From a market to a college: a Madras transformation Premium

Explore the transformation of Madras from a bustling vegetable market to the esteemed Sri Kanyaka Parameswari College for Arts and Science.

Last week, I was invited to preside over the annual day of the Sri Kanyaka Parameswari College for Arts and Science (SKPC). I accepted at once. It is not often that you get to visit a space in Madras that has a continuous recorded history from 1708 onwards. The college occupies land belonging to the Sri Kanyaka Parameswari Devasthanam (SKPD). Readers will be aware of the area’s better-known name – Kotwal Chavadi.

For centuries, it was the city’s vegetable market, until it was shifted to Koyambedu. Its history begins in 1708 when it was mentioned as the Komatla Thotta in a property document. The full name was Kooragayala Komatla Thotta – the vegetable garden of the Komatis or the Arya Vysyas. This group of Telugu-speaking businessmen had their heyday during the East India Company (EIC) and British Raj days. The garden was a community property that was dedicated to the “general body of the Vysya caste people for the performance of the festivals, ceremonies and charities of the caste,” as per historian Mattison Mines.

The Vasavi Kanyaka Parameswari Temple | Photo Credit: Sriram V.

It was administered by leading members of the Arya Vysya community and in the 1790s, the responsibility lay with Sunku Krishnamma Chetty. The EIC, either wilfully or under the mistaken notion that it was his personal property, took over all 44 grounds of it, and the dispute lasted over 10 years. When in 1803 it was returned, the community elders pondered over how to protect it. Colla Muthurama Chetty, then the head, decided to build in one part of the land a temple to the community’s tutelar deity Vasavi Kanyaka Parameswari. Thus came up the shrine and the SKPD.

The origins of the market on the rest of the land are somewhat hazy. Even in the 1750s, we read of the Kotwal’s Market, though it is not clear if it was in the same place. That was an era when the Indian law officer, designated the Kotwal, was also responsible for the markets and so it got its name. By the early 1800s, the market was within the SKPD land. And it probably doubled as the space where the Kotwal held court and so became a community centre of sorts. It thus borrowed a Marathi term, Chavadi, and made it its own.

Kotwal Chavadi, circa 1996. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives