By John B Monteiro

Mangaluru, Feb 2: It is an old joke that women hide or reduce their age with the help of beauty-aid products and we, except the census enumators, are not supposed to ask women their age. But that should not happen to heritage institutions like Mangaluru City Corporation (MCC) whose top brass seems to be unaware that it has hit 150 years. The credit for lifting the veil on this goes to Harsha, a very perceptive senior journalist of the city whose inquisitive and enquiring mind churns up very readable stories on the city and the district. According to his story, "M’luru City Corporation is 150 Years Old! But Very Few Aware of the Fact", in The New Indian Express (16-1-16) is a wake-up call to Mangalureans and their city fathers. According to Harsha, senior corporator and a former deputy mayor, Harinath, admitted unawareness of the milestone and the mayor claimed to be aware about it (with apparently no preparatory work to celebrate the landmark to back her claim yet in the news). Incidentally, Wikipedia gives the founding year as 1865. That is our sense of history!

I had tracked the history of the first hundred years of MCC, in its various avatars, a decade ago, for a series I wrote on "Surviving Centurions" (institutions aged 100 years or more) and am happy to share part of it with Daijiworld readers.

"A city should be set up in a place which abounds in various trees, plants and shrubs and is rich in cattle, birds and other animals, endowed with good source of water and supplies of grain, adorned with pleasant forests and vegetation that is bestowed by the movement of boats up to the sea, and not very remote from the hills, and an even grounded picturesque plain". – Sukraneethi Sastra.

Nothing could have been more idealistic in the Mangalore that we inherited from our forefathers. As someone has said, cities are the nerve centres of civilisation and what we make of Mangalore, with the hope of Smart City on the horizon, will ultimately determine what we make of ourselves.

Prior to the introduction of local self-government system in the district of South Kanara, the District Collector was in charge of Mangalore city. Local funds were created in 1855 to find money for the construction of roads and creation of civic amenities. Government orders were passed in 1864 for the supervision of local funds. The management was transferred to the District Collector who administered the funds under the supervision of Board of Revenue in Madras. This was followed by Madras Town Improvement Act 1865 which established the Municipal Council for the first time for Mangalore on May 23, 1866. W M Codelb, then collector of the district, was the first president of the Council. It functioned from the collector’s office till February 22, 1909 when the office was shifted to the Old PWD Building – which was once said to have been the warehouse of East India Company.

The Council started its functions with seven members who were then district officers. Most of them were Europeans. The vice-president was Administrative Officer. He was an employee of the government and worked under the Collector. The first Council members were the collector (president), vice president, the officer commanding, civil surgeon, district engineer, superintendent of police and inspector of schools.

In 1866, the area of Mangalore Municipality was one square mile with a population of 28,000. By 1871, the population increased to 29,712, with 6619 houses of which 4341 were thatched. The first dispensary was started in 1868 at the site of the present Lady Goschen Hospital. The Local Fund Act of 1871 converted "Police rule" into Municipal rule and saw the commencement of amenities to citizens such as education, street-lighting and sanitation. The Council was named Municipal Board. It had 18 members of whom 11 were nominated by the government on the basis of their merit of good behaviour and position in society. After 10 years the Board strength was increased to 23. The town was extended over Mogar, Kasba Bazaar, Attavar, parts of Kadri, Kodialbail, Jeppu and Boloor.

An elective element was introduced under Madras District Municipalities Act, 1884. The Councillors were now called Commissioners and there was Board of Commissioners. Under this Act there were the following key provisions:

1. Revenue divisional officer was ex-officio member
2. One fourth of the Board commissioners and the chairman was nominated by the government.
3. Three fourth of the members were elected.
4. The term of office was three years.
5. All the public streets, including drains, sewers were vested in and were to belong to the Municipality.
6. The Act gave powers to Municipality to levy taxes on houses, and also collect professional tax, income tax and toll tax.

It is interesting and relevant to note that Gandhiji visited Mangalore thrice – in 1920, 1927 and 1934. On his second visit to Mangalore, Gandhiji stayed in the newly-constructed Saraswati Nivas. It was built on a 30-cent plot by Nagar Ramnath Shenoy in what was then called Pentlandpet after a Britisher. When Gandhiji camped in this house for four or five days, he conducted bhajans on the patio and some goats were tethered in the western compound of the house. These goats were milked to provide fresh milk for the Mahatma. Now, there is no Pentlandpet; this area having been renamed Gandhinagar. Saraswati Nivas is located on the 6th Cross of the main road, adjacent to Gandhi Park.

During this visit the Mangalore Municipal Council presented him an address an excerpt from it is given below:

"In discharging our civic duties we shall be guided by the thoughts you have so often expressed about the duties of a Councillor. We shall remember that ours is a sacred trust, not a place of power or profit. We are proud of our city which is so largely endowed by Nature’s beauty. But we are aware of our slums, of our general unsanitary conditions, and the little we have done to redeem our trust. Large schemes of town planning and town improvement are on hand and in their execution we shall remember the needs of the working and poorer classes and endeavour to make the city beautiful, clean and truly worthy of what Nature has bestowed on us."

Against this the following is ironically relevant.

File Photo

No account of MCC would be complete without noting the bust of Gandhiji installed on a handkerchief-size lawn at the traffic junction in front of the Corporation Building on Mahatma Gandhi Road at Lalbaug. It sports no specs! Perhaps a nocturnal admirer of Gandhiji had the fetish of flicking his specks. Fed up of replacing, the authorities have allowed the bust to be without his trademark specs.

But, there is a different version. On my journalistic beat, I stopped my car and asked the traffic cop about the missing specs to be told: "Sir, a lot of wrong things (read corruption) are going on in that building facing Gandhiji’s bust. Either he does not want to see them with his specs on or those inside the building don’t want Gandhiji to see what is going on inside. So, he is stripped of his specs."

MCC and History

While looking for details of Mangalore’s rail link in 1907, someone tipped me off that it is cited in the MCC Centenary Souvenir. Knocking at all likely doors in MCC headquarter at Lalbaug, I drew a blank. Then I landed at ex-mayor P M Castelino’s office. Yes, he had the Centenary Souvenir and he readily lent it to me. What about MCC? Is it so insensitive to its own history and heritage? (A point also made by Harsha) Or, as it was said by the French Emperor, on the eve of the Revolution, "After me the deluge". Or, shall we say, after me blank or chaos?

Veteran journalist and author, John B Monteiro now concentrates on Editorial Consultancy, having recently edited the autobiography of a senior advocate, history and souvenir to mark the centenary of Catholic Association of South Kanara and currently working on the history/souvenir to mark the platinum jubilee of Kanara Chamber of Commerce & Industry.