Chennai’s Queen Mary’s College loses a heritage building
The Beach House, located inside Queen Mary’s College (QMC) in Chennai, has been demolished. The colonial-style bungalow, with wooden balconies, a gable, a large portico
The Beach House, located inside Queen Mary’s College (QMC) in Chennai, has been demolished. The colonial-style bungalow, with wooden balconies, a gable, a large portico, and Madras-style roofing, was demolished a month or so ago, to make way for what is claimed will be a “world-class auditorium.” With that, we have lost a building that had a direct connect with the freedom struggle. Beach House, and its neighbour, Sankara Iyer’s bungalow, of which very little is known, came up late in the 1800s. They were built in a style sympathetic to two of their neighbours – the older Cappers House to the north, and the DGP Office to the south. Beach House itself was the residence of Sir S. Subramania Iyer (1842-1924). How the two bungalows became part of the QMC campus I have not yet found. Qualifying in law, Subramania Iyer practised in Madurai and later Madras. He became judge of the High Court of Madras in 1895. He was also significantly, the first Indian to officiate as Chief Justice of the High Court. Why am I going into so much detail? This is just to counter one of QMC’s teachers who responded to my lament about the demolition, stating that this was not a heritage building.
I am sure she is referring to the list of heritage structures enumerated in the Justice E. Padmanabhan Committee report and adopted by the High Court. But is that the only yardstick to identify what qualifies as heritage? What about the intangible history of a place? Significant landmark Beach House became a centre to which the brightest legal minds of Madras came. That led to the birth of the Madras Law Journal. As the judge who sat over the trial in the sensational Arbuthnot Bank collapse, Subramania Iyer remained firm against all pressures that were brought to bear and sentenced the accused, Sir George Gough Arbuthnot, to serve a term in jail. In 1906, it would not have been easy to fend off the establishment that wanted Arbuthnot to go scot-free. In another case, the Mahant of Tirupati was accused of pocketing gold that was to be buried at the base of the flagstaff. The only option was to uproot the flagstaff, which was against agamic law, but Subramania Iyer ordered it. There was no gold and the Mahant was sentenced. These are just two instances of his conduct as a judge. Knighted for his services, Subramania Iyer served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras which conferred an honorary doctorate on him.
He was a founder of the Congress Party and post his retirement as judge, became a follower of Annie Besant and her Home Rule League. When she was arrested in 1917, he wrote to President Woodrow Wilson that the U.S.A. ought not to come to the aid of Britain in the First World War owing to suppressed civil liberties in the colonies. He was chastised for this by Edwin Montagu, then Secretary of State for India and Lord Chelmsford, then the Viceroy. He, in response, immediately surrendered his knighthood. That was in 1918, a full year before Rabindranath Tagore did the same, in response to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. That latter act is celebrated in Bengal. Tamil Nadu treats its heroes differently. I do not blame the QMC faculty of today for not knowing all this, though they do have a history department. To them, Beach House was just a dilapidated building that would have collapsed anyway. I also am not surprised at some of the revisionist history buffs who wrote to me that temples are the only heritage worth preserving and that this was just a colonial building. They may have never heard of S. Subramania Iyer. QMC’s heritage has been unlucky ever since Jayalalithaa eyed the space for a secretariat; the move failed owing to spirited opposition from the alumni.
The BriefWire