Calcutta Diaries: Part 5

My earliest memories of the world are filled with the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Calcutta. My parents tell me I was born in the Turret suite of the Eden Hospital. And then due to father's business we first moved to Park Street, then Saltlake and ultimately Barasat.

The city of Calcutta formed the backdrop to most of my childhood memories– the sight of yellow ambassador taxis; traffic jams on Howrah bridge and policemen in white; the trundle of hand-pulled rickshaws through busy lanes; the clatter of trams winding their way through congested streets; Rabindra sangeet wafting through our neighbour’s windows , Maa clearing her voice in the early morning hours and all the cacophony and celebration of Durga Puja. The slogans of ‘cholbe na, cholbe na’ and 'Hok kolorob' became part of my early Bangla vocabulary in the heydays of strikes watching street processions from our balcony.

My first initiation towards becoming an inveterate foodie was being fed hilsa and rice by Bose Dida, who would patiently handpick all the fine bones of the delicious fish and make balls of fish and rice to feed me fondly... her children all grown up and living abroad; visits to New Market to buy imported cheese so precious in an era before India’s economic liberalization and, of course the cakes at Flury’s. 

I remember the excitement and exhilaration of my first visit to the Victoria Memorial as a five year old. With its cavernous interior capped with a bulbous dome and its gleaming white marble, I mistook it for a queen’s palace and it became the benchmark to my childhood idea of monumentality, forming the setting in my mind’s eye for all the fairy tales of princes and queens. To me, all of Calcutta was like Victoria Memorial – grand, white and gleaming – and I treasured this mental image of the city like a keepsake flower pressed between the pages of a beloved book.

The yellow ambassador taxis are still here, as if the automobile revolution that had hit the rest of India had somehow escaped the city and so were the policemen dressed in white.

And yet these grand buildings, a bit tottering with age, with rickety balconies and peepul trees growing out of masonry cracks still stood with dignity and pride, silent sentinels to an age of elegance. Their silence was like that of a dowager empress, wrinkled and unsteady on her feet but every inch as regal. That is when I fell in love with Calcutta all over again.

With its Hellenic pediments supported on lofty classical columns, louvred windows, wrought iron balconies and brick covered in lime stucco, Calcutta’s architecture is regal and timeless. Its grand edifices are a study in classical proportions, a carefully articulated composition of mass and void. Unlike the fantastical Victorian Gothic of Bombay with its visual language of gargoyles and spires, a busy medley of pointed arches, cinquefoils, trefoils, quatrefoils, floral and animal imagery composed of sturdy basalt juxtaposed with delicate limestone, Calcutta’s architecture is elegant and understated.

Without the abundance of stone seen in Bombay Presidency, the Bengal landscape offered only terracotta and brick which forms much of its construction material. The classical proportions of its buildings, however, relieved the monotony of brick masonry. Corinthian, Ionic and Doric – the classical orders ruled. Lime stucco gave the buildings a gleaming whiteness and a purity of colour while the quintessential green wooden louvred window shutters filtered light into the handsome buildings and added colour to the facades.

Calcutta was the imperial city, an 18th and 19th century ode to the European Classicism of the colonial rulers. As the capital of British India, it became the site for most of the principal institutions of British India. The Asiatic Society was established in 1784 by Sir William Jones and by 1814, the Indian Museum had been established – the earliest and largest multipurpose museum in the entire Asia Pacific region and second in the world. With its gleaming white chunam plaster and colonnades of Tuscan columns, the magnificent building inspired awe and curiosity. The Government House, with its monumentality built to match that of Kedleston in Derbyshire, became the seat of all Governor Generals and then Viceroys until the shifting of capital to New Delhi in 1912.

Raja Binaya Krishna Deb wrote in The Early History and Growth of Calcutta, published in 1905: ‘With the exception of London, no city in the great British Empire can be compared to Calcutta in point of size, beauty and commercial and political importance. It is not only the recognized capital of British India, and hence the seat of the Supreme Government, as well as the headquarters of the Provincial Governor of Bengal, but it may be regarded as the second capital of the Empire.’ 

This confidence in its superior status endowed Calcutta’s architecture with a supreme confidence and pride. The City of Palaces, its handsome edifices retained an understated elegance, a self-assured confidence that did not bother to blindly copy and replicate other presidencies or colonial towns. Calcutta set the tone for others to follow.

The shifting of the capital to Delhi, however, dealt a blow to Calcutta’s ambitions. For a few decades after independence, it remained among the nation’s most cosmopolitan cities and economic centre. With its Bengali intelligentsia, Anglo-Indian community, Chinese entrepreneurs and Marwari businessmen, the city lived through the 1960s living life and tapping its feet to Usha Iyer (now Uthup’s) songs at Trinca’s and cabarets at Moulin Rouge and Firpos. However, the Naxalite movement led to an exodus of the businesses in the early ’70s, many of the Marwari families shifting base to Hyderabad, Delhi and Bombay.

The grand buildings of Dalhousie Square positioned between St. John’s Church and St. Andrew’s Church (Scottish Kirk) once created a spectacular urban design statement. The Writers’ Building, the General Post Office with its rotunda and the HSBC Bank were part of an unparalleled urban scheme, a dynamic civic centre of political and business institutions. Over the decades, much of the historic fabric was lost. The Mackinnon Mackenzie building was gutted in a fire, the Currency Building suffered a fate of dilapidation and neglect and the harmonious skyline was jarringly punctured by the concrete addition of the Telephone Bhawan.

I urge myself that in however difficult situation I would be in future, my presence in Calcutta should be my first priority.