Calcutta Page 27
The edges and the intersections of these roads were where the British put up the statues to their idols. George V himself was here in bronze and so were Lords Curzon, Kitchener, Roberts, Minto, Northbrook, Canning, and many of their peers who had known Calcutta well, together with men like Sir Robert Peel, whose relationship with the city was more elusive. Two or three were put down in the first few years of Independence because they were occupying sites of more obvious usefulness without them. But it was not until the middle of 1969 that the last sixteen were removed. A few were handled as the museum pieces they had become and were simply parked inside the boundary of the Victoria Memorial at the bottom of the Maidan; two or three were fondly procured by Canada, New Zealand and other parts of the old Empire where they still retain an affection for such things; the rest were unceremoniously dumped in a Corporation yard out at Barrackpore, leaving behind on the Maidan a series of stumpy plinths to keep company with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at one end, and with the Mahatma, who is peering down the length of Park Street half way towards the other. And nothing in this highly confusing land is more inconsistently bewildering than the memory of Lord Mayo, still trotting on his horse at a cross roads in the middle of the Maidan, twenty-two years after Independence, above an inscription which read: To the honourable and beloved memory of Richard Southwell, 6th Earl of Mayo, Humane, Courteous, Resolute and Enlightened. Struck down in the midst of a Patriotic and Beneficent career on 18th February 1872 by the treacherous hand of an assassin. The People of India, mourning and indignant, raise this statue.’
The Maidan is much used. It is used by people who like to keep clean and who are forever dhobying themselves or their garments in the three great tanks – the Manohar Das, the General’s and the Elliot – which are set one after another down the edge of Chowringhee. Parts of it are stockaded during Durga Puja and other festivities, to become a sort of fairground. One of its roads is lined with tiny bungalows belonging to the Calcutta Kennel Club, the Rajasthan Club, the Armenian Sports Club, the Wari Athletic Club, the Engineers Club, the Calcutta Tramways and Athletic Club and many another organization that likes to build a bunker in a small garden, surrounded by a high thick hedge, in which its members can take refuge and amusement at the weekend. There is a middle section of the Maidan devoted to cricket every Saturday afternoon and every Sunday morning, with a dozen or more pitches heaving with figures in natty white flannels, who are dripping with sweat below their floppy white hats and their gaudy club caps. Indian cricket began on the Maidan indeed, with a two-day match in January 1804 between Old Etonians employed by the Company and ‘Calcutta’. Robert Walpole’s grandson Richard opened for Calcutta and one of Sir Elijah Impey’s sons scored thirteen for the side; but the Etonians won by 152 runs, being fortified by a Vansittart and (inevitably) by a Metcalfe major and a Metcalfe minor – one of the brothers later becoming a Governor-General of India. And on almost the same length of turf now stands the Eden Gardens stadium, where they play Test matches and where the spectators are rather more liable to lay on a riot than the batsmen a century.
People play crown green bowls under floodlights at night on the Maidan. They hold the biggest political rallies on earth on the Maidan. They wander with large flocks of hornless, pimple-headed, flop-eared goats across the Maidan. When they are young and Indian they play hide and seek in the ditch that surrounds the glaring white walls of Fort William on the river side of the Maidan. When they are older and British they go for a constitutional before dusk down at the Racecourse end of the Maidan and, on meeting each other, they exchange a polite good evening without stopping, just as they would on Hampstead Heath. In the terrible heat of high noon, travellers from one end of India to the other shelter beneath their long-distance buses, which are also resting on the edge of the Maidan by Strand Road; and, a mile away across the spinneys and the grass and the ditches, taxi-drivers are doing the same thing beneath the trees which flank Chowringhee, with cardboard cinema posters dangling from their branches; and a handful of idlers are slumped beneath the filigree ironwork shading a fountain there, which was presented to the Municipality in 1884 by Mr Ezra, who had it made (as you can still just make out) by Walter Macfarlane and Co., Glasgow.
The Maidan’s biggest old totem is still in place, presumably because it was too big even for a Communist Government to shift into limbo with all the other monuments to the Raj. There are 165 fluted feet of the Ochterlony Monument, which is forty feet less than the Monument to the Great Fire of London. It starts with an Egyptian base, proceeds through a Syrian column, and is topped by a Turkish dome; a confection which is usually passed off as a deference to Sir David Ochterlony’s taste for all things Muslim. And conceivably the monument was raised in the first place not only to commemorate Sir David’s annexation of Nepal, but also to salute the days when he and his thirteen wives would take the early morning air by the banks of the Hooghly, on one elephant after another; or possibly because he was that very rare bird indeed among the eighteenth century rulers of India, the man who died almost penniless because he had not bothered to graft for a fortune. Ochterlony was half Scots but he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, though this does not explain why Mark Twain was so besotted with the monument when he was in the city, for he seemed unaware of Ochterlony’s background. His journal of a trip round the world spent only seven pages on Calcutta, though Benares rated forty, and he spent most of his space ruminating on the ‘cloud-kissing monument to one Ochterlony’. Today, the Monument (having been rechristened Sahid Minar, a title unused by anyone but the Communist Minister who insisted on the change) tends to be in the middle of all those colossal rallies at which the name of even a half-American is implicitly considered worse than Hooghly mud. It is also the focal point of those splendid weekend happenings on the Maidan, a Mukta Mela here, a man juggling with spinning things there, someone whirling by his feet from a rope lashed to a tripod round one side, someone else trying to charm a dozy snake from its basket round another; and all these entertainments are watched and applauded by scores of people who are, given the circumstances of the city and their lives, unaccountably merry. The Monument is used by the police as a watchtower during the Maidan rallies and anyone else needs constabulary permission to climb to the top, just in case he should be a Pakistani spy wishing to take a long-distance look at the Howrah Bridge.
From the top you can pick out one by one the other outstanding monuments to the Raj. Almost by your elbow is Chowringhee, which Edward Lear thought a fearful humbug of palaces and distinctly inferior to the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. Bishop Heber took more kindly to it, for he occupied one of the palaces and there he would sit drinking his favourite Bass ale, enjoying the company of his wife, whom he was always loth to leave; whenever he had a prolonged visitation to make upcountry he would write her long love letters, which Mr Gladstone later translated into Latin for amusement and intellectual exercise. Lord Macaulay, who lived almost next door, alongside the rising Bengal Club, agreed with Lear, for ‘a lodging up three pairs of stairs in London is better than a palace in a compound of Chowringhee’. He must have been the only titled visitor to the dry from the early nineteenth century onwards not to have been mightily impressed by that very self-satisfied road. And if, today, it has no reason at all for self-satisfaction it still has the presence of an international thoroughfare. Once they rise above the scruffy trade of the pavement arcades, its buildings are presentable and gleaming with creamy stucco, as they should be with all the money tucked inside them. Its roadway is wide and sweeping, almost the only one in Central Calcutta where traffic can usually proceed at the rush, sometimes being thrown into great confusion when a herd of white Brahmani bulls decides to advance down the centre lane at the stroll, ten or twenty at a time, while the taxis and the buses pile up around them.
Chowringhee is nicely counterweighted across the Maidan by the sprawling octagon of Fort William, which is where the Central Government of Delhi maintains a thoughtful and secure foothold in this frequently re
bellious city. It is almost a small town, as you can see from the top of the Monument, for it can garrison ten thousand men, but in all the years since Robert Clive started it, not one shot has yet been fired in anger from its battlements, though they are said to be well mounted with guns. And though the Fort keeps much to itself, a distant and enigmatic colony on the edge of potential insurrection, just occasionally it yields up an old-fashioned delight to the connoisseur of the Maidan. For on a Sunday morning you may see, emerging from one of its portals, a troop of cavalry in splendid line ahead. Delicately the horses pick their way across the grass, stiffly moving with the animals each trooper rests a hand by his bucketed sword, chatting with composure are the two officers at the head. The tone is khaki, not scarlet or blue, but for a moment or two, until the column disappears down Strand Road for exercise along the river, it is as though the Raj were still firmly in the saddle here. Five minutes later a lorry swerves round the corner onto the Red Road, full of young Communists in red berets, thumping their staves in time to some rousing chorus, on their way to yet another rally beneath the Monument. And it is as though the revolution had already broken out.
A vision of white marble dazzles at the bottom of the Maidan. When W. H. Auden was here in the fifties, some enthusiastic guide told him that the Victoria Memorial had been designed by the man who did the Taj Mahal. This is not quite as comical as you might suppose, for you would certainly swear that it was at least George Gilbert Scott heavily inspired by the Taj; a sort of St Paneras by the Hooghly, but Classical not Gothic. Instead, it was the work of Sir William Emerson, President of the British Institute of Architects in his day, whose only building in England worth a moment’s attention (if you laboriously investigate the forty-odd volumes of Pevsner) was the Hamilton House he put up just past King’s Bench Walk on the Victoria Embankment in London. The idea of the Memorial was Lord Curzon’s, of course; its foundation stone was tapped into place by George V on his princely excursion to Calcutta in 1906, and whatever professional frustrations Sir William may have suffered from at home, he let them all loose in one majestic throw right here. They landed amidst sixty-four acres of lawns, ponds, shrubbery and herbaceous borders and nothing in Calcutta ever had more pleasing or more amply open surroundings. Here, as you walk up one of the drives, past the bronze Victoria on her throne, or the bronze Edward VII on his horse, or the marble Curzon looking very stern and ruly, you behold something which is more palatial than memorial; a great white cliff which in Calcutta’s light hurts the eyes, with its vaguely Renaissance sides ending at each corner in a sort of minaret, with its entrance arches soaring through two high storeys, with its entire rambling, derivative, nostalgic and impressive rectangle dominated by a colonnaded dome (the Taj, with concessions to St Paul’s Cathedral, maybe) which is itself capped by three tons of bronzed and victorious angel.
It echoes inside, as it was doubtless meant to echo for ever and a day. It echoes most resonantly under the dome, in the Queen’s Hall whose walls have been deeply graven with the text of Victoria’s proclamation of herself as Empress. But reverberations from those illustrious days pursue the visitor to the Memorial wherever he goes along its galleries, its armouries, and its ennobled chambers. Many of India’s old rulers are represented here in stone, quite often dressed in Roman togas, like Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis. And where they have not been immortalized with a chisel they have most certainly not been forgotten with a brush and a palette of oils. The Queen herself, quite naturally, comes first in all things. You have her in paint at her coronation, at her marriage, at the baptism of her son and heir, at her first and then her second jubilee celebrations in her cathedral church, at her son’s wedding, at her residence of Frogmore, and at exercise with dear old John Brown holding the horse’s reins. You have one or two of her possessions: the pianoforte (that’s what the label says) at which she received tuition in childhood, the writing desk and chair occupied for daily correspondence at Windsor, the last letter she wrote to her people in India thanking them in person for their sympathy on the loss of her grandson in the Boer War (‘she cannot deny that she feels a good deal shaken …’). You make the unexpected discovery that from her favourite Indian attendant, Abdul Karim, she learned Hindusthani.
There are portraits of other Great Britons who were in Calcutta at one time or another; Macaulay, of course, and Kipling and Bishop Heber and William Hickey with the closest of his sixty-three servants and his little dog. William Makepeace Thackeray gets his bust in because he was born here and Florence Nightingale hers because, like the Queen herself, she took a distant interest in India. From time to time an Indian face is displayed without discrimination among these alien images – Keshub Chandra Sen, poor Michael Madhusudan Datta who was so nearly an Englishman himself, Rabindranath Tagore and his enterprising grandfather Dwarkanath. There are documents, including the forgery which had Nuncomar judicially executed. There are treaties, among them the one Clive made with Siraj-ud-Daula after he had recaptured the city. The Permanent Settlement is here. So is a model of the battlefield of Plassey. And an antique musical grandfather clock by Whitehurst of Derby. Yet nothing that the Victoria Memorial contains is more memorable than the gallery displaying Mr Finden’s Portraits of the Female Aristocracy of the Court of Queen Victoria – all fifty-six of them, with the occasional damp stain having intruded upon the ladies since they were engraved in 1849. Lady Georgina Toler, Viscountess Canning, Miss Blanche Bury, Caroline Countess of Mount Edgecumbe, The Lady Ashley, the Honourable Mrs Fox Manie and the rest – there they all are in two long rows, almost all of them bonneted, with ringlets, with chins carefully poised on slender hands and with variously arch expressions; though Lady Agnes Buller, much the most individual, looks faintly Sultanate and fingers a harp. And on Sunday afternoons small Indian children, being towed round the premises by elders with a fine sense of history, pause for a long time before Mr Finden’s Portraits and gaze at them silently with large and wondering eyes; as well they might. For the Victoria Memorial cost Rs 10,500,000 to build and, under the gentle persuasion of Lord Curzon, their great grandparents paid every last anna of it by loyal and dutiful subscription.
Balancing this monumental expenditure of glory a couple of miles away, on the north side of the Maidan, is Raj Bhavan – the Government House in which Viceroys sat and ruled India as though they were Emperors themselves. This was quite the grandest gesture Lord Wellesley made to his subject peoples, Fort William College perhaps being the most careless. Before Wellesley came to Calcutta, a strong-minded dapper little man with a refined taste for Classics, the Governors-General of Bengal and India inhabited a Buckingham House on this site, rented from the local Nawab. Wellesley at once decided that this was insufficient to his position; India, he let it be known, should be ruled from a palace not a counting house, with the ideas of a prince, not with those of a retailer in muslins and indigo. Without bothering to consult the Directors of the East India Company, he summoned architects and began to build, and there was much anguish in Leadenhall Street when the bills began to roll in – £87,000 for the structure, £71,000 for the land, £18,000 for the furnishings and over £3,000 for the two new roads laid alongside; Wellesley could scarcely complain when his flabbergasted Directors, hearing that he had started building a second residence at Barrackpore, stopped its foundations in their tracks. Government House when finished was seen to be almost identical to Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and, by a noble coincidence, a Curzon of Kedleston was to move out of one into the other within a century.
It was – and is – not exactly like Kedleston. Where Kedleston has only two projecting wings to the main building, two others never having been finished, Government House was given all four to catch every suspicion of breeze that might come its way. Where Kedleston has two floors, Government House has three. Where Kedleston’s upper salons are illuminated from above by skylights, Government House gets its light from the sides. Where Kedleston is made of sandstone, Government House was built of bride with colour-
washed plaster on top. Otherwise, no one could tell the two places apart, particularly after Lord Curzon himself had placed a row of urns along the roofline, to establish the details just as they were at home. Wellesley had already ordered the busts of twelve Caesars to be situated in the Marble Hall, to conform with the model, and among these each night, it was said, he would sit plotting his moves and counter moves against opponents military and political. His main staircase already terminated in a pair of sphinxes, whose breasts were amputated shortly after installation on the orders of a discreet aide de camp, who thought they might offend his Lordship.
From the moment of its completion, Government House became the scene of such entertainments as Calcutta had never known before, though the most memorable was not held until Curzon mounted a centenary ball at which he set the pace by dressing in the style of Wellesley, and so inspired a guest to write that ‘We became our grandparents again, imitating in spirit, language and dress the high-waisted ladies and stately men who danced in these very halls a century ago.’ Scarcely a British ruler of India lived here without making his contribution to the place. Lord Hastings imported the finest gravel from Bayswater for the paths. Lord Ellenborough bequeathed a Chinese cannon mounted on a brass dragon for the front terrace. Lord Elgin introduced gas. Lord Northbrook laid on hot water. Lord Curzon provided those urns, experimented with the plasterwork after having the plans of Chatsworth sent out, and put in a lift as flimsy as a bird cage which still works today. Lord Hardinge replaced the front gates when he heard that his King Emperor was coming to town. The ladies of the household were no less interested in their direction of the grounds. According to Emily Eden, it was Lady Amherst who started the splendid garden, though Lady Bentinck, coming close behind her, had everything uprooted within the first week because she thought flowers unwholesome. The Eden sisters recovered this lost territory when their brother Lord Auckland was in command and added a fish pond for good measure. Lady Mayo started planting trees, Lady Lytton installed a swimming pool and, by the time dear Lady Dufferin arrived, there wasn’t much left for her to do except to suggest a tennis court.