So you thought you knew everything about making coffee, or kapi, as southerners call it? Or that Chennai is where politicians wear dark glasses at night and everyone heads for the beach to do a lungi dance in the middle of the afternoon?
Nirmala Lakshman upends these cliches with an affectionate biography of the city that she likes to call Madras, while telling us why we should now call it Chennai. She swats away the dust of its colonial facade and gives us a fresh and zesty view of ‘her town’.
This does not preclude the examination of the bio-polarities that are included in its history and nomenclature. Should it be ‘our town’ or ‘their town’? Black coffee or white, Tam-Brahm or Non-Brahm? For one of the lessons that she has imbibed from her mentors—and there are several with whom she consorts while picking her way through the streets of the city—is that the personal is also political.
She is superbly qualified to do this. Despite being modest about her ancestral DNA—she belongs to the illustrious line of the Kasturi Ranga Iyengar family, the begetters of The Hindu newspaper dynasty, on the one side and to an equally feisty grandfather, V. Bhuvaharan, on her maternal side. She describes him as an admirer of the poet Subramania Bharathi. By ascribing a verse of the poet’s with an ideal of womanhood that her grandfather inculcated within his own family—‘An upright walk, a steadfast direct gaze, and eyes that are afraid of nothing on this earth’—Lakshman effortlessly links the idealism of that earlier era of nascent nationalism to our own.
It’s a similarly direct gaze that Lakshman brings to the different aspects of her town. For a small book—it’s packaged neatly enough to fit into a Birkin bag, should you own one—it has a large heart. Should this be called Bijou Publishing, one wonders, tiny, jewelled volumes about Indian cities that seem to be part of the Aleph agenda?
Never mind. Lakshman has polished each facet of the city’s past and set it into the present, with a jeweller’s eye for a telling story. She even humanises the recent crop of politicians with a tenderness that is every bit as endearing as her reminiscences of her granny’s recipe for a perfect tumbler of kapi.
Chennai lives.
