Beyond Fort St. George: Tamil Nadu government’s quest for an Assembly-Secretariat site is more than a century old

The search for a suitable site for the Tamil Nadu Assembly-Secretariat complex – now being carried out by the incumbent Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK)-led regime – has a very long history. Various sites were identified, and the legislature was even shifted to a couple of locations outside Fort St. George in the last 105-odd years. Somehow, the Fort had such an appeal that the legislature kept coming back to the historic 17th-century vestige of the colonial era.A perusal of the materials available with The Hindu Archives reveals that as early as 1896, a proposal was mooted for “constructing a new building for the [Legislative] Council Chamber and Secretariat of the Madras Government. The site selected is on the South Beach [now called Kamarajar Salai] near the Presidency College.” Estimated to cost ₹12 lakh, the proposed building would have “a covered passage to connect the Council Chamber with the Board of Revenue [a body of very senior government officers, which was done away with in 1980] and other public offices in Chepauk Park [located on the east of Chepauk Palace],” this newspaper reported on February 24, 1896.Bracken’s motionFinance Member G.T.H. Bracken, a former Chief Secretary of the now-abolished Madras Presidency, moved a motion on March 12, 1936, for the new building to house the legislature, as, he said, there would be two Houses after the first election to be held under the Government of India Act, 1935. In the pre-1935 period, the term “Minister” was not used and the term “Member” was used instead. The head of the council of Members was called the First Minister.Just as Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay pointed out in the Assembly recently that the Fort complex belonged to the Union government (Ministry of Defence and the Archaeological Survey of India), Bracken also made a similar point in those days and said the Government of India had provisionally permitted the Napier Battery, close to the Napier Bridge, for housing the legislature,In the discussion, C.R. Reddi and C. Natesa Mudaliar, both from the Justice Party, suggested that the design of the proposed building be “Dravidian and Swadeshi,” while C.R. Parthasarathy Iyengar, a member from Chittoor (now in Andhra Pradesh) and a Theosophist, wanted the architecture of the building and its environment to “evoke the purest and highest national feelings.” Beyabani, his colleague, stressed the point that the building should have a provision for a place of worship for Muslims.Responding to the suggestions, Bracken said that though he was “not sure” about the design of the building’s architecture being Dravidian, he was in sympathy with the idea that it should be Indian in design – Dravidian, Moghul, or otherwise. Also, the new structure should be in harmony with other buildings nearby, especially the Chepauk Palace, occupied by the Board of Revenue, this daily quoted the Finance Member as having told the House on March 12, 1936. After his reply, the motion was adopted. The Tamil Nadu government Secretariat building at Fort St. George Fort, circa 2003 | Photo Credit: R. Ragu ‘Parliament House’A significant feature of the public discourse regarding the building project in the 1930s and 1940s was that the term – Parliament House – was used instead of “the legislature complex.” When the British government had appointed an architect to prepare designs and plans for the proposed House to be raised on the foreshore to the north of the Napier Bridge, where the Napier Battery stood, The Hindu wrote an editorial on September 17, 1936, titled “Spare the Foreshore.” It recommended the Island Grounds and stated that “the needs of the military cannot be subordinated for all time to the needs of the civil government.” As of date, the Grounds remain with the Defence authorities.Ten months later, when the Congress formed the government under the leadership of C. Rajagopalachari (CR or Rajaji), the Napier Battery site was abandoned. The vacant land in Esplanade was considered a possible alternative site, according to a report published on July 17, 1937.The negotiations went on between the Governments of India and Madras regarding the transfer of a portion of the Island Grounds for the Parliament House project, but to no avail. In the meantime, the bicameral legislature had started functioning from the Senate House in Chepauk, where Rajaji, as the Premier holding the portfolio of Finance too, presented the historic, first budget presented by an Indian in the State. Subsequently, the Banqueting (Rajaji) Hall on the Estate was also used as the venue for the legislature, according to V. Sriram, a Chennai-based writer and historian.Fort St. George underwent remodelling in 1939 with a view to bringing the legislature back to the premises. Even as the discussion continued about the new structure, the Second World War erupted in September 1939, and the British government in India immediately announced that the country (India) was at war with Hitler’s Germany, forcing all the Congress governments in all the provinces, including Madras, to quit. When the Secretariat was briefly shifted to Omandurar Estate on Anna Salai. The picture was taken on March 10, 2010 | Photo Credit: S. Thanthoni Congress’ returnWhen the Congress came back to power in April 1946 with T. Prakasam as the Chief Minister, the talk of erecting a new ‘Parliament House’ started doing the rounds again. This time, the site in focus was the Government Estate, now named after former Chief Minister Omandur P. Ramaswami Reddiar.By then, it had become a practice for Governors of the Madras Presidency to use the present Lok Bhavan complex in Guindy as their residence and not the Government House on the Estate, spread over 110 acres. Archibald Nye, the last British Governor to leave India, made an offer to Prakasam to set apart the entire Estate for housing the legislature.Writing about the plight of Fort St. George, The Hindu reported on July 16, 1946, that “both the Legislative Assembly and Council are at present accommodated in the Secretariat Buildings. Fort St. George. The existing Assembly Chamber had been originally designed for a House of about 100 members, less than half the strength of the present Assembly and has proved too inadequate for its needs. There is no suitable accommodation for offices, rest rooms, library, or restaurant for the use of members who oftentimes have had to stand about in the passages when the House is not sitting.”Even while pursuing the proposal to have the Assembly complex on the Estate, the government toyed with the idea of using the Museum Theatre on the premises of the Government Museum in Egmore. Eventually, by June 1950, it decided to stick to the Estate. M. Bhaktavatsalam, Public Works Minister, told this newspaper then that “the site for the permanent Parliament House lies to the east of the Cooum House [now demolished] in the Government House Estate, alongside Adams Road [being known as Sivananda Salai] and the building will be designed to face the Cooum river.”Estate in the limelightIn late 1951, the then Finance Minister B. Gopala Reddi told the Assembly that the new building would be ready by January 1952. As on September 25, 1951, the amount spent was ₹4.6 lakh, this newspaper quoted Reddi as having told the House on October 27, 1951. On May 2, 1952, the then Governor Sri Prakasa declared open the legislature building in the presence of the Chief Minister CR and pro tem Speaker, P.T. Rajan, the last elected member of the Justice Party and the grandfather of former Finance Minister P. Thiaga Rajan. The Jayalalithaa government rechristened the Secretariat building constructed by the DMK as a multi-specialty hospital, at the Omandurar Government Estate. Photographed on January 29, 2013 | Photo Credit: Bijoy Ghosh At that time, the strength of the Assembly was 375, and the building had been constructed with this figure in mind. After the reorganisation of States in the next few years, the strength of the Tamil Nadu Assembly went down, compelling the authorities to go back to the Fort. The building, built at a cost of ₹10 lakh, was later called Children’s Theatre or Balar Arangam. Later, it was known as Kalaivanar Arangam, named after veteran thespian N.S. Krishnan.The last time the Assembly met on the Estate was on December 27, 1956, before returning there in March 2010, when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) regime, led by M. Karunanidhi, chose to take back the legislature to the Estate, where a new building had been constructed at a cost of ₹450 crore to house the Legislative Assembly and the Secretariat. On May 16, 2011, when Jayalalithaa of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) was sworn in as Chief Minister, the Assembly-Secretariat returned to the Fort.