Governor of Madras
Grant Duff was captivated by the beach at Madras on an earlier visit to the city. As a result when he became Governor in 1881, he immediately commenced the construction of a promenade along the beach. The beach was extensively modified and layered with soft sand and was named "The Marina". The new promenade was opened to the public in 1884.
On the naming of the beach, Grant Duff explains in a letter:
We have greatly benefitted Madras by turning the rather dismal beach of five years ago into one of the most beautiful promenades in the world. From old Sicilian recollections, I gave in 1884 to our new creation the name of Marina; and I was not a little amused when walking there last winter with the Italian General Saletta, he suddenly said to me 'On se dirai a Palerme'.
Grant Duff was a strong supporter of Dietrich Brandis in his reorganization of the Madras Forest Department and expansion of systematic forest conservancy in India.
Grant Duff's tenure was filled with a number of controversies and allegations of partisan behaviour and injustice. Grant Duff was sharply criticized for the way he handled the Chingleput Ryots' Case and the arrests and trials following the Salem Riots of 1882. The Hindu accused Grant Duff of indulging in vindictive and vengeful behaviour. In one of the articles, he was criticized thus:
Oh! Lucifer! How art thou fallen? Oh! Mr Grant-Duff, how you stand like an extinct volcano in the midst of the ruins of your abortive reputation as an administrator! Erudite you may be, but a statesman you are not.
Grant Duff was also accused of deliberately nurturing a movement against Brahmins.
However, Louis Mallet, the then Under-Secretary of State for India, was all praise for Grant Duff. On receipt of Grant Duff's last minute as Governor, Mallett said
I doubt whether any governor has left behind so able and so complete a record
W. S. Blunt, the British publicist, who visited Madras in November 1884, says of Grant Duff:
"And Mr. Grant Duff?", I asked a friend. "We consider him, he said "a failure. He came out as Governor of Madras with great expectations, and we find him feeble, sickly, unable to do his work himself, and wholly in the hands of the permanent officials. The Duke of Buckingham, of whom we expected less, did much more, and much better. "...I found this opinion of Grant Duff a general one among the natives. Though a clever man, he had spent all his life in the confined atmosphere of the House of Commons, and was quite unable to deal with a state of society so strange to him as that which he found in India
The Madras Mahajana Sabha was established in 1884 with P. Rangaiah Naidu as its President and R. Balaji Rao as its Vice-President. To this day, this is considered to be one of the oldest Indian political organisations in the Madras Presidency, notwithstanding the Madras Native Association which was a failure. Members of the Madras Mahajana Sabha played a pivotal role in corresponding with Indian associations in other provinces and forming the Indian National Congress in 1885. The Indian National Congress held its first session at Bombay in December 1885, attended by 72 delegates including 22 from the Madras Presidency. Grant Duff was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1881 and a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India in March 1887. In July 1886, Gladstone tried to get a peerage for Grant Duff but failed.
On an official visit to Rome, a few years after the conclusion of his tenure, Grant Duff records that the Speaker of the Italian Parliament Biancheri inquired about the size of the province which Grant Duff had governed. On receiving the reply from Grant Duff that the province was 'larger than Italy, including all the Italian islands', Biancheri astonishedly asked "What an empire is that, in which such a country is only a province".
Read more about this topic: M. E. Grant Duff
Famous quotes containing the words governor of and/or governor:
“Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I said to myself, There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts,—what has he been about the last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake?... He could at least have resigned himself into fame.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Ah, Governor [Murphy, of New Jersey], don’t try to deceive me as to the sentiment of the dear people. I have been hearing from the West and the East, and the South seems to be the only section which approves of me at all, and that comes from merely a generous impulse, for even that section would deny me its votes.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)