Tara Murali – a crusader for heritage of all kinds

If you were young in the 1990s and were keen to know about Chennai’s heritage, there were many resource persons around. Foremost was, of course, S. Muthiah; he had all the background knowledge. And then you had Tara Murali, who passed away last week.

To her, these structures, precincts, and natural features had to be preserved. While Muthiah too felt the same way, he wrote about them and was philosophical, though saddened, when they were demolished. Tara, on the other hand, fought tooth and nail, and when many of those battles of hers ended in failure, she never allowed those responsible to forget.

Tara Murali

Fire is the element that defined Tara. She burnt with a desire to set things right, across a wide variety of causes, bringing to them all her characteristic thoroughness and desire for forthright action. Foremost among these was championing the cause of heritage buildings of Madras. In this, she was not alone, of course, but she certainly was a leader. Putting her membership of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) to good use, she made that body challenge every demolition, through representations, and if all else failed, through the courts, following due process of law.

The majority of the cases ended in permit for demolition. The list is long – Bentinck’s Buildings, old Madras Club (Express Estates), Government House and P. Orr & Sons annexe are a few that come to mind. But there were the occasional successes – the Director General of Police building on the Marina and Queen Mary’s College were two prominent ones. It helped, of course, that the occupants of the properties were themselves in favour of restoration. And there was the complete conservation and restoration of University Senate House. Well, almost. But at least, the building survived to tell that tale.

It must have gladdened Tara’s heart in her final months, that work on Bharat Insurance Building’s restoration had begun. She once told me that she considered it an icon of the city and was very disturbed when LIC proposed its demolition. That was a great win for INTACH, when the judge not only prevented this but also ordered the listing of heritage structures in the city. That was in 2010.

That the government is still going about this enumeration is a different matter. All of these exercises were frustrating and time-consuming, and in one instance, severely detrimental to INTACH, for it was hauled up for frivolous litigation, or at least, that was the learned judge’s view. But in the long term, by relentlessly fighting all instances of demolition, Tara made sure the case for preservation was strengthened.

Another battle that she fought, as part of the Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group, was the saving of the Adyar Creek. Without it, today’s Tholkappiyar Poonga may have ended as a set of government-owned memorials and high-rises. Tara was not entirely happy with the way the preservation was done, but then hers was not a nature that settled for compromise on anything. Half-measures were what she detested most. For that matter, she was rarely happy with conservation efforts where slapdash solutions were adapted to speed up matters and give a good appearance. She was quick to denounce such camouflage.

Tara would have liked to see the battle on heritage conservation fought to the finish. But as she herself said, such transformations do not happen in a lifetime. What matters is that it is not so easy to get away with demolition today. This was an achievement that Tara could take comfort in. Not that she would have.