Victoria Students Hostel in Chennai, where history lurks in every corner

The building, made of wire-cut red bricks, has the signature architectural features of structures designed by the legendary Robert Fellowes Chisholm

“In great cities, the great buildings tell you things you don’t know and remember things which you’ve forgotten. It’s a collective wisdom, an engine superior to your own intelligence. Architecture is the biggest unwritten document of history.” – Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind

“One century’s building is another century’s useful aberration.” – Urban writer and activist Jane Jacobs

When great cities forget their great buildings, it evokes images of falling giant trees, burning libraries, blue whale victims losing their grip over ledges, neglected parents and wasted memories. A visit to the Victoria Students Hostel was one such experience.

The Victoria Students Hostel is tucked away in Triplicane in the heart of Chennai. Relatively unused, the road, which is named after the hostel, has few other buildings – barring the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital, which was originally established at Moore’s Garden, Nungambakkam in 1885 as “The Royal Victoria Gosha (purda) Hospital for Women”. It was relocated to Victoria Hostel Road in 1890.

The tragedy of the Victoria Students Hostel is that it has its back to the road -- it was built facing the Buckingham Canal, perhaps to receive the cool evening sea breeze. The hostel residents would use the canal to commute to other parts of the city in gently moving country boats. The hostel is also near-invisible from the derelict road on the other side of the canal.

The beauty of the building is, thus, not known to the public. The road runs parallel to Buckingham Canal, starting from the Wallajah Road end of Chepauk stadium and terminating at Pycrofts Road. Its tree-lined vista is redolent of a bygone era when most Chennai roads had trees on either side, their branches reaching out to those on the other side.

It was in just such an era that the Victoria Students Hostel opened in 1901. It was built in memory of Pundi Runganadha Mudaliar, professor of mathematics at Presidency College. Made professor in his early 30s, Mudaliar was a one-time official Tamil translator for Madras Presidency, member of the Hunter Commission (the Indian Education Commission) and the sheriff of Madras, before he died at the age of 45. The foundation stone for the building was laid in 1895 by Beilby Lawley, the 3rd Baron Wenlock, then governor of Madras. Scarred remains of a plaque commemorating this event today lie hidden behind an iron fence.

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The building, made of wire-cut red bricks, has the signature architectural features of structures designed in the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture pioneered by the legendary Robert Fellowes Chisholm, who was consulting architect to the Government of Madras. Chisholm designed several landmark buildings in Chennai, including the Presidency College, PWD Office, Victoria Memorial, P Orr and Sons, and the University Senate House, apart from the Napier Museum in Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), the Bombay Municipal Offices and the Laxmi Vilas Palace in Baroda (now Vadodara). But, the Victoria Students Hostel appears to have been designed by Henry Irwin, who took over as consulting architect in the year 1888, and continued the tradition of designing buildings in the Indo-Saracenic style. The other buildings designed by Irwin include the Madras High Court, the Law College, Connemara Museum, and the State Bank of India Main branch, all in Chennai, Amba Vilas Palace, the Mysore Palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, the Viceregal Lodge and several other buildings in Shimla, Christ Church, Pachmarhi, and the American College, Madurai. Henry Irwin died at his residence in Ooty (Udhagamandalam), in the year 1922. Irwin does not seem to have seen through the construction of the hostel, as his term as consulting architect ended in the year 1896.

The hostel, though located behind Presidency College, initially accommodated students of other colleges too, including the College of Engineering, India's oldest technical institution founded in 1794. When the College of Engineering moved to Guindy in 1920, the hostel became exclusively for Presidency College students.

Presidency is the only Indian college to have produced two Nobel laureates – C V Raman and S Chandrasekhar. Its alumni also include S R Srinivasa Varadhan, winner of the Abel Prize, considered the Nobel equivalent for mathematics. All of them might well have stayed at the hostel or been frequent visitors to it. Other residents, from Presidency College alone, may have included the famous Benegal brothers, Narsing Rau and Rama Rau, Field Marshal K M Cariappa, V K Krishna Menon, C Subramaniam, S Jagannathan and a string of other bureaucrats, judges and scientists. There was also O V Vijayan, writer and cartoonist, Pothen Joseph, journalist, and P P Pillai, the first Indian to publish in an international economic journal and the first Indian to join the League of Nations secretariat.

Apart from visitors such as C Rajagopalachari, who came to address the students, and S Radhakrishnan, who taught at the college, there were also many part-time residents. Robert Kanigel, in his 1991 biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity, describes the hostel as “a large red and black brick structure whose turrets and three storeys of brick-columned arches looked as if they had been transplanted intact from England”. Kanigel notes how the young mathematical genius stayed at the hostel in 1910 as a guest of one of his students from Kumbakonam. Impoverished and already married, Ramanujan would go from room to room in search of students to tutor. He was, of course, unsuccessful, given that his maverick reputation preceded his knock at the door. But, he savoured and remembered for long the rasam that the hostel served – perhaps even when rasam continued to be his lifeline during his lonely tubercular days in Cambridge. It is ironic that complaints about the quality of food were one of the reasons the hostel seems to have been closed down.

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The warden’s bungalow

On entering the hostel premises through the northern gate, one first sees a stately red, two-storey bungalow, with venetian blinds and corridors circling both floors. It does not appear to have been occupied for some time. Is this the Warden’s Bungalow where Henry Davison Love, the principal of the College of Engineering, lived from 1880 to 1907? (Love’s four-volume history of Madras is standard reference for historians.) Or was there a separate principal’s residence, named “The Lodge”, according to some reports, which had already been pulled down?

A little beyond, behind the bungalow, lies the U-shaped, three-storey hostel, its graceful arches reminiscent of other well-known Chisholm buildings. A painted statue, presumably of Professor Mudaliar, occupies the centre of what was once a lush green lawn. Only fragments of the cement pathways leading to the statue from the four sides remain. The front gate and the spires of the iron grilled fence enclosing the lawn, found in old photographs of the hostel, are missing.

The entrance to one of the rooms

On entering one of the open rooms, after crossing the corridors with Madras terraced roofs, one finds it long and airy, with doors and windows with venetian blinds at both ends and two spacious bookshelves on one side. The floors are made of Cuddapah stone and are in good condition. The walls seem to be aching to share a few memories from their past. The hostel was built, no doubt, on the line of hostels at Oxford and Cambridge, where the architecture itself is educative and instils a sense of awe and humility.
 

Inside of a room

One can only guess at the locations of the hostel mess and reading rooms. The vast outdoor expanses, where some construction activity is going on behind tall aluminium sheets, would have provided ample space for sports and other activities, or for simply lounging around on the iron sofas under the shade of the numerous trees.
 

To the right of the hostel, a corridor leads to the back of the bungalow, where on a wooden plaque is written “Warden”, indicating that this was an entrance to Love’s office and confirming that the bungalow was his residence. To its left, on the wall near the steps leading to the first floor, is a notice in Tamil dated April 7, 2017. Among other things, it states that the building is 116 years old and that someone had slipped and fallen, and was hospitalised, after which the students were shifted from the second floor to the lower floors. And that a new hostel will be built to accommodate 500 students.

It is understood that the hostel was in use until fairly recently, though badly in need of upkeep. While the parapets on a floor at the back seem to have fallen, a July 2016 photograph of a student demonstration shows the front to be in better shape than it is now. The silver coloured iron spiral staircase leading to the terrace of the bungalow from the first floor remains mute witness to that.

One wonders whether the objective of additional accommodation for students could have been achieved by building extensions to the hostel, in a sympathetic manner (as done for Chennai Central and Egmore stations), while retaining the charm of the original structure. In any case, Henry Irwin had been advised by the Madras Government, while designing the hostel, to provide for ample space around it so as to accommodate future extensions. Irwin does not seem to have seen through the construction of the hostel, as his term as consulting architect ended in the year 1896. To borrow from Jane Jacobs, the cost of replacement being higher than the cost of repairs and the need for older buildings, especially in what is an undeclared heritage district of the city, ought to be factored in. The lack of modern amenities nearby and the need to take a circuitous route to walk down to the college probably explain the inadequate support for the hostel. Had the hostel been more visible and located, say, on Mount Road or Marina Beach Road, it would have perhaps earned more support from local conservationists.

The hostel authorities would do well to take a leaf from the book of the Madras PWD, which has done a remarkable job of renovating a part of the nearby Khalsa Mahal, which was almost entirely gutted. Such renovation awaits the rest of Khalsa Mahal and its twin, Humayun Mahal, which together form the Chepauk Palace, their beauty and majesty hidden behind ugly modern structures.

As one leaves the compound, and pulls into the bridge over Buckingham Canal, the present drags one rudely out of the past. The traffic is thick. A few bikers make a crude manoeuvre over the footpath, threatening pedestrians with their speed. Some others come in from the wrong side. And, a stench blows over you from Buckingham Canal. One is left hopelessly hoping that the Indo-Saracenic structure, listed as a heritage structure by the Madras High Court, will defy this neglect and continue to stand to see yet another century.

The author’s great-grandfather, a student at the College of Engineering, was among the early residents of Victoria Students Hostel, between 1904 and 1907; the views are personal