When American ice merchant Frederic Tudor built a house in old Madras overlooking the Marina beach in 1842 to store ice slabs, he inadvertently became part of the history of the Indian Renaissance and spiritual awakening spearheaded by Swami Vivekananda.
The “Ice House” built by Tudor to facilitate his trade in India is now a Ramakrishna Math property leased to it by the Tamil Nadu government. The Math has set up a cultural centre and museum dedicated to Vivekananda’s life and teachings, with the room where he stayed in 1897 preserved as a meditation hall.
The Ice House in what was then Madras was the third that Tudor had built after constructing similar structures in Calcutta and Bombay in the 1840s, earning him the sobriquet “Ice King”. He was the first merchant to bring ice to Calcutta from Boston in 1833 in a ship called Clipper Tuscany after a four-month voyage.
The Ice House was a plain, well-like single structure without any floors, where ice slabs could be moved up and down through a pulley fixed on two wooden bar-like scaffolding. It was used to store the imported ice bars with charcoal of light wood and dry wood pieces used as insulation.
A model of the original Ice House is now a unique exhibit at the Vivekananda House — a name change that came about much later.
Historical exhibits at the Vivekananda House show that Tudor’s ice business in Madras continued from 1842 to around 1880 till the invention of the steam-powered ice-making machine led to its collapse.
However, the Ice House endured. Biligiri Iyengar, a leading advocate of Madras and a disciple of Vivekananda, purchased the house in the 1880s and “refashioned the building to suit residential requirements, the most impressive alteration being the majestic semi-circular frontage that greets us from the beach”, historical records note.
He renamed the building “Kernan Castle” in memory of his friend, Justice Kernan of Madras High Court.
“During those years, Vivekananda visited Madras twice,” Swami Isha Premananda, current-in-charge of the Vivekananda Heritage Centre, told The Telegraph.
Vivekananda first visited Madras as a wandering monk in early 1893 and was hosted by Manmathanath Bhattacharya, a Bengali government official posted in the southern city, before setting sail for America.
On his return from America, where he made waves at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda stayed at the Ice House from February 6-15, 1897, as a guest of Iyengar, before leaving for Calcutta.
On the request of his Madras disciples, Vivekananda soon sent Swami Ramakrishnananda — one of the 16 original disciples of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — to establish a permanent centre of the Ramakrishna Order in south India.
“That was how the Ice House became the first centre of the Ramakrishna Math in south India,” Swami Premananda said.
From 1897, the Ramakrishna Math functioned from the Ice House. Sister R.S. Subbulakshmi, a devotee of Vivekananda, also began her pioneering work on women’s education in Madras from that building in the late 1890s.
“She nurtured a string of institutions such as Lady Willington School and College and Sarada Vidyalaya for women’s uplift, which led to the Ice House becoming an integral part of the Math,” Swami Premananda said.
He said Iyengar’s property came up for auction in 1906 and the Ramakrishna Math had to shift to Mylapore. In the following years, the Ice House changed several hands and eventually came under the Tamil Nadu government’s possession.
In 1963, the birth centenary year of Swami Vivekananda, the Ice House was renamed Vivekananda House. In 1997, when the centenary year of Vivekananda’s return from America was celebrated, the Tamil Nadu government gave the property on lease to the Ramakrishna Math to set up a permanent exhibition centre on the life and teachings of Vivekananda alongside Indian cultural heritage.
Former chief minister M. Karunanidhi formally handed over the property to the Math on December 20, 1999. Initially, the lease was for three years, followed by 10 years. “In 2015, the state government extended the lease for 99 years,” said Swami Premananda. An additional building called Vivekananda Cultural Centre was inaugurated by then chief minister J. Jayalalithaa in July 2014.
Rare exhibits
Since 1999, the Math has been undertaking extensive renovations to turn Vivekananda House into a full-fledged Vivekananda Heritage Centre.
The centre showcases colourful paintings, vintage photos taken during his stay in Madras, eye-catching murals and dioramas on the “transformation of a young Naren Dutt to Swami Vivekananda”, capturing the turning points in the monk’s life. Visitors also get to watch three multimedia virtual reality shows on Vivekananda’s life, including a short 3D film on his historic Chicago Address.
An exhibit of rare historical value is a photocopy of the first two pages of A Short History of India and the Frontier States of Afghanistan, Nepal and Burma by J. Talboys Wheeler (Macmillan & Co, London, 1884), late assistant secretary to the Government of India’s foreign department and late secretary to the Government of British-Burma, from Vivekananda’s personal book collection. It preserves in his immaculate writing style his signature and a one-liner disclosing the fact that it was “purchased from a hawker”.
Wheeler, in his preface, says he began writing on India in Madras in the early 1860s. “The essays of Lord Macaulay on Robert Clive and Warren Hastings are perhaps known to every English household, but they refer to mere episodes in the history and are wanting in that familiarity with native character and forms of thought, which is essential to a right appreciation of the great collision between Europe and Asia that has been going on in India for the last two Centuries,” Wheeler wrote.