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Endangered Government House
S. MUTHIAH
An 1807 view of Government House (left) and Council Chamber (Banqueting Hall): Engraved by Edward Orme
The first Governor of Madras was George Foxcroft, appointed to the post in 1666. From 1639 till 1666, the head of the East India Company government in Madras was referred to as Agent or, a while later, as President. The early Agents and Governors liv
ed in the Fort, but had a garden house for rest and recreation about where the General Hospital now is. In the Fort, the Governor’s house was home, office, ‘Secretariat’ as well as Council Chamber. Privacy was at a premium and, so, when opportunity presented itself, after the French had left the Fort’s buildings in shambles, Governor Thomas Saunders in 1752 rented a house belonging to the wealthy Mrs. Antonia de Madeiros just across The Island from the Fort. On August 28, 1753 the Government of Madras bought the house for 3500 pagodas (about Rs.75,000 today) to serve as the Governor’s garden house. From that time, till 1947, for nearly 200 years, the Governors of Madras used that slowly growing house, first, as a part-time residence and, later, as a permanent one. And it was in it that numerous decisions were taken to establish the institutions of Madras that went on to become the pioneering institutions of modern India. There’s hardly another building in Madras with a more significant history or one considered worthier of being described as a heritage building. Yet this is the building, Government House (incorrectly called Admiralty House by many) in Government Estate, that Government wants to pull down to locate the new Legislature complex!
For a Government whose leaders have long valued the historical, this decision seems inexplicable. Government Estate has acres of space, so why pick on this one corner and pull down a historic building in the process? Wouldn’t it be better to realign the new Legislature and Secretariat complex slightly in all those acres and restore Government House for re-use as a splendid library befitting a learned legislature? It’s still not too late to think along those lines and save Government House.
Mrs. Madeiros’s house is the core of what Lord Edward Clive, Robert Clive’s son, enlarged in 1800 and made Government House. Till then, Governors had spent their evenings and their weekends there. Edward Clive was the first permanent occupant – almost by default. In 1799, when the Governor General, Lord Mornington, came down from Calcutta to personally supervise the last Mysore War, he virtually took over Admiralty House in the Fort which Governors had been occupying in the latter half of the l8th Century and shunted Edward Clive to the Government Garden House, thereby giving him the opportunity to make it a house fit for a Governor.
Clive wrote at the time, “The garden house, at present occupied by Myself, is so insufficient either for the private accommodation of my family and Staff, or for the convenience of the public occasions inseparable from my situation, that it is my intention to make such an addition to it as may be calculated to answer both purposes…This addition will enable me to dispense with the use of the house commonly called the Admiralty and I propose that it be converted into an office for the revenue Department…”
Using John Goldingham as his architect-engineer, Clive had further additions made to the garden house that had already been enlarged by Governor Thomas Rumbold between 1778 and 1780. Simultaneously, Clive had Goldingham build Banqueting Hall to provide him a complex that would overshadow the Nawab of the Carnatic’s Chepauk Palace. From then on, till 1947, this became the official residence of the Governors of Madras and Guindy Lodge their weekend retreat. In 1947, Guindy Lodge became Raj Bhavan.
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