Calcutta Read online

  Ironically, while men in the Indian capital were building in the styles of Europe, their counterparts in England were beginning to create follies in the native idioms of India. Sometimes they had served in the East; invariably they had been stimulated by the now celebrated Daniell prints; and from time to time they would ask Thomas Daniell what he thought about this or that project they were planning. He was consulted by Sir John Osborne, formerly Colonel of the Nawab of Oudh’s Light Infantry Battalion, about a garden temple in honour of Mr Hastings (who was to be represented as an incarnation of Vishnu) at Melchet Park in Hampshire, and Thomas eventually supplied the designs. He was consulted by Sir Charles Cockerell, who had just come home from Calcutta with a fortune after some years as the Company’s Postmaster there, about his new mansion at Sezincote in Gloucestershire, for which Daniell designed a garden temple, grottoes, fountains, a bridge and an ornamental pool. The Prince Regent was so impressed by this work when he visited Sezincote that he drew the attention of his own architect, William Porden, to Daniell’s prints and designs; a by-product of this encounter was the Dome at Brighton, and probably the whole of the Royal Pavilion there, though Daniell was unmoved by John Nash’s major part in the work.

  The Victoria Memorial is well stocked with Daniell prints, and occasionally some lucky fellow manages to unearth one among the secondhand bookshops of College Street. In the High Court you may inspect Zoffany’s portrait of Sir Elijah Impey, a portly figure in a red robe, with a blue cummerbund and with his right hand raised in a kind of archiepiscopal blessing. The Vestry of St John’s eventually had to shift The Last Supper’ from behind the altar, where it was being attacked by rising damp, to the Lady Chapel, and there poor Mr Paull still is, fixed forever as Judas, sitting at the front of the table with a hand reflectively on his chin, looking very sinister and plotting. And these are only two of the imperial ghosts that are apt to haunt you at almost every turn in Calcutta.

  Cross Dalhousie Square after finding (if you can) the tablet marking the Black Hole, and you run into the Great Eastern Hotel, where the businessmen mustered their unnecessary vigilantes during the non-existent local Mutiny; and where Rudyard Kipling stayed while he sent those despatches back to the Civil and Military Gazette about the work of the Hooghly pilots and the night he spent in Calcutta with the police vice squad, when he observed Dainty Iniquity and Fat Vice at their accommodating trade. Go shopping in the New Market: if you take one side street to it off Chowringhee you pass a tailor’s shop which still mounts an impressive coat of arms above its doorway ‘By appointment to the Marquis of Linlithgow’; if you take the only other approach you pass the Empire Cinema, which may be showing Blow Hot, Blow Cold! this week, but which is where Harry Lauder once performed, not to mention Anna Pavlova, Marie Tempest, Matheson Lang and Dame Clara Butt; and where, according to one local historian, ‘as a frightened amateur Merle Oberon stared across the footlights’. Follow Chowringhee to its conclusion beyond the Racecourse and you run into the Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital, which was once the Presidency General, where you can see a small pink-washed hut which is now used as a dump for unwanted hospital junk.

  Malaria was finally defeated in that hut, when it was a laboratory, and on the hospital gates they have fixed a plaque with the verse that Ronald Ross composed to celebrate his triumph:

  This day relenting God

  Hath placed within my hand

  A wondrous thing; and God

  Be praised, at his command.

  Seeking his secret deeds

  With tears and toiling breath,

  I find thy cunning seeds

  O million-murdering death.

  I know this little thing

  A myriad men will save.

  O death where is thy sting

  And Victory, O grave?

  Not half a mile away, just inside the Corinthian portico of the District Magistrate’s House on the banks of Tolly’s Nullah, a pair of swords are crossed above the front door and there is an inscription on each lintel. The one on the left says ‘Sir Philip Francis lived here 1774–1780’. That on the right says ‘William Thackeray the novelist also lived here during infancy 1812–15’; and so he did, being sent home to England at the age of six, having been born where the Armenian College now stands, of parents who were married in St John’s, of a father who was Secretary to the Board of Revenue.

  The most haunted place of all is the old cemetery in Park Street, where ghosts began to accumulate from August 1767 when the sick season of the year was getting under way. Such was the mortality rate of Calcutta, so grandiose the habits of the British, even when they were burying their dead, that it is only just possible for a lugubriously sacred cow to squeeze between the tombs today, to get at the odd tuft of grass – as three or four always seem to be doing, whenever you pass – while mangy dogs nose the rubble and a refugee family cooks a meal in the shade of the first mausoleum on the right. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is probably the only one in the world more congested with corpses than Park Street, for there the grave slabs slope sometimes one on top of the other; here the dead merely lie dust to dust, but the mood of Park Street is one of much greater claustrophobia, for scarcely a grave is without a monument quite four feet tall, and most are higher. Richard Barwell’s wife, the entrancing Miss Sanderson that was, lies under the tallest, a twenty-foot pyramid which was copied from the even larger one that marks the end of Caius Cestius at the Porta Paolo in Rome. The whole cemetery is spiky with pyramids. Where there is a gap between pyramids it is filled with a block of masonry whose pedimented roof is level with your head. Or else it is occupied by a temple whose columns rise to twice a man’s height. And all with their plastered surfaces flaking off and lying crumbled at your feet, with their slabs lurching tipsily, with weeds prising them apart, sad and heavily decayed relics which are now piebald with exposed brickwork and lingering cement.

  It is difficult to read the inscriptions on many, so worn and demolished are they by a century or two of Calcutta’s weather; but one or two can still be picked out, together with crossed swords, gun-barrels, trumpets, banners, scythes, arrows, torches, hour glasses and other funereal symbols of imperial mortality. Job Charnock is missing, of course; he enjoys an even larger mausoleum than any here (though nearly as dilapidated) in the churchyard of St John’s. But General Clavering was brought to Park Street, after his fruitless plotting against Hastings. So was Colonel Pearse, who was the Governor-General’s second in his duel with Francis. So was Lady Anne Monson, of royal blood and high reputation at the whist table, whose coffin was carried to the cemetery gates by Hastings and Francis among others, where it was handed to six ladies of gentle birth, who bore it the rest of its way to the grave. And somewhere among these melancholy surroundings lie Walter Savage Landor’s old sweetheart and William Thackeray’s father and Walter Bagehot’s father-in-law and Fanny Burney’s half-brother and sons of Charles Dickens and Captain Cook. Yet the saddest graves of all in Park Street Cemetery are those of the men and sometimes women who had astonishingly survived half a lifetime in Calcutta, who set sail for England and retirement, who died somewhere just out at sea, and who were brought back by sons and daughters carrying on the family tradition of helping to rule India; or who, if they had got as far as Aden, as happened now and then, were dumped overboard and fondly memoralized with an urn and a tablet in the middle of these rotting pyramids.

  *

  Some things the British started here are more deeply embedded in Calcutta than any of their buildings, caste marks that will still be visible when the cemetery as well as its contents is reduced to dust and when the Victoria Memorial is no more than a crumbled ruin. And, alas, no one can say with any certainty that these will include our vaunted rule of law, for that has been oozing out of Calcutta for quite a while now; no one can even be sure that its government by a parliament will endure, for twice within the past few years this has been dissolved by the order of a higher authority. The most lasting legacy of the Raj may well
be a stamp which almost every other Bengali in Calcutta carries around with him every day of his life. Bengali names are very often not Bengali names at all, but some dilution of the original made by the first British, who were unable or unwilling to wrap their alien tongues round it. Mukherjee and its thirteen commonplace and Anglicized variants ought properly to be rendered as Mukhopadhyaya when transliterated from its native script; Chatterjee should be Chattopadhyaya (you can see just where that sweating Company man gave up in exasperation and said ‘For God’s sake, let’s call it – jee’). A handful of proud Bengalis insist on the purist version even when they find it necessary – as they so often do in India’s linguistic labyrinth – to communicate it in English. There are some nominations to be found in this part of the world much less defensible than those.

  No student of British India who gets as far as Calcutta should ever fail to go down to Gopalpur-on-sea. It lies about four hundred miles South on the coast of Orissa, in the country of temples to the Lord Jagannath (which the British, of course, turned into Juggernaut; and, indeed, there is something cumbersomely unstoppable about the great chariot upon which the god is trundled out during his festival each year). To get to Gopalpur-on-sea you take the overnight train to Madras from Howrah Station, and well-wishers beforehand are likely to insist that you lock your compartment, once safely inside; twelve years ago, Mummy’s cousin forgot to and she was beheaded by dacoits in the middle of the night. Long before Madras, you reach what must once have been the most genteel watering place East of Frinton-on-sea, which in some ways Gopalpur still resembles. This is where some of the British took their annual hols from the confinements of the city; Mr Nehru himself used to come here occasionally, and today rising Indian executives follow in those imperial footsteps from Calcutta to dear old Gopalpur. They stay, for the most part, in the posh Palm Beach Hotel, the only thing in Gopalpur which is not now distinctly sad and failing. The tourist brochures may insist that Gopalpur is ‘set like a precious stone beside the creamy blue of the sea’ but it has become, except for its short annual holiday season, a ghost town where fisherfolk barely subsist beside the Bay of Bengal.

  Once there were twenty-seven flourishing boarding houses here, served and waited upon and victualled by 160 Anglo-Indian families. Now there is only Ocean View, Christopher Lodge, Colbon House and Sea View, with no more than twenty-four Anglo-Indians to maintain them. These do their best still to make the lodgings like a home from home, as every landlady the British Empire ever produced always has tried to. In Ocean House there is a typewritten sheet behind a bedroom door which says ‘We are not responsible for anything done without our knowledge’ and ‘No anti-social or unlawful things are allowed here’. In the dining room there is a much larger notice which says ‘Silence’, and which you also have to yourself. The street outside, like all the streets in Gopalpur-on-sea, is adrift with sand which has blown up from the beach fifty yards away, leaving only a small channel of cracked tarmacadam for pedestrians in between its shallow banks. The sand has drifted up to and inside The Anchorage and Wroxham House and all the other old boarding houses, where the paint has peeled in the blistering sun and where everything is gently subsiding into the earth from which it sprang. It whirls in miniature storms round the wreckage of one building whose two marble gateposts, the only things there not yet collapsed or tottering, bear the inscriptions ‘Ralph N. Moore’ and ‘Blue Haven 1938’.

  The beach still makes all this well worthwhile, however, for it is long and deep and you can laze on it while the Oriya fishermen, wearing curious pointed hats which help them (so they say) to cleave the water more easily when they have to swim, struggle to launch their boats through the surf and the powerful undertow. So strong is the inshore current along this coast that it is usual for swimming boys – who are very full-grown men – to offer their services as lifeguards when they see you proposing to take a dip. At Gopalpur-on-sea, the swimming boy who presses himself most engagingly upon you is in his mid-forties, with a wife and five children. He is very dark, as Oriyas are, he wears a rag round his head, for their sun is desperately fierce, and he brandishes and cracks like a whip the long thin tail of a sting ray he has caught, which he would like to sell you, for he is also very poor. He is a mixture of shyness and eagerness; he is a diffident chatterer. You ask him his name and he grins very widely, bobbing his head to the side as he does. It is, he says, Nancy Boy Number Five. And you can believe him. You can even visualize its conception one night on the verandah of Ocean House, in the mindless inspiration of some imperial manager with his origins in Braintree and his office just behind Dalhousie Square.

  Now and then, in Calcutta, the English language can be turned back upon its begetters by Indians who can manipulate it as skilfully as any descendant of Lord Macaulay. You can be watching the documentary film The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in one of Chowringhee’s cinemas one night. As that standard shot of Dunkirk comes onto the screen, with the troops wading through the water to get to the boats, after some stirring commentary from the sound track an unmistakably Indian voice in the row behind murmurs ‘Good show’; and it is quite impossible to tell, from the inflexion or the tone, whether its owner is identifying himself with the British and their sturdy retreat, or whether he is mocking them as deftly as any young satirist fresh from the Cambridge Footlights.

  There are other British caste marks. In spite of the large majority of British names upon the roll of lay officers at St Paul’s Cathedral (they dominate the Indian names by thirteen to six) an average congregation there consists of many more Indians than British. Nevertheless, both Matins and Evensong are otherwise quite indistinguishable from those of the Church equivocal at home. The choir sings the Nunc Dimittis with a tonic harmony that His Grace of York would applaud. As the fans whirr and click overhead, the four Indian sidesmen advance upon the altar with the collection in the same slightly embarrassed, carefully in step, all rolling together manner of the English parish churches. During Lent in 1970 the priest in the cathedral pulpit, who was also Indian, produced a sermon one Sunday of impeccably Anglican felicity. He spoke of marvellous concepts like ‘to love is to make the unlovable, lovable’. He did it under a text entitled ‘The relevance of Christ’s Cross to the Teacher in Calcutta’. Somehow he managed to preach on this theme for twenty minutes without once mentioning either Calcutta or anything that had ever happened there. You can discover many such attitudes, all of them at odds with their situation and some of them slightly sinister. At approximately the same time as that sermon was preached, there was a train crash in Australia which killed fifteen people and injured thirty more. It was reported by The Statesman in what journalists call a box or a panel, a setting of bold type to catch the reader’s eye better than any surrounding story, and this box was placed high on the front page. It is possible that as many people died on the street of starvation and undernourishment the night before, within a mile of the newspaper’s office, though if so the loss was unrecorded. Perhaps nothing other than this can be expected in a city which still includes twenty-three telephone subscribers beginning with the word ‘Empire’ and another thirty-nine beginning with the word ‘Imperial’. Where a few letter boxes may still be caught out with an imperial cipher on them. Whose Ambassador cars and taxis, the only such vehicles produced in India are, beneath their Birla monopoly, to all intents and purposes the 1957 Morris Oxford model. Which runs every year at its Racecourse a Calcutta Derby, a Calcutta St Leger and a Calcutta Oaks. Whose most revolutionary elements frequent a Coffee House which they themselves have nicknamed the House of Lords.

  The sponsors of all these manifestations are beleaguered in Calcutta now, but that is because they are rich much more than it is because they are British. They do not have an insulation of Anglo-Indians between them and the natives any more and the Anglo-Indians have totally isolated problems of their own. No longer patronized by their old masters, they are nervous of what they suppose (even when it is not evident) is hostility brewing among their old
inferiors. The Bengalis do, in fact, generally call them Firinghi, which means foreigners. And the daughter of a Bengali family which is highly self-conscious in its generally cultivated ways can be heard producing a wicked imitation of an Anglo-Indian girl in her class, the point of which is completely that she is not as others in school are. So the Anglo-Indians tend to sigh at the thought of Auntie, who managed to secure a foothold in Bayswater or Notting Hill Gate before the British decided that not even half-caste chee-chees (or Eurasians, as milord Hastings would more scrupulously have called them) were welcome on their doorstep any more. They wonder what the chances now are of finding sanctuary in Australia, which is said to be allowing a few in. They cling fiercely, where they are able, to the positions of responsibility they managed to retain when the Raj abandoned them; like the police officer whose moustache is waxed to a pair of pinpoints, whose jackboots are burnished with blacking, whose eyes are invisible behind very dark glasses and who tells you that the boot and the baton are the best thing for a lot of these people; by which he means the full-blooded citizens of Calcutta; and he thwacks his own boots smartly with his cane by way of emphasis.