Calcutta Read online

  We must beware of an error that too frequently overtakes us when we consider Victorian England, of assuming that everyone is living at the same presentably high standard as the popular stereotype; there would be comparatively poor Europeans here, too, sweating it out in barracks and ship as well as in the Writers Building. We hear nothing of them. We hear only of households like that of Mrs Fay, barrister’s wife and dressmaker, who first came to Calcutta in 1780 and returned three times to die there in 1815. One of her early letters home describes their eating habits. ‘We dine at 2 o’clock in the very heat of the day. I will give you our bill of fare and the general price of things. A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, excellent Madeira (that is very expensive but eatables are very cheap). A whole sheep cost but Rs 2, a lamb R 1, six good fowls or ducks ditto, 12 pounds of bread ditto, 2 pounds butter ditto, good cheese two months old sold at the enormous price of Rs 2 or 3 per pound, but now you may buy it for R 1½. English claret sells at this time for Rs 60 a dozen.’ She might have added that you could also obtain best Durham mustard (Rs 2 per lb), pickled oysters (Rs 8 a bottle) or marmalade (Rs 12 per jar) through H. Davies of Tank Square. And by the time Mrs Fay died, soda water was coming in from Messrs Schweppes.

  These were trenchermen, and every June the newspapers had to warn them against overeating in the desperate weather ahead, if they didn’t want to follow the surgeon of an Indiaman who had dropped dead after consuming a hearty meal of beef with the thermometer at 98 degrees. They were also powerful drinkers. A man would easily tipple three bottles of loll shrub (claret) or two of white wine at dinner and even ladies put back a bottle a day (‘fashionably or medicinally’ as Mrs Fay delicately has it). They did their best to keep the climate at bay. Every family had its ab-dar, the servant whose duty was to stay up all night, constantly moving an earthenware jar of water in a larger receptacle containing saltpetre and water, which produced something nearly as cold as ice by morning; the real thing did not arrive until the enterprising Frederic Tudor cut enormous blocks off frozen Wenham Lake in Massachusetts and in 1933 sailed them to Calcutta for storage in the domed Ice House on Bankshall Street. They also had the punkah, usually at mealtimes only, which had probably been introduced by the Portuguese. But the climate generally won in the end, one way or another, if people stayed too long. It often enough took them in a roundabout way when they had barely settled down, as it did Rose Aylmer, who died at the age of twenty after ‘a most severe bowel complaint brought on entirely by indulging too much with that mischievous and dangerous fruit, the pineapple’. A memorable death, nonetheless, for it inspired one of Charles Lamb’s favourite poems, written by Walter Savage Landor, who had fallen in love with young Rose during an intoxicating hour in the Swansea Circulating Library before her parents took her East.

  The climate made them go carefully with their office hours; from nine to noon in the hot season and again from seven to nine, from ten till two and from seven to nine in the rest of the year. They would have gone riding or walking before they started work, of course, and until 1818 all the horse races in Calcutta were run before sunrise. When evening came they could pretty well take their pick of amusement. A drive usually came first, in a variety of carriages, along the Course, which ran south from the Esplanade by the Maidan. Once a week there would be a public evening mounted by three or four of the most prominent ladies of the city, a conversation party which started at ten o’clock or even later and offered a couple of hours’ babble with cold supper before going home. There would be subscription assembly balls at the London Tavern in Vansittart Row, and it was said that many Englishwomen died of consumption brought on by the excessive strain of dancing through the night. There were endless card tables, offering ombre or quadrille but mostly whist; Lady Anne Monson was a very superior whist player. There was magnificent and desperate gambling, with Philip Francis calculating that on one blessed day in the year of our Lord he had cleaned up £20,000 at whist. There was boating on the Hooghly in the cool evening breeze, when parties would take to a budgerow or a mourpunkhy, a snake boat which was eight feet wide and sometimes one hundred feet long, paddled by thirty or forty men; but the most dazzling craft of all was William Hickey’s 48-footer, manned by a crew of fourteen rigged in white linen jackets and trousers with red and green turbans and cummerbunds.

  The cultivated, who were trying to keep up with their Sterne and their Richardson, could also enjoy their theatre. The city’s first one had been demolished when Calcutta was sacked by Siraj-ud-Daula, but a replacement had been built in 1772 and the New Playhouse followed three years later. David Garrick had a hand in promoting the first and supervised the despatch of scenery for the second, and the grateful local patrons sent him two pipes of Madeira for his kind interest. Then they watched The Critic or Venice Preserved or Shakespeare from a seat in the pit at Rs 12 or a bench in the gallery at Rs 6; or they went along to see what Mrs Bristow, that enthusiastic amateur, was offering in the private theatre at her house on Chowringhee; and Mr Playdell’s fine voice was much in demand for his tonic rendering of Let me approach my sleeping love. Calcutta left it to the Russian adventurer Herassim Lebedeff, though, to produce the first Bengali plays at Lebedeff’s Theatre in 1795.

  This was, overwhelmingly, a masculine society. There were more women in Calcutta than in any other British settlement, to be sure, and many a girl came in high hope of a husband; if she got someone in the growing civil service, after all, it meant an assured income of £300 and a pension when he died; and she wouldn’t need to wet nurse any babies, for the climate was an excellent excuse to farm an infant to an ayah. So the young spinsters arrived and Sunday morning on the church steps became a great time and place for casting an eye over the latest boatload of beauties. And before long they were making their first tentative acquaintance, with the hookah, inviting a gentleman of their choice to share the mouthpiece for a refreshing puff, whereupon the man knew that he was at least in with a chance. Or they might dabble with a pinch of his prime Macouba, for Calcutta was a great place for taking snuff. They would patronize the two Frenchmen who settled into the community as fashionable hairdressers, M. Malvaist charging two gold mohurs a month for attending to ladies, M. Siret charging Rs 8 for cutting ladies’ hair and Rs 4 for dressing it, with half prices for gents. For the gents of Calcutta were increasingly mindful of a certain pace that was set in London society. Mr Hastings might have preferred a plain brown coat but the general taste in such matters ran to waistcoats of gold brocade or blue satin, sprigged and flowered at Rs 200–300 each. Calcutta, in fact, began to outstrip London in its fancies after a while; by the time William Hickey got home he was given to understand that the wardrobe he had built up in India was, by the most tailored canons of St James’s, just a little too loud.

  It was a society which thrived on scandals and gossip of scandals. Much of the gossip was circulated, for the two indiscreet years of its life, in the Bengal Gazette. Everyone knew that the latest fragment purveyed about Marian Alipore referred to the Governor-General’s lady, and that greedy old Poolbundy was none other than the Chief Justice, so-called because Sir Elijah had helped his cousin to a contract (or pulbundi) for the upkeep of bridges and embankments at Burdwan. Eventually the Gazette’s freebooting proprietor, Augustus Hicky, went too far and Hastings had him up for libel. There had been plenty of scandals for Hicky to choose from. Hastings and Mrs Imhoff was juicy enough, but nothing was better than Philip Francis and Madame Grand.

  She was Mile Catherine Verlée, to start with, daughter of a French official at Chandernagore. When she was not yet fifteen she married George Grand, a member of the Company’s civil service who had sailed to India in the same ship as William Makepeace Thackeray’s grandfather. Twelve months later, Grand being out at dinner with Richard Barwell, (‘the happiest, as I thought myself, of men’) Philip Francis scaled the walls and took himself to the young Madame behind a locked bedro
om door. A dutiful ayah raised the household. By the time Grand got home Francis had disappeared, but a jemadar was holding Mr Shee (he was later knighted) flat on the floor; Mr Shee had merely rushed in to help after hearing an alarmed whistle from Francis. There were recriminations, there were tears, and Madame Grand was parcelled off to her parents at Chandernagore, till Francis pursued her and installed her in his house at Hooghly. There was talk of a duel, with Francis being supported by his redoubtable cousin Major Phil (Fighting) Baggs, but it evaporated into a Supreme Court action in which Grand sought £160,000 damages. He received £5,000 and soon after left Calcutta for some other station. Only months later, Madame Grand herself sailed for Europe alone. There she eventually became the Princess Talleyrand, hostess to statesmen at the Congress of Vienna, wryly remembered by Napoleon on St Helena, last heard of in extreme old age surrounded by parrots and snuff in a house on the Rue de Lille in Paris. And when she died, randy old Talleyrand merely said that her death simplified his position.

  It was, above many things, a heavily introverted society. It could hardly be otherwise, given the difficulties of travel outside Calcutta. You could go by boat up the Ganga to Benares, but that took 75 days. Dacca was 37½ days away and it took the best part of a month to be transported as far as Murshidabad. Apart from the boat, the palanquin was the only method of travel abroad. The passenger reclined on cushions in this glorified sedan chair, sipping loll shrub or some other refreshment, while four bearers staggered and stumbled along the jungle trails; and, weeks later, he would reach Benares for Rs 500 or Patna for Rs 400. Much better stay at home, even though the streets were so dimly lit that William Hickey once scraped his face rather badly on a wall en route to a party, even though there were certain conveniences like window glass absent from practically every house but the Governor-General’s, even though there were plenty of local hazards like tigers stalking any kind of meat just behind Chowringhee and footpads of both races who made the Maidan a deadly place at night; and there was that awful spot in Bowbazar which was becoming known as Gulla-kutta Gully, or throat-cutters’ lane.

  But at least, you could comfort yourself, villains were properly dealt with if caught. Thieves were generally branded on the hand and pilloried for hours, though Ram joy Ghosh in 1795 stole tenpence and was first gaoled for a few days before being carried to Burrabazar and whipped for four hours up and down the street until he was discharged half dead at Chitpore Bridge; he might, alternatively, have been flogged all the way from Loll Diggy, the great tank of water where old Fort William was, along Lalbazar as far as the house of Mr Willoughby Leigh in Bowbazar. Dacoits, who killed as well as robbed, were savaged to death; fourteen caught in 1789 were pinioned to the ground, one by one in sight of the others, where their right hands and left feet were hacked off at the joints; the stumps were then dipped in hot ghee and the mutilated bodies were left to perish slowly in the sun. Only Mogul jurisdiction contrived more hideous executions than that.

  The chronicles of these times do not mention Bengalis much, except in subservient capacities. There was, in fact, by now a rising mercantile class among them, distantly accepted by the British, having its share in the plunder of Bengal, soon to become much closer to the new masters of the country. The way was almost open for a bright young lad of the district to become as rich on his wits as any red-faced sprig from Kensington. Russomar Dutt worked as a clerk for Hawke Davis and Co. at the turn of the century for Rs 16 a month until the accounts got inextricably confused; the firm offered Dutt Rs 10,000 to straighten out the mess, which he did, and was rich thereafter. There were natives making plenty of money before that. A member of the Tagore family was letting his house on the Esplanade to Company servants for Rs 800 a month, and if an Indian had property he invariably rented it to an Englishman at a very high price. It had long been commonplace for a man to take a local mistress on arrival in Calcutta, as William Hickey took his lovely Jemdanee; and sometimes these liaisons became so deeply affectionate that the Calcutta Gazette in 1809 could advertise for sale ‘a garden house and grounds situated at Toltalah Bazar, which to any gentleman about to leave India, who may be solicitous to provide for an Hindostanee Female Friend, will be found a most desirable purchase’.

  But mostly the British regarded the natives as servants of one kind or another. They were part of that mob of bheesties who crowded all day round Loll Diggy to fill skin bags with water, eight gallons at a time, for their masters. They were dur wans (doorkeepers), peons (footmen), hurcarrahs (messengers), houcca-burdars (stewards), mussalchees (dishwashers), dhobies (laundrymen), or sirdars (chief bearers). They were that army of menials attached to your household; one family of four had 110 servants, the bachelor William Hickey had sixty-three, and thirty or forty was common. They were the sharks who extracted extravagant wages from you (head cook Rs 15–30 a month, bearer Rs 4, syce Rs 6–8, wet nurse Rs 12–16) and so in 1785 you and the other Company employees asked the Directors in London to do something about it, perhaps by fixing a pay scale; then you drifted along to the London Tavern or the Harmonic House in Lalbazar, to sup a dish of coffee and to riffle through the newspapers for R 1 inclusive. And eventually you sailed for home, taking your fortune with you. Samuel Tolfrey, under-sheriff, returned with Rs 600,000, which is six lakhs, which was then £30,000. Thomas Farrer, who defended Nuncomar, walked off with £60,000 and became Member of Parliament for Wareham. And the tales these people told when they reached home were so enticing that, within a few years, the Prince Regent himself was lobbying the Governor-General for a post in this fabulous land. He was turned down.

  *

  This was the society Warren Hastings bestrode like a colossus for thirteen years. The clearest symptom of his management was Pitt’s India Act in the last year of his power, which subordinated the Company even more to the authority of Parliament. The best of his achievement was a shift in the governing cast of mind, though this did not show itself at once. Immediately after Hastings there was Sir John Macpherson, a Skyeman best remembered for singing ballads with equal verve in Gaelic, Spanish and Hindustani and for helping himself on his way to the top by interesting the Nawab of the Carnatic in electricity and the magic lantern. His successor Cornwallis, lately surrendered at Yorktown, thought that Sir John’s twenty months in office had bequeathed him a ‘system of the dirtiest jobbery’ and proceeded to clean it up. He called the Calcutta warehouses ‘a sink of corruption and iniquity’ and did what he could there, too. And then he went on to make the Permanent Settlement. Only a few years before, Frenchmen had been storming the Bastille and what Cornwallis now did was almost as revolutionary in the context of Bengal.

  Traditionally, the revenue had been collected by the hereditary zamindar, a word which literally means landholder, but which covered anyone from an owner to a tax-collector. The zamindars paid dues to the Mogul’s government, later to the Company’s government under the revenue licence that Clive had secured in 1765. In turn they collected what they could extort from the peasantry in their areas; and the difference between the two sums, a jealously-held secret, represented their income. It was a system complicated, as far as the British were concerned, by the vagueness of Hindu and Muslim land-law which recognized force as the only title to land possession. This was anathema to the rising rulers of India, who were Whigs with a belief in justice founded on private property and commercial transaction. It was substantially this philosophy that they now imposed in Bengal; the peasant was to be secure as long as he paid fixed dues to the zamindar, who was to hold his position while he could produce a fixed revenue to the government. It was well-intentioned, it was civilized, it was very English. It meant that the zamindar was a recognizable proprietor who could be sold up like any other squire who failed. What it did in the end was to break up a potentially brutal but always close relationship between peasant and zamindar and lay Bengal wide open to a new breed of speculators from Calcutta and even farther afield; it made the peasant even more uncertain of his future than before. And it was th
e beginning of the end of Muslim supremacy in India.

  It was part of Cornwallis’s permanent aversion to corruption and in this it was enormously misplaced. He had little time for most of the British he found in Calcutta but his distaste for the Indians was even greater. He verily believed that every native of the country was corrupt, and said so; just as the Marquis of Hastings (who gave us the word Eurasian) was to say within a generation that ‘The Hindu appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions and even in them indifferent’. The same language was to be repeated until the British left Calcutta, but from now on new voices could be heard from time to time and the first of them was Sir John Shore’s, who governed near the turn of the century. ‘When I consider myself the Ruler of twenty-five millions of people,’ he declared, ‘I tremble at the greatness of the charge … I consider every native of India, whatever his situation may be, as having a claim upon me; and that I have not a right to dedicate an hour to amusement further than as it is conducive to health and so far to the despatch of business.’ That was the genuine tone of the Raj as the Raj was to imagine it for a century and more to come. It was the voice of the Clapham Sect, for Sir John, like a good many of his successors and their administrators, believed in a profound alliance with the Testaments – with, if anything, a slight preference for the Old over the New. It was also an echo of Warren Hastings.