With due apologies to S. Muthiah for usurping that caption.
Ambattur Old Town
Last fortnight has been spent more on catching up with correspondence and less on research and I thought I must close a few gaps in the articles written in the last few months. The first concerns Ambattur OT. I thought the flood of mail would never cease, most of them averring that the abbreviation expanded to Old Terminus. I am glad to say I have reached the truth, and it is Old Town, no matter what the naysayers feel.
Chaitra Mohan from Ambattur has dug deep into the family archives and found electricity demand notices and payment receipts dating to the 1970s. All of these have a rubber stamp that says Ambattur Township, Chingleput District. Apparently, Ambattur was one of those panchayats that were regularly upgraded, qualifying by the late 1960s to become a Municipal Township. That constitutes the Old Town. This status was formally recognised when it was made a Township Municipality on January 30, 1971, by bringing together 10 revenue villages — Ambattur, Athipattu, Kakapalam, Korattur, Mannurpet, Menampet, Mogappair, Oragadam, Padi, and Pattaravakkam.
Apparently by 2008, when the area merited a government study that is online, Ambattur Municipality, at 40.6 sq. km. and then a part of Tiruvallur district, was the second largest municipal body in the Chennai Metropolitan Area, Avadi being the first. It merited a separate administration and plans were afoot, but in 2011 it became part of the Greater Chennai Corporation. Its journeys via multiple districts and upgrades have not made any change to one aspect — the quality of its roads. Then, as now, Ambattur remains a motorist’s nightmare. It has a Pallam Street whose name says it all.
Which brings me back to OT. All of this confusion in such recent history! I cannot help reflecting on how when there are so many alternate theories about place names not older than a few decades, we have some armchair theorists coming up with confident explanations. Even Ambattur is a victim with this claim that it gets its name by way of being home to the 50th Sakthi Peetham that has not been identified by anyone. For the record, it is one of the oldest place names in continuous use in the city. According to K.V. Raman’s Early History of the Madras Region, it appears in an inscription dating to 1242 AD and was the headquarters of a major administrative division — Ambattur Nadu.
Chepauk Stadium
My next hot topic concerns the Chepauk Stadium and M.A. Chidambaram’s role in it. I had mentioned in my previous article the name of S. Sriraman (I had mistakenly used the initial M for him and I apologise) who was Chidambaram’s right hand in cricket matters and at the Tamil Isai Sangam. His family wrote in to say that he had a major role in arranging the bank guarantee. I thank them for this, but I would also like some documentary proof, which has not yet been forthcoming. And anyway, MAC did acknowledge his role by naming a gate at the stadium after him. The other was a message that one Sangameswara Iyer was the architect of the stadium. I have since verified this claim and thanks to Kalpana Shanmugam, can write that this is not correct. The architect was the firm of F. Bennet Pithavadian and Partners. Sangameswaran was the structural engineer for the project.
(V. Sriram is a writer and historian.)
