Old Madras, a veritable Tower of Babel, and her Yellabanasar Street

Unraveling the history of mints in Madras, from Linghi Chetty to Mint Street, with intriguing etymological insights.

What do you do with a name like that? And sure enough, it did exist in this city of ours. The past few weeks have seen me poring over the history of mints in Madras and if you recollect, the last instalment of this column had details of Linghi Chetty, who was the Master of the mint at Chintadripet. That facility seems to have vanished without a trace but not so the last mint in the city, which having been established in the early 1800s was closed in the 1830s, reopened a couple of years later and finally closed for good in 1869. Its vast premises became the Government Printing Press and the thoroughfare leading to it became Mint Street.

Except that when the mint was functional it did not give its address as Mint Street. The entrance was on what was called Yellabanasar Street and it took me quite some time to decipher what that could be or mean. I cannot say I have nailed it, but I think I am reasonably correct with my reasoning, which I give below.

When the gold and silver mints at Fort St. George and the one at Chintadripet were all ordered to be consolidated into one facility, the Government of Madras began scouting for a suitable space to set it all up. It zeroed in on an old powder mill, used for making gun powder, which stood at the northern end of the city, close to the old Town Wall. This was all once upon a time an area known as Seven Wells, a name that persists. In the 18th Century, water supply to Fort St. George was from seven (in reality ten) wells here and it continued at the rate of 140,000 gallons per day till the establishment of the Red Hills facility in the 1860s. The vast property that encompassed the Seven Wells eventually also accommodated the powder mill which gave way for the Mint and the Public Works Department workshops. The locality, however, was always referred to as Seven Wells. In fact, the savant Ramalinga Swamigal was often spoken of as Ezhu (Seven) Kinaru (Wells) Ramalinga Swami because he had once lived in that area.

It was a time when Madras was a town where multiple languages were spoken — a veritable Tower of Babel. And that gave me a clue. Ezhu/Elu or Edu was seven in Tamil/Telugu, but what of the rest of that word? Pansar is the Urdu word for the act of drawing water for supply. The place was obviously known variously to people of different languages. It was EzhuKinaru in Tamil and Edu Baavi in Telugu. Somewhere it seems to have acquired mixed nomenclature and become Ezhu/Elu Pansar, which over time became Yellabanasar.

There was just one complication — the present day Seven Wells Street does not connect with Mint Street at all and if so, how was this explanation justified? A street directory of the 1940s helped in solving that quibble. In its time, Seven Wells Street did end on Mint Street close to the mint itself. Over time, a part of it acquired other names and so that connection was lost.

I still have one more riddle and am not in any way close to an answer. The Saidapet/St Thomas Mount area has a Seven Wells Street too. I wonder what the etymology of that thoroughfare is. Could it be that the success of the North Madras seven wells had the East India Company dig exactly the same number when it came to water supply for its garrison at the Mount?

(V. Sriram is a writer and historian.)