Venugopal, amateur historian and a bank official from India, pays his respects at the grave of John Sullivan, who founded the hill station Ooty, in the Berkshire graveyard on Tuesday. Picture by Amit Roy

Upton-cum-Chalvey, July 15: A journey ended yesterday for Dharmalingam Venugopal when the amateur historian from Coimbatore placed a wreath of yellow roses and white chrysanthemums on the grave of John Sullivan in an English church in Berkshire, knelt down and offered prayers to the man credited with “discovering” Ooty, the hill station in Tamil Nadu.

Venugopal was followed by his wife, Sita, who has been “secretary and PA and everything else” to her husband who has been trying to locate Sullivan’s grave for 24 years.

On a day when summer sunshine alternated with brief showers, the small ceremony took place at the 900-year-old St Laurence’s Church in Upton-cum-Chalvey, Slough, a short drive from Eton College.

The card on the wreath with Venugopal’s scribbled tribute summed up all he wanted to say: “To the Beloved Founder of The Nilgiris From the grateful people of the Nilgiris.”

Opinion could differ on the popularity of Sullivan. According to a Wikipedia entry, Sullivan, the then collector of the neighbouring Coimbatore province, bought up from local tribes many square kilometres of Ooty in a day for the price of a few meals. But Venugopal feels Sullivan stuck up for his Indian subjects against his fellow British rulers.

While professional historians settle that matter, what makes the effort of Venugopal, a bank official, striking is the detective work that took him to the English church, although it threw up a conjugal detail the Indian had not factored in.

With the Venugopals yesterday were senior members of the church who had put the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place by looking up their old records and confirming that the Sullivan who was being sought was buried, “undiscovered”, in the grounds of St Laurence’s in “grave 242”.

John Sullivan’s portrait

An entire team at St Laurence’s, consisting of Allan James, the verger and parish warden, his wife, Julie, Ken Bryant, the local historian, and other parishioners clinched information provided to Venugopal by the Buckinghamshire Family History Society, which can trace genealogical trees.

In his email, Venugopal appealed for help: “Sullivan matters a lot for the people of the Nilgiri Hills in south India. The hill station that he developed and nourished nearly 200 years ago remains a shining legacy of the British. We will be very grateful if you can confirm that the grave is indeed there.”

Venugopal probably would not have been successful in the sleuth work had it not been for the digitisation of the records at the India Office and the British Library which made it easier to search for information about one John Sullivan who had joined the East India Company as a boy of 15 and risen to become collector of Coimbatore.

After checking, Julie James emailed back: “I gave the information to our archivist at church and he confirmed that the grave you are looking for is at St Laurence’s, Upton. My husband has since cleaned the stone and taken photos.”

Back in India, Venugopal works for a bank but his real obsession since 1985 has been to track down what happened to Sullivan after he returned to England in 1841 after a career in the Madras Civil Service when he laid the foundations of the hill station in the Nilgiri Hills.

According to the visitors, Sullivan treated the local tribes — the Todas, the Badagas (Venugopal himself is descended from them) and the Kotas — with commendable respect. He introduced them to European crops flowers, including especially the potato, and conceived the notion of elevated climate being good for health.

Sullivan built Stonehouse, his home in Ootacamund (Ooty) which now serves as a government art college, and a lake, and, above all, rubbed many imperialists the wrong way by insisting Indians ought to educated, given responsibility and dealt with as equals.

At the graveside ceremony, Venugopal placed a twig from an oak that Sullivan had planted plus water from the lake he began.

Venugopal’s wish to ensure that Sullivan’s legacy was properly recognised and honoured increased in 1985 at Ooty’s St Stephen’s Church where he stumbled upon the grave of Sullivan’s wife, Henrietta, who married at 17 and died at 35 after giving birth to 10 children.

Within hours of arriving at Heathrow airport, Venugopal and his wife were kneeling by Sullivan’s grave. The grave carries the inscription, faded by a century and a half of weathering, that Sullivan, “late of the Madras Civil Service”, was born on June 15, 1788, and died on January 16, 1855.

St Laurence’s Church not only has Sullivan’s grave but also a commemorative stained glass window which overlooks his final resting place.

What has slightly spoilt Venugopal’s uncritical hero worship of Sullivan “in the Indian context” is that on returning to England, the former collector married again. Sullivan’s widow, Frances, who was born on April 8, 1799, and died on March 22, 1876, lies buried in the same plot as her husband – as is customary in England.

The stained glass window, probably paid for by his second wife’s family, mentions Frances but rubbed out Henrietta’s name from history.

This has come as a shock to Venugopal. “I was going to suppress this when I get back to India,” he told The Telegraph, only half in jest.