The Forgotten Mister Porter

In November 1894 Raja Raja Varma wrote: ‘‘In the evening, a visit was paid to the Town Hall, where all the leading gentlemen of Kumbakonam had assembled. The Hall is named after Mr Porter, who did much for the spread of education in Southern India, and a truthful likeness of whom in oils, painted by Mr Ravi Varma, looks down from the walls’’.

Porter Town Hall looked sad and neglected when I reached it. At the time that the two Varma brothers passed by, it must have looked quite splendid, even though it is not a large building. A portrait of a studious looking Englishman hung high on one wall garlanded with some glitter, probably a long time ago and under unknown circumstances. It took a while to bring the painting down, for which I was very thankful to the Collector of the area.

The canvas was dark, dusty and very dirty, but it was Mr Porter’s portrait by Ravi Varma. This was not a fact that anybody around me knew or was even remotely aware of, not even the caretakers of the Town Hall. But this is what time does to people, events and material things. They have great value at a given time that the next generation will be aware of and maybe the next. But then, all becomes history, pushed into the past and forgotten, while new personalities, achievements and situations hold centre stage.

Porter Town Hall was built in 1885 and the painting installed shortly thereafter. There must have been great excitement in Kumbakonam at this time because of Porter’s great reputation and that of Ravi Varma as well. Porter was Principal of the renowned Government College, which was opened around 1850 while Ravi Varma was already well established.

Raja Raja Varma informs us that ‘‘Kumbakonam has been called, and very justly, the ‘Eaton of South India’. It was formerly an as important centre of Oriental learning as it is today of Western culture’’. Today, Kumbakonam is visited for its many temples while its reputation as a university town is hardly acknowledged, and Porter the educationist has been reduced to a cobwebby painting.

This is just a small event. Other happenings in the past of far greater magnitude with near earth shaking consequences were forgotten before history unearthed them again. Emperor Ashoka, the Gupta period, even Gautama Buddha, for example, had vanished into oblivion before they were rediscovered in the 18th century, the result of the linking together of clue to clue, painfully reconstructed.

We have a tendency to believe that we are the first to be young, first to be in love, first to experience or achieve something and that the earth is newly inherited. Nothing really is new, there is only a rhythm that moves forward and pushes us into the past.