'Dhobikhana' washed away by floodwaters

Till December 2015, anyone gazing out at the Adyar from the Maraimalai Bridge in

Saidapet

could see encroachments and clothes hung out to dry on the dry river bed. Then there was a flood and the corporation relocated slumdwellers. What remains, amid a heap of rubble, is a porch with 'Anusuya Mandapam Thuni Thuvaipavargaluku Mattum' (for washermen only) inscribed on it.

The city's second largest '

dhobikhana

', spread over four acres, was formed in the late 19th century when migrants from rural areas came to Madras in search of work.A colony of 150 families sprung up and began washing 'dirty linen' of Britishers, Nawabs and later, middle-class locals and hotels. “It became popular as water was cleaner and the river in that area had pebbles,“ says historian K R A Narasiah.

Poets and writers have described the dhobikhana. S Muthiah, chronicler of Ma dras, in his `Madras Rediscovered', mentions English poet

Edwin Arnold

's observation while crossing the bridge with “the air filled with the thunder of a thousand wet clothes slapped upon flat stones“. In his memoir, 'Chennai City: A Kaleidoscope', late Tamil author

Ashokamitran

writes how “hundreds of dhobis used to steam clothes in large clay pots, rinse the clothes in the flowing water and leave them drying in the sun.“

In the 1990s, the area was allotted to washermen who got

Metrowater

supply, says Karinne Hochart, PhD scholar from France's University of Tours now at the School of Planning and Architecture, Anna University. TOI reported in December 2014 that the corporation was planning a makeover of the dhobikhana. The December deluge a year later seems to have drowned those plans.