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The landmark builders
S. MUTHIAH
Reader E. Sundaresan writes that a Loganatha Mudaliar was the building contractor who raised Ripon Building and wonders whether there was any connection with the Loganatha Mudaliar of Tarapore & Co. I had referred in Miscellany, May 28, 2007. They certainly are not the same person, the latter being at least a generation younger, and, as far as I know, there is no connection at all, except in the similarity in names.
Ripon Building, which became the Corporation of Madras’s headquarters, was opened for business in 1913. It was built by P. Loganatha Mudaliar who received Rs.5.5 lakh for his share of the Rs.7.5 lakh work. P. Loganatha Mudaliar also built the Madras Records Office building, which was opened in 1909, and had earlier built St. Mark’s Church in Bangalore and the Medical Students’ Hostel in Royapuram.
C. S. Loganatha Mudaliar, on the other hand, joined J.H. Tarapore and they established Tarapore & Co., Engineers and Contractors, in Madras in 1936. Their first contract was to build a transit shed for the Madras Port Trust, but then they went on to build many of Madras’s post-Independence landmarks. These included the Reserve Bank of India building opened in 1961, Customs House, the Central Excise Building, the A.C. College of Technology building, the Bank of India building, Dhun Building, Abbotsbury and the Meenambakkam Airport building (the old building now not used) and the Boeing runway, among others. Some of these, like the Airport building, have a distinct Art Deco style, but most of the others have a stately similarity. Elsewhere in Madras State, the firm built the India Cements factories in Tirunelveli and Salem Districts and the Madras Aluminium factory.
As one of the largest engineering contractors in India in the early years after Independence, the firm also handled many major contracts outside the State. These included major contributions to the Farakka Barrage in West Bengal, Hirakud Dam, the Rourkela Steel Plant, the Indian Aluminium plant in Orissa, the Sharavathi Hydroelectric Project in Mysore, the Travancore Cements and Rayons factories in Kerala, the Aerodome in Trivandrum, and the Trivandrum-Nagercoil concrete road, among other works. Tarapore & Co has been involved in many more major building projects, but the ones I’ve mentioned here I owe to a recollection C.S. Loganatha Mudaliar himself wrote in the mid-1960s.
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