The fantasy of orientalism in Madras’s architecture

Malavika Karlekar in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Around the same time, the sea wall around the heavily guarded Fort St George at Madras was built. Its construction, as well as that of the sewers in the Black Town, required knowledge of local conditions and materials – an expertise that was easily available with Indians enlisted for the job. A port city till well into the 19th century, Madras consisted of the walled Black Town of “native” settlements. To its south was the Fort and beyond stood Chepauk Palace, home to the Nawabs of Carnatic. They patronized a Muslim courtly culture and had well-known Sufi scholar-mystics as guests. While there were some feeble attempts at bringing about an interface between cultures through, for instance the Cosmopolitan Club, Jayewardene-Pillai argues that it was the dynamism of the governor, Francis Napier, that led to “a peculiar and unexpected hybrid imperial architectural style”. And Robert Chisholm was the man chosen to design and implement the construction of many of these buildings. In the 1860s, the government of Madras launched a competition for the best plans for Presidency College and the Senate House of the university and 17 proposals were received; the judges decided on the designs of Robert Chisholm, an executive engineer in Bengal’s public works’ department. More:

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