Calcutta Read online

  The growth does not now cease, but the atmosphere begins to sour. It will soon be so embittered that the Bengali journalist Girish Chandra Ghosh will be writing that men like Jones, Colebrooke and Wilson ‘respected our fathers and looked upon us hopefully at least with melancholy interest, as you would look on the heir of a ruined noble. But to the great unwashed abroad today, we are simply niggers – without a past; perhaps, without a future. They do not choose to know us.’ For 1857 will have come and gone, bringing to Calcutta the lustre of the first Indian University and the disgrace of the Mutiny. The second of these was entirely British.

  There had been mutinies of sepoy soldiers in Bengal before. In 1764 Hector Monro had suppressed one by lashing a score of insubordinates to the muzzles of field guns and blowing them to bits. In 1824 the 47th Native Infantry at Barrackpore had refused to march on Burma, whereupon their Commander-in-Chief had shattered them with grape shot at close range. But in the great Indian Mutiny, where there was savagery on both sides from one end of Northern India to the other, nothing but British panic happened in Calcutta. The rising began at Meerut in May and by the first week in June it had spread steadily eastwards. The city then quartered three and a half sepoy regiments at Barrackpore, and they were certainly seething with discontent; so was another sepoy regiment at Fort William. If the worst came to the worst the British could only muster a weak wing of the 53rd Foot and artillerymen in Calcutta, though there was a complete regiment of the 78th Highlanders up at Chinsurah. As rumour circulated, the civilian population settled into various postures of defence. Volunteer Guards were formed, with four guns, five troops of cavalry and seven companies of infantry. A tradesman in Dalhousie Square barricaded himself in and waited at the top of the stairs with a loaded gun, molten lead and boiling water.

  On Sunday 14 June, the British were emerging from Matins in their churches when the news went round that the sepoys had mutinied at Barrackpore and were marching into the city centre. It was untrue; the sepoys had been disarmed by the Highlanders. But it started a headlong panic. Colonel Malleson, who was there, described it like this: Those highest in office were the first to give the alarm. There were secretaries to Government running over to Members in Council, loading their pistols, barricading their doors; Members of Council abandoning their houses with their families and taking refuge on board ships in the river. Crowds of lesser celebrities, impelled by these examples, having hastily collected their valuables, were rushing to the Fort, only too happy to be permitted to sleep under the Fort guns. Horses, carriages, palanquins, vehicles of every sort and kind, were put into requisition to carry panic-stricken fugitives out of the reach of imaginary cut-throats. In the suburbs almost every house belonging to the Christian population was deserted. Half a dozen of determined fanatics could have burned down three parts of the town. A score of London thieves could have made their fortunes by plundering the houses in the neighbourhood of Chowringhee which had been abandoned by their inmates. ‘Dr Mouat compared the scramble of people across the Maidan, babbling for the safety of the Fort, to ‘what might have been if a modern Herculaneum had been evacuated in broad daylight on the approach of a visible eruption from a neighbouring volcano’. Sardonically, Girish Chandra Ghosh observed that ‘The state of feeling now exhibited by the notabilities of Chowringhee and their humbler satellites in Cossitollah is very much akin to that which drew the laughter of the world on the aldermen of London and their militia when Boney was a stalking horse in the imagination of the British people.’

  The Great Eastern Hotel became another rallying point for the British and from there they sent out their patrols of Volunteers (armed by Messers Manton and Rodda) to scout the city till midnight, while in the poorer Eurasian quarters people loosened their fear by firing fusillades of blank cartridges for hours on end. Nothing happened. On Monday morning everyone went sheepishly home and started to relieve bruised feelings with a campaign for retribution upon those who had threatened but not harmed them. The Governor-General, Lord Canning, was abused because he would not dismiss loyal sepoys from guard duty at Government House. The hysterical temper of the British civilians was poured into the columns of the local press, including the Poet’s Corner of The Englishman:

  Barring humanity pretenders

  To hell of none are we the willing senders

  But, if to Sepoys entrance must be given,

  Locate them, Lord, in the back-slums of Heaven

  It even found its way into art criticism. ‘Portrait of Captain Hazelwood, which may be seen in Thacker and Spink’s Gallery. The friends of the gallant officer will at once recognize the likeness and feel confident that no undue lenity on his part will be shown to the murderers of women and children, for he has a stern expression of countenance, as if he had just given the order to hang them and their favourers.’ Had this been Meerut, Delhi or Cawnpore, where Europeans had been butchered by mutineers, this would have been a valid Old Testamental reaction. But no one had laid a finger on Calcutta. It was plain terror mixed with shame and it became racialism of a kind the city had not known before.

  *

  The East India Company was now liquidated and its 16,000 soldiers were quick-marched into the British Indian Army. Victoria was proclaimed Queen Empress and the Governor-General was translated into her Viceroy. Within four years, Indians were serving alongside Englishmen on the Imperial Legislative Council and on the presidential assemblies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal. The high noon of the Raj was upon the land and its heat was unevenly deployed, in Calcutta most distinctly of all. From here, the Imperial capital, the Government and its supporting Indian Civil Service ruled with something between benevolent despotism and hurt reproach; and sometimes, intermittently and by the light of its day, it performed even more creditably than that. Standing apart from Government, at an increasing distance, was the other British community of merchants and tradesmen and their various hangers-on. Of them, Sir Bartle Frere was now writing that ‘the English here are almost generally openly discontented, disinclined to remain here or to care for India, and disposed to look at things in anything but an Indian light …’ They did stay, of course, for there was still much money to be made from Bengal.

  The fifties had seen the first Indian railway-train, hauled by the ‘Fairy Queen’, pull out of Howrah for Hooghly and it had seen another line opened from Calcutta to Raniganj, 120 miles away; coal, not as good as the best Welsh or Pennsylvanian but profitable nonetheless, had been discovered up there and fifty pits were working it by 1860. Dundee had started to supply power-driven looms to turn jute into gunny sacks and other heavy packaging; by 1885 there were to be twenty-four of these power-driven factories in Calcutta, with 52,000 operatives, and expatriate Scottish managers in the city were rubbing their hands and regarding that scrofulous plant as ‘gold on silt’. In 1861 regular auctions of tea from the gardens up-country around Darjeeling began in Calcutta and, from then on, more and more of the crop was sold direct to overseas buyers in Mission Row and less and less was shipped to London for resale by the moguls of Mincing Lane. Trade was coming along so comfortably that the Bengal Chamber of Commerce could toss £54,000 in the direction of Lancashire, which was in some difficulty because of the American Civil War; in 1869 it was handing Rs 8,250 to a Mr Cooper for trying, but failing, to open up an overland trade route to China.

  This was to be a half century of headlong commercial rush, accompanied by the first bridge, a pontoon affair, across the Hooghly to Howrah in 1874, the appearance of horse-drawn trams in 1880 and the installation of a telephone system in 1882. It was to be checked only by the opening of the Suez Canal, which soon persuaded the directors of the Peninsula and Oriental Steamship Company to shift their Indian headquarters from Garden Reach to Bombay; a rare example of Calcutta suffering from the primary instincts of commerce which had served it so well so far. Not that the business community needed to worry overmuch about a small loss of prestige. In 1853 the total value of import and export trade for the whole of Bengal had been
just less than £29 millions. By 1901 in Calcutta alone it was worth nearly £111 millions. Buried somewhere in the middle of that goldrush is the strangely foreign figure of Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross, sending his servant Mahomed Bux from the laboratory of the Presidency General Hospital in search of mosquitoes, getting them to bite the poor fellow on his return, but finally discovering that this was how malaria happened. That was in 1898 when, at the other end of the city, Captain Bertie Clay was inventing a bullet with a soft lead nose in the small arms factory of Dum Dum; it was designed to punch a hole the size of a fist in Afridi tribesmen who were undeterred by conventional ammunition, and the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment, who tried it out in the field, reported a shot at one thousand yards which went right through a man after first penetrating the mess tin and thirteen folds of rolled greatcoat belonging to someone in front of him; ‘the bullet’, they said, ‘was in good shape and not distorted in any way’.

  The Bengalis, meanwhile, were becoming more difficult to contain in peace. Their educated élite, the bhadralok (literally the respectable people, the gentlemen), had long been aware how heavily the economic condition of the land had been weighted against its natives. They could quote (in English) things that conscience-stricken Englishmen had said on the subject; what the economist Montgomery Martin had said in 1840 about previous decades, for example, that ‘We have during this period compelled the Indian territories to receive our manufactures, our woollens duty free, our cottons at 2½ per cent, while we have continued during that period to levy prohibitive duties from 10 to 1000 per cent upon articles they produce from our territories … a free trade from this country, not a free trade between India and this country.’ The uneducated ones merely experienced the effect of such things as facts of life, together with the evident contempt and worse of the average Englishman they met. In 1861 a Society for the Promotion of National Feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal was launched, inviting everyone to speak and write Bengali, not English, to wear dhoti and chadar instead of hats and coats, to abandon British foods and hotels, to adopt indigenous games and physical exercises and to take up Hindu medicine again. New names, belonging to the cultural descendants of Rammohan Roy, began to travel through me bazaars and their owners began to demand greater participation, more freedom and less subservience in the running of their land; we shall hear more of them later.

  And for a little while they found some Englishmen in and around Government willing to listen with sympathy. There was Allan Octavian Hume, for example, Customs commissioner and ornithologist, son of a great English radical who, instead of retiring to London, set himself up in Simla and helped to found the Indian National Congress to promote liberal and secular ideals. There was even a Viceroy, Lord Ripon, a Gladstone man, who in 1882 wrote a memorandum aiming to help ‘the small beginnings of independent political life’. It was Ripon who brought in the Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Indian judges sitting alone to try Europeans in the courts. Nothing demonstrated more clearly the distance between the best men of Government and the general men in the streets of British Calcutta. These openly abused the Viceroy as his carriage passed by, gangs of indigo planters came in from the country to do the same, and there was a threat to kidnap him. The Englishman declared that ‘We are on the eve of a crisis …’ and ranted in the same tones it had once used before, when a planter called Rudd had actually been sentenced to death for killing one of his native workmen without provocation. On that occasion the Government had stood fast and Rudd was hanged; this time it watered down the Ilbert Bill so that a European would be tried at least by a jury, half of whom must be European too. A typical British attitude of these years was represented by a correspondent to The Englishman, writing about Calcutta Corporation, which had lately been created with an elected majority of councillors, which meant a majority of natives. ‘Sir,’ wrote this gentleman, ‘With reference to the question of the Municipal Government of Calcutta, I beg to submit that the present system is perfectly preposterous. Calcutta is a purely English city. The city belongs and has always belonged to the English, and the native community in it is simply a foreign and parasitical community which would cease to exist if the English were to abandon it. Its site was selected and the land taken up for it was taken up by the English. They founded it, built it, occupied it, maintained it, defended it, regulated it, and it is still from their commerce and enterprise that its revenues are now developed. The English race, in its capacity for self-government, is admitted by all nations to have never been surpassed by any race that has ever been recorded in history. The Government of India in the plenitude of its wisdom has, however, taken out of the hands of the English race the management of their own city, which they built for themselves, and which they support by their own exertions, and in which they live, and has handed it over to their native followers, who live by them and who are notoriously unfit for the discharge of such functions – as is only too manifest at the present time … The end, however, is not far off. The nations of the world will refuse before long to be done to death by cholera and other loathsome diseases which are diffused from Calcutta over the surface of the globe, in order that Bengali babus may hold places of importance for which they are unfit and in which all they can do is to exercise their talents for chatter, and enable Government to say “See how liberal our administration is in India to the natives.”’

  Sympathy in Government did not last long. There had been too many insurrections in Bengal since the Mutiny, mostly of peasants rising against indigo planters, who notoriously ran their properties on medieval principles. Acting Chief Justice Norman had been assassinated while entering the Town Hall in 1871 and that still cut deeply even after Lord Ripon had come and gone again. There was a strong element in the ICS who believed Ripon and his ideals were the feeblest possible responses to a situation requiring the most decisive and muscular central administration; talk of delegating some authority to Indians was to them the fatuity of the milksop. They got what they wanted. They celebrated Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee first with an earthquake. And within twelve months, in 1899, Lord Curzon arrived in Calcutta and began to be a real Viceroy.

  He began by demanding a more efficient administrative machine. A bill to reconstitute Calcutta Corporation at once offended him, so he scrapped it and produced a new measure himself, which reduced the elected representation and ensured that the Corporation would remain firmly under British control. He decided that the administration of Calcutta University had ‘fallen into the hands of a coterie of obscure native lawyers who regard educational questions from a political point of view’ so he appointed a commission of reform without a single Indian member. It was possibly the largest single insult that could have been offered to the highly self-conscious and educated bhadralok. And then Lord Curzon turned his attention to the vast and increasingly troublesome province in which his Viceregal throne was set.

  At the turn of the century Bengal was administratively a collection of provinces, each with distinctive historical, sub-racial and cultural differences; besides Bengal proper it included Bihar, Chota Nagpur and Orissa. It contained 78 million people. For years the Government had toyed with the idea of dismantling this cumbersome unit, to make it more manageable for hard-pressed civil servants. One reason for Curzon’ s next move was certainly administrative convenience. A larger reason was totally political. In October 1905 a partition line drawn down the middle of Bengal proper created two provinces. To a new East Bengal was added Assam; to the western half of Bengal the people of Bihar, Chota Nagpur and Orissa remained attached. From now on East Bengal was overwhelmingly Muslim in character. And in Bengal to the west, the preponderantly Hindu Bengalis of Calcutta and its hinterland found themselves numerically dominated by Oriyas, Biharis and others with whom almost the only thing they shared was a religion. This meant that the bhadralok, entirely upper-caste Hindu in character, were isolated from most fellow Bengalis and surrounded by people of alien traditions. It was the bhadralok of Calcutta who for
the past half century and more had been more vociferously and intelligently critical of British rule than anyone else in India. They were now to be cornered in the hope that their influence could be reduced; or at least, in the expectation that it could be prevented from spreading.