MADRAS MISCELLANY- A strait by another name

S. MUTHIAH
In all this brouhaha over what’s now being called Ramar Sethu, with even a bandh being declared today as part of all the sound and the fury, some long-used names in Geography textbooks have been forgotten. The chain of rocks linking Rameswaram Island in India and Mannar Island in Sri Lanka has for centuries been known as Adam’s Bridge without anyone getting worked up about it. Even less remembered in all the excitement is that for a couple of centuries all maps of India have called the strait between the two islands Palk Strait and the bay, northeast of it, separating the two countries, Palk Bay. Who Palk was even fewer will remember, so I’ll try and refresh some memories today before, as part of the current impassioned preoccupation with Indian antiquity, it becomes a name to be eliminated from the maps of India.

Robert Palk was the first man of the cloth to become not only a civil servant but also a Governor in India in Medieval and Modern History. He was appointed Governor of Madras in 1763 and, as befitting an ordained clergyman, his period of office was marked by no extraordinary alarums and passed off peacefully. But the first of his significant contributions to history was his deputing, in 1765, Lt. William Stevens of the Engineers to survey Adam’s Bridge. That survey report is something I’d like to get my hands on in the context of today’s happenings. I wonder whether the Tamil Nadu Archives has a copy. Be that as it may, Stevens’ extensive survey was enthusiastically encouraged by Palk – and his enthusiasm for this little bit of exploration got both Strait and Bay named Palk.

A naval chaplain with Admiral Boscawen’s fleet, Palk was in 1749 transferred to the Company’s service when the quarrelsome, abusive and aggressive Rev. Francis Fordyce was dismissed from service after coming to blows with Robert Clive in Cuddalore. Palk served nine years as chaplain in Fort St. David, Cuddalore, and St. Mary’s in Fort St. George. During this period, he was on numerous occasions sent to conduct political negotiations with the French and the Rajah of Tanjore. For successfully negotiating with the latter, his inseparable friend Major Stringer Lawrence, founder of the Madras Regiment and Father of the Indian Army of today, recommended that he be presented a diamond ring of value 1000 pagodas.

This political role he had played in the Carnatic had the Company urging him to join its civil service – and it was as Third in Madras that he returned in 1761 after a couple of years in England. The Governorship followed, during which his second significant contribution to the history of the times was to negotiate a treaty with the Moghuls and obtain for the Company the Northern Circars – what’s northern Andhra Pradesh and southern Orissa today.

Retiring to England in 1767, the Rev. Sir Robert Palk (I wonder how many priests have been knighted) bought himself Haldon House in his native Devonshire, in which he lived with his fellow-bachelor and friend Stringer Lawrence, a major-general by then. When Lawrence died, Palk raised a tower on the summit of Haldon Hill in memory of his friend. Palk himself served in Parliament for 14 years.
(The Hindu, Metro Plus Chennai, 01:09:2007)
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