani artists have started to appear outside the walls of the city’s colleges, schools, restaurants, railway underpasses and now metro stations. With them came new forms and ideas linking the lives of urban city dwellers to the villages from across the country. These artists, too, learnt how to work with different materials and idioms to cater to a new marketplace.
In Sriram’s book, there are a number of British-era mansions. They feature a grand portico fronting the entrance, usually with a terraced balcony above and deep covered verandas at the sides of the main halls. These mansions whether reflecting the art deco style, or a more decorative pillared one with stucco elements, were usually built in large gardens with a driveway curving in and out of the portico and a mandatory fountain in front of it.
When Kiran Rao, a student of antiquaries returned to India after a childhood in both England and Germany, she found just such a house that had belonged to her paternal grandmother. She named it Amethyst. It became her first experiment with redefining the past with a contemporary twist. You could plug in your laptop and sit for hours contemplating the future. It could be described as ‘greening the past’. When she started Amethyst Part Two, set in one of the busiest areas just off the main artery of Chennai, she called it ‘Wild Garden Café’. It’s a jungle of native trees and plants with its own wildlife of cats and a reclusive mongoose couple, besides squirrels and birds. With two boutiques, a flower shop, with an extension for garden accessories, it’s a lifestyle space continually in the process of evolving.
Moving on, toute de suite!
At Puducherry, Kiran Rao’s trademark style has found a whole new dimension with the creation of Maison 26. It recently received an award from the French Vieilles Maisons Françaises (VMF), an institution that rewards the restoration of the old buildings. What makes it especially romantic is that the original mansion belonged to a Franco-Tamil merchant named Xavier Condappa who made his fortune in Vietnam in the early 20th century. There are exquisite references to the complex heritage in one of the finer suites named Indo-Chine in rich plum sauce red colours.
“I did not put lights in the chandeliers,” explains Kiran. “I didn’t want it to look like a Saigon parlour.” Never mind what the intentions, each of the four suites with their attached bathrooms is a feast for the senses, with four-poster beds, wonderful tapestries and hangings on the walls, with clusters of quaint artefacts that mingle amidst her trademark greenery. There are casual design references to the Tree of Life that links the differently themed suites, named Bengal, Bombay and Madras, each with its own dominant colour and accessories.
Like the waves that sweep across the Marina each season brings changes. At its core Chennai remains the same. Heritage wins.