Blood-tainted ice cubes and a famine in Madras

In the sweltering heat of colonial Madras, British rulers and the city’s elite raised glasses of Scotch whisky, chilled by ice cubes floating in their drinks.

The huge blocks of ice were naturally formed in the lakes of New England in the U.S. and imported to India. In Madras (now Chennai), the ice bars were brought to the Ice House in Triplicane, where they were stored and cut into smaller pieces for evening drinks.

The Ice House, even today, remains a popular reminder of a place where the British sold ice. Behind that luxury, however, lay a darker history of labour, exploitation, and suffering.

A tale of exploitation

The story of the ice was also the story of the workers who handled it. Scheduled Caste (SC) labourers were employed to cut, move, and handle the massive blocks under punishing conditions. Tamil writer Jeyamohan brings this little-known world alive in his novel Vellai Yaanai, set against the backdrop of the Great Madras Famine of 1876-78, which wiped half the SC population. The book is translated in English as White Elephant by Priyamvada Ramkumar.

The novel is part-fact and part-fiction. Jeyamohan said the idea came to him during a conversation with the late Anbu Ponnoviyam, a scholar belonging to an SC community, who told him about “a protest that took place during the Great Madras Famine at the Ice House – a protest by and for the Dalit workers.”

Drawing on oral accounts and historical material, he sought to reconstruct the experiences of workers and an episode of labour unrest that, he argues, has received little attention in conventional histories of Madras.

“The White Elephant” is a metaphor for the giant blocks of ice imported from America. Jeyamohan has described the novel as “a war against India’s historical amnesia and amnesias that sculpt our everyday lives.”

Oppression and resistance

Present-day Chennai knows Vivekananda House and remembers it by its earlier name, Ice House; yet the history associated with it is largely outside the city’s popular memory.

Built in 1842 by Frederic Tudor, the Ice House was used to store naturally formed ice cut from lakes in New England and shipped across the seas to India.

The ice blocks, packed with insulating material such as sawdust, wood shavings, or rice chaff, were a remarkable example of a colonial-era trade in a commodity that was otherwise unavailable in the tropics.