‘White Elephant’: Jeyamohan’s excellent novel is backed by an equally excellent translation
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On Chennai’s Kamaraja Salai, just off Marina Beach, stands a large circular building now known as Vivekanandar Illam, after Swami Vivekananda, who stayed here for a while. It’s a city landmark, but relatively few people know of the building’s blood-soaked past, its connections to Chennai’s colonial history as well as to caste politics, commercialism – and the sheer ruthlessness and greed of those who would not let anything come in the way of their ambition for power and wealth. Till 1880, this edifice was the Ice House at Madras, built in 1842 by American merchant-businessman Frederic Tudor to store ice shipped from the lakes and ponds of New England.
The Ice House and the famine
Jeyamohan’s Vellai Yaani, translated from the Tamil into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar as White Elephant, has the Ice House as the pivotal setting of the novel. It is here that the protagonist, Captain Aiden Byrne, first sees the 30-tonne block of ice that ends up changing his life and his way of thinking. The edges had thawed and blunted, turning it into a bevelled square. A square elephant. A white elephant. It is 1876, and the ruthless exploitation of Dalit workers allows the Ice House to function. Outside Madras, a famine rages through the Deccan...