Virtual Walk Through Sowcarpet
Sowcarpet is often described as Chennai’s “Little North India,” in tourist book style. Bustling and bazaar-like, this old neighborhood is not too far from the city’s iconic Central Station. This area is home to the city’s first Jain temples and shops and eateries that offer north Indian goods and delicacies. The smell of fried snacks and mint-cilantro chutney hangs in the air. Its lanes are narrow, except for Mint Street. This congested commercial area is best explored by foot.
The “sowcar” in the name comes from the Hindi word sahukaar, merchant or native banker, a money lender. In Madras Rediscovered, city historian S. Muthiah writes: “The Ekambareswar Temple became the chief temple of Gujarati weavers who had first settled around Madurai and Tirunelveli in the 11th Century and some of whom, in the 17th Century, moved to the growing entrepot of Madras. They were followed in the late 18th Century by the diamond and silk merchants who gave Sowcarpet its name, and the Kutchi traders. In the 18th and 19th Century came more Gujarati traders, including the Gujarat Parsis who made Royapuram their home. There are over 50,000 Gujaratis in the city whose roots here go back over 300 years.”
These are interesting facts, no doubt, but the atmosphere and the soul of a place are often better understood through fiction. If you want to know more about the life of the Gujarati immigrants, read the short stories written by renowned author Dilip Kumar. He was born in a Gujarati-speaking family in Coimbatore, but his maternal uncle lived in Sowcarpet. He knew what made this Madras neighborhood tick — he’d visited the place as a young boy, and later as a young man looking for work in the city. His unlikely literary career took off when an early work, Theervu, “the solution” won The Best Tamil Short Story of the Year award for 1977. The story was set in the Gujarati locality close to the Ekambareswarar Temple on Mint Street
Back in the 1970s, for anyone with literary ambitions in Tamil, Madras was the place to be. In which other Indian city would a regional language writer when asked “Have you read Jean Paul Sartre?” come back with, “Why don’t you ask Sartre if he has read me?” (This was the Tamil writer D. Jayakanthan, Dilip Kumar’s early idol with whose writing he grew disillusioned later.) At the age of 28, Dilip Kumar moved to the metropolis where he’d make his mark as a writer, translator-promoter, and exporter of modern Tamil literature. Today, he is an acknowledged authority on contemporary Tamil fiction and is sought after by universities abroad for his expertise on the topic.
The Ekambareswarar Temple of Sowcarpet, which came up in the 1680s, had been commissioned by Alanganatha Pillai, a dubash or translator with the British East India Company. “Like the city’s other famous temples, this one appears quite ordinary to its habitués, and magnificent to infrequent visitors,” Dilip Kumar wrote of the historic temple and set the stage for his early stories. In this neighborhood called Ekambareswarar Agraharam, you will run into stereotype-shattering characters. Not all the Gujaratis here are saits or wealthy merchants with money to hoard (or lend) – some even hold ordinary government jobs. True, Mittu Mama, a 70-year-old foodie, a protagonist of three excellent stories, was a well-to-do businessman once but in his current straitened circumstances, he displays an appetite for life, a heart-warming exuberance. Gangu Patti is not an average religious old woman. Her prescriptions—part ritual, part common sense—often surprise with their psychological acuity. The well-read widow, with her piquant talk, is beloved of the many younger residents in the building who seek her counsel.
Even minor characters in the Agraharam are well-etched. For instance, take Suri, the well-dressed loafer who can curse with felicity in both Tamil and Gujarati. He metes out justice with his stick — whether the wrong-doer is Tamil or Gujarati, it makes no difference to him. There is the miserly Jeevanlal who refuses to pay for the treatment of the dhobi’s donkey which broke the possibly fatal fall of his kite-flying 8-year-old son. Suri should “reason” with Jeevanlal, you begin to think. The stories give you a sense of being inter-connected though, except for Mittu Mama, no character appears in more than one story.
Dilip Kumar’s fiction, rooted in the reality of everyday life, is never dispiriting – his keen observations are laced with a sly, affectionate humor, so it’s perfectly natural to find yourself laughing out loud in the middle of a moment of insight. His work has traveled widely, translated into several Indian and European languages. You’ll also find a Sowcarpet-based short story in each of the two Chennai-themed anthologies, The Unhurried City and Madras on your Mind.
If you do choose to visit Sowcarpet after reading the stories, don’t look for Dilip Kumar’s residence there. The litterateur lives, with his wife Ambika in a flat in a shaded cul-de-sac in Mandaveli. They are avid readers both; their drawing room is quiet, library-like. Overall, the ambience here is quite different from the congested streets downtown where commerce rules.
The man who gave Sowcarpet its fictional soul now lives in Mandaveli, where the only bazaar is in memory—and in the pages of his stories.
- Mind Your Tongue by Dilip Kumar– in Madras on your Mind, edited by Chitra Viraraghavan and Krishna Shastri Devulapalli.
- The Solution by Dilip Kumar– in The Unhurried City: Writings on Chennai edited by C. S. Lakshmi