The enduring charm of the Bangalore Derby

Pongal Without a Derby: The Silence That Fell on Guindy

 

By Sharan Kumar

 

Pongal Day at Guindy was once measured not by calendars but by cadence. The rhythm of hooves, the flash of silks, the anticipation that rose steadily towards the South India Derby, the crown jewel of Chennai racing. For generations, that day announced itself with noise, colour and certainty. Pongal was never a single date but a festival that stretched across days, a harvest celebration marked by government holidays and a city collectively at ease. The Derby was woven into those celebrations, as much a part of Pongal as tradition itself.

 

This year, Pongal arrived to an unsettling stillness. Not for racing anymore. The Madras Race Club racecourse at Guindy lay mute, its vastness echoing only absence. Where celebration once galloped, there is now only silence.

 

Racing in Chennai was not a pastime. It was part of the city’s bloodstream for well over a century, shaped by eras when Indian trainers and jockeys tested their craft against British counterparts, creating a standard of competition that was both fierce and formative. The traditions were not merely inherited; they were lived, renewed every season. That glorious past now exists only as memory, abruptly shut down.

 

The government’s role in this erasure is neither subtle nor accidental. The lease of the Madras Race Club was terminated two decades before its natural conclusion. The premises were forcefully occupied, the track dug up, and plans announced for an Echo Park. The irony is unmissable. What remains at Guindy is indeed an echo, a hollow reminder of what once thrived there. The closure of the Ooty Race Course two years earlier had already signalled intent. Guindy was not an isolated act but a continuation of a policy that showed little patience for sporting heritage.

 

Yet, to blame only the government would be to tell half the story. Racing was also let down by its own custodians. When the threat first emerged, the club’s response lacked urgency and conviction. The attempts to resist the takeover were muted, procedural, almost resigned. Even the effort to secure an alternate venue for racing never gathered momentum. Two years passed as demands for arrears mounted and cancellation loomed, but the administration’s approach remained tentative, almost defeatist. Planning for the inevitable never truly began until the inevitable had already happened.

 

Today, the Madras Race Club survives in name and fragments. The Guindy Lodge functions as a club for members, while the racecourse that once defined the institution has vanished. Off-course betting continues, a strange afterlife for a sport that once lived and breathed in real space. Without decisive action, the Madras Race Club risks becoming a historical footnote, remembered more for what it lost than for what it rebuilt.

 

There is now talk of revival, of land being acquired under the authorisation granted by a Special General Body meeting to a small group led by Chairman Muthiah Ramaswamy. Pollachi, somewhere beyond Coimbatore, is mentioned as a possible site. But racing is not a business that can be transplanted at will. It is not created by advertisements or incentives. It grows through generations, through familiarity, through a public that inherits the sport rather than discovers it. Coimbatore, for all its merits and a stud farm, does not possess a deep-rooted racing culture. Expecting a thriving racecourse to emerge there is, at best, an experiment with uncertain odds.

 

The tragedy of Guindy is sharpened by the scale of what has been lost. It was among the finest racecourses in the country, blessed with solid infrastructure and steeped in lived history, all of which now stands wasted. The gloom has been deepened by the outbreak of glanders, disrupting racing across South India and casting a shadow even over centres still in operation. For Indian racing, 2025 has become a year of closures, disease and disillusionment. Ironically, every major southern turf club once conducted under the Madras Race Club has long since emerged as an independent racing authority, while the parent body itself has been reduced to silence.

 

Chennai racing once represented the sport at its most vibrant in the south. The competition was genuine, the narratives compelling, the standards high. That world has been consigned to the past, not by the natural passage of time but by intolerance, indecision, and failure of foresight.

 

The silence at Guindy is therefore not merely the absence of racing. It is the sound of a city losing a part of its identity. A glorious past, shut down.