A shot at history: Twelve decades on South Parade
MTR celebrated 100 years with a book launch, highlighting iconic Bangalore brands like GK Vale, Mysore Sandal Soap, and GG Welling, a historic photo studio.
Last week, the iconic Bangalore eatery, MTR (Mavalli Tiffin Rooms), celebrated 100 years in business with the launch of a commemorative coffee table book, The MTR Story. Over the sumptuous tiffin after, conversation veered towards other legendary, still-extant, early 20th century Bangalore brands.
Like GK Vale, today the largest photo lab in south India, which began life on Brigade Road in May 1910 as the Madras Photo Stores, eventually taking on the name of its founder, Gangadhar Kumara Vale (Kumaravel). Like Mysore Sandal Soap, launched in 1918 as a byproduct of Mysore’s Government Sandalwood Oil Factory, with young IISc researcher Sosale Garalapuri Shastry, aka “Soap Shastry”, coming up with the tech for creating a soap from sandalwood oil. Like Vijayalakshmi Silks, born in 1920, and raised, like all good Bengaluru silk saree businesses, in the lanes of Chikpet, by savvy businessmen Devatha Adappa Venkata Ratnam Setty and his nephew CS Venkataram. Like PN Rao & Sons, a 1923 South Parade (MG Road) haberdashery that built its reputation on the bespoke gowns created by master tailor Pishe Narayan Rao for the ladies of the Cantonment; today, it is known for its off-the-rack menswear and fine tailoring of men’s suits.
Not quite as well known as these brands, perhaps, but equally iconic, is another photo studio and specialist camera repair shop, also on MG Road, that has been ticking away quietly since 1903 – GG Welling. Its founder was not British, as its name may imply, but an Indian whose family hailed from the village of Veling, home of the famous Shantadurga Temple in Goa.
Photography came to India soon after it was invented – cameras first went on sale in India in 1840, mere months after they did in Europe. As early as 1856, notwithstanding the clumsiness of the picture-taking, the wet-plate developing process, and the weight of the photographic equipment, photographic societies had come up in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It was also around this time that a young outlier called Srinivas Mahadeo Welling from Belgaum developed a keen interest in photography. Loading his equipment onto a bullock cart, Srinivas travelled far and wide, capturing images for posterity.
In 1869, his son, Govind Srinivas, who had caught the bug from his dad, opened the “Welling Camera Works” at 96, Church Street, in Belgaum Camp (Cantonment), an establishment which, apart from taking photographs, also manufactured cameras until WW II. 156 years later, this beloved city landmark is still in operation, with thousands of Belgaum homes proudly displaying a “Welling” wedding or family portrait in their living rooms.
In 1903, renaming his establishment S Mahadeo & Son, Govind set up shop on Bangalore’s South Parade. It was the era of postcards – according to records, a staggering six billion of them passed through the British postal system in the first decade of the 20th century. Thousands were sent home to Blighty from Bangalore, some featuring pictures of the city published by S Mahadeo & Son.
Govind’s son, Gajanan Govind, came into his own in the 1920s, at a time when creative photography, which went beyond documentation and portraiture to artistic expression, was all the rage. He embraced the new trend with a passion, and brought S Mahadeo & Son into the modern age, rebranding it, with his own initials, into GG Welling. Today, his grandson carries on the business.
Gajanan Welling doubtless created hundreds of extraordinary pictures in his life, but his legacy rests on a series of portraits he made on a three-day visit to Tiruvannamalai in 1946. Beloved and familiar to millions, the “Welling busts,” black and white photographs of the Tamil sage Ramana Maharishi, who passed away in 1950, continue, to this day, to gaze compassionately out at his devotees across the world.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)