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                    In 1760, when Pachaiyappa first came to Madras, hardly a year had passed since, for the second time, the French had besieged Fort St. George, but this time unsuccessfully. Count de Lally, maddened by the failure, had retreated, wreaking destruction along his path. The victorious British were beginning to rebuild the fort into something very much like what it is today. But the debris of the ineffective siege would be still strewn about, and young Pachaiyappa would have seen what war meant to people.

                    He would, of course, have been for too young to understand the political and economic conditions of the time. These were pretty chaotic. The Nawab of the Carnatic, Mohammad Ali, was nominally ruler of a vast territory extending from Nellore to Tirunelveli. The real rulers were the British. In the Carnatic wars, they had defeated the French. The French siege of Fort St. George was an incident in the second war.

                    The inhabitants of the “Black Town” had felt war’s alarms. Very near where Pachaiyappa was now living, a skirmish had occurred on December 14, 1758, hardly two years before he had come to live in Madras. Colonel Draper had a brush with a French contingent. There was some street fighting in this war, and the “Black Town’s” appearance could not have been much improved thereby.

                    The young boy must have heard some of the older residents talk about the stirring events of the first Carnatic war when, in 1746, on the banks of the Adyar river, a tiny French contingent, marching from Pondicherry, had made short work of a huge array of the Nawab’s, about de la Bourdonnais’ siege of the fort, about the British surrender after only two days of nominal resistance. He might have heard but probably could not have realised the significance, of the exploit of Robert Clive when, with a small force, he held at bay, in Arcot fort, a huge army of Chanda Saheb who, under French auspices, was fighting Mohammad Ali for the throne of the Carnatic. It was a troubled time for Madras and its inhabitants, particularly for those like Pachaiyappa who had no money.

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