The first flush of Iyers in Matunga: the neo-Pilgrim Fathers in Bombay –
Back in the 1940s to 60s joint family system was quite the norm: parents, children and grand children all lived under one roof, no matter even if it got too cramped with too many occupants; all cousins, including first and second cousins, and nephews and nieces cared for each other. A bachelor boy usually left his native village on completion of his SSC (or SSLC as they are known in the southern India) and after gaining some typing skills in search of livelihood and once he landed a job, he promptly brought his younger sibling or a cousin and got him a job, more often in the same office where he worked; getting a job was far easier then. Those who had already settled in a city with their family also pitched in: these kind souls also brought their cousins or other relatives who had just completed their education back in the villages, helped them get a job in the city and let them live with them till they grew independent financially and were able to stand on their own feet. Cases were not infrequent when just the fellow-feeling had moved the heart of a man well settled in a city and when he had extended his helping hand hearing the plight of a family in dire financial straits back in the village. In my family's case too it was the kindly relative of our neighbours who lifted us up from our distress. Every village had its mandatory quota of a couple of commercial institutes humming with the clickety-clack sound from a dozen or more well-worn Remington typewriters being pounded by the novices furiously trying to learn the basic typing skills – all aspirants hoping to catch the earliest train from the nearest railway station to the dream cities and making it big there and thus helping their families live a better life.
For all the new "arrivals", Matunga provided the safe sanctuary: for all practical purposes it had the same ambience and flavour as the villages they had come from: you found the same kind of mamas and mamis scurrying hither thither in the neighbourhood; the same kind of temples that generated the unique sweet burning fragrance of camphor, incense sticks and sambhrani (an aromatic compound whose smoking scent is said to drive out the evils from around the area) and rang out peals of bells; the locality had the same heavily Malayalam-accented Tamil for a spoken language to the extent that the seasoned footpath vegetable-selling bhayyajis had a smattering knowledge of the lingo; the vendors even sold the same vegetables like safed bhofla, lal bhofla and suren they were so used to back home; the shops lining the main bazaar stocked the same famous coconut oil-fried nedrakkai varuvals (chips made out of the raw, large-sized bananas, available only in Kerala), and the same varieties of frying items like appalams, papads and vethals (raw and unripened seeds fruits of exotic plants unheard of in the other parts of India and even the lotus' stem sliced into pieces, all seasoned in salt, spices or other condiments and dried in the sun), one or the other of these frying items make good accompaniments to the daily food menu; the hotels run by the locals or fellow-Madrasis served the same food stuff like idlis, dosas and even the piping-hot, freshly-ground filter coffee served in the typical stainless steel glass and davra (that served the same purpose as a saucer) and that gave off the same native aroma; for those who longed for authentic Kerala meals, there was Society which specialized in Kerala delicacies served on banana leaves and the Concerns met the Tanjorean palate of the Tamil Nadu-born Iyers. Matunga indeed was a home away from home for the homesick who most missed their mothers' made khana; a mother is the most wonderful cook if only because every one's palate is fashioned in his/her growing up years by the unique way she cooked. Matunga remained my favourite haunt in my bachelor days; Sundays or other holidays would remain incomplete without a visit to my Mecca . I haven't visited the place in years now. How has the time changed!
Those that didn't have a relative to lean on or live with could always turn to the Mysore Mess which was a boarding and lodging house; it was owned, my grand uncle would tell me, by a distant relative of ours; what the actual relationship was, I forget. The eatery section of the mess faced Chandawarkar lane while its lodge, in same building, on the first floor faced the Bhandarkar Road, the main thoroughfare in Matunga. Why the name Mysore Mess when it was owned by a pucca Keralite Iyer, I haven't a clue. I had had my grub at the mess a couple of times but the quality of food was not something worth writing home about. The lodge had several rooms and each had four cots for the lodgers to sleep on and which was all what they had for all other purposes – it was not very different from the dormitory-type accommodation in large lodges, guest houses and hostels. . The lodge, I remember, charged 5 bucks a day and the Manager would collect the rent every morning while making his daily round. Many couldn't afford Rs.150 a month, with their meager salary of about 200 bucks; the food expenses came to about Rs.125 a month and some money had to be remitted to the family which would be eagerly looking out for the beat postman in the first week of every month for the money order, so the lodgers would move out sooner than later – in contrast the youngsters of the current generation splurge as much as 300 rupees on a single, calorie-laden junk food like a Pizza. So for most arriving there the lodged served as a transit house.
Getting a home on rental or ownership basis has always been a Herculean task in the city; people resorted to all kinds of malpractices and under-hand dealings to lay their hands on one. Construction activity was at a low key and nowhere near the frenetic pace one sees today The railways had their staff quarters beside many railways stations and the original allottees usually sub-let their premises to others for a price; the needy Brahmin families settled in the city also accommodated paying guests, as lodgers and many, as boarders too, to tide over their financial difficulties; the housing board tenements were much sought after and if you were lucky enough in the lottery system prevalent then you could own one of them by paying just Rs.3000 – the officials were as corrupt as ever and you could, by greasing their palms well, get an out-of-turn allotment, too and which was commonplace; usually 4 to 5 bachelors came together and rented out a two-room kitchen flat and equally shared the total compensation paid of 250-300 rupees; but the pugree system was the common practice in vogue for an accommodation for a family.
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Matunga couldn't absorb so many Iyer boys, mostly from Kerala, as the influx continued unabated right since the 1940s, so they soon started fanning out to the adjoining Wadala, King's Circle and Sion – actually these four lie in a contiguous belt, but Matunga remained the heartland for the migrant iyer boys. Before long, they started acquring accommodation, often one or two rooms, on pugree system with the aim of bringing in their parents or getting married; actually the rented rooms were, with the passage of time, often found not roomy enough to accommodate the expanding families The pugree system is unique to the city: you pay a lump sum to the landlord say one or two thousand bucks and then continue to pay a low rent of 20 or 25 rupees and a like amount would be adjusted against the deposit – the pugree – you had paid, and you were allowed to live there till your entire deposit was wiped out. Of course, even after expiry of the pugree you could pay a further deposit and continue to live there. Then the advent of Rent Control Act passed by the Maharashtra Government conferred tenancy rights on all those living in rooms rented on the pugree system, and they could not be evicted by the landlords without offering them alternative accommodation or large lump sum in cash as compensation.
Matunga has three typical Madrasi temples: the Asthika Samaj complex with the temple proper with a Gopuram on the ground floor and a thoughtfully created community welfare centre cum multipurpose hall on the first and second floors that could be rented for any function like poonal (thread ceremony), Shashtiabda poorthy and even small-scale weddings; the South Indian Bhajana samaj, though it is a temple, it is more often used as a place for bhajans and kirtans; and the Shankara Maddam also on a gopuram, directly across the Bhajana Samaj on Telang Road, the Maddam is sparsely crowded and the most ideal if you believed in chanting prayers quietly without being disturbed, in a serene, clean environment. In the evenings the area around Bhajana samaj served as a common meeting place for all the Mumbai vadhyars and cooks and their assistants to chalk out their next day's agenda.
The wedding halls included the Neppoo Hall and the Ram Baug.
The Brahmins may have inborn frailties like aversion to risk-taking and lack of entrepreneurial qualities, but we are among the first to grasp that education is the key to progress and prosperity, so our forefathers usually spent their spare time in the evenings building institutions, for example are the SIES school in Matunga and the South Indian Welfare School in Wadala, and the SIES college in Sion for the benefit of their future generations. We also always are keen lovers of the fine arts, Bharata Natyam, Classical music and theatre; a standing testimony is the imposing Shanmukhananda Sabha in King's Circle to seat 3000 people, until recently it was the largest such auditorium in Mumbai, where well-known theatre and musical groups from Madras were invite to hold their programmes, 3 or 4 such events were held every month. In the 1960's and 1970s practically all Bombay Brahmins were life members of Shamukhananda Sabha and Iyers and Iyengars settled way outside Matunga made monthly treks to the Sabha in the evenings for attending such events unmindful of the difficulties of traversing 10 or 15 miles in the night for the return journey with their family members. I remember Madras's R.S.Manohar theatre troupe with their spectacular stagecraft presenting stories from our epics – Manohar had a fetish for depicting the brighter sides of evil characters e.g. Ravana, Hiranya Kashupu, etc. was the most popular and largely attended. A decade or so ago, the auditorium was completely gutted in a fire, but it rose like the Phoenix from the ashes with fellow-Brahmins spontaneously chipping in with resources in terms of men and material to rebuild it in a record time. For several years the Filmfare awards extravaganza was held at the sabha, and now even the otherwise anti-South Indian political party, Shiv Sena, also hold its annual events here.
Once the Matunga-Wadala-Kings Circle-Sion belt got saturated, the iyers quickly moved over to Chembur. In my view, Chembur was the best middle-class suburb: there was a major avenue from the railway station towards the east leading to the Diamond Garden (it is actually a traffic island cum park) and on either side there were clean lanes, numbered 1 onwards, with each having about 8 or 9 ground+2 storey buildings amidst a lot of greenery of shrubs and trees. By the side of Diamond Garden is the famous Ahobhila Mutt of the vaishnavaite Iyengars – it too has a temple and multi-purpose hall. Any stranger to Chembur could easily locate the home/address he was looking for on his own with very little help. Chembur was very clean, too, and it has a Fine Arts society with its own imposing nattily done up building near the Chembur flyover.
One other reason why Matunga Iyers moved out to other places was most of them lived in small, cramped spaces that couldn't accommodate growing families. For instance, the rooms in buildings around the Nepoo Garden were all ultra compact; of course those near the SIES/ school/Rotary Club were all airy and very spacious, many having 2 or 3 bedrooms.
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On the west side of Chembur railway station sprang up, in the late 1970s, the brand new Chheda Nagar, a cluster of 1+4 storey buildings on saltpan land by the side of Eastern Express Highway. Most of the flats were compact 1-bhks type. The colony was relatively quite away - by the then standard that is, when people preferred to live close to stations, the criss-crossing suburban rail network is still the lifeline of Mumbai and provides the cheap and fast intra-city connectivity any time, anywhere; from the railway station and the mini-township was connected by a kucha access road that didn't initially have any streetlights, either, not just, it got sodden and slush at the very first showers in June! No wonder even at a throw-away 45-rupee-a-sq.ft. there were few takers for these flats then. Chedda Nagar has a Murugan temple housed in a south Indian style, very impressive and imposing gopuram; while the gopurams traditionally serve as a roof for the sanctum sanctorum/garb gruha or as the entrance façade to the temple proper, here the idol, that of the principal deity, Murugan, is installed atop – maybe an allegory to the very many hilltop Murugan shrines, the so-called arupadai veedu, in Tamil Nadu. The temple precincts include a multi-purpose community hall to hold weddings and other functions of the iyer clan living nearby or afar.
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Slowly the Iyers moved on to Mulund, Bangur Nagar in Goregaon, Thane and the far distant suburb Dombivli which now has the largest Brahmin population because accommodation there is relatively cheap, so more affordable for our middle-class and lower middle-class fellow-members.
The only exclusive Iyer enclave – akin to an agraharam – in the heart of Mumbai…
Shriram Nagar is an exclusive Iyer enclave by the arterial S.V. Road – it is a verdant island with peace and tranquility rarely seen anywhere else in the city as it is built on a hillock secluded from the hustle and bustle of surrounding areas. The entire Brahmin neighborhood is set in lush greenery with a variety of trees and shrubs. It is a replica of a typical Iyer agraharam transplanted from the heart of Tamil Nadu/Kerala: it has a community hall where all Iyer religious festivals are celebrated with the same fervor as in our native land and an exclusive full-fledged school that gradually grew from primary level to the secondary level for the benefit of the colony's kids and where the medium of instruction used to be Tamil until a decade ago. The society isn't visible from outside and a barely 8-foot motorable approach pathway leads you there from the main S.V. Road. In fact, most Andheri residents, even those in close proximity to the Shriram colony, wouldn't have ever sighted it. To an outsider, the only sign of the colony's existence is an almost illegible nameboard hung high across rusted, rickety poles at the far gate facing the road and at which not a soul passing-by even takes a cursory glance, and the weather-beaten, creaking wrought iron gate eerily looks straight from the spooky film, Woh Kaun Thi?.
Now some history of the society. Migration of bachelor Iyer boys from Kerala to Bombay (and other metro cities) began as a trickle in the early 1930s with the rapid decline of temples as a source of their sustenance, and their mass exodus began from the late 1940s: the boys armed with no more than an SSC qualification and some degree of proficiency in typewriting and shorthand descended in Bombay in droves in search of livelihood. They crammed themselves into tiny South Indian lodges or shacked up with kind, sympathetic friends and relatives already settled in the Matunga-Wadala-Sion belt, who were till not long before birds of the same feather and had sailed in the same boat. The dreamy boys were all of very modest means, most of them working as typists or stenos, the tribe one found practically in every office back then. From amongst those large numbers of permanent home-less migrants, a group of like-minded – and far-sighted, in retrospect - bachelor boys banded together, scraped about 20000 rupees – it was a princely sum for them in those days as each of these guys barely earned 50-60 bucks a month and out of which they had to money-order at least half to their near and dear ones back home, spend as little as possible to keep their bodies and souls together in the city – yeah, food for the whole month costed only Rs.10 -, and then scrounge enough cash to buy their dream homes. With the money thus pooled, the resolute boys boldly bought the parcel of the Andheri hillock land that was such an inaccessible, wooded and forbidden place frighteningly unfit for human habitation. Slowly they cleared the veritable jungle, bulldozed and flattened out the rocky terrain to the desired level and started raising buildings, the first to come up were the ground+1 structures with four compact 1-RK homes in each to be soon followed by the ground+2 storey ones each of more spacious six 1-BHK flats – the cost of the flats was an apparently amazingly low Rs.10 a sq.ft and a 1-RK home with 300 sq.ft. carpet area cost no more than Rs.3000! As word of mouth publicity about the spanking new mini-TN/Kerala agraharam having sprouted in the far suburb of Andheri spread quickly among the boys temporarily sheltered in Matunga, more and more of them queued up to join as members of the Shriram Nagar society, and with larger and larger sum of money pouring in, the founding fathers of the society decided to use the unutilized land to construct more buildings to accommodate the new members. The society has now 20-odd ground+2 storey structures with 6 flats in a combination of 1BHK and 2BHK in each for a total of about 130 homes. The same property is now worth a couple of hundreds of crores, and many builders are eyeing to redevelop it – the proposal did get finalized with a builder but didn't get off the ground due to the recession in the industry; some die-hards, heavily out-numbered, in the society also oppose the move on the ground that allowing rank outsiders indiscriminately into their exclusive citadel would once and for all ruin the uniqueness and quietitude of an all-iyer enclave distinctly reminiscent of a characteristic Kerala village; it would be unwise to undo what their forefathers have done with such foresight. It is not done. For sure, the redevelopers, always ill-famed for their Shylockian blood-sucking fleecing ways, are not suddenly stricken with a never-before heard sense of philanthropy to hand out brand-new flats gratis and dole out lakhs or crores in cash as corpus funds to the society/individual members; they are far more interested in enriching their coffers, you see, the land that is scares and costs a bomb in the city they get for free in a property being redeveloped, the money they would rake in through the free sale of flats to outsiders from the extra FSI would be at the rate of Rs.10000 a sq.ft. whereas the cost of best construction would only be in the vicinity of Rs.1500-2000. Somehow I go with the minority sentiment although in my heart of hearts I am very cosmopolitan in my outlook and very much love living in such multi-ethnic environs in Mulund.
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The self-righteous mediawallas or pseudo-intelligentsia may disapprove it or more often dub it ghetto-mentality or ghettoism, but fact is, since time immemorial people from every community or caste prefer to live in their own neighbourhood, mini-townships or exclusive enclaves for reasons of commonality of tradition, culture, language and values. Besides of course, for safety and security for themselves, their kith and kin and property in the face of unforeseen adversity that could strike without forewarning and with lethal consequences. As the maxim goes, safety is in numbers, and birds of a feather, indeed, flock together.
