Calcutta Page 28

  From this building were sovereign and imperial rights exercised over a people who had grown to 300 millions, a fifth of the world’s population, by the start of the twentieth century. The men who exercised that right generally believed that in the whole hierarchy of British Empire they and their position were second only to the imperial monarch, not excepting the British Prime Minister himself. Sir Herbert Kitchener was so cast down when Lord Hardinge got the nod he thought should have been his, that he went into hiding for ten days to conceal his disappointment. Apart from their aspirations and their belief in the rectitude of their rule, they were a mixed bunch of men. They could be as arrogant as Lord Amherst, who never moved from one room of Government House to another without being preceded by a column of mace bearers and who, during morning exercise on the Maidan, would not suffer his wife to approach closer than his horse’s backside. They could be as homely as Sir John Lawrence, who used to work stripped to his collarless shirt with slippers on his feet, who preferred rambling through a bazaar to attending the races (he even declined to present the Viceroy’s Cup), and who would continue to play croquet on his lawn long after dark, when great crowds would gather to watch him by lamplight through his railings. They could be as genuinely loved by their subjects as Lord Canning, who ruled during the detestable years of the Mutiny and after and of whose departure the normally caustic Girish Chandra Ghosh could even then write: ‘If India grieved at the loss of one who had proved himself so worthy to rule, it rejoiced on the other hand at the presence in England of a friend whose mature judgement and intimate acquaintance with local politics, feelings and requirements, would at all times offer Her Majesty’s Government a true criterion by which to settle Indian questions.’ A Viceroy might be as effectively nonconformist as Lord Lytton, who set up a famine control scheme and who startled the exclusive society of Simla by smoking cigarettes between courses at dinner. Or he might be as thickly imperious as Curzon himself, who wrecked almost every good thing that had preceded him with one insufferable assessment of his situation the moment he arrived, and who was himself startled to discover that guests at his levees would stuff their pockets with his cigars and his cigarettes before bidding him good night. A Viceroy could be as thrifty as Lord Lansdowne, who told his successor Hardinge that he had managed to save £20,000 out of his salary of £16,700 per annum. A Viceroy could eventually be remembered less for what he had done than for the guests he had entertained in Calcutta.

  Such is the plight of the banker-Viceroy Lord Northbrook, a Baring who happened to be an old friend of the Queen’s former tutor, Edward Lear. Notwithstanding his own imperial connections, Lear shocked British Indian society during his fourteen-month tour round the country because he brought a white man with him as servant (to whom General Palmer politely passed the cake at tea one afternoon, as he did to everyone else at the reception). Lear was not himself much impressed by the British of Calcutta. He mentally divided them into Cummerbundians and non-Cummerbundians, let it be known that he preferred Tolly’s Nullah to Chowringhee, thought the main staircase of his lodging and its mutilated sphinxes preposterously magnificent, not to say awful, and immortalized Government House and its contents as Hustlefussabad. People were always dropping in at Government House. Young Winston Churchill spent days on end shut up in a room along the South-east wing, writing The River War about the Omdurman Campaign; and, having occasionally ventured forth into this reception or that, he would report back to Mama in London that ‘Calcutta is full of supremely uninteresting people endeavouring to assume an air of heartiness suitable to the season’. The visitors continued to come even when Government House had been relegated to provincial status with the departure of the Viceroys to New Delhi. George Mallory stayed here before making his first attempt to climb Everest in 1922. Noël Coward strolled in while he was entertaining troops in Calcutta during the last war; and, having been taken on the obligatory tour of the establishment by his host, paused amidst the Caesars, swept the gallery with an appraising and thoughtful eye, and murmured – only half to himself – ‘Pokey place’.

  Viceroys and their staffs were always dropping out whenever the weather became too impossible, after Lord Bentinck decided that Simla was a better place for summer imperialism. Gladly they would forsake the Calcutta of Cockle’s Pills (for dysentery) and interminable subscriptions (for the sake of appearances) and take to the healthier hills; though Curzon was to reckon that never in his life had he been fitter than during his Viceregal years in spite of a recurrent pain in his leg and an intermittently nagging toothache. But at Simla you could enjoy polo at 8,000 ft, and wander round a perfectly adequate Viceregal Lodge whose rose garden and herbaceous borders had been first organized by Lady Minto. You took your very strict sense of courtesies with you, of course, including all the people involved in the sixty-three official ranks of precedence, which started with the Viceroy, finished with the superintendent of a telegraph workshop, and had the Archdeacon of Calcutta neatly inserted between a brigadier-general and the Tea Controller for India. You also, by and by, had to put up with a great deal of criticism from the British who remained in Calcutta, who believed that the nation’s government was not being effectively conducted unless it was being conducted where it could be effectively lobbied. Many a Viceregal heart must have been heavy when the time came each autumn to strike camp in Simla and return to the city, to those awful levees where you had to shake 1,900 hands and make 1,900 little bows before you could even moisten your lips on the first cocktail of the evening, where you had to walk 250 yards to get from your own room to your daughter’s, and where you might be required to endure the more pungent parts of Calcutta once or twice a year, like the student hostel attached to the university, because you had scarcely been able to refuse the appointment of Rector when it was obediently offered you.

  Most of the Viceroys survived all this well enough to enjoy an authority in the House of Lords and a stately pension in Gloucestershire or elsewhere. But Elgin died here and so did Lady Canning, as well as a couple of Governors of reformed Bengal, while Mayo, whose agricultural policies were among the better Viceregal fingerprints laid on India, was assassinated on a visit to the Andaman Islands. The rest came and went, leaving Government House and its staff to be slightly modified by the whims of the next man. And eventually this too became part of India’s legacy, to be translated at once into the Raj Bhavan, but still to be maintained with a staff of liveried flunkeys and to be occupied lately by a Hindu but non-Bengali Governor of West Bengal, whose son was simultaneously presiding over the Union in the University of Cambridge.

  Raj Bhavan is not the only building in Calcutta that looks distinctly familiar to a visiting Englishman, who may find himself wondering where he has seen the outline of that large church before, the one just across the road from the Victoria Memorial. The answer is that the church is Calcutta Cathedral (another St Paul’s, as it happens) and that the tower is a painstaking copy of the Bell Harry at Canterbury, which the Primate of All England knows so well. The walls, moreover, have something of Norwich Cathedral about them, and there are bits and pieces of decoration (a capital here, a pinnacle there) which might set some vague old ecclesiologist to thinking that perhaps the master masons of York Minster had wandered rather farther afield than he had supposed. There is a West window by Burne-Jones and, indeed, once you get inside Calcutta Cathedral it would be possible to lose yourself in a reverie which persuaded you that you were now meditating in some splendid wool church of the Cotswolds rather than an outpost of God’s Empire on the Tropic of Cancer. One thing, however, soon dispels hallucination. For the wide white roof, with its moulded Tudor roses all shining with gilt, is partially obscured by the network of ironmongery necessary for the suspension of forty-six great fans one after the other above the choir and the nave; which has never been known to happen anywhere in the see of Gloucester. There are other churches in the city even more eerily imitative than this. Both St John’s and St Andrew’s, the first just behind Dalhousie Squar
e, the other on one of its corners, could quite easily have come from the drawing boards of a Wren, a Gibbs, possibly a Hawksmoor; refined and elegant exercises in Anglo-Greek architecture on the outside, they contain galleries, fonts, lecterns and reredoses just like those you have seen only a few weeks ago on the edge of Trafalgar Square or somewhere just past the Bank of England.

  The secular has been cribbed as freely as the sacred. The most marvellous bartering place in Calcutta is Sir Stuart Hogg’s old New Market, just behind Chowringhee. For almost a century it has been possible to obtain here practically all that imagination could conceivably want to buy. You can get anything between dangling charms from a Tibetan stall and a baby crocodile from the adjacent bird and animal mart – though you need a very strong stomach and preferably no sense of smell if you are going to patronize that. As you approach the New Market you also do well to select the first porter who rushes up to you with a basket, for if you think you can purchase and then carry one packet of liver salts yourself without assistance, you are liable to move around with an entourage of half a dozen basketeers, all negotiating quite fiercely for a temporary position on your payroll. All of this – the demanding porters, the purposeful memsahibs, the small boys who offer you blandishments with their trade – is housed under one long and very rambling roof. Without the local colour, these interminable rows of stalls, this endless maze of small shops, would be scarcely distinguishable from the Grainger Market in Newcastle, the Pannier Market in Barnstaple and the covered daily markets to be found in any self-respecting town from one side of Lancashire to the other of Yorkshire. They even have a clock-tower by the entrance to the New Market which is so completely Northcountry Victorian, with stone buttressed corners, Gothic louvres piercing the red brickwork, a steep slate roof above the dial which is then topped by a lightning conductor surrounded by a small iron fence, that many people have supposed some Anglophile Maharajah transported it once, brick by brick from Huddersfield, like a rich American taking an obscure fancy of his own across the Atlantic. Which is not the case, any more than it happened that someone once brought Calcutta High Court over from Belgium. For that great bastion of Gothic, with its files of pinnacles doing sentry duty along the roof and its columns ornamented with Caen stone capitals, each subtly different from its neighbours, bears such a close resemblance to the Staad-Haus of Ypres that the two buildings are now linked in legendary fashion. It is said that when the Belgians lost their Town Hall by bombardment during the Great War they immediately sought the plans of Calcutta High Court so that they might rebuild their original faultlessly – though no one can ever lead you to the source of this stimulating myth.

  There is nothing at all fanciful about the origins of Calcutta’s most suggestive buildings. Most of them were designed as a military operation, by officers of the Bengal Engineers. Apart from Emerson’s Victoria Memorial the most notable exceptions are the High Court and the General Post Office, which both came from Walter Granville, Architect to the Government of India, and the Writers’ Building, whose architect was probably Thomas Lyon, a former carpenter who had come out to work on the construction of the new Fort William. It was quite customary for young Sappers to put up the odd public edifice in the growing years of the Raj, even though their professional equipment was minimal. Permanent buildings were not beginning to rise in Calcutta until about the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, and by then the Company as well as the regular Army was giving its engineers some basic training before leaving for India. Once in Calcutta, however, they usually had only their notebooks to guide them, together with a handful of standard architectural works like Vitruvius Britannicus, The Antiquities of Athens and A Book of Architecture which James Gibbs had published in 1728, just after finishing St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. It was this last volume, with its plans of the London church, that allowed Lieutenant Agg to design St John’s as he did half a century later. Captain Wyatt, who was a nephew of the professional British architect James Wyatt, was able to imitate Kedleston Hall so well when Wellesley invited ideas (and selected Wyatt’s plans for Government House in preference to those of the Company’s Italian architect Edward Tiretta) because the architect of Kedleston, James Paine, had published his drawings in Plans, elevations and sections of Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s houses in 1783. Having absorbed this, having copied it carefully, and having finished his splendid Government House in 1803, Wyatt went home with money in his purse and became the MP for Sudbury.

  His superior officer Colonel Garstin was by then designing the Town Hall to Doric specifications, though with rather less success; shortly after its opening the front portico collapsed, somewhat later the ballroom floor began to spring and the whole structure had to be overhauled, which caused Sir Charles D’Oyly (sometime opium agent up at Patna, always an amateur artist and now gentleman about Chowringhee) to write a mocking little verse that would have come well out of a production much later on by his family’s light opera company. Soldiers, however, take these things as they come, and Major Forbes was proceeding with his plans for the Mint, which was so strikingly impressive that he was commissioned to design the Cathedral after it. The Mint, naturally, was a copy as well. Its portico was nothing less than a half-size replica of Minerva’s Temple in Athens. Everything in Calcutta was derivative. The gates of Government House were a mixed reproduction of those belonging to Syon House in Middlesex and Wilton in Wiltshire; the Turf Club’s frontage could have been seen before by anyone acquainted with West Wycombe Park; many of the handsome town houses now going up carried obvious traces of John Nash and his terraces round Regent’s Park; people were even having open fireplaces installed.

  What the original artists in the city thought of all this we can only guess from the occasional oblique hint they dropped; the Daniells wrote that ‘The streets are spacious, and from the diversity of European and Oriental manners present a scene of inexhaustible variety and amusement’; which perhaps meant buildings as much as people, but it wouldn’t do to laugh too loudly in Calcutta’s face, for she was a considerable source of patronage to painters at the time; though, curiously, they seem to have vanished by 1836. Emily Eden remarks that by then there is only one professional in town, and he is capable of nothing better than a second-rate sort of sign-post; it was one reason for her own prolific output. The first to discover what a wealth of prospects lay here was Tilly Kettle, who arrived in time to be empanelled on the jury at Nuncomar’s trial and whose work is frequently confused with that of Sir Joshua Reynolds.* After him came William Hodges, recently returned as artist aboard the Resolution on Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. It was Hodges who tipped off his old friend John Zoffany to catch the first boat to the Hooghly.

  Zoffany was a glittering character who had started life as a cabinet maker in Prague, who called himself Sir John at this stage (with the uncertain permission of George III), who had earlier been dubbed ‘the Baron’ by Marie Thérèse of Austria, and who had just been making himself a reputation for portraiture in London, particularly among the theatrical acquaintances of David Garrick. As soon as he reached Calcutta in 1783 he found the Nabobs falling over themselves to sit for him. He would rarely paint a solitary individual, for his nose for profit was as sharp as anyone else’s in the city and he charged Rs 1,000 for every figure on his canvas, usually finding himself much too busy to oblige anything less than a family group unless someone very important like Impey or Hastings approached him. His paintings are therefore generally well-crowded compositions, and they were sometimes a means of settling scores, for Zoffany was a quarrelsome man. He excelled himself when the Reverend Tally-Ho Johnson and the Vestry of St John’s commissioned him to paint The Last Supper to hang behind their altar. Zoffany had lately been bickering with a Mr Paull, a Company official, and now he made him into Judas. A Mr Blaquiere, a police magistrate of effeminate good looks whose hostility to Christianity was notorious in the town, appeared as St John the Divine. Christ was represented by Father Parthenio, a Greek priest of Calcutta
, in what seems to have been a mark of approval. The Vestry, after much testy debate, finally settled with Zoffany for Rs 2,500 when the painting was worth at least three times the amount at his current rates.

  The Daniells were more assiduous than colourful. Thomas Daniell had been a bricklayer’s labourer who learned to varnish carriages when he was later apprenticed to a coach builder. He also learned to paint and by the time he was twenty-three the Royal Academy had accepted one of his flower pieces. When his brother died he agreed to look after nephew William, and thus the famous partnership began. William was only fifteen when the Daniells received the Company’s permission, in 1784, to sail for India to make engravings of this fabulous land. They arrived two years later, by way of China, and they at once opened a subscription list in Calcutta for a dozen aquatints of the city by Thomas. William’s part in the enterprise was to fetch and carry, to operate the camera obscura and to make simple sketches, though eventually he was to become an artist in his own right; Thomas was made a Royal Academician in 1799 and William twenty-three years later. For almost ten years they travelled all over India, sketching steadily as they went, and they produced hundreds of landscapes, from the Himalayas to Ceylon. Sometimes they slipped themselves into a composition, riding on a horse or in a palanquin or sitting by their drawing board while an Indian servant held a large umbrella over them; but they never allowed themselves to be more than tiny figures in a landscape, a device to establish its scale. No other place on the sub-continent was as thoroughly pictured by them as Calcutta; it is largely because of the Daniells that we know what the city looked like at the end of the eighteenth century.