Station Vigilance Committee: A movement that still throbs in Mylapore

Here is how a clutch of residents from the neighbourhood unearthed a piece of history and imbued it with flesh and blood

To any superficial ear, it would have sounded like an oral history project. But it was collecting voices not to enhance an existing, neatly-documented chronicle, but to put one together — almost from the scratch. Though history was being built account by account, history was not the primary goal. The exercise was seeking to recreate a whole voluntary organisation whose spirit had been hollowed out by time’s underhand stab, oblivion. Station Vigilance Committees (SVC) were born within a handful of years from Indian Independence, and would function as a prop to local police stations to keep the order.

A Mylapore division of SVC had been in existence since the early 1950s, first having been registered with the Teynampet station, according to Shankar KS, who got on its trail and seems to have recaptured its essence with a reasonable degree of success.

“Even as late as 2016, the true significance of SVC eluded us. I was part of SVC Mylapore Division, and with a handful of other members, would go to the Panguni festival for crowd management. That was just about it. There was certainly more to it, and I started looking for the missing pieces that would give a complete and meaningful picture of the voluntary group,” discloses Shankar, who operates as a convenor of SVC Mylapore Division.