Women’s liberation in Madras of the ’40s and ’50s

It has become quite the thing to celebrate the city you live in. Certainly in Chennai. Tireless chronicler S Muthiah has recorded not only facts, but the myriad facets of Madras — in books, newspapers and in his niche monthly, The Madras Musings. V Sriram’s humour-spiced talkathons describe the forgotten haunts of old Madras musicians. Books like Degree Coffee by the Yard (Nirmala Lakshman) capture the flavours of Chennai, while Tamarind City (Bishwanath Ghosh) gives you a newcomer’s perspective. The recent Madras, Chennai and the Self (Tulsi Badrinath) walks us through the city with veterans to whom Chennai is home. But to me Madras is Adyar, the suburb-by-the-sea, where my grandparents built their villa in the 1940s. “Land’s End”, they called it. In my childhood, the main street snaked through a tunnel of rain trees where bullock carts groaned, horse cabs clip-clopped, an occasional car growled by.

However, serene Adyar was no village, but a cosmopolitan oasis. Foreigners from Australia to Argentina were familiar to us. They were the resident and visiting members of the Theosophical Society, flanking the Adyar estuary. The local Tamils grew used to blonde locks and auburn whiskers. The vegetable stall and local bakery learnt to take strange and exotic accents in their stride. Street vendors found a way, as only Indians can, to chatter with the new clientele.

To students of the Besant School, and the world-renowned Kalakshetra centre of performing arts, both situated in those days on the Theosophical Society’s vast campus, “glocal” was not a word, but an everyday experience. Visitors from many countries talked or demonstrated bits of song and dance. Stone tablets marked “Greece”, “Belgium”, “Chile”, “Portugal” or “Japan”, announced that soil from those distant lands had been sprinkled on the roots of the trees under which they stood.   

Co-education in the Adyar schools made it natural for boys and girls to sit, study, eat and play together. Segregation was out, congregation in. Gender divisions were shattered when boys and girls challenged each other on the games field, partnered each other on the dance stage, made music as a team, or simply shared the same class. Paradoxically, for both men and women, while training in dance and music at the Kalakshetra school was essentially a pursuit of tradition, it also brought a radical shift in perspective, and altered gender equations in the whole community.

Adyar women were amazingly independent. Most of them cycled nonchalantly — a sight that made the rest of Madras wonder, and later shrug, “Oh those Adyar girls!” Western wear was taboo of course. Most women however, wore a half-length saree touching the knee, over pyjamas — the dance costume invented by Kalakshetra. I remember how Adyar’s Lakshmi Mahadevan, the first woman tennis player to win the Asian Singles Championship, set a new trend when she appeared on the court in salwar kameez.

Recently when someone asked me how women in Adyar came to enjoy a freedom unknown to most parts of the country in the 1940s-50s, I realized how the humble bicycle gave them that freedom and confidence. Cycling was an easy, economical means of getting in and out of the house — unescorted.  

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist