Madras Government House-Indian Reformation in British Style

3D Power & Historians regard the year 1757 as the starting point of the British Empire in India, even though large parts of the country remained under the rule of Indian princes. It took nearly another hundred years for the East India Company and the British government to extend British rule to northern and western India. The British ruled over the Indians for nearly two centuries, when finally in 1947, India gained independence and became a sovereign state.

During these years, the British introduced innumerous reforms in India. They developed roads, introduced better means of communication, built great cities and buildings to facilitate their smooth governance over the large Indian sub-continent. Renowned architects of the likes of Lutyens, Edward Frere, Le Corbusier, etc. laid layout plans for some modern Indian cities and designed exquisite buildings during this period. These buildings and monuments still stand high glorifying the excellence of these icons of modern architecture.

When the British government had consolidated its position in India, it decided to redefine its administration. A whole new Government architecture was developed. During the initial phase, the East India Company's main interest in India was to generate internal revenue for promoting its trade but under the British government, India developed as a colony and British dominion.
The government developed a transport network to help its economic, military, and administrative operations. Railway building in India was done for both military and economic reasons. Government buildings were erected and new cities developed. The foundation stone for British architecture was laid down.

In the subsequent pages to follow, a series of information has been provided regarding some exquisite examples of British architecture in India and also the life of some ingenious architects who contributed to it. One of the work has been recognized as The Madras Government House.
The Madras Government House: The vestiges of the British architecture can be traced to the times when the East India Company had a firm hold over a large part of the Indian mainland. The Madras Government House represents the architecture trends of the period. Unlike its French equivalent at Pondicherry, Government House Triplicane, Madras (now Chennai) is typical except for its later Banqueting Hall.

The Madras Government House was adapted for Lord Clive in the 1790s from an earlier one, after the pattern set at Pondicherry by the residence built for Dupleix some fifty years earlier. There superimposed arcaded loggias before clerestory-lit major spaces were articulated with Doric and Ionic Orders in the Academic Classical manner of early 18th-century France.
At Triplicane, however, much lighter colonnaded verandahs, elegant but quite uncanonical in their intercolumniations, were erected around much of the side as well as the front. The whole complex is dominated by the Doric Banqueting Hall, which, even in its original form without the lower arcading -but not least in the application of column to wall - was as remote from its ostensible model, the Parthenon, as the main house is from Academic Classical principle.