The twin cities of Madras-Chennai emerge from the birthday bash perhaps wiser for the lessons from history and the need for modernity. The expanded fortnight of paying tribute to the city’s rich past was marked by a bit of a debate about the real age of Madras. Chronologically it is possible to relate more easily to the day the sleepy fishing villages began coalescing into a town thanks to the buying of land for building a fort. The number 377 dating back to 1639 makes a lot of sense as it has a proven history to it.
There is the other view of ancient Madras, perhaps 2,000 years and stretching back to the Sangam era. Well, life on Earth is said to be 3.7 billion years old and an early to-be-Madras in it might have been somewhere in Australia because that is where India was said to have broken away from as the great tectonic plates shifted. We can’t put a date to those events but the simple thing we can do is recognise that more recent history is fascinating and provides many simple reasons to celebrate days in the Gregorian calendar.
One of the great features of our modern metropolis is it is such an amalgam of the old and the new. Why, it even has one line of Metro running through it now and in a couple of decades public transportation of the greener kind might even crisscross it. While we have the church of Luz Church road fame – you can’t see it from the main road named after it as it is tucked away in the Kennedy lanes – celebrating 500 years of its unique Portuguese style architecture, we also have Starbucks cafes busy enough to be serving lattes pretty early in the day, competing successfully enough in a city known for its obsession with ‘degree’ coffee downloaded off a filter of powdered beans.
Much as we do not stop celebrating the first day of Chithirai as the New Year in the Tamil calendar just because a Dravidian politician has his own fixation about why the first of Pongal is the real Tamil New Year, so too must we be open to celebrating two birthdays, if need be. And the city is conveniently named so we could have a Madras Day and a Chennai Day. How they fix the date from a day out of the ancient calendar is the business of historians and finding the corporate and media support is up to those who wish to celebrate it. The fact remains that the August 22 date is already a fixture, which you don’t bring down, much like Pongal does not stop Chithirai from being the real Tamil New year for many.
This way we can celebrate even more the old and the new nestling closer in this city of great contrasts, from the ancient Tiruvallikeni temple dating back some 1,200 years where the charioteer God even wears a moustache in his Kshatriya avatar to the boutiques of Italian and French fashion labels on Khadar Nawaz Khan road, which are a kind of New York Fifth Avenue tribute to the prosperity of some of our fellow citizens. Talking of New York, it did not go by that name till 1664, which is when the British felled the Dutch and named it New York on September 8, 1664 – which day the city celebrates as its birthday. The parallel from the history of British colonialism may not be the most appropriate but it is a fact of history that we the colonised cannot ignore.
It is a mixed legacy that we hold, for instance the ancient Higginbotham’s bookshop facing the much more modern LIC, all decked up last week to celebrate the national insurer’s 60 years. Beauty is in the beholder’s eye and so generations may see them differently, but the heritage seems easier on the eye than the unvarying glass and chrome of today’s office architecture. LIC was, however, an early example of the high-rise in Madras and we are so used to the edifice now that the skyscraper seems almost stylish compared to what we see today in a virtually cloned atmosphere of office blocks. It would be in the fitness of things that both edifices be lit up when we celebrate Madras Day and Chennai Day too, if ever that comes up. We should be measured by our ability to absorb the new as well as appreciate the old as this ‘twin’ city grows on beyond its ancient birthday as well as its better defined beginning as a centre of power 377 years ago.
