Rangadurai, popularly known as Randor Guy, a well-known writer and columnist, has aptly subtitled his Memories of Madras as being about ‘Its Movies, Musicians and Men of Letters’. In a sense, there can be no better description of the movers and shakers of Madras as it opened up to a new development phase in the beginning of the 20th century.
The birth pangs of modern ideas and technology brought with them culture shocks, but there was always a willing reconciliation, a middle path, at various levels of social reality, of the traditional and modern in Indian society, with its locus in one of the most famous ‘Presidency towns’ of British India- Madras, now Chennai.
In a word, without the movie makers, alongside a parallel developments of what was then happening in the two other equally famous Presidency capitals of Bombay and Calcutta, the Musicians - both Carnatic and Tamil Isai- and the men of letters, predominantly lawyers and a few scholars, this gateway to the South may not have gone beyond Madras Central Station, which the author notes at one point did not even have a proper board.
If the British Raj and the institutions they created provided the framework for birth of a modern, free India in August 1947, the initiators of change in the realm of socio-cultural history, substantially belonged to these three categories of people Randor Guy has talked about in this valuable collection of articles written over long years.
With his passion being for Cinema, the bulk of Randor Guy’s writings is about the development of South Indian Cinema in old Madras led by Tamil films, with its inspirational roots in theatre, themes in the great Indian mythologies and epics, intellectual sparks in poverty-stricken writers, talented songster-artistes, maverick directors. While producers were from an assortment of think-ahead businessmen, largely the Thondaimandalam Mudaliars, Nagarathaars of Chettinaad and the land owning class of Andhra region, their superglue were the cameras and film production technology itself.
A critical mass of extraordinarily creative Tamil Brahmins from composite Thanjavur district, and later a powerful band of politically brilliant writers led by late Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai and former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi as ‘new wave leaders’ of the Dravidian Movement, have also shaped the form and substance of modern Tamil cinema.
There was also a marked Sri Lankan influence too here, what with the likes of the Jaffna stunner and enchanting danseuse, K. Thavamani Devi, who later led the life of a recluse in Rameswaram after finally marrying a small-time priest, and intellectual writer-directors like the Colombo and London-educated Roman Catholic ASA Sami, who left their indelible mark on celluloid. And last but not least, an eclectic group of highly creative personalities and businessmen from Bombay, Pune and Calcutta, who looked to the film production facilities and techniques in Madras as their second home, besides translations from Bengali and Tamil classics mutually enriching each other’s screenplay discourse.
For all the misery that cinema generates behind the scenes for both artistes, producers and exhibitors, Randor Guy’s meticulous chronicling of each phase in the development of South Indian Cinema – beginning with the ‘Silent Era’ in the early 1900s’, with all the cheer, sarcasm and humour he could muster, brings to light little known aspects of socio-cultural history. There is candour in his style, but no rancour or ill will to anybody.
The author has painstakingly profiled every key actor in the major phases of film development in the South. Whether it is Raghupathy Venkaiah, who got down to the business in 1913 to give Madras its first cinema house in ‘Gaiety’, alongside the ‘Coovum’ river on Mount Road, the first-to-modernise Anglo-Indians playing the lead roles in early silent movies like Meenakshi Kalyanam, a Sanskrit scholar’s family like Kuppuswami Sastrigal partly funding a nascent film magazine, ‘Sound and Shadow’, or the travails of many an entrepreneur who built and sold out studios, have all been faithfully recorded by the author to the best of his knowledge and available information.
The early ‘talkies’ in the 1930s’, the glamour and glitz that moved into Tamil cinema with major figures like the amazing American writer-director Ellis R. Dungan, virtually one-man phenomenon as represented by personalities like Raja Sandow, M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, T.K.S. Brothers, movie moguls like B.N. Reddi, K. Ramnoth, A.V. Meyiyappa Chettiyar, the new era inaugurated in Tamil cinema by S.S. Vasan in the early 1940s’, K.R. Sundaram of the famous Modern Theatres in Salem, to the scintillating voices of musicians in cinema from Papanasam Sivan, M.S. Subbulakshmi, N.C. Vasanthakokilum, G.N. Balasubramaniam to K.B. Sundarambal, and legendary heroes like Sivaji Ganesan and M.G. Ramachandran, there is a mine of information in Randor Guy’s sketches of them.
As the work is primarily a bunch of his writings put together, there is some repetition of little known facts about people and places, but Randor Guy’s style never makes them boring, including in his profiles on celebrity musicians and lawyers. Above all, the author’s work is an important addition to South Indian cultural history sans any ideological baggage.
