The impact of the Swiss, the Finns and the Swedes in Chennai’s history | Madras Day 2025

We come to a couple of European countries that had some small but significant interactions with Madras. The Swedes were present in a small way from early colonial times. Their involvement was essentially ecclesiastical and Rev. Johann Kiernander is a name from the 18^th Century. His church career spanned Madras, Cuddalore, and Calcutta. Thereafter, the Swedes, as part of missionary activity, were present in various places in Madras Presidency, where they also established educational institutions.

Interestingly, they were into trade as well, and Madras had consular agents for Sweden, chiefly heads of British companies here, from the 1880s at least. It was, however, post-Independence that the Swedes gave us a landmark to remember them by — the Halda Junction. This may mean nothing to the younger generation, a huge Ashok Leyland office block having come up on the space, but between the 1950s and 1970s, this was where a typewriter factory flourished. Halda typewriters were produced here by the Rayala family, in collaboration with the Atvidabergs Group, which later became Facit AB.

In its heyday, Halda was known to be the typrewriter brand with the maximum number of Indian language options, though in terms of volume it always ranked third, after Remington & Rand and Godrej & Boyce. Later, the Facit Group would set up Facit Asia off Madras, for calculating machines. The sweep of technology rendered all that redundant but at the entrance to the Madras Club, in the roster of past Presidents is the name of Gosta Rundberg, who once headed Facit here.

Burgeoning industry

Halda was the reason behind many light engineering companies setting up base in Guindy. And it helped another Swedish venture, in the social uplift. Way back in the 1960s, the Swedish Red Cross, together with an Indian pioneer — Antony Sami — decided to rehabilitate persons cured of leprosy by setting up a workshop where they could do light engineering work for various technical majors in Madras. It was not charity, but a novel attempt at giving dignity to them. The WORTH Trust came up this way in Katpadi, and it was Halda, along with the Murugappa’s that gave it its first orders. WORTH today continues to flourish, having moved since to those with orthopaedic, aural, visual, and intellectual challenges.

WIMCO Nagar is the name of a station both on the suburban and the Metro Rail lines, and it commemorates the Western India Match Company, promoted by the Swedish Match Company in the 1920s. The company made safety matches in multiple factories across India, one of them being at Tiruvottiyur. It laid the foundation for that northern end of Chennai to become an industrial hub. Cheetah Fight was the most popular brand of matches that the company made. In the early 2000s, WIMCO’s Chennai unit was acquired by ITC, which almost two decades later, closed the plant. But the name WIMCO remains and probably will do so forever.

The Schweizerische Wagons- und Aufzügefabrik AG aka the Swiss Railcar and Lift Factory Corporation entered into a collaboration with the Indian Railways to establish the Integral Coach Factory.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives

We now come to the Swiss. A Swiss-related landmark is the Integral Coach Factory (ICF). Contrary to popular belief, ICF does not take its name from the fact that it is an integrated coach building facility. Integral coaches were a variety of bogie designed by the Schweizerische Wagons- und Aufzügefabrik AG aka the Swiss Railcar and Lift Factory Corporation. And this company entered into collaboration with the Indian Railways to make coaches in India. The plant was commissioned in 1955 at Perambur, and integral coaches were what the railways used until 2018 or so.

The Finns, with Nokia, were also a major presence in the city till recently.