You might agree or disagree with the way Ajit Koujalgi went about restoring heritage buildings, but there is no denying his passionate commitment to preserving heritage and offering both citizens and visitors a view of a splendid past. In his passing away recently in tragic circumstances, the heritage movement in India has lost one of its foremost champions.
Ajit, who lived in Auroville from the 1970s, except for an eight-year break in Germany, contributed significantly to Auroville’s early architecture and town planning. That stint in Germany, however, changed his focus and, inspired by what was happening in heritage preservation in Germany, he began, on his return in 1987, to focus on trying to save heritage buildings in and around Pondicherry. From 1987 he led an INTACH-Pondicherry initiative to list the territory’s heritage buildings, both of French origin and Indian. By 1998, INTACH was virtually a full-time preoccupation with him, beginning with the restoration of a 250-year-old French building as the Neemrana Group’s Hotel de l’Orient, now a landmark in the Union Territory. It won him an UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage award.
With the Pondicherry Government getting interested in his work, INTACH-Pondicherry forged an alliance with it that has seen a considerable amount of restoration in the French Quarter and some in the Indian Quarter, with one street in particular in the latter becoming a showpiece. He had hoped all the interest the Pondicherry Government was taking in heritage would spur the Tamil Nadu Government into action, but after many of his frequent visits to Madras to interact with the Tamil Nadu Tourism authorities we used to meet and exchange despairing notes about what was happening here.
Meanwhile, the Neemrana Group had moved into Tranquebar (Tarangambadi) and Ajit helped restore an old bungalow there for them that became a hotel called “The Bungalow on the Beach’. He then began restoring several other old Danish-style and Indian-style buildings, as well as old church properties, including Ziegenbalg’s house. Meanwhile, the Danish Museum met with INTACH-Tamil Nadu, the honorary Danish consular authorities in Madras, and Tamil Nadu Tourism and suggested restoration of the old Governor’s Bungalow in Tranquebar. Agreement was eventually reached on making the bungalow an Indo-Danish Studies Centre and Museum with the help of INTACH-Tamil Nadu. Taking into consideration logistics and the work he was already doing in the area, INTACH-Tamil Nadu requested Ajit to handle the project and a striking building was re-created from what had been a dilapidated shell overwhelmed by trees and plants. The Studies Centre, however, is something I’m still waiting for — just as I await a printing museum as an adjunct to the Ziegenbalg house.
While working on the Governor’s Bungalow , Ajit and his team also drew up a master plan for the revival of Tranquebar and making it a major destination for heritage tourism. The team had drawn up plans for restoring King’s Street, from the Entrance Arch to a restored Parade Ground, and a couple of other streets alongside. The last time we met, however, Ajit bemoaned the fact that everything was slowing down in Tranquebar with local politics, bureaucracy and NGOs at odds with each other and pulling in different directions. He wasn’t the happiest of persons at the time; perhaps they will all now work together to restore Tranquebar according to Ajit Koujalgi’s vision and make him a happier man somewhere up there.
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A request for a name
Will Madurai Airport on October 30th be named the Muthuramalinga Thevar Airport by the Union Government? It will, if Subramanian Swamy’s appeal to the Centre that Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar (PMT) be remembered is heard. PMT was born on one October 30th (1907) and, coincidentally, died on another (1963). Will he be remembered this October 30th?
PMT is better known in Indian political circles for being elected three times to Parliament and for being one of the leaders of the All India Forward Bloc that Subhas Chandra Bose had established as a splinter group within the Congress in 1939, drawing to it most of the Left-leaning Congressmen. PMT was to lead the Bloc in the South.
Forgotten however are PMT’s impassioned campaign to have the discriminatory Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), enacted in the Madras Presidency in 1920, withdrawn and his trade union activities. The CTA mainly targeted the Maravar, Thevar and a couple of other castes of the Madura, Ramnad and Tinnevelly Districts (the Mukkulathor). The Justice Party, despite the PMT-led agitations and its own caste orientation, refused to repeal the CTA. When Rajagopalachari came to power in 1937, he too did not repeal the Act. It was 1946 before the Criminal Tribes Act was removed from the books.
Meanwhile PMT, got involved in trade unionism in Madura District, leading the workers in several mills from the late 1930s. His labour activities had him sent to jail three times between 1938 and 1945, though the charges appeared to have had little to do with labour militancy. Apart from unions in the textile mills, he led a TVS union.
After Independence, PMT continued to be a thorn in the Congress flesh, still hoping the Forward Bloc could make a difference to India. But from the early 1960s he was a sick man and slowly began to withdraw from the political scene. In more recent years he was remembered with the naming of a district in Tamil Nadu and a road in Madras (once Chamier’s Road) after him. A stretch of highway near the airport in Mumbai is also named after him. But now Swamy wants greater Central recognition for him, for one who long hoped the Congress he had first joined would reform and who, when it didn’t, challenged it.
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Will this be the last word?
A long letter from P. Sethu Seshan together with a clipping of an item in this column dating to October 2001 arrived at my desk last week stating that he is a relative of Chempakaraman Pillai (Miscellany, October 6) and that he would like to show me records and papers he has about that early freedom fighter. He also implied that Chempakaraman Pillai was aboard the Emden and says that his name would not be in the Australian records because he left the ship in Cochin “after the bombardment of Madras and short stay in Pondicherry”. As for his name not being in the German records, he suggests “Dr. Chempakaraman might have purposely made his name not found in the official list of sailors in the ship of Emden .” Both those possibilities exist if Pillai was a spy being dropped ashore. I hope that Seshan’s “records and papers” include a letter from Pillai stating that he was spying for Germany in India from October l5, 1914, which was the approximate date when the Emden was some distance off Cochin.
Ever since I wrote that column in 2001 I have been trying to pick up information about Pillai, and only discovering that story needed to be relooked at. And as I mentioned on October 6th, I found in several accounts that Pillai had in September 1914 founded the International Pro-India Committee in Zurich and in October gone to Berlin where a group of Indians had founded the Berlin Committee that a year later named itself the Indian Independence Committee, absorbing Pillai’s Pro-India Committee. Now if he was in Switzerland in September 1914 and in Berlin in October, I find it rather hard to accept that he was with the Emden on September 22, 1914 when it shelled Madras and in Cochin around October l5th, while being in Zurich and Berlin about the same time in an age when jet aircraft did not exist. I trust this will be the last word on Chempakaraman Pillai and the Emden ; he was undoubtedly a yemden, but he was not on the Emden .
What he was, from all records, was one of the pioneers of a revolutionary Indian freedom movement, including being the Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government of India established in December 1915 in Kabul by Raja Mahendra Pratap (as President) and Barkatullah (as Prime Minister). He should be remembered for all those years in Germany when he campaigned for India’s freedom and had a British price on his head; gilding the lily is not necessary. But if there are those who wish to believe that Chempakaraman Pillai was on the Emden at the shelling of Madras one hundred years ago, may it remain an article of faith with them.
Footnote: Seshan says Chempakaraman Pillai studied in Switzerland and he took Doctorates in Political Economy, Science and Engineering. He adds, “He took medicine as mentioned in your article is a big question mark.” I await the papers he has promised to bring me.
