 "S Muthiah (13 April 1930 - 20 April 2019)")
It is poetic that S Muthiah’s first job after returning to Chennai, then Madras, in 1968 was with a firm that made atlases — for he would eventually find purpose in mapping in panoramic detail the story of South India’s preeminent city. More than a dozen books, over 900 columns, and a local magazine were born of him over the next several decades out of an urge to record the genesis of all the built and natural heritage around him. Somewhere along the way, its name changed, but Chennai always remained “Madras, that is Chennai” for him. When he passed away last Saturday at age 89 after a period of illness, it was as if the city had lost one of its discoverers and one of its institutions.
Muthiah was a pioneer of the heritage movement in Chennai. Studying the great temples and monuments seemed less urgent to him at a time when the buildings people lived in were not looked after. In Ceylon, and Madras, and his native Chettinad, he noticed beautifully done mansions that were ill-maintained, or even pulled down. “There is a world of knowledge we had, and we lost it. And we continue to lose it because we are not doing anything about it,” he said, in a talk titled “Are you aware of heritage?”. His own idea of heritage was straightforward, standing simply for stories that are worth receiving from our predecessors and bequeathing to future generations. An MBE recognised his contributions to the field in 2002.
The historian was born in 1930 in Ramanathapuram in the erstwhile Madras Presidency, and later moved to another British colony Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where his father Subbiah had been involved in politics. Apart from a stint in the United States where he went for higher studies, Muthiah’s formative years were spent in the South Asian island country. There, he became a journalist, writing for 17 years largely on sport. In Madras, he joined TTK Maps, where he worked on making tour guidebooks and maps of South India. By 1981, he had written and published the first of his books, Madras Discovered.
A decade later, he began a long-running Monday column in The Hindu newspaper called “Madras Miscellany” which dealt with past happenings in areas as diverse as industry, cinema, law and defence — a wide and deep account of former events rose from his 970 pieces. A self-taught historian, he cared most for immediate rather than faraway phenomena. His career is an exemplar of the diligent practice of documenting local or city history, an underdog-vocation that has occasionally been disparaged: HPR Finberg, himself a local historian, labelled its outcomes as “the dullest of all dull books”. But Muthiah’s columns were spaces of vibrant dialogue. In a section called “When the postman knocked”, he would acknowledge and respond to readers who sent in findings of their own. With the launch of Madras Musings, a fortnightly magazine, he again made room for others to write too.
Working on history in India can be a frustrating business; record-keeping is so often seen as something that interferes with the rest here. But rather than turn jaded, Muthiah signalled hope, advocating physical engagement with the city through tours and walks. In lectures that he was invited to give, he often implored the audience to visit and walk around North Chennai, which otherwise has a bad reputation among locals. “If you’re an engineer in this city you owe it to North Madras,” he once noted. You know that industry in this city began only in North Madras. His pitch: the city in fact began in the north with industrial developments like the Perambur railway workshop and Binny’s. He was vocal about the need for improved access to public archives and libraries. His own repository of reference books and clippings, was spread across three rooms on the upper level of his home in Anna Salai. Some of this material has been digitised and is available at the Roja Muthiah Research Library.
Certain aspects of Madras became pet subjects. A special affection for Anglo-Indians, ostensibly because his childhood governess belonged to the community, resulted in a book about their 500-year history. He also wrote histories of local corporate houses (Spencer & Co and Parry’s) and important personalities (AMM Arunachalam and Inderjit Singh Gill). He was last working on editing a book on the city’s historical trysts with sports, not just cricket or football but also unspectacular games like kho kho and carrom. It was his time living in Ceylon and studying in the United States, where it is common to follow three or four sports, that made Muthiah an aficionado, reckons sports journalist T N Raghu, who wrote a chapter for that book.
For his writers he was “The Chief”, while readers saw him as “Mr Madras”, and Muthiah himself signed off some columns as “Madras Man” or “Mad Man of Madras”. As far as epithets go, he preferred “chronicler” to “historian”. There were battles won and lost when it came to conservation. If the Senate House stands restored in all its architectural splendour in 2007, some credit at least goes to Muthiah whose ceaseless urging persuaded the then-vice chancellor to raise funds. He was involved also in halting the demolition of the Bharat Insurance Building and Gokhale Hall. In the case of some structures in the Express Estate in Royapettah he had little luck, and a prominent mall stands there now.
Perhaps Muthiah’s biggest achievement was the fact that he used his connections such that his writings could translate into action on the ground. Several fixtures on the city’s culture calendar trace their beginnings to him. Madras Day, the celebration of which has grown so popular it now stretches over almost a month, was born of a suggestion from journalist Vincent D’Souza, founder of the Mylapore Times community newspaper. Muthiah supported the idea and threw his weight behind it. “He was the patriarch at the helm, pushing people in his network to do more, and was always there to give a piece of advice,” says D’Souza. For Sriram V, associate editor of Madras Musings and one of the organisers of this event, the question looms of how to sustain the success the ageing historian helped bring to it. He would write letters inviting foreign consulates in the city, and not think much of putting an arm in avuncular fashion around the shoulder of consul generals, says Sriram. Muthiah was also always present at meetings of the Madras Book Club until his health began to fade.
As Sriram further points out, much praise owes to Muthiah’s wife Valliammah too, who passed away in 2013. She celebrated his columns, made peace with the unruly libraries in their home, and managed finances, while Muthiah worked. His daughters did not share his great thirst for past events. Sriram says his phone has been ringing and condolences pouring in from big and small organisations in India and elsewhere.
In many ways, Muthiah was firmly of the old world. He did not believe in afternoon naps, and as one of his employees Krish Venkatesh noted in a 2013 blog, he was working on four books at any given moment. Among friends, he usually took the initiative to suggest lunch and dinner meetings, and somehow always knew the new restaurants in town and their specials. He closed his day typically with half an hour of reading fiction. His doors were always open, it is said, and he made a habit of inviting emerging writers to discuss the art of chronicling. It was normal for people to visit and narrate personal family histories, seeking his help to fill in the gaps.
The work of editing, offering careful notes and inserting queries in long hand pleased him even more than writing. He dealt with any overuse of adjectives and adverbs first, before matters of accuracy and interest. No amount of bad writing fazed him. Even if a contributor had, as Sriram recalls “thrown in everything including the kitchen sink” into a piece, Muthiah encouraged the team to spruce it up for publishing. Always encouraging and never insecure, he was passionate and dispassionate, says T N Raghu. Muthiah’s storytelling stirred a benign form of regional pride in readers and, through his surviving work, it is possible to discover and rediscover Madras that is Chennai.
