Mosques, Gopurams, varied waters and stormy seas: built and natural environments of early Nineteenth Century Madras

Almost a hundred years after Elizabeth Gwillim and her younger sister Mary Symonds arrived at Fort St George or Madras, Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Song of the Cities,” a poem about his grand tour of the Empire and in one of the fifteen quatrains he describes the changing fortunes of Madras. In the first decade of the 19th century, when Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds were in at Madras, the city was emerging as a place of consequence. This paper records the sister’s remarkable documentation of the landscape and architecture of what then was then an emerging colonial settlement.