DEVELOPMENT
When an English colony had settled down in Fort St. George, it was
only to be expected that a town would spring up outside. The personal
necessities of the numerous colonists had to be supplied, and
purveyors and bazaarmen and workmen made themselves readily available
for the supply. The requirements in respect of the Company's
mercantile business were yet greater. The Company's agents wanted not
only native employees in their office--'dubashes' and 'shroffs' and
clerks and interpreters and porters and peons, but they also wanted
wholesale buyers of the cloth and other articles that they imported
from England for sale, and also merchants who could supply them with
large quantities of the Indian wares that the Company exported to
England; and they were able to get the men that they wanted.
A crowd attracts a crowd; and when once a town has begun to grow, it
goes on growing of its own accord; and ten years after the acquisition
of Madras, the population of the town was estimated at as many as
15,000 souls. The Fort itself, moreover, had to be enlarged; for the
growth of the Company's business meant that more and more factors and
writers had to be brought out from England, and more and more
warehouses had to be provided for the multiplied wares; and, moreover,
the increasing lawlessness of the times necessitated a larger
garrison. Outside the Fort, Indian and other immigrants flocked from
near and far to settle down within the Company's domains, looking for
profit under the white men's protection; and, with their enterprising
spirit, they played no small part in the development of Madras.
The town that grew up outside the little fort was divided into two
sections--'the White Town' and 'the Black Town.' The boundaries of
White Town corresponded roughly with what are now the boundaries of
Fort St. George itself. The original Black Town--'Old Black
Town'--covered what is now the vacant ground that lies between the
Fort and the Law College, and included what are now the sites of the
Law College and the High Court (_vide_ Map, p. 10). The inhabitants of
White Town included any British settlers not in the Company's service
whose presence the Company approved, also all approved Portuguese and
Eurasian immigrants from Mylapore, and a certain number of approved
Indian Christians. White Town indeed was sometimes called the
'Christian Town.' Black Town was the Asiatic settlement. The great
majority of the original Indian settlers were not Tamilians but
Telugus--written down as 'Gentoos' in the Company's Records.
The Company's agents encouraged people of various races to reside in
Madras; and the names of some of the streets and districts of the town
are interesting testimonies as to the variety of the people who came.
Armenian Street--which began as an Armenian burial-ground (_vide_ Map,
p. 10)--is an example. Armenians from Persia, like their
fellow-countrymen the Parsees, have a racial gift for commerce; and
Armenian merchants had been in India long before the English arrived.
Enterprising Armenian merchants settled in Madras in its early days to
trade with the English colonists, and the Company's agents were glad
to have as middlemen such able merchants who were in close touch with
the people of the land. The most celebrated of the earlier Armenians
in Madras was Peter Uscan, Armenian by race but Roman Catholic in
religion, who lived in Madras for more than forty years, till his
death there in 1751, at the age of seventy. He was a rich and
public-spirited merchant. He built the Marmalong Bridge over the Adyar
river, on one of the pillars of which a quaint inscription is still to
be read, and he left a fund for its maintenance; he also renewed the
multitude of stone steps that lead up to the top of St. Thomas's
Mount. His inscribed tomb is to be seen in the churchyard of the
Anglican Church of St. Matthias, Vepery, which in olden days was the
churchyard of a Roman Catholic chapel. Within the last half-century
the Armenian community in Madras has been rapidly declining, as the
result, probably, of inability to cope with the hustling style of
commercial competition in these latter days; and only a very few
representatives of the race are now to be seen in the city.
In Mint Street there is a small enclosure which is the remains of what
was once a Jewish cemetery of considerable size; and the graves that
are still to be seen are interesting reminders of the fact that in
bygone times there was a Hebrew colony in Madras. In more than one of
the Company's old records the Jews in Madras are referred to as being
rich men, some of whom held positions of high civic authority. Some of
them were English Jews, and others were Portuguese; and most of them
were diamond merchants, on the look-out for diamonds from the mines of
Golconda, which were formerly very productive. The English Jews
exported diamonds to England, and imported silver and coral to Madras;
coral was in great demand in India, and was sent out by Jewish firms
in London. There is still a 'Coral Merchants' Street' in Madras, a
continuation of Armenian Street, and it is a living reminder of the
old Jewish colony. The Golconda mines eventually ceased to be
productive, and Jewish diamond merchants are no longer to be seen in
the city, and the Jewish colony has long since disappeared. Jews are
notorious all the world over as money-lenders, and it may perhaps be
wondered why none of them survived as money-lenders in Madras; but the
fact that Coral Merchants' Street is now the habitat of Nattukottai
Chetties, who are past-masters in the art of money-lending, suggests
that even the Jews were unable to compete with Madras sowcars in the
business of usury, and that the Chetties displaced the Jews who used
to live in the street. The little Jewish cemetery in crowded Mint
Street is an interesting spot. One of the antique tomb-stones has been
caught in the branch of a tree and has been lifted high in air, and is
a quaint sight; and the deserted little Hebrew graveyard itself is
symbolic of the dispersion of the ancient people.
It is a curious fact that the Company's employees in South India never
spoke of Indian Mohammedans as Mohammedans or as Moslems or as
Mussalmans, but always as 'Moors.' It is thus that the name of 'Moor
Street' is to be accounted for. The original 'Moors Street' was a
street in which Mohammedans used to live, and the fact that one
particular street in a large city should have borne such a name is
evidence of another fact, namely, that in the earlier years of Madras
very few Mohammedans resided in the town. It should be remembered that
Madraspatnam, Triplicane, Egmore, and the other hamlets that went to
make up the city of Madras were all of them Hindu villages; and it was
only now and again that Mohammedans, in some capacity or another,
found their way into the town. In the earlier years of Madras a single
mosque sufficed for all the few Mohammedans therein. The mosque was
located in 'Moors Street' in old Black Town, a street that was the
predecessor of the 'Moor Street' of to-day. It was not till nearly
fifty years after the acquisition of the site of Madras that a second
mosque was built--in Muthialpet; and these two small mosques supplied
Mohammedan requirements for many years. The fact is that Madras was so
frequently troubled by successive Mohammedan enemies--the King of
Golconda; Da-ud Khan, Nawab of the Carnatic; Haidar Ali, Sultan of
Mysore; his son Tipu, and others--that the Company was disposed to
regard all 'Moors' with mistrust, so much so that they discouraged
Mohammedan residents; and a measure was passed with the special
intention 'to prevent the Moors purchasing too much land in the Black
Town.' There are large crowds of Mohammedans in Madras now, grouped
especially in Chepauk and the adjoining Triplicane and Royapettah; and
this is due to the fact that in later days Nawab Walajah of Arcot, who
was friendly to the English, came and settled down in Madras. He built
Chepauk Palace for his residence, and the many Mohammedans who
followed him into the city formed the nucleus of a large Mohammedan
colony.
The name 'China Bazaar' appears early in the Madras Records; and it
would seem to have been the place where Chinese crockery was on sale.
Whether or not the salesmen were Chinese immigrants I cannot say; but
the fact that another street in Madras bears the name of 'Chinaman
Street' suggests that there was at one time a colony of pig-tailed
yellow-men in the city. The supposition is not unlikely, for China was
included within the sphere of the Company's commercial operations,
with Madras as the head-quarters of the trade, and ships of the
Company plied regularly between China and Madras. Tea was one of the
articles of trade, but Chinese crockery was in great demand in India,
and ship-loads of cheap China bowls and plates and dishes were
imported; and valuable specimens of Chinese porcelain were highly
esteemed by wealthy Indians--so much so that it is on record that one
of the Moghul emperors had a slave put to death for having
accidentally broken a costly China dish which the emperor particularly
admired.
As the Company's trade was very largely in cloth, it can be understood
that the Company's agents were eager to induce spinners and weavers to
settle in Madras, so that cloth might be bought for the Company at the
lowest possible prices from the weavers direct. Elihu Yale, who was
one of the early Governors of the Fort, imported some fifty
weaver-families and located them in 'Weavers' street', the street that
is now known as Nyniappa Naick Street, in Georgetown. Some twenty-five
years later, Governor Collet established a number of imported weavers
in the northern suburb of Tiruvattur, in a village that was given the
name 'Collet Petta' in the Governor's honour--a name that degenerated
into 'Kalati Pettah'--'Loafer-land'--its present appellation. There
was still a demand for more weavers, and eventually a large vacant
tract was marked out as a 'Weavers' Town,' under the name of Chindadre
Pettah--the modern Chintadripet. In order to attract weavers, houses
were built at the Company's expense, which weavers were permitted to
occupy as hereditary possessions. It was formally decreed that "None
but Weavers, Spinners, and other persons useful in the Weaving trade,
Painters (i.e. designers of patterns for chintz), Washers (bleachers),
Dyers, Bettleca-merchants (beetle-sellers), Brahmins and Dancing
women, and other necessary attendants on the pagoda (erected in the
settlement) shall inhabit the said town." In Chintadripet to-day there
are still many spinners and weavers; and one of the sights in
Chintadripet--growing gradually more rare--is the spectacle of
primitively-clad urchins or grown men spinning in the streets with
primitive gear and in primitive fashion; and it is interesting to
recall the fact that this has been going on in Chintadripet for nearly
two centuries--an industry which the Company established.
Washermanpet is another such locality. It was not so called, as many
people imagine, for being a land of dhobies (male laundresses). In the
Company's vocabulary a 'washerman' was a man who 'bleached' new-made
cloth; and the Company employed a number of bleachers. The bleaching
process needed large open spaces--washing-greens--on which the cloth
could be laid out in the sun to be bleached; and Washermanpet covered
a considerable area.
A great many more of the streets and districts of Madras have history
in their names; but the few that we have dealt with suffice to
exemplify the manner of the expansion of the city of Madras. We can
picture the rustic suppliers crowding into the city to sell the
produce of their fields; we can picture the humble weavers migrating
into the city with their wives and their children, and with their pots
and their pans and their quaint machines, in response to the Company's
tempting invitation; we can picture the small tradesmen and the small
mechanics setting up their humble shops in the new city in which they
believed that fortunes were to be made. And in the higher grades of
life we can picture the grave Armenian merchants, the submissive Jews,
the mistrusted 'Moors,' and others seeking interviews with Stuart or
Georgian-garbed factors of the Company, and eager all of them to turn
the Company to profitable account.