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Image details : Interior of Fort St George, Madras, [showing the Secretariat] - 1851 Photograph of the interior of Fort St George, at Madras, taken by Frederick Fiebig in c.1851. This view shows Fort Square in the foreground and the Secretariat, dating from 1694, in the distance. The top of the flagstaff, reputedly the tallest in India, is visible behind, and the monument to Lord Cornwallis beneath a rotunda stands in front. The fort was erected in the early 1640s by the British East India Company as a trading post and base for European residents, and the city of Madras grew up outside its walls. It was considerably expanded and its fortifications strengthened during the 17th and 18th centuries and many historic buildings were erected within its confines.Little seems to be known about Frederick Fiebig. He was probably born in Germany and became a lithographer (and possibly was also a piano teacher) in Calcutta, publishing a number of prints in the 1840s. In the late 1840s Fiebig turned to photography using the calotype process, producing prints that were often hand-coloured. His photographs includes several hundred views of Calcutta in the early 1850s, one of the earliest detailed studies of a city, a large hand coloured collection of which were bought by the East India Company in 1856, their first major acquisition of photographs. Among the roughly 500 pictures were views of Calcutta, Madras, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Cape Town. Source : British Library

It is amazing that the British East India Company could have built such magnificient edifices in 1694. Elihu Yale must have worked out of this grand building.

...Asad ~ your speculative comment (above), got me thinking... Elihu Yale was based in Madras towards the end of the 17th century... but the 'neo-classical' lines of the Secretariat building ( as shown to the right of this photograph), to my mind, immdiately suggested a later period for its construction. Perhaps around about 1800 ... somewhere in that neck of the woods... Good old Philip Davies (whose books on the architecture of British India are a must for anybody interested in the subject) provides the answer : "The Secretariat incorporates the nucleus of the second Fort house erected in 1694... The original dimensions of the building were preserved until 1825, when wings were added and the interior was converted into government offices, but the earlier form can still be discerned internally." So it seems that while technically you are correct, and Yale might well have been able to recognise certain features inside the building at the time the photograph was taken, its elegant facade would have been entirely alien to him.