The Sundarams: Bangalore’s first couple of aviation
In 1935, Capt V Sundaram became a licensed pilot. In 1937, he became the first Indian to get a commercial pilot’s licence. In 1950, his wife Usha Sundaram became PM Nehru’s personal pilot
At a recent event celebrating the memory of Maharaja Jayachamaraja (JC) Wadiyar on the occasion of his 50th death anniversary, his son-in-law, Rajachandra Urs, a meticulous archivist of his remarkable life, talked about a young couple who had rendered a rather special service to the Maharaja in the late forties – they had piloted his private plane, the Mysore Dakota VT-AXX, between 1946 and 1951.
How the Maharaja came to own a Dakota is a fascinating tale, part of the genesis story of aviation in Bangalore, in which JC played a very significant role. It includes the story of why Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) came to be set up in the city in 1940, the part it played in the establishment of the Aeronautics Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science in 1942, and the natural fallout of these two events – during WWII, with HAL being handed over to the US Army Air Force for the duration of the war, Bangalore became one of the most reputed aircraft tinkering shops in the east. In 1945, the Americans returned home, leaving behind several war-surplus Dakotas. It was one of those Dakotas, newly refurbished and converted into a shiny 21-seater passenger aircraft, that JC snapped up for himself in 1946.
Now that there was a plane, a pilot had naturally to be found. The one JC handpicked, Capt V Sundaram, was something of a rockstar. In 1935, when he was only 19, he had become a licensed pilot. In 1937, he became the first Indian to get a commercial pilot’s licence. Over the next few years, he flew extensively across the country, served as instructor at the venerable Madras Flying Club (estd 1929), trained British and American pilots, and, according to an unconfirmed report, took the first aerial photograph of the Taj Mahal. In 1945, he joined Tata Airlines (estd 1932, later Air India), an airmail carrier set up by JRD Tata that had grown into a full-fledged passenger airline. In 1946, he moved to Bangalore to become JC’s personal pilot.
Somewhere along the way, Capt Sundaram also found a wife, the lovely Usha Krishnamurthy, who was only 17 when they were married in 1941. Two years after the couple had moved to Bangalore, JC, now fascinated by aviation, bought up 200 acres of land to the north of the city for an aerodrome. He handed it over to the government of the new, democratic Mysore state soon after, on the condition that it only be used to set up a flying school; in December 1948, the Government Flying Training School came up at the Jakkur Aerodrome. The first graduate of that school, who was also independent India’s first woman pilot, was Usha Sundaram.
The late forties were frenetic years in India, as the new government, especially Deputy PM Sardar Patel, toiled to integrate all 565 princely states into the Indian Union. There was a lot of flying around the country to be done, and JC generously donated his Mysore Dakota to the cause. Through 1948 and 1949, the Sundarams – with Usha first playing hostess and later co-pilot – flew the Iron Man of India some 100,000 miles, standing by as he masterfully stitched the country together. In 1950, once the Herculean task had been accomplished, Usha Sundaram became PM Nehru’s personal pilot, and remained so until she retired from professional flying in 1952 to raise her three children.
There’s one last flying story to be told about the Sundarams – in 1951, tasked with purchasing the trendy de Havilland Dove for the government of Madras, they travelled to England by ship and then flew the Dove from London to Bombay in 27 hours, setting a record flight-time for piston-engine aircraft that is yet to be surpassed.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)