Tales of Old and New Madras by Muthiah S

Author:Muthiah, S. [Muthiah, S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: westland
Published: 2014-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

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1 Aquarium : Imagine a coastal city without an aquarium. With the close of this one, Madras that is Chennai does not have even a minor one.

2 New lighthouse : Inaugurated in 1977

3 Carnatic : An area that once stretched from Orissa to Kanniyakumari and from the shores of the Bay of Bengal to close to Bangalore.

1886

THE GARDENS OF RARE SERENITY

T he Blavatsky Gardens, the Olcott Gardens, the Besant Gardens, the Damodar Gardens, the Gardens of Remembrance and many more, all gardens of rare serenity in South Madras, grew, it might be said, from a puff of smoke. That first puff was blown at a tea party that was held at a farm in Vermont in the United States, one day in the early 1870s. When the hostess, Mary Baker Eddy 1 , introduced Colonel Henry S. Olcott to Madame Blavatsky, he lit the cigarette of the short, dumpy Russian aristocrat. The American Civil War veteran 2 was later to recall that that “acquaintance begun in smoke stirred up a great and permanent fire” .

The flame that Blavatsky and Olcott lit has blazed ever since as the theosophical message of Universal Brotherhood. When they brought ‘home’ that message to India, they found on the banks of the River Adyar in Madras the surroundings most conducive to nurture it. And as the message flourished, so did the gardens the odd couple surrounded themselves with.

Russian-born Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had a talent for music, art and writing and a lineage that included Ivan the Terrible somewhere. But it was as a clairvoyant and mystic that she had a reputation at the time Olcott met her. The tall, bushy-bearded American’s reputation was built on totally different foundations. A farmer and journalist before the Civil War, his reputation was established after it when he investigated corruption in the armed forces of the Union. What had brought him to Mary Baker Eddy’s was a growing interest in rationalism.

Their interest in matters spiritual led Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott to found the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. But the hustle and bustle of an almost godless city was not the right atmosphere they sought for a growing, world-wide spiritual movement.

India, home of several great religions and with its strong traditions of meditation and contemplation of the universe and the infinite, beckoned. And so, they sailed for Bombay and, from there, moved on to Madras in 1882, drawn by a Blavatsky vision of where the Movement’s headquarters was to be .

For £600 they acquired, on the thickly wooded south bank of the Adyar estuary, a garden house and two smaller bungalows set in a 30-acre estate of orchards and parks. Here, at Huddlestone Gardens, they established in 1886 the world headquarters of the spiritual movement that searches for the Truth in the wisdom of all the great religions of the world. The peaceful retreat that Huddlestone Gardens and its sylvan surroundings provided was just what Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott had been looking for to pursue their quest with the least interruptions.

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