Delhi's Madrasis

   Till about the early sixties, New Delhi was just a central government city, except for a few corporate offices along Ramlila Maidan from Delhi Gate to Ajmeri Gate, a stretch of about a mile and half long road called Asaf Ali Road, and some shops big and small in Connaught Place and Karol Bagh. The inhabitants of the city were mostly government servants living in government quarters located within in a circle of about two miles radius from Gole Market. The high ranking Government servants like Secretaries, Joint Secretaries etc.  Lived in aristocratic bungalows in Lodi Estate, Queen Mary’s Road, Aurangazeb Road, Ashoka Road etc. while lesser rank officers like superintendents etc.  lived in smaller bungalows  on Talkatora Road, Mahadeo Road, Baird Road etc.   Low ranked officials like Assistants and Stenographers lived in smaller quarters consisting of an open veranda in the front, a small front room, one or two bed rooms, a store room and kitchen. The latrine in most quarters was away from the living rooms and kitchen at the end of a court yard at the rear side.

    The quarters were in blocks called “Squares” named after British monarchs and  viceroys  like Edward Square, Hastings Square, Cornwallis Square, etc. with an occasional Indian name like Ganesh Place, Ranjit Place. The difference between a Square and a Place lay in their shape; the Sqaure had four rows of quarters, one each on its four sides while the Place had quarters only on three sides, the fourth side being the boundary road, like Reading Road (now renamed as Mandir Marg). What intrigued us as children was that the squares were mostly rectangular , two long parallel rows of quarters  on two opposite sides and two short  parallel rows on the other two opposite sides

     In this great city there lived the “Madrasis”- a collective noun invented by the North Indians for all people who came from the south of the Vindhyas. Almost all of them were government servants with some essential service providers like school and music teachers, vadhyars (religious pundits0 and cooks. With many Subramanians and Ganesans, distinction was made either with reference to the Ministry where they worked or in the Square where they lived, like Finance Subramanian, Defence Ganesan or Wilson Square Ramasubban and Lawrence Square Sivaramakrishnan. If two Sethuramans were in the same Finance ministry, then the distinction was based on the Wing/ department, such as Expenditure Sethuraman versus Controller of Capital Sethuraman.  Another distinctive clue was their pass time or leisure activities like Bhajana Samaj Krishnan or Karnataka Sangeetha Sabha Ramamurthy and these persons had high titles like Additional Secretary, Joint Secretary Etc. in their respective organisations... And in addition, there were also nick names given and recognised by the whole community like Bonda Srinivasan, Typhoid Krishnamurthy, and Driver Devarajan and so on.

    When it came to their career in government, all Madrasis earned the unenviable reputation as honest, sincere, hard- working, efficient and with absolute integrity. The price that was paid for such appreciation of work was the neglect of leisure time happiness on holidays with family and friends. Many of them would have spent decades living in Delhi but not had had time to v see the Kutb Minar, the  Red Fort,  Purana Kila and other historical monuments which abound in Delhi .Their Annual Confidential Reports grading them as “Outstanding” were confidentially and individually leaked to them by their superior officers. They would then confidentially tell their wives! There was this joke about a Madrasi junior officer once getting reported by his senior Punjabi officer that he (the Madrasi) often “slept in office” - a remark considered as adverse in his annual confidential report. When he remonstrated to the senior officer about this, the latter told him that he wanted to highlight the fact that on several days the Madrasi officer had worked very late hours in the office almost till the early hours of the next morning and was thus compelled to sleep in the office itself in the absence of a bus to go home at that hour. ! Similarly another Madrasi officer’s work was graded as “far from satisfactory” by his senior Bengali officer. He later explained saying that the work of the junior was exceptionally good and the grading category “satisfactory” did not adequately describe the quality of work which was several notches high!!

     The institutions that united them were The South India Club, The Madrasi  School, The Karnatak Sangeetha Sabha, The Vaishnava Siddhantha Sabbha, The Saturday Bhajana Sabhas, The Navaratri Golus and of course the Irwin Road Pilliar  Koil and the adjacent Hanuman Mandir and the Baird Road Kali Koil. Apart from mutual family visits, inter family communication was through the Tamil Vadhyar group to which the families belonged when a Sastrigal of that group came to announce the important religious events of the month and collect monthly subscription. Integration with other communities was next to nothing for most of the Madrasis although they collectively enjoyed the confidence of the Punjabi grocers, clothiers and other shopkeepers who gave them credit facility liberally without a question The Madrasis however privately made fun of the Punjabis’ English pronunciation like    meyerment for measurement, lier for lawyer as well as bad grammar like “Mehra don’t even Know English”.   Little did they know as to how many times the Punjabi traders took advantage of the Madrasis ‘confusion between “Dhed” (one and a half) and “Adhai” (two and a half).

    Among the uniting institutions mentioned above, the Madrasi School occupied a predominant position as it was here that the children of all Madrasis irrespective of the status of the parents, whether a Joint Secretary or an Upper Division Clerk, or the child of a Sastrigal or a cook, came for studies. Those were days of no dress code or uniforms and yet all children studied in an environment of equality and fraternity .The teachers,  both male and female, were exceptionally devoted to their profession, took  avuncular interest in each student  and were  kind hearted . Till the fifties there was only one school at Reading Road. Even when there was no bar for students from other regions or linguistic groups for admission, the Madrasi School remained exclusively a Tamil school. Ironically, when it became a multi branch Tamil school in its name in the sixties, called The Delhi Tamil Education Association School (DTEA), it has now both students and teachers form other parts of the country.

  

     The Madrasis were a powerful group in the Central Secretariat. Their network was strongly knit and mutually helpful. Any special treatment or facility in AIIMS, Safdarjung and other government hospitals were arranged by the Madrasi Jt. Secretary, in Health Ministry, while his counter- part in Civil Supplies Department took care of additional allotment of sugar and maida for weddings. Acquiring of land and construction of the many temples in the sixties and seventies in New Delhi was mainly because of the initiative and strength of this group which at one time had the Hon’ble President of India as Patron. . Even the introduction of Leave Travel Concession for visiting home towns by Central Government Servants and their families was said to be the brainchild of some Madrasis in the Home and Finance Ministries. They quietly introduced the main condition that the home town should be at least 400 kms away from Headquarters so as to benefit the South Indian employees!   Not only did the Northerners feel  jealous, the Punjabi booking clerk oh the Northern Railway felt further injured as he had to book the onward journey to a home town like Kattumannarkovil  by the shortest route and had no clue as to which of the two routes from Madras Egmore, the chord line or the  main line, was shorter. 

     Most of these Madrasis have retired by now.  Many continue to live in Delhi in DDA and other housing colonies in the faraway Dhwarka and Mayur Vihar and their post- retirement activities and interest are confined to within these areas mainly centring the local temple.  Some of their sons and daughters, the next generation Delhi’s Madrasis, took the Madrasi School – St. Stephen’s College route to qualify for induction into the All India Services and other Allied Services while others have become doctors, engineers, lawyers and accountants. The Old Students   Association of DTEA Schools with branches in Chennai and Bangalore is their social network apart from Facebook.