Tag: history

Tipperary Bungalow: Yercaud’s heritage home of misty memories

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Like many relics of the British Raj, Tipperary Bungalow, among the oldest in Yercaud, has a storied past that lives only in oral recollections. It continues to be the hub of a coffee plantation

Though it is close to afternoon when we reach Yercaud, the hill station nestled in the Shevaroy range of the Eastern Ghats around 1,500 metres above sea level, is still blanketed in late winter mist. Even the wild monkeys, relentless watchers of the highway traffic from the plains to the top, seem to be in a pensive mood, as motorists switch off the air-conditioning and open their windows to let the eucalyptus-scented breeze in.

Thanks to the lockdown, Yercaud’s winding roads and bylanes are quiet these days, though the lakeside sellers of fried chilli fritters and steamed corn are back in full force.

The recent construction boom has changed Yercaud forever, with its verdant fruit orchards and coffee plantations slowly giving way to real estate projects meant for the well-heeled. Some of the heritage structures though, especially those attached to plantations, have reinvented themselves as homestays with adventure tourism activities built into their packages.

The Tipperary Bungalow, a colonial-era house that is considered to be among the oldest buildings (approximately 120 years) in Yercaud, is one such property, perched upon a mini peak of its own.

The house is part of the eponymous 70-acre working coffee farm that also cultivates jackfruit, avocado, banana, wild turmeric and pepper.

A photograph of Walter Dickens, family members and plantation staff taken on the Tipperary Estate in Yercaud circa 1900. Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU

A photograph of Walter Dickens, family members and plantation staff taken on the Tipperary Estate in Yercaud circa 1900. Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU
 

On any day, visitors to the property — now functioning as a heritage bed-and-breakfast homestay — set in four acres, can expect to see local fauna like gaur and spotted deer from the veranda that opens out to views of the valley below from the master suite.

Like many relics of the British Raj, Tipperary Bungalow has a storied past that lives only in oral recollections. “Though my father purchased this property in 1970, we weren’t really aware of its original British owners, the Dickens family, until quite recently,” says N Satyendran, a former engineer and commercial pilot who runs the estate today.

Clan of coffee growers

Whether the Dickens family of Yercaud was related to the famous Victorian author Charles Dickens (1812-1870) remains debatable in the absence of any documentary evidence, but there is little doubt that this India-based British clan did much to develop the commercial cultivation of coffee and other crops in the hill station.

“My great grandfather Alfred Ernest Stark Dickens (1844-1898) came to Yercaud in 1881; he had five sons and five daughters, and most of them were in the coffee business. Before that, he grew coffee in Ooty. Five generations of our family were based in Yercaud from the 1880s until 1950s, so there were at least 15 coffee plantations, each with their houses, run by us in that period,” says Anna Dickens, over a WhatsApp phone call from London.

Approaching her 80th birthday, Anna is perhaps the Tipperary Bungalow’s last link to its British owners. She visited Yercaud in 2005, and was reportedly moved to tears when she saw her birthplace (she was born here on August 7, 1941). According to family sources, the Tipperary Bungalow was already part of the estate that Alfred Dickens had purchased. Anna says that it was maintained as plantation guesthouse for some time before it was used as a family home.

A visit to the cemetery at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Yercaud shows the number of members from the Dickens family who are interred here.

“My aunt Gwendoline and her husband Leslie Dickens were the last occupants of the Tipperary. They sold the property in the 1950s before leaving India,” says Anna.

Original structure

Considering that Yercaud got its first metalled roads only in the early 20th Century, the Tipperary and other buildings of its vintage in the hill station are obviously great examples of native engineering using rudimentary infrastructure.

“We have tried to maintain the original style of the building, though quite a bit of it was in disrepair when we acquired it,” says Satyendran. “The polished red oxide floors are still the same, and the thick stone walls keep the building insulated from extreme cold and heat through the year.”

Anna remembers the Tipperary as being a popular meeting spot for the local British community. “We were a very musical family; and I played the antique grand piano that is still there in the reception room when I visited in 2005, though we don’t really know how it was transported up there in those days!” laughs Anna, as she recounts hearing stories of people being carried up the rough mountain trail to Yercaud by bearers.

The Dickens had a very busy social life, she adds. “We used to have picnics, dance and tennis parties very frequently. And people also used to dress up a lot, because I’ve got photographs of my aunts in fancy dress as well,” says Anna.

The dance floor of the Tipperary has long been demolished, but one sturdy tennis net post is a silent reminder of those leisure-filled weekends of yore.

Ties that bind

Anna’s father Alfred M Dickens, studied locally in the Montfort School, like many British children in those days, and later served in the Royal Navy. “We left Yercaud during the Second World War, and my mother and I stayed in Bandra, Bombay for a few years as my father was posted on war duty.

“We left India in 1947, and soon the rest of the Dickens family also started moving out. I miss Yercaud, even though I was there for a very short while. I remember dal and rice being my favourite Indian dish as a child,” says Anna, who has worked as an actress in theatre and films, and later as a professional artist.

As the wind sighs through the ancient willow tree guarding the Tipperary Bungalow, the mist clears, and then clouds up the area once again.

Leslie and Gwendoline Dickens, the last occupants of Tipperary Bungalow. Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU

Leslie and Gwendoline Dickens, the last occupants of Tipperary Bungalow. Photo: Special Arrangement/THE HINDU
 

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How to read a 300-year-old letter without opening it

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(Subscribe to Science For All, our weekly newsletter, where we aim to take the jargon out of science and put the fun in. Click here.)

In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk containing over 2000 unclaimed letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum. The letters were closed using an ancient technique called letterlocking, in which the writing paper is intricately folded and secured to become its own envelopes. Now an international team of researchers has virtually unfolded and unlocked the contents of one of the letters and the findings were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

The team used a technique called X-ray microtomography. “The scanning technology is similar to medical CT scanners, but using much more intense X-rays which allow us to see the minute traces of metal in the ink used to write these letters,” explains one of the authors Dr. David Mills from the Queen Mary University of London in a release.

The team developed algorithms to virtually separate the different layers of the complicated folds in the letters.

 

“We were not interested in working on the project if the endgame was to tear open the unopened letters. The unopened letterpackets preserve invaluable letterlocking evidence,” explains lead author Jana Dambrogio in an email to The Hindu. She is from the Wunsch Conservation Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries, Cambridge, and has been studying the intricate details of letters for twenty years.

Content of the letter

The study revealed that the letter, dated July 31, 1697, was written in French by a legal professional named Jacques Sennacques, from Lille (a city in northern France), who requires a “legalised” death certificate for a relation, Daniel Le Pers.

“Jacques doesn’t say why he needs this document, but it’s clearly an urgent request as he reminds Pierre that he’s asked for it before. The letter is important because it shows that family members were able to communicate across borders thanks to an efficient postal system. It also sheds light on the worries of ordinary people – most letters we have are by the elites, but this mundane letter reveals the more day-to-day business of people at the time.” says one of the authors David van der Linden, from Radboud University (The Netherlands), in an email to The Hindu.

“This is a great example of the everyday business of a lawyer more than 300 years ago. The people whose lives are recorded in the trunk were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances – often separated from their friends, families, and patrons for reasons of religious persecution, or simply the enduring need to make money. These letters poignantly capture their attempts to maintain vital human connections across vast and sometimes dangerous distances,” adds Dr. Jana Dambrogio.

A seventeenth-century trunk of letters bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmaster and postmistress of the day, Simon and Marie de Brienne, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. Courtesy of the Sound and Vision The Hague, The Netherlands. The trunk is part of the Brienne Collection.

A seventeenth-century trunk of letters bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmaster and postmistress of the day, Simon and Marie de Brienne, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. Courtesy of the Sound and Vision The Hague, The Netherlands. The trunk is part of the Brienne Collection.
 

 

The studied letter required at least eight folding and locking steps to transform the flat sheet of paper into a compact letterpacket. Dr. Dambrogio explains that there are hundreds of folding sequences in the collection and the virtual unfolding pipeline has helped study them

She says that the team is also interested in using this X-ray technique to study origami. “A challenge in origami is to accurately measure folded objects so that we can better understand if they truly ‘exist’ from a mathematical standpoint – if they can be folded without stretching the paper in any way. Another area of interest is to study important origami works whose designers have long since passed away and we have no record of how they were constructed,” she adds.

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The ‘Coolie’ Corps: Why Indian Construction Workers, Janitors Were Unsung Heroes of First World War

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Although official historical narratives remember the Indian soldiers who ‘contributed’ to the First World War by fighting for the British empire, there were more than 550,000 Indian men, who participated in the same war as ‘non-combatants’ whom no one remembers.

They were porters, stevedores, construction workers, janitors (sanitation workers who cleaned latrines), washermen, stretcher-bearers, water-carriers, cooks and many other menial job workers. It was through their backbreaking work that the British were able to maintain the supply chains, remove wounded soldiers from the battlefield and tend to the many needs of their army.

One rarely finds their mention in the official literature of the Great war, but Radhika Singha – a professor of Modern History at Jawaharlal Nehru University – has meticulously plugged that literature gap with her new book, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour In Global Conflict 1914-1921.

Singha’s book is a result of a decade long research on legal, and military history of the first world war and talks about the labour systems — built on the backs of the menial workers — which collectively sustained the military infrastructure of the British empire. The book views the global conflict through the lens of Indian labour, talking about how Indian tribals, as well as colonial prisoners, were shipped off to far-flung battlefields of France and Mesopotamia, for the vested interest of the British rulers.

Singha’s research on the subject began after she stumbled on a letter from Mesopotamia sent on March 1916, which was marked ‘confidential’. The letter was an urgent call for latrine sweepers from India, but the reason it was kept confidential was that Cholera had broken out in the area. By calling sweepers from India, they were sending Indian labourers in the cusp of an epidemic for their own advantage.

In the book, she collectively calls the menial workers, the ‘Coolie’ corps. She explains that although they were initially viewed as ‘racially subordinate and subjected to non-martial caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers’ need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials.’

In the book, Singha writes:

Inspecting the Lady Hardinge Hospital at Brockenhurst, which treated Indians from the Expeditionary Force in France, Sir Walter Lawrence noted an act of local kindness. A burial plot had to be found for a sweeper belonging to a peculiar sect which never cremates. We asked the Woking Muhammadan Burial ground to allow us to bury him there, but they flatly declined. We then had recourse to the Rev. Mr Chambers, the Vicar of Brockenhurst. He came forward and kindly allowed us to bury him in his churchyard.

Lieutenant General George F. MacMunn embroidered this incident into a story about untouchable life, seeking to strike ‘a mingled vein of sorrow and glory’. Bigha, the latrine sweeper in MacMunn’s account, is from the Lalbeghi community, whom MacMunn describes as ‘nominal’ Muslims, though ‘untouchables’. They, therefore, bury their dead instead of cremating them, so that they ‘might face the recording angels like any other follower of the prophet.’ The Imam refuses to bury the outcaste in his ‘cleanly plot’, but the other hospital sweepers insist he has to be buried. Learning of the dilemma, the vicar declares, ‘Surely Bigha Khan has died for England, I will bury him in the churchyard.’ ‘And so Bigha, outcaste Lalbeghi, lies close to a crusader’s tomb’ by the end of the story, ‘in the churchyard of St Agnes Without … Lalbeghi and Norman, the alpha and the omega of social status.’

There is no real churchyard of St Agnes Without, but the grave of one Sukha Kalloo, a sweeper, lies beside some New Zealand graves in the churchyard of St Nicholas at Brockenhurst. Sukha was probably the sweeper of Lawrence’s report and the ‘Bigha’ of MacMunn’s fictional account, as his gravestone is indeed subscribed by the parishioners of Brockenhurst, and it has an Islamic arch instead of the cross which marks the grave of an Indian Christian sapper nearby. MacMunn added a second such tale of ‘pathos and glory’, modelled, he claimed, on another real-life incident.

In this, the regimental latrine cleaner Buldoo, inspired by his childhood play at soldiers with a golden-haired English boy, assumes the identity of a Rajput sepoy and dies leading a heroic counter-attack from a trench in Mesopotamia. Clearly, MacMunn was suggesting that it was in empire alone, in such spaces as the British home and regiment, that the ‘untouchable’ found succour, not, as he crudely put it, in ‘Gandhi and his blather’. But the war’s hunger for manpower had also allowed the unimaginable to be imagined—the sweeper to be cast as a war hero.

Singha explains how the war not only gave those ‘racially subordinate’ to earn their respect, and climb up the ladder in the army to become war heroes, but also gave farmers and farmhands a respectable occupation as soldiers. She writes:

In recruitment propaganda, service as a sepoy or an Indian cavalryman was cast as the only form of off-farm work which did not demean respectable agriculturalists:

Jat ki kamai, kahan-kahan kis kaam mein aati hai Karen kheti hai zamindara, fauji kaam hamaara Aur jitne hain ahalkaar, yeh kamai nek kehti hai. Jat ki [Of all the different forms of work it is only cultivation or military service which is honourable for the Jat].

Some propaganda pamphlets described sepoy service as ‘not work at all!’ The peasant had to be induced to believe that when he put on his military boots, he distanced himself from an existence shaped by backbreaking labour and the vagaries of the weather. He also acquired, propaganda materials suggested, some immunity against the rough handling of his person by the policeman, the creditor and the revenue official.

A World War One recruiting song contrasted the plight of the man outside army life with his position inside: ‘Here you get tattered shoes, out there you get full boots … Here you get shoved around, out there you get a salute.’

Such immunities prioritised the army’s own claims to the person of the sepoy, but they were cast as status enhancing privileges acquired by service to the state.

The world of work was still an insistent reality for the follower ranks. However, they were told that their uniform and fixed monthly wage gave them the prestige of government service. Medical and transport officers who wanted a better deal for their follower personnel had to contend with the hyper-masculine code of combatant service. The rhetoric they used was that the devotion of the follower ranks gave a higher gloss to the valour of the fighting races, rather than dimming it. At the same time, they pointed out that this duty of care exposed stretcher-bearers and mule-drivers to battlefield risk.

They also drew upon contemporary ideas about labour efficiency to argue that better food and kit for followers would allow them to train more intensively and would prevent desertion and invaliding in field service. To track the improvement which took place over 1916–17 in the institutional position of the ‘higher followers’, this chapter focuses on the stretcher bearers, or kahars, and the mule-drivers, or drabis. It also picks out the cook, bhisti (water-carrier), sweeper and syce (groom and grass-cutter) in order to explore the service milieu of the attached followers, often referred to as the ‘menial ranks’.

The following excerpts have been published with permission from HarperCollins.



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