Linking Madras, Cuddalore, and Calcutta

Fort St. David guesthouse | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The long weekend a fortnight ago had me driving off to Cuddalore, my destination being Fort St. David, the property of the Murugappa Group, which is now managed as a guesthouse. I have fond memories of the place, having stayed here earlier when it was a Murugappa guesthouse, and this sojourn was a great one too.  

Fort St. David commemorates in name the fort that the British built in Cuddalore. The brainchild of Elihu Yale when he was Governor of Madras in the 1690s, the place had been eyed repeatedly by colonial forces since the early 1600s. The Dutch negotiated for it with the Nayaks of Gingee but the Portuguese would have none of it. When Gingee became a Maratha stronghold, the British proved luckier, being given as much land as could be covered by shooting cannonballs! The French, thereafter, repeatedly tried to take the place over, giving up only in the 1760s.  

The commemorative stone in memory of Nettle, a dog, erected by its owner, Dr. H.E. Busteed, among the early chroniclers of colonial Calcutta | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The colonial interest was that Cuddalore and its surroundings had plenty of textile-weaving centres. But under the British, it developed more as a military stronghold. It became a convenient bolthole when Madras fell to the French in 1746. Interestingly, while Fort St. George surrendered, Fort St. David did not, and remained the British headquarters of Madras up to as late as 1752 – three years after our city was vacated by the French. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if the British had never returned, and invested in building up Cuddalore as their capital. Much of Fort St. David was ruined during Comte de Lally’s siege of the late 1750s and today, barring three or four colonial buildings and some graveyards, there is very little to show what could have one day rivalled Madras. Cuddalore Old Town (OT), however, flourishes and has by the river a few old British warehouses, one of them being the Parry sugar warehouse, and the Christ Church, badly modernised, where Thomas Parry is buried.