A documentary, titled Boys from Vepery by Fokiya Akhtar, explores the migration of members of the Irish community to India during the Great Famine of Ireland during 1840-50.

Ian Michael, professor of marketing at Zayed University, Dubai, has vivid memories of listening to stories told by his great-grandmother, Agnes Footman, when he was 12 years old. Sipping grog in an old-style British home at Hyderabad’s Sarojini Devi Road, Agnes would tell of her great grandfather’s family of fighters and revolutionaries who migrated to India during the Great Famine of the 1840s and ’50s. She would go on for hours, talking about the valour and lineage of these Irishmen. As a child, the thing that stood out most for Ian was his family’s accent — an unusual mix of Irish and Indian.

About 40 years later, when he mentioned his Irish connection to Fokiya Akhtar, a fellow professor at the university, she said the story had the potential for a documentary. In the next few months, Michael and Akhtar had multiple sittings and locked the script for the documentary, Boys from Vepery, which they plan to release in mid-2018.

“The protagonist of the documentary is John Footman. He was my great-grandmother’s grandad. Footman was a famine migrant who travelled by ship from Ireland to Vepery, Madras, in 1847 as enlisted Irish fusiliers with the British East India Company. My mum’s mother also came from Irish stock. Her grandfather, William Curran, sailed as a 10-year-old boy from Ireland with his father Patrick and his three sisters,” Michael told HT, via email.

The documentary traces John Footman’s family to Clonakilty, a town in County Cork, Ireland.

Most of the Footmans served in the Army and Railways. After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the British East India Company was disbanded and John Footman joined the British Army. He married a woman called Matilda, who was most likely Mangalorean. Their eldest son, Patrick, joined the British Railways in Madras. Patrick’s daughter Agnes (Michael’s great-grandmother) left Madras with three of her brothers to settle in Secunderabad. She married Lewis Francis, a senior railway line inspector with the then British railways.

“My grandmother Joyce Curran was the Station Master of Nampally (a Hyderabad suburb) station in the 1960sand ’70s. Her brothers, the Currans, were divers at the Mazagaon docks in Bombay. They migrated to the UK a few years after India got independence,” says Michael.

In India, the Footmans kept to themselves, mostly interacting with members of the Irish-Indian and Anglo-Indian communities. The only Indians they interacted with were the people they worked with. Nor did they imbibe the Indian culture. The women of the family never wore Indian clothes.

All their weddings were held at two Parsi community centres – the Zoroastrian Club and Percy’s hotel in Secunderabad. And their dances, especially at Christmas and New Year’s Eve, would involve lots of dancing and drinking, just like they would have back home in Ireland.

Picnics centred on fishing and shooting. Michael remembers going with his uncles and grand uncles, fishing and shooting in the forests of Andhra Pradesh, including Nizamabad.

For research, Michael made multiple visits to Ireland to obtain baptism and death certificates; went through the records of the British Indian Army and the Chelsea Hospital. He began investigating the Curran side of the family, but ended up getting more details about the Footmans. “I met relatives. We were several generations apart during filming and this feeling was nostalgic, filled with unique emotions,” Michael says.

Michael uncovered during his research a fascinating connection with General Michael Collins, a politician and soldier who spearheaded the struggle for Irish independence in the early 20th century and became the leader of the provisional government of the Irish Free State. “I discovered that John Footman’s mother was one Joan Collins, who came from the same village as General Collins,” says Michael.

He also stumbled upon the information that the ancestors of the late US President John F Kennedy, Margaret Field and James Hickey, came from Clonakilty and surrounding villages too. “So while John Footman chose to use the Indian Ocean route and came to India in 1847, his probable mates, the Fields and Hickeys, chose the Atlantic-to -Newfoundland route and went to Boston,” Michael says.

source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> Art & Culture / by Danish Raza, Hindustan Times / May 21st, 2017

The East India Company was a huge importer of elephants and ships would use elaborate pulley systems to transport these animals.

Chennai :

It seemed appropriate that there were Ganesha figurines and statues on shelves and tables at Airlift House in T Nagar, as the talk scheduled for the rainy evening was ‘The Giants of George Town’ by historian and author Venkatesh Ramakrishnan.

He explained that in Madras’ 500-year history that included the Portuguese settlement in Santhome, there was a steady flow of migrants and the elephants were no different. The city was a hub for the 5,000-kg animal with a constant inflow of herd from Coorg and Kongunaadu for the first 300 years.

The East India Company was a huge importer of elephants and ships would use elaborate pulley systems to transport these animals. “As Madras did not have a port for the first 150 years, boats would take the cargo and passengers to the ship from the shore. The elephants would be pushed off the boat and made to swim to the coast,” said Ramakrishnan.

Once a port was established, Madras began exporting elephants to various places, primarily the Andaman Islands. Fort St George has many references to the animals, with a gate in the L-shaped wall built to separate Black Town on Walltax Road called the Elephant Gate. The street opposite is called Elephants Gate Road. Following the British’s love for hunting, Madras was the first city to ban the hunting of elephants in the 18th Century.

The East India Company records show that elephants needed 600 pounds of grass daily. With the elephant, caretaker and grass-cutter costing `48 in total, double of what they cost in Bengal at the time. Ramakrishnan said an elephant in captivity was a metaphor for the control over India for the British, which explained the elephant motifs in records related to India from the EIC.

“Thirumullaivoyal has the first record of an elephant in Madras. A king was travelling on his elephant when it scratched its leg and a lingam was found where the blood flowed,” said Ramakrishnan, adding that the Madras Veterinary College is one of the few veterinary colleges in the world that offers a degree in elephant management.

During World War II, train carriages were in great need for the British Empire, who took all unnecessary bogeys and engines for their warranty efforts. This led to elephants leading the entire shunting business in Madras. “You were also permitted to transport your elephant, for a princely sum of `400. Ticket prices then were between `1 and 10, which made this all the more exorbitant,” said Ramakrishnan, adding that this was mostly used by the rulers of princely states.

Elephants have also featured in many Kollywood films. For the 1948 film Chandralekha, produced and directed by SS Vasan at Gemini Studios, two circuses stayed at their studio in Kodambakkam. “It was a common sight then to see elephants being taken for a walk in Kodambakkam. People would come to the studio to see the elephants,” said Ramakrishnan.

Notable facts
The city was a hub for the 5,000-kg animal with a constant inflow of herd from Coorg and Kongunadu for the first 300 years. The East India Company was a huge importer of elephants and ships would use elaborate pulley systems to transport them.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Rochana Mohan / Express News Service / October 08th, 2018