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A forgotten boundary-marker
``ESPLANADE? WHAT'S that?'' asked a puzzled young caller a day or so after noticing my rather casual mention of The Esplanade last Monday. And that brought me up short, as it suddenly struck me that a couple of generations must have grown into adulthood without ever hearing mention of what was commonly referred to as Esplanade or Esplanade Road by people of my generation.
Esplanade Road is today called N.S.C. Bose Road. Curiously, this obvious post-Independence recall of one who fought the battle for freedom from abroad found a place in Madras geography long before those who fought it at home, the Mahatma and Jawaharlal Nehru. Both have been remembered by significant road names only in the last decade or so and, stranger still, the roads named after them do not come as easily to the tongue as that of the militant anti-imperialist who is, ironically, remembered in one of the main thoroughfares of George Town. Somewhere in its history, this road was also called China Bazaar Road, raising a question or two on dating. And those questions take me back to the Esplanade.
When the French, during their occupation of Fort St. George from 1746 to 1749, and the British, after beating back the French besieging the Fort in 1759, between them razed all the buildings of the first Indian settlement just outside the Fort, they gained a vast open space offering their guns a clear field of fire. That space was christened The Esplanade, a term generally now used more in the sense of a promenade or play area than in a militaristic one, which was, in fact, its origin and the case here. With George Town developing north of The Esplanade in the 1760s, the road separating both became Esplanade Road. But when did the road get called China Bazaar Road? In fact, what in more recent times is called China Bazaar is further west of the High Court-Law College campus.
That campus, developed on the northern half of The Esplanade in the 1890s, was the side of Madraspatnam's first Indian town, Chennapatnam. The area between this campus and the Fort, where the Reserve Bank is, was the growing town's bazaar. Curiously, there's reference to a China Bazaar here too!
Once The Esplanade was developed, its boundaries were marked by six pillars on January 1, 1773, and the area north of the pillars grew as the new `Black Town'. Of the pillars, only one stands, by the southwest corner of Dare House, tended well by Parry's, one of the few monuments in the city to have such attention paid to it. The others were at the Badrian Chetty Street, Stringer Street, Popham's Broadway, Kondi Chetty Street and Linghi Chetty Street junctions with Esplanade Road. In 1996, when a corner building at the Badrian Chetty Street junction was being pulled down, the boundary-marker here was revealed as one of the cornerstones of the building. Despite pleas to the builders, the pillar was pulled down before further efforts could be made to save it. So much for history!
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