The Last of the English Theatres in Colonial Calcutta:

Bengal Renaissance, Bengaleese, British, British Rule, british rule, Company Rule, Maidan/ Esplanade, Play Houses

THEATRE ROYAL

Backdrop

After a warm farewell at Lyceum Theatre on 31 March 1870 night George Benjamin William Lewis and his wife Rose Edouin Lewis had left for Melbourne with no plan to revisit Calcutta any sooner for renewing the fame and commercial success they achieved during the last two and half a year of their theatrical performance. It was only a chance meeting with J B Howe, a versatile actor, in a Collins Street restaurant, GBW Lewis and his wife Rose were tempted to take Howe to Calcutta, where he could play for them both comedy and tragedy; moreover, he knew the repertoire and could sing. [Colligan] Because of his precommitments, Howe accepted the position of the ‘Leading Actor’ but for a single season. This was the beginning of a new chapter of Lewise’ theatrical adventure in Calcutta that concluded after six annual sessions in 1876 leaving their Theatre Royal behind continuing their legacy for over four decades.

‘Theatre Royal’ Announced

The Burlesque and Dramatic Company led by Lewises with thirteen actors besides Mr and Mrs Howe and Mr and Mrs Edouin reached Calcutta for the second time in early September of 1871. The next day, Howe writes, they had a rehearsal of the play, ‘Not Such a Fool as He Looks’ at the ‘charming’ little opera hall on Lindsey Street. Next Monday the 16th of September, they staged the play to a house crowded in every part, by the elite of Calcutta, Earl Mayo gracing the performance with his presence, and the two grandsons of the ‘notorious Tipoo Sahib’ being among the native princes and potentates present. On this opening night, Mr George Lewis, before the show began made a delightful announcement to the packed house, in presence of the Viceroy, of his plan to build a theatre house in Calcutta. Lewis Company did a grand performance that evening. Calcutta press reviewed the first appearance of Howe and said, “Mr Howe had not been five minutes on the stage, upon which he came with rounds of hearty welcome when we were quite satisfied that he was the right man in the right place. … he would be a most valuable acquisition to our stage.” [Howe] The curtain rose on Brougham’s comedy of – Faces in the Fire. During that short span, they did several revivals, amongst which was Rip Van Winkle. The team played at this ‘charming opera’ at Lindsey Street every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for no more than four weeks, as an Italian opera company had booked the stage thereafter in advance.

George Benjamin William Lewis 1818-1906. Courtesy: State Library Victoria.

GBW Lewis, the indefatigable proprietor and an exceptionally resourceful and capable manager, was ‘not to be baulked’ under pressure. Without wasting a day, almost miraculously he managed to buy a suitable plot on Chowringhee Road opposite the Maidan, cleared its ground dislodging a ruinous structure and install a new theatre building on it in less than a month’s time. It was the prime location and much sought after for establishing a European centre of entertainment. [Howe] We may recall how earnestly the Calcutta Opera Committee and Augusto Cagli, the Italian Opera Impresario, hunted in vain for a piece of land in Chowringhee / Esplanade area some six years ago for the Grand Opera House before it finally placed at no. 7 Lindsey Street in 1867 where Lewises just inaugurated their current season jubilantly. [Rocha]

The Location and its Surroundings

Calcutta in the south was an obvious centre for new development and by the beginning of the nineteenth century Chowringhee that skirted the open space behind Fort William was described as an ‘entire village of palaces’. The palaces were mostly built as two- or three-storey square and rectangular blocks of Italianate design with pedimented windows and balustraded roof parapets. Their frontages were linked by colonnades, arcades or substantial railings and gateway. The view across the Esplanade open space took in Government House to the right and the Hooghly river ahead to the west. The site of these mansions had been won in a lottery by Colonel Grand, who proceeded to build himself a Sussex-inspired version of the English country house. [Denby]

Five Mansions. nos. 13-17 Chowringhee Forming a nucleus of the present Grand Hotel.

The tract that Carey found in his time covered by the palaces of Chowringhee, about a century before had contained only a few miserable huts thatched with straw; a jungle, abandoned to water-fowl and alligators, covered the site of the present citadel and the course by its side, daily crowded at sunset with the gayest equipages of Calcutta. [Carey] It was indeed an enviable location that Lewises found out within the most dignified stretch opposite the green of the Maidan, a cluster of five stand-alone buildings, that long back Mr Grant had erected with the Lottery money he won, covering nos. 13 to 17 Chowringhee Road, which after two and half a decade were to merge into a classy mega-mansion of the Grand Hotel created by Stephen Arathoon. Arathoon bought the first three premises from Mrs Annie Monk, an eccentric British lady who stringently managed several ill-maintained boarding houses, including these five at Chowringhee and the other four in the vicinity at no. 11 Middleton Row, no.13 Theatre Road, no. 26 Camac Street, and no. 8 Harrington Street. One of her formerly lodgers wrote in London Illustrated: ‘the two hardest things in the world are the diamond and a Calcutta board-house keeper’s heart.’ A little barrister while in Calcutta, he managed to get the best side of her for five thousand rupees. [Hobb] It was this lady from whom GBW Lewis had purchased in September 1871 a dilapidated lodge on plot no 16 Chowringhee, and that must have been at a fabulous price to persuade her to sell a property for the first time. At one time, it seems, here stood the Royal Hotel established by Mr Jack Anderson, formerly proprietor of the old Spence’s. Next stood Mitchell & Co.’s shop, and next to Mitchell’s stood the corner plot, no. 17. The last two were once occupied by the ‘Calcutta Club’, an institution set up for the leisure and recreation of the merchants, brokers, public servicemen and sundry. Colonel Abbott managed its affairs until its board split and doors closed. [Massey] As we understand from Colligan, Lewis founded the Theatre ‘behind the old Calcutta Club’ [Colligan].

Construction and The Interior

The very day after Lewis secured the ground, he engaged over eighty workmen on the spot, with all the ‘plant’ to commence operations, most of them Hindoos, with of course European foremen and architects. The old mansion was down as if by magic, and in four days the foundations were being laid. Huge iron pillars and rafters, arrived by the dozen, and in less than three weeks the roof was on. The decorations and scenery were all being painted at the Opera House so that when the roof was on, they were carted to the theatre, and everything was ready to open on the fourth week. [Howe]

The new theatre, measuring 132 feet long by 60 feet wide, accommodated 800 seats inside. The proscenium, or the space between footlights and the curtain, is occupied by two upper boxes, and by doors leading behind the scenes. It is ornamented with four Corinthian columns one at each corner. Besides these two proscenium boxes, there are … two boxes on each side o the house near the stage and the Viceroy’s box in the middle of the dress circle. The dress circle is supported by iron pillars. It is reached by a double staircase and seated for thee hundred people. The theatre is entirely lighted by one large sun, consisting of gas jets about eight and a half feet in circumference. Architecturally, Lewis’s Theatre Royal can be defined as of later proscenium style of a mid-nineteenth-century theatre and not as of Elizabethan design, as some writers, like Utpal Dutt [Dutt], suggested misleadingly, in all probability due to inaccessibility to faithful documentary sources they needed to verify.

Inauguration of the Theatre Royal

A new chapter in the history of English theatre in Calcutta opened with the inauguration of Lewis’s Theatre Royal on 21 October 1871 with the ‘slight comedy’ by Buckingham, The Silver Lining, with Howe and Rose as leads. This was the beginning of six and a half year-long journey of Lewis’s Burlesque and Dramatic Company performing in the Theatre Royal along with several other global touring operatic and theatrical enterprisers and some local ones. Apart from Mrs Esther Leach, there was however none of the English theatrical performers in Calcutta who enjoyed the ovation of the Calcutta audience so exultantly. Incidentally, due to her untimely death, Mrs Leach reigned Calcutta theatre for a shorter period than Lewises did. Some months before Lewises arrival, the famous English soprano, Anna Bishop had performed in the Town Hall. An opera company led by the Italian impresario, Augusto Cagli toured between Melbourne and Calcutta during the earlier seasons of Lewises. Among others, Mr and Mrs English were the two important English thespians performing at the Corinthian Theatre from 1875. The English born minstrel proprietor Dave Carson arrived before Lewises in the early 1860s and later had occasions to share a stage with them showing signature piece ‘Bengali Baboo’ or some other of his mimes and minstrels. Dave lived in Calcutta until his death on 26 February 1896 and in respect to the departed soul of the artist, the Star Theatre remained closed on the 29th. [Mukherjee]

English Theatre Was For The Englishmen

Unquestionably, it was those downhearted Britishers and Europeans living away from their home who hailed the touring operatic and theatrical companies more to appease their nostalgic sentiments by witnessing the rerun of the family and social life than for appreciation of art and culture. ‘The repertoire of the different companies brought with them should speak more of the crowd-pleasing – popularand fashionable dramas, burlesques, extravaganzas. Shakespearean plays were included because those were fashionable. The elite society of then Calcutta had less care for serious themes, wanted something entertaining on the stage and did not mind a little vulgar or even a racy burlesque if that boosted the audience’ spirit.

ENGLISH Theatre AUDIENCE SAME EVERYWHERE IN MID-19th CENTURY; DEPICTED BY ST GILL, Melbourne, 1853. COURTESY: STATE LIB. VICTORIA

The scenario, however, was changing fast. For the first time in the early nineteenth century, the amateurish Calcutta theatre started transforming into a professional institution with the foundation of Chowringhee Theatre, or ‘The Theatre’ as it was frequently called. The Theatre was a ‘private subscription’ theatre under the patronage of a few liberally educated celebrities like Mr Hares Heman Wilson, David Richardson, C R Princep, J H Stoqueler, Dwarkanath Tagore. Soon it became a fervent hub where Calcutta elites would gather every evening for chats or drinks. “If any public Theatre can ever boast of its connection with a galaxy of brilliant scholars, artists and men of lead and light, belonging to the west, and having an intimate connection with the Indian people, it was the Chowringee Theatre. [Dasgupta] In 1826 when Mrs Esther Leach was inducted, The Theatre superbly presented the best English dramas before the Calcutta audience. The audience of Calcutta was never the same after being reshuffled to let in a small but significant section of young Bengalis versed in English dramatic literature. We may say with confidence that one of Mrs Leach’s significant contributions to the Calcutta society must have been its new culturally ‘receptive audience’ with adequate theatrical sense to judge a stage performance critically. In fact, this ‘audience’ was being groomed systematically for a long time in a number of English schools within their classrooms and on their makeshift stages [Ajantrik] To witness the marvel of Mrs Leach’s theatrical feats at Sans Souci was for them a magic touch complementing their learning of theatrical appreciation.

Newborn Bengali Critics

After two decades, the stage Directress Rose Lewis encountered the same small but very different homegrown audience enduringly settled themselves next to the much larger group of the British and European elitists. Rose had to satisfy a wide range of varied interests of the mixed population with a spectacular repertoire she prepared every season and to reproduce those on the stage as best as she can depending on the talents of her hired artists and ultimately on her own virtuosity and charisma. “Although its predominantly London repertoire was primarily aimed at British members of the colonial public service, Lewis’s theatre attracted many educated Bengalis, noted for their critical knowledge of Shakespeare.” [Colligan] The situation can be well understood from a press review quoted in Colligan’s book:

“It is amusing to note some of the criticisms in the native papers on our theatricals.” Times of India, Bombay Edition continues to report on 11 January 1868 “The tone is by no means complimentary to our theatrical troupes, as their performances are very severely handled, and in many respects, I must confess, with a certain degree of justice. Shakespeare has been studied by our Baboos in their educational courses at the universities and colleges, and they regard everything below Shakespeare as something scarcely worth notice. They are themselves paying considerable attention to dramatic literature, several new plays have recently been published, of which the native press speaks highly. They say that if they were translated into English and placed on our London boards they would create a sensation.”

So unlike the British who were prepared to ‘make allowances’ for the provincial standards of the Lewises, this British-educated Bengali audience expected more than ‘the odd pantomime and burlesque interspersed with, for instance, an unevenly acted Hamlet. None of the critics liked the company’s first ‘leading man’, tragedian John H. Allen, an American mediocre artist. Lewises had to depend on Melbourne for finding suitable actors willing to travel to Calcutta. It deems to be the primary reason why there were not many genuinely good actors to benefit the Lewis’s Theatre as did Williamsons or a Howe, other than Rose Lewis herself.

Rose Lewis

Rose Edouin Lewis 1844–1925 Courtesy: State Library Victoria.

Rose Lewis was veritably a star actress having ‘grace’, versatility, and a ‘good taste’ – regardless of her appearances in restoration plays crossing over into tight breeches. ‘By 1870 her versatility was almost legendary.’ As acknowledged by the English and the Bengali presses, Rose played with equal agility and success literarily in any form of performance ‘from High Tragedy down to Burlesque. As for her male role, there was always some reservations in the reported views. Her Romeo was ‘manifestly’ a buxom lady playing a man’s part. Some ‘babus’ present seemed bewildered by the changes to the text and possibly to the gender of the person playing Romeo.

Rose faced similar adverse comments for her title role in Azad The Prodigal. There the male role she played should be better-suited for a hideous, bony, muscular woman, rather than for someone like Rose Lewis “essentially feminine and graceful in appearance, voice and manner”. Playing the ‘other’ was, of course, one of the common tasks for an actor playing the part of a villain or a hero. She often played the ethnic ‘other’ in many of the plays available to her from the London or New York stage that demanded expertise. She was almost a ‘slave to her profession’; a most cheerful and willing one certainly; yet there were few players who have worked so hard, otherwise she could never reproduce atypical characters like a ‘Zoe’ or a ‘Monee’ impersonating their subtle expressions and mannerism.

Overall Appraisal

Lewises theatres were unpretentiously mercantile and prosaic in scope as its name defines. GBW Lewis the whiz kid of the company, after all, a hardcore businessman who, in terms of profitability alone, could differentiate a circus, which brought him to Calcutta the first time, from a theatre, his later obsession. He understood the box-office but little stagecraft, and not much of the people on the stage with whom he had some rough times too. Nevertheless, money could hardly ever make him all smile. We find him grudging about his loss in his farewell speech for 1873-74 – the weakest of all the sessions when he had bagged GBP 80,000 to take home.

The burlesque and similar forms of cheap entertainment always have a popular appeal irrespective of age or sex. The box-offices at Calcutta as well as at London and Melbourne favoured plays like Jack and the beanstalk, Cinderella, Robinson Crusoe and Aladdin, the political satire, the amazonian leggy chorus girls, the pantomimes such as Lalla Rookh; or The Princess, The Peri, and the Troubadour, and Jack the Giant Killer; or The Harlequin King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. All these pantomimes were part of general nineteenth-century interest by Europeans ‘in the spectacular and exotic otherness of the East’. In the late nineteenth century, the ‘Principal boys’ and ‘chorus girls’ of pantomime and English burlesque evolve in America into an entertainment of ‘less good’ taste featuring ‘bump and grind’ and strip-tease. There were, however, many of those racial items in Lewis’s production. One of the most significant ‘other’ characters Rose enacted was that of ‘Monee’, a Bengali ayah, or a lady’s maid, in Tom Taylor’s comedy-drama, Up at the Hills. The often racist Calcutta anglophone press dismissed the plot that depicted a British Major’s engagement to Monee, as highly improbable. Similarly, they reviewed apathetically Rose’s performance as ‘Zoe’ where a white gentleman contemplating such an alliance with an octoroon was repeated. Interestingly, In the USA the critics commented on the failure of The Octoroon there because of the race question.

There was above all the uncomplimentary histrionics of British dominance, where Indians found themselves barbarously portrayed to humour the white elitists. In pantomime tradition localization of a playscript was not uncommon for making stories colourful and realistic. Colligan mentioned a crude sketch of a babu, which Mrs Edouin Bryer enacted in male attire, delivering a welcoming address to the representative of the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour in India accentuating babu’s servile obedience and his horrible English. In another event, one of the most respectable Bengali, Dr SG Chuckerbutty – the first Medical professional educated in London – was ‘sent-up’ to be heckled in a pantomime show only to please the larger sections of the arrogant fun-loving audience, and perhaps a smaller section who were critical of the over-anglicization of Dr Soorja Coomar Goodeve Chuckerbutty, née Surjo Kumar Chakraborty (c.1826 –1874) better known as Dr Goodeve Chuckerbutty as he himself preferred to be called. Colligan took it for a case of cruel joke that the respectable London-trained Doctor was wrongfully caricatured by twisting his name in a funny manner. We may recall that the contemporary Bengali bards never spared an overzealous anglicizing act of fellow countrymen. Plenty of examples of such mocking and mimicking one may find in loud-mouthed Kolkatar Song as well asin the polite Hansir Gan of DL Roy. Practising this kind of self-criticism publicly was one of the reasons why the ‘Young Bengal’ put off their pro-English lifestyle. Rose Lewis understood this Bengali sentiment well and took the liberty to stage Dr Goodeve’s show with no remorse. She was intelligent and had adequate resources for learning the equations between the British Raj and progressive Bengali minds.

She might have developed a stand of her own as reflected from the episode of staging the controversial play, The Happy Land, a burlesque by WS Gilbert. The play was a notable example of political banning that satirized Gladstone in London, Graham Berry in Melbourne, and in India when it was staged in 1874 in Theatre Royal the Viceroy Lord Northbrook walked out insulted by the localised ’satire’. To save the situation, Rose Lewis wrote the next day admitting her approval of the words spoken in the rehearsal, all about Bengal famine and relief fund, which she quoted for the public to read. The text which appeared to her not so brilliant but nothing was there that may suggest insulting to His Excellency but rather ‘a rub against the selfishness of the natives’ whose duty it is to succour such distress while on the part of the European community it is charity. For Rose, who witnessed political assassins during her stay, the staging of this controversial play was a bold decision, and that she must have taken voluntarily.

Lewis’S FAREWELL TO Calcutta

The Lewis’s company returned to a different Calcutta theatre scene from that which they had left in 1874. Then main rivals for audiences were Cagli’s opera. and touring circuses on the Maidan. After the Lewises seeming retirement, a ‘Theatrical committee’ was formed in a meeting at the Town Hall to raise funds for theatre season. Others, led by a former ‘utility player’ of Lewis’s company, George Anderson, built a new theatre, Corinthian, on Dhurrumtollah Street. There was also a London based company led by Mr and Mrs English that arrived in Calcutta for the 1874-75 season. Lewises this time promised in their advance advertising to Calcutta public two American actors, James Cassius Williamson and Maggie Moore, who proved themselves the most successful stars in their Australian tours. GBW spared no expense in producing the newest and most successful pieces of the as well as some established favourites of the Calcutta modern stage. The Indian Daily News, Bengal Hurkaru advertised the day before covering the front page the varied programmes of three theatres at English’s Theatre, directed by Mrs E. English; Lewis Theatre Royal, directed by Mrs Rose Lewis; and Corinthian, directed by GB Allen. The reviews of all the three performances reported full houses, but the Williamsons and their play Struck Oil received the most glowing report. Struck Oil Apart, in their five-week season the Williamsons presented Kerry, Little Nell, and Rip van, Winkle.

The Lewis Burlesque and Dramatic Company gave their last performance on 29 January 1876. The programme consisted of WS Gilbert’s charming mythological comedy Pygmalion and Galatea a quite satire upon social life and human nature generally. The naive simplicity and innocence of Rose playing in her part of Galatea made the character so amusing and real, and her artful skill was creditably acknowledged by the Indian Daily News and Hurkaru on 31 January 1876 that also reported GBW Lewis’s farewell speech. The speech was largely rambling and self-justifying. He declared that he had not made a profit from the season. Indeed, he had lost a little, some Rupees 2000 per week, until the arrival of the Williamsons. He also focused emphatically that ‘He had tried to do his best for his patrons and friends, and had always made it a duty to bring a respectable company and to keep it so, as he studied respectability as well as talent. It was however an undeniable fact that Lewises made sufficient financial gain from Lyceum and Theatre Royal phases. he had evidently had made sufficient profits to finance the building of investment properties on Melbourne land he had bought in 1865. The Lewis Dramatic and Buffesque company gave their last performance on 29 January 1876. The day after, on 31 January 1876, GBW Lewis sold his interest in the Theatre Royal , the Parsee Operatic and Dramatic Troupe open at Lewis’s Theatre in the ‘Ever fresh, Ever New Opera of Indur Sabha. [Colligan]

END OF THE THEATRE ROYAL

At the fag end of the eighteenth century, Aaracoon Stephan, a Bagdadi Armenian boy arrived at Calcutta in 1894 to paddle jewellery but soon took more interest in Calcutta’s fast developing real estate. He bought three mansions at nos. 13, 14, and 15 Chowringhee from Mrs Monk and added no.16 from its present owner. The mansion at no. 16 accommodated a Royal Hotel forming a part of the Theatre Royal. Stephen developed these properties integrated into a dream Hotel the Grand Dame of Calcutta that remains an icon of the city of palaces. During the first part of the twentieth century, when the Theatre Royal under new management was in function there were a billiard saloon, a bar and a lounge on the Grand Hotel’s ground floor for the convenience of the people attending the Theatre Royal. A little away at its northern side, where the dining hall of the Grand Hotel stands, an open-air skating rink ran as a private club. [Massey]}

The Theatre Royal was burnt down shortly after midnight on January 2, 1919, finally ending the history of the English Theatre of Colonial Calcutta. The Humphrey-Bishop Company, showing there at the time lost everything including music and manuscripts. As the premises including tumbled-down edifice with a worm-eaten stage were fully insured Stephen suffered no loss. The last establishment that entertained Calcutta standing on the plot was the cosy cinema hall, Tiger, screening little offbeat English movies till the early 1990s. The memory of the Tiger Cinema with its small bar and smoking lounge, I believe, may not be completely wiped out from the minds of the Calcutta movie fans. [BalaBenoy]

END OF ENGLISH THEATRE

The tradition of English theatre in Calcutta had its best time between the late 1860s and mid-1870s when after a long interval the London repertoires were being regularly presented on the Calcutta stage to the heart’s content of the culturally deprived homesick British population. Other than the nostalgic reasons, the white people had also immense pleasures seeing the native Indians ridiculed in burlesque and pantomime shows. Viewed from the twenty-first century, the content of Lewis’s repertoire seems often ‘racist, imperialist, orientalist and melodramatic’ but undeniably the company went for the items in response to the popular taste and largely noncommittal attitudes of London and Melbourne. This kind of ‘popular theatre’ can be seen as a transition phase between the formal stage play of the mid-century and the realist drama of the late nineteenth century. The end of the English theatre in Calcutta was not abrupt but a consequence of a long process of cultural transfer under its colonial socio-political environment.

The English theatre never vanished in the blue of Calcutta sky but was emptied for the Bengali theatre to capture with the ‘new audience’ and with the most recent socially and politically relevant vernacular dramas penned by leading essayists, novelists and poets for the first time. The contributions of these ‘new dramatists’ that won over the English stage were enough powerful and influential to scare the government. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 did suppress the theatrical and literary movement for a while but took a new turn to flare up. “After Mrs Lewis left, there was no permanent English theatrical party, although there were Opera House, Theatre Royal and Corinthian Theatre they were meant for casual performances or musical entertainments only. Except [for] a few solitary instances, dramatic pieces too were either light comedies or farces which could not approach the high standard of comic representations where Ardhendu Sekhar or Bel Babu, Khetromoni or Binodini were the rival artists”. [Dasgupta. v.4]. Before long those remaining English theatres and operas were transformed into movie houses or closed their shutters forever.

Girishchandra Ghosh 1844-1912. Noti Binodini 1863-1941 Ardhendusekhar Mustafi 1850-1908

The new audience, which is to my mind a direct product of Mrs Esther Leach’s theatrical presentations to the young Bengali theatre-goers, is indirectly responsible for the emergence of the ‘new dramatists’. In addition to what we already discussed on this issue, I would like to emphasize here the fact that ‘critiquing the theatre’ is a necessary forte not only for theatre appreciation but for theatre production and theatrical enactment as well. Theatre, being a performing art, needs close personal and group interactions and a platform, which was available with Rose Lewis for the theatre enthusiasts like those Bagbazar boys. Rose Lewis as the Directress of the stage, felt sufficiently attracted toward the argumentative young theatre-loving Bengalis, which was revealed in the course of interactions between Rose Lewis and the Bagbazarian youths who set the modern Bengali theatre on a national platform. It was never possible without the research work of Mimi Colligan which I have extensively used, to feel the momentums of journeying through the theatrical movement in colonial Calcutta ultimately blooming into the National Theatre. The relationship between the Bengali enthusiasts and Rose Lewis and her troupe members grew into a professional camaraderie with a far-reaching impact on the history of Bengali drama on the English stage. which we would like to take up separately.

REFERENCE

Ajantrik. 2021. Lewis’s Royal Lyceum: In the Making of Homegrown Professional Theatres and Theatricals of Calcutta. puronokolkata.com. https://puronokolkata.com/2021/07/10/lewiss-royal-lyceum/

Carey, William. 1964. Good Old Days of Honorable John Company from 1800 to 1858; vol.1. Calcutta: Quins. https://archive.org/details/goodolddaysofhon00careuoft/page/n4/mode/1up?view=theater

Chowdury, Darshan. 1995. বাংলা থিয়েটারের ইতিহাস. Calcutta: Pustak Bipani. https://granthagara.com/boi/331880-bangla-theatrer-itihas-by-darshan-chowdhury/.

Colligan, Mimi. 2013. Circus and Stage: The Theatrical Adventures of Rose Edouin and GBW Lewis. Mellbourne: State Library Victoria.https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/177161657

Dasgupta, Hemendranath. 1944. The Indian Stage; v.4. Calcutta: Das Gupta. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.21261.

Dutt, Utpal. 1992. Girish Chandra Ghosh. Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi. https://www.google.com.Au/books/edition/Girish_Chandra_Ghosh/oCARY9BKjT4C?hl=en&gbpv=1dq=Theatre+Royal.+Dharmadas+Sur,+Girish%E2%8%99s+designer,+often+went+with+him+and+between+scenes+of+the+play+they+would+make+mental+calculations+of+the+proportions+of+the+auditorium,+which+was+a+replica+of+the+Elizabethan+design+of+Richard+Burbage.&pg=PA13&printsec=frontcover

Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels, Reality & Illusion: An architectural and social history. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/G/bo3536413.html

Hobbs, Harry. 1944. John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old-time taverns in India. Calcutta: Thacker. 15.53429.John-Barleycorn-Bahadur_text.pdf

Howe, J Burdett. 1888. Cosmopolitan Actor. London: Bedford. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066164185&view=1up&seq=7.

Massey, Montague. 1918. Recollections of Calcutta for Over Half a Century. Calcutta: Thacker. a&usg=AOvVaw3uvydXqyjqB3xbkOOZe4jp

Mukherjee, Sushil. 1980. Story of Calcutta Theatres: 1753-1980. Calcutta: KP Bagchi. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.100095.

Rocha, Esmeralda. 2012. Imperial Opera : The Nexus between Opera and Imperialism in Victorian, 1833–1901. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/imperial-opera-the-nexus-between-opera-and-imperialism-in-victori

A Note on the Featured Image

This hand-coloured etching by Edward Gurk depicts the inside view of a proscenium theatre, Théatre I.R. de la cour, prés le palais, and not of Lewis’s Theatre Royal, Calcutta. Image Courtesy British Museum.

LEWIS’S ROYAL LYCEUM

Anglo Indian, Bengal Renaissance, Bengaleese, British, british rule, Cultural, Maidan/ Esplanade, New Township, Play Houses, Ways of Life

In the Making of Homegrown Professional Theatres and Theatricals of Calcutta

View of Calcutta Maidan By Charles D’Oyly. Courtesy: BL. Lewis’ Royal Lyceum Theatre was situated near Ochterlony Monument.

Backdrop

When the English came to Calcutta they brought with them the plays of William Shakespeare. When Lewises arrived in 1864, English theatre made a century dating from Calcutta’s second playhouse: the Calcutta Theatre. The first one, named ‘Play House‘, already destroyed in the Battle of Lalldighi, had left its little but precious history untraceable. It was, however, the collective experience contributed by a number of small private playhouses that shaped the minds of the Calcutta audience of the 1840s to appreciate Augusto Cagli’s Italian operas and the English theatres of Mrs Esther Leach. The immense goodness she brought about in developing Calcutta’s theatrical culture through her two unlucky establishments, the Chowringhee Theatre and the Sans Souci together with her liberal-minded friend circle paving the inroad toward making modern vernacular theatre, which had to wait for a decade more to begin. Lewises entered the scene in that opportune moment and did their best to inspire and facilitate instituting the Bengali theatre on the English model.

For a long time, Calcutta had no permanent home to stage an opera or a theatre after the Sans Souci collapsed in the 1840s. That is why in 1866 it was a challenge for the haut society of the City of the Palace to accommodate in the Town Hall the debut performance of Augustus Cagli – though it was one of his orchestra-less chorus-less semi-staged concerts played by a small band of 12 artists. In spite of the serious limitations of the utilitarian structure of the public Town Hall, the event proved to be a grand success. [Rocha] It was a time when both the media and the townfolk argued that what was missing from Calcutta was an opera house, for the city already boasted a fine opera company and an enthusiastic audience. They genuinely believed, ‘were a suitable building erected, an opera could be maintained here’ [Rocha]. Happily, not even a year went by, as many as three new theatres founded in Calcutta: Cagli’s ‘Opera House’ later rechristened The Corinthian, the Lindsay Street Opera House reserved for Cagli, and the Lyceum on the Maidan set up by Lewis couple. [Rocha]

Rose Edouin Lewis (1844-1925) Courtesy: Mimi Colligan

George Bejamin William Lewis (1818-1906). Courtesy: Mimi Colligan. State Library of Victoria Collection

Lewises in Calcutta

Six years before establishing the Lyceum theatre, George Benjamin William Lewis had toured Calcutta in early October 1860 with his Australian Hippodrome and Mammoth Amphitheatre. He opened here a circus on the 16th of October in a huge tent in the Maidan with the special permission of the British authority. After many gainful years of running the circus business in China and India Lewis had sensed an upcoming market for a British theatre in two colonial cities – Calcutta and Shanghai. Lewis moved from circus to stage in 1864 while in China with lady Rose – a 23-year-old English actress of rare talent and beauty whom he married on their boat sailing to Shanghai. Lewis’s Dramatic and Burlesque and Ballet Company arrived in Calcutta in early September 1867. Acquiring access to a rent-free land on the Maidan, he had erected a prefabricated corrugated iron theatre close to the Ochterlony monument. Lewises inaugurated their first theatre in Calcutta under the banner, ‘Lewis’s Royal Lyceum’ in mid-September 1867. Sadly, in less than two months a disastrous cyclone lashed about Calcutta on the first day of November, tearing down some old buildings and parks including the newborn Lyceum flattened to the ground. It took, however, only eight days for Lewis to erect the structure anew, which he did without taking any help offered by the Calcutta sympathizers.

Programme for the School of Scandal at Lyceum, Calcutta Feb. 1869. Courtesy: Mimi Colligan. State Library of Victoria Collection

Lyceum Royal Theatre

The theatre was impressive and well-equipped, approached by a broad flight of steps. The hall measured about 40 by 100 feet claimed to hold 800 people. With an interior decorated with guilt plaster walls and red velvet seats, ‘ample and imposing stage’, a proscenium, pit, boxes, and a gallery it had a look of an English provincial theatre. While the overall management of the theatre was the responsibility of Mr George Lewis, his wife Edouin Rose Lewis as the ‘Directress and Star’ dominated the acting and the choice of plays, stage managing, and rehearsing. As an actress, her versatility was legendary. She had the ability to play ‘from High Tragedy to Burlesque with equal skill and success ‘. She also appeared in a male role but, as Englishman reviewed on 19 Jan. 1874, with limited success being ‘essentially feminine and graceful in appearance, voice and manner’ [Colligan]. The first dramatic company Lewises had engaged in Calcutta consisted of 21 artists. Except for Austin Shanghai – the young acrobat from China, all others were from Melbourne. Lewises had produced at the Lyceum mainly Elizabethan and Victorian tragedies and comedies besides burlesque and pantomime. Their repertoire reflected the ‘popular taste and largely unquestioned attitudes of London and Melbourne’ an admixture of British and orientalist, melodramatic and burlesque, even sometimes with imperialist and racist appeals. During the two and half years, a transition from the formal stage play of the mid-century to the more natural acting style and realist drama of the late nineteenth century took place representing the theatre of Sydney Grundy, H.A. Jones, Pinero, Ibsen, Wilde, and Shaw. Lewises developed Lyceum to be an audience-oriented professional theatrical enterprise. Both George and Rose Lewises were English by birth, and it was an English theatre of predominantly London repertoire they staged for the Calcutta audience comprising the British and European members of the civil and military services and their families, not discounting, however, the British educated natives of Bengal. Lewises welcomed all theatre lovers irrespective of racial differences, yet their pricing policy restricted admission of the disadvantaged ones. The price-tags of the admission tickets were on the high side: two to five rupees at the beginning, afterwards revised to one to five – which were, in fact, more expensive than at London where the highest being of about seven shillings. Later, they discarded the one-rupee ticket because of the ‘bad behaviour of audience’ at the lower gallery [Colligan]. From the very beginning, Lewises took all care to keep their theatre high in professional standard and in respectability. Lewises took pride in keeping up that will to the last, as revealed from the farewell address of Rose Lewis delivered in 1876 before leaving Calcutta finally [Dasgupta].

Winding-up of Lyceum

In early 1870, after more than two and half years in India and their third season in Calcutta, Lewis decided to end his connection with the sub-continent and return to Australia. He advertised on March 10 1870 his Lyceum Theatre for sale. Lewises wished continuity of the English theatre in Calcutta, and perhaps they were also reluctant to cut off Calcutta link in haste that was what prompted them to encourage Willie Gill, a ‘low’ comedian in their team, to take a venture to start a theatre anew on the site of Lyceum. After a farewell performance at Lewis’s Lyceum on 31 March 1870 night Lewises left Calcutta without any plan to coming back soon. Willie Gill was true to his promise to provide a theatre on the old Lewis site. Together with a Calcutta businessman, named Sultana, Gill opened a theatre on the Maidan in October 1870. He opened their theatre under the banner, ‘Olympic Theatre’, in early October. But although some critics liked the ‘capital actors’ the venture failed. p.95 [Colligan]The Lewis company was only one of many entertainment troupes that visited Calcutta in the mid to late nineteenth century, but they were the first to stay for a length of time of seven years. They influenced Calcutta theatre in the form of their public purpose-built proscenium theatre itself and by their repertoire and production values [Colligan]. The story of Lewis’ Royal Lyceum ends here but not before it lights up the first Modern Bengali Stage.

II A STEP TOWARD BENGALI PUBLIC THEATRE

Apart from the direct influence of the performing English theatres in nineteenth-century Calcutta, there had been a conscious learning process introduced by some extraordinary schoolmasters for their students to acquire tastes and skills of theatrical arts and stage crafts. In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was taught in several venerable Calcutta schools before it was a subject of higher study in Hindu College. English literature was studied there under great teachers like David Lester Richardson, C.H. Tawney, H.M. Percival, and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. Prof. Richardson used to advise his students to go to see Shakespeare on the stage. [Dahiya] The boys knew the names of the good actors and actresses of Calcutta, and also familiar with the names of David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and some other famous performers of London theatres. [Mukherjee]

Theatre In Schools

The reading of English dramas and recitation and enacting of scenes were practised and encouraged in such early nineteenth-century educational institutions of Calcutta as Drummond’s School at Dharamtolla, Sherborne’s School at Chitpore, David Hare’s School, Gour Mohan Auddy’s Oriental Seminary, and Alexander Duff’s General Assembly’s Institution. [Bandyopadhyay]

The boys of David Hare Academy staged ‘The Merchant of Venice’ on 16 and 24 February 1853 under the direction of Mr David Clinger, a teacher of English in Calcutta Madrassa. Mr Clinger was also associated with the Sans Souci Theatre. Sambad Pravakar reported on 10 February 1853 that it was the first such performance by students in an educational institution [Mukherjee]. The credit, however, as we understand, should go instead to the Dharmatalla Academy of David Drummond (1785-1843) for staging Home’s tragedy ‘Doglus’ in 1824 – a decade before the establishment of Hindu Theatre, being the earliest attempt in making young minds ready to appreciate modern theatre.[Dasgupta]

Bengali Private Theatres Before Lyceum

Before Lewises’ Dramatic company landed with its collapsible theatre, Calcutta had experimented with the realities of establishing a few short-lived indigenous private theatres:

HINDU THEATRE (1831) In response to the public demands voiced in Samachar Chandrika since 1826 for establishing a theatre on the model of the English theatre, Prasanna Kumar Tagore, himself a product of Hindu College, founded the Hindu Theatre on 28 December 1831, with his college friends imbibed with westernised values and ideas in mind. This was the first theatre founded by a Bengali, housed in his garden-house in Narkeldanga, a Bengali quarter, for a Bengali audience, but had no place for Bengali drama, and therefore it was never considered as the first English modelled native theatre. The Hindu Theatre was an aristocrat theatre and its audience comprised Indians and Europeans admitted by private invitation only. Hindu Theatre, in spite of its excellent performances, was short-lived. It might have failed to appeal Bengali audience at large because of the sophisticated and exotic content and form of the plays it staged.

SHYAMBAZAR THEATRE (1835) After Hindu Theatre closed, the Shyambazar Theatre came next, again as a private theatre, to stage Bengali plays. The theatre was housed at the residence of Babu Nabin Chandra Basu in North Calcutta. On 6 October 1835, the theatre was inaugurated playing ‘Vidya Sundar’ – a long play that continued from 12 midnight to 6.30 in the morning having its different scenes enacted at separate locations with appropriate makeover within the sprawling mansion. The female roles in Vidya Sundar were played by female artists: Radhamoni, Jaidurga and Rajkumari. The theatre died a premature death like its immediate predecessor. After Nabin Chandra Basu’s Shambazar Theatre there was a lull in the world of Bengali theatre for about two decades. Nothing happened except the handful performances of English dramas at Calcutta schools between-whiles as mentioned before.

ORIENTAL THEATRE (1853-1857) Bengal Harkaru of 7 April 1853 reported that the students and ex-students of the Oriental Seminary raised a sum of Rs. 800/- to set up the theatre at Garanhata, Chitpore for staging Shakespeare’s plays. The pioneers included Priyanath Dutt, Dinanath Ghosh, Sitaram Ghose, Keshab Chandra Ganguly and others. It took some five months to get ready under the drilling of Mr David Clinger, an English teacher at Madrassa and an associate of Sans Souci, and Mr Roberts and a lady named Miss Ellis. There were also some European actresses who took part in Shakespearean plays, as we find Mrs Greig appeared as Portia in their play Merchant of Venice on 2 March 1854 and then on 17 March. Oriental Theatre was open to the public against admission tickets of Rs. 2 each, which to be had of Messrs F W Brown & Co. and Baboo Woomesh Chunder Banerjee, Cashier, Spences Hotel.

JORASANKO NATYASALA (1854) This was again a short-lived English theatre, contemporaneous with its neighbouring Oriental Theatre at Baranasi Ghose Street. Jorasanko Natyasla was a privately-owned theatre of Babu Parry Mohan Bose but not a ‘private theatre’ since it practised admission by tickets sold publicly. On 3 May 1854, it staged Julius Caesar in English. At the end of the year, Jorasanko Natyasala staged some plays in Bengali in response to the appeal of The Hindu Patriot (11 May 1854).

OTHER PRIVATE DESHI THEATRES Besides these four theatres, there were some more short-lived private theatres of great historical importance that had performed vernacular dramas with local talents, like the Belgachia Theatre (1858-1861), Pathuriaghata Theatre (1859-1872), Sobhabazar Theatre (1865-1867), Jorasanko Theatre (of Tagores) (1865-1867). All the theatre houses were local initiatives that ceased to exist little before the coming of Lewises in mid-September 1867 to establish Lyceum Royal Theatre at Maidan. Two other such vernacular private theatres, Bowbazar Theatre (1868-1874) and Baghbazar Amateur Theatre (1868-72) were contemporaneous to Lyceum. It was the latter, which had its history intertwined with the Lewis’ Lyceum affairs.

BENGALI AUDIENCE & ESTHER LEACH

Lewises’ theatres had gained a mighty advantage of having a ready Bengali audience receptive and appreciative of theatrical entertainments and artistry, backed by their elementary learnings of the English dramas and theatrical arts at schools, besides their exposures to the stage performances of the English and vernacular plays. An earnest Bengali spectator was born to be tuned to the English theatre of the latter half of the nineteenth century Calcutta and for that largely responsible were Mrs Leach’s theatres, particularly the Sans Souci, which is overstated sometimes by historians as “the last important English theatre in Calcutta” [Dasgupta?] belittling the seven years Lewises contributed to Calcutta’s English theatre. On the other hand, some of them, like Colligan, preferred to overlook the deep imprints of the ‘actress-manager Mrs Esther Leach’ who had achieved, to their mind, only ‘a moderate success’ [Colligan].

LYCEUM: A BOON TO YOUNG BENGALI THEATRE

Advantaged with the new research findings on Lewis’ theatres in Calcutta, which remained unavailable to the veteran theatre historians, one can identify today more confidently the eventualities bearing on the emergence of the professional Bengali theatre – modernistic, realistic and democratic – that outlasted the English theatres of the English in Calcutta. For the sake of convenience, I may be allowed to tag the period of Olympic Theatre (popularly called ‘Sultan’s Theatre’) [Binodini], which followed next, to the history of Lewises’ Lyceum Royal Theatre, on the plea of Olympic Theatre being merely an extension of the former without adding anything new for its identity other than the name. The special significance of the Olympic Theatre was that, in absence of the Lyceum, it facilitated the Baghbazar amateurs to inspect the specimens of Lyceum’s building, auditorium, stage, scenes and screens.

Since this paper is restricted to the phase of Lewis’ Royal Lyceum Theatre most of the contributive issues involved with the Lewis’ Theatre Royal will remain untold. I will concentrate here on only two relevant issues:

A historic friendship between the two great thespians: Mrs Lewis and Girish
Adaptation of English model by Dharmadas in building early Bengali theatres

CAMARADERIE BETWEEN GIRISH AND MRS LEWIS

The most critical event in the history of professional theatre in Bengal deems to be the chance friendship between Girish Chandra Ghosh, the father of the Bengali theatre, and Mrs Rose Edouin Lewis, the queen of the English theatre of then Calcutta. The two versatile thespians were exactly of the same age, born in 1844, Girish on 28 February, Rose 29 January. Their bonhomie served as the foundation for the generous cooperation and support the young Bengali theatricals received in transforming their traditional resources and styles into the professional theatre of the modern time that should happen in course of the next five years.

Girishchandra Ghosh (1844-1812) Source: Girish-rachanabali. V.4

Amritalal Basu, a doyen of Indian theatre, revealed in his memoir how Girish came in touch with the famous English actress Rose Edouin Lewis. Girish, it looks like, often visited Lyceum theatres even before he met Mrs Lewis in his office. He was then in the employment of the John Atkison & Co. at no. 6 New China Town Street. Mrs Lewis had occasions to visit Atkinson’s as the company was looking after her business account. Incidentally, it was Girish who was keeping her books. Mrs Lewis, already a celebrity – a star actress, unapproachable ordinarily by commoners like young Girish. It is interesting to note here that once Amritalal before he ever met Girish, had refused to believe that mere an office clerk, what Girish was, could ever recite or play a Shakespeare. For Girish, however, theatre came naturally, and his job title did hardly matter. On the contrary, Girish had a sore point with ‘acting as a profession ’ that was looked down on in respectable Bengali society. This was why Girish had been much reluctant to print his name on theatre bills unless a qualifier ’amateur’ was annexed to guard his honour. This again might be the primary reason for his disapproval of ticket selling, which was considered lowly in the middle-class mindset. [Basu]

As mentioned earlier, Girish had frequented Lyceum theatre before he met Rose Edouin Lewis at Atkinson’s. [Gangopadhyay] He had times to talk about the plays he witnessed and frankly exchange views on points of strength and weakness insightfully. Mrs Lewis was supposedly very pleasantly surprised seeing in her bookkeeper a critical mind of a matured artist. She used to take him for an evening ride on her phaeton for prolonging discussions on various aspects of western dramas and their enactments.

Their friendship, Amritalal and other theatre historians think, had helped Girish in flourishing his theatrical genius. The kind of discussions he had with Mrs Lewis and the exposures he had to English plays at Lyceum, helped Girish enacting a ‘Nimchand’ in the play ‘Sadhabar Ekadashi’ so bewitchingly. Amritalal Basu, in his reminiscences, spoke of Girish playing the role of Nimchand in verse:”মদে মত্ত পদ টলে নিমে দত্ত রঙ্গস্থলে । প্রথম দেখিল বঙ্গ নব নট গুরু তার ।।” [Girishchandra] Mrs Lewis must have been present in one of the repeat shows of Sadhabar Ekadashi to witness Girish in acting, which as we understand from Utpal Dutt, she considered a masterpiece. [Dutt]

BAGHBAZAR AMATURE THEATRE

Ardhendu Mustafi 1850-1908 || Amritalal Basu 1853-1929 || Dharmadas Sur 1852-1910 || Radhagobinda Kar 1852-1918

When the Bagbazar Amature Theatre (1868- 11 May 1872) created by a few local theatre enthusiasts who wanted to do their theatre in a modern way as did the English theatres at Lyceum, Opera House, and Corinthian in then Calcutta. They also wanted to make their theatre open to all, that is, not restricted to the few rich elites, but to the commoners as well. In spirit and actions, the Bagbazar Amateur Theatre was the precursor of the Great National Theatre initiated by the same aspirant theatricals: Nagendra Nath Banerjee, Dr Radha Madhab Kar, and Ardhendu Shekhar Mustafi. Girish was then working at Atkinson‘s. The group rehearsed under Ardhendu, and on the day of ‘Experimental Play’ (dress rehearsal), Girish joined the initiative as their undeclared leader. He, however, refused their plan for selling tickets, instead, he advised collecting donations to meet expenses that Madhusudan Dutta had recommended earlier.

The play ‘Sadhabar Ekadasi’ was first staged in October 1868 by Bagbazar Amateur, after a year their theatre founded and repeated four times within a fortnight under the directorship of Girish on different dates in different places. Two more plays of Dinabandhu: ‘Biye-pagla buroh’ and ‘Leelabati’ were staged with overwhelming success. ‘Without Dinabandhu’s simple and socially relevant plays the young thespians would have been nowhere.’ [Mukherjee] They felt now more desperately than ever for a permanent theatre to stage their enactment in a natural style as done in the contemporary world of English theatres.

National Theatre was not born yet. The members of the new Bagbazar Amateur Theatre were then drifting aimlessly without a home. The attention of a few energetic young was drawn to a collapsible theatre building in the maidan belonging to the Lewis’ Lyceum Theatre. Unfortunately, before they reached, the Lyceum sold out. On 10 Mar 1870, George Lewis advertised for the sale of Lyceum building and accessories including the extended stage scenes, dresses, and machinery. Before leaving Calcutta Lewises had encouraged Wille Gill, a funnyman in their team, to take a venture to keep up the presence of the British theatre in Calcutta. Gill took the challenge and reinstalled the theatre on the same site with a new name, ‘Olympic Theatre’ in early October 1870. Gill did it in collaboration with some A.G. Sultana, the proprietor of Liberty Hotel – a small bar at 85 Bentinck Street [Bengal Directory, 1876]. Sultana worked for Gill as the contractor for erecting the theatre building, and perhaps it was he who did the same job two and half years ago for Lewises. Those days, as we may find in Binodini’s ‘আমার কথা’, the theatregoers often referred to the new ‘Olympic’ as ‘Sultana’s Theatre’ after the name of Sultana – a flamboyant who sported earrings [Binodini].

Hunt For A Model Theatre

Apparently, when the three Baghbazarian youth, Amritalal, Dharmadas Sur, and Nagendra Banerjee, at last, reached the English theatre at Maidan, Lewises had left and in place of their Lyceum Theatre, the Olympic Theatre, nicknamed Sultana’s theatre, was in operation. The zealous theatricals bought three ‘pit’ tickets and watched intently the performance of English theatre, and at the same time, sitting on their chairs, they gathered the details of the auditorium and stage-related objects, including an estimated size of the stage screen upon calculating the number of the folds. It was the idea of acquiring building materials cheap and affordable that brought them to the door of Sultana who lived in a lane off Bentick Street. In an adjacent plot, he had dumped the old pieces of dislodged materials of the Lyceum Theatre. They did not succeed in getting those as Sultana demanded an absurdly large amount for the lot. Moreover, some experienced well-wishers advised the youngmen against buying spoiled materials with holes. They spent more justifiably around Rs 3,000 on some good teak logs purchased from the Guillinders company, which were eventually reused in constructing the Star Theatre and remained there in sound condition even in 1927 [Basu].

First Bengali Theatre after the model of Lyceum Theatre

The visit to Sultana, however, was not altogether futile since that had allowed Dharmadas Sur a singular opportunity to steal a look with his penetrating eyes at a wooden miniature of the Lyceum Theatre that served as the model for building the first homegrown theatre. [Amritalal] Lewis theatre had its walls and the roof made of corrugated sheets. Dharmadas made the walls of wooden planks, which were cheaper than corrugated sheets because those were not saleable at the old railway market. Dharmadas finished the building flawlessly proving his extraordinary talent in stagecraft, equipped with his discerning eyes and nimble fingers. He had no engineering background but was fortunate to have someone like Jogendranath Mitra, a civil engineer by his side to provide expert advice whenever needed.

Dharmadas Sur was also generally recognized as the first scene painter of the public theatre. He got his ideas from the scenes used in contemporary local English theatres, the Lewes Theatre at Chowtinghee and Opera House at Lindsay Street. These theatres used portable ‘rolling’ canvas scenes. The style of the English scenes was at first imitated, then modified with a few local touches, to recreate the Bengali play being performed. Scenes of Nildarpan, the first public theatre play, were painted in this manner. [Mukherjee] Dharmadas apart, we understand from the narration of Radha Madhab Kar that he was no less involved in making the first modern stage. It was Girish who told his young colleagues that the use of drop-scene was no good to give effect all kinds of stage events, and we must try to install the sliding scenes as could be found in operation in the Olympia Theatre (Sultana’s) at Maidan. Radha Madhav,
then a student of Engineering College, was surveying the Maidan area living in a camp. He with a few others (names not mentioned) bought tickets to witness ‘Macbeth’ played by one American among mostly Australian artists. The show won their heart. Radha Madhab felt an urge to learn how to reproduce similar theatre scenes. He wrote a personal letter requesting permission to go and study the interior of the Olympic Theatre, which was readily granted. He took full advantage of their friendly cooperation in learning several stage-art techniques like how on the stage the boats float, the man vanishes while flying in the sky, or how to recreate raining and thundering effects on the stage. All these techniques were translated into realities while erecting their own stage in the house of Rajendra Pal. Although Radha Madhab Kar’s episode was not corroborated by the contemporaries, his contributions may not be ignored altogether unless proved otherwise. [Gupta] It is, however, a well-established fact that the Great National requisitioned the service of David Garrick, originally principal of an art school and then an independent painter and photographer, to paint few representative flat scenes: a garden, a forest with mountains, and the interior of a room. He also painted a drop-scene depicting a view of Varanasi on the Ganges. They paid the painter a remuneration to the tune of Rs. 600/-. The next development was the introduction of carpenter or shutter scenes which were painted on flat boards and fixed on two wooden frames in two halves which were to be pushed from two sides to join up in the middle of the stage to form one whole scene. Dharmadas Sur also painted a panoramic scene. As early as 1875, that is. within three years of the beginning of the public theatre, the ‘audience saw a railway train on stage. Dharmadas was regarded as the man who taught the Bengali in making stage, while Girish Ghosh and Ardhendu Mustafi taught them stage-acting. [Mukherjee] All credit of having the permanent stage of the first theatre must go to Babu Bhuban Mohan Neogy who borne the entire expense amounting to Rs. 13,000.00 and kept it under his protection. [Dasgupta v.2] Such theatres as George Lewis installed at Maidan and served as a model for the National Theatre were said to be available from English iron foundries like Bellhouse and co. of Manchester at a substantially high cost.

End Notes

When the audience of the modern theatre of Calcutta was a product of the 1840s, particularly under the spell of Esther Leach’s English theatres, it is undoubtedly the Lewis’ theatres: the Royal Lyceum and Theatre Royal, that directly contributed to the making of modern Bengali theatre and theatricals. The special significance of Lewis’ first phase, centred around Lyceum Theatre and the contemporary Bengali theatrical movement, remained so far unheeded in the history of theatres because the episodes of the Lewis’ enterprises were never accessible until some credible researchers, like Colligan, published their findings, which have been extensively used in this essay. The second inning of the Lewises coincided with the birth of the first homegrown professional public theatre in Calcutta – a topic for the next post.

REFERENCE

Bandyopadhyay, Brajendranath. 1939. বঙ্গীয় নাট্যশালার ইতিহাসঃ ১৭৯৫-১৮৭৬. Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.477805/page/n5/mode/2up.

Basu, Amritalal. 1982. স্মৃতি ও আত্মস্মৃতি. Edited by Arunkumar Mitra. Calcutta: Sahityalok. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.298801.

Binodini Dasi. 1959. আমার কথা ও অন্যান্য রচনা. Edited by Nirmalya Sanyal. Calcutta: Subarnarekha. http://boibaree.blogspot.com/2018/09/blog-post_19.html.

Chowdury, Darshan. 1995. বাংলা থিয়েটারের ইতিহাস. Calcutta: Pustak Bipani. https://granthagara.com/boi/331880-bangla-theatrer-itihas-by-darshan-chowdhury/.

Colligan, Mimi. 2013. Circus and Stage: The Theatrical Adventures of Rose Edouin and GBW Lewis. Melbourne: State Library Victoria.

Dahiya, Hema. 2011. “Shakespeare Studies in Colonial Bengal: The Early Phase.” Sheffield Hallam University. https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/00799a00-c799-3b67-838c-fe0a08050943/?utm_source=desktop&utm_medium=1.19.8&utm_campaign=open_catalog&userDocumentId=%7B2bde07bb-1bbe-42c0-be71-f1cf8300a110%7D.

Dasgupta, Hemendranath. 1938. The Indian Stage; v.2. Calcutta: M K Das Gupta. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.228124/mode/2up.

Gangopadhyay, Abinashchandra. 1927. গিরিশচন্দ্র. Calcutta: Nath Brothers. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.302236/page/n1/mode/2up.

Gupta, Bipinbihari. 1952. পুরাতন প্রসঙ্গ. 2nd ed. Calcutta: Bidyabharati. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.299309/page/n5/mode/1up?q=রাধা+.

Mukherjee, Sushil. 1980. Story of Calcutta Theatres: 1753-1980. Calcutta: KP Bagchi. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.100095.

Rocha, Esmeralda. 2012. “Imperial Opera : The Nexus between Opera and Imperialism in Victorian,” 1833–1901. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/imperial-opera-the-nexus-between-opera-and-imperialism-in-victori.

Calcutta’s Grand Opera House

British Rule, british rule, Cultural, Maidan/ Esplanade, New Township, Play Houses, Racial Profile, Socio-Cultural Institutions

Operatic culture in colonial Calcutta vanishing into the new wave of professional Bengali theatre

Emperor Napoleon III, Queen Victoria, Empress Eugénie, Prince Albert seated in Opera Box at Italian Opera. 1855
Lithograph on chinecollé. Print made by: Marie Alexandre Alophe. Courtesy: Commons

PRELUDE

Italian Opera was most ardently welcome in colonial Calcutta as an icon of British art and culture. ’Ironically, the cultural supremacy of London and Paris was achieved not through the assertion of a nationalistic culture, but instead through the construction of cosmopolitan identity.’ [Rocha] The bondage between the two, Italian opera and British culture, deems to be a marriage of convenience than of love. The British needed to project an image larger than life in order to institute their cultural supremacy at home and, as enlightened colonialist, to zealously civilize the natives in Italian opera – the queen of all arts. Though in the early 1830s The Englishman lamented the natives being so supine and indifferent in the matter of Italian opera, in the late 1860s, Calcutta turned into a pivot of Italian opera before it faded out finally from the Indian scenario.

To some scholars, one of the root causes of the fade-out was elitism that corrupted Calcutta’s socio-economic and political structures to paralyze the democratization of services and facilities including entertainments. Italian opera was looked upon as the highest form of entertainment and a haut art that necessarily demands a cultivated mind for appreciation, and therefore the opera art aficionados are always fewer in any society, native Indians or the European. The craze for operatic art that ballooned up during the initial phase fizzled out within a decade leaving empty halls with not even fifty enthusiasts in Calcutta to buy opera tickets. One by one all the opera houses in Calcutta turned into picture houses by the end of the nineteenth century.

How one of those institutions of operatic culture, the Grand Opera House, came into existence, performed and lost is the matter of this story narrated based on a limited number of studies and reports including the research of Esmeralda Rocha most extensively used here.

The Town Hall

A view of the Town Hall. Artist: James Baillie Fraser. 1826. Courtesy: British Library

The present Town Hall, which is, in fact, the Second Town Hall of Calcutta still standing as one of the most elegant elevations in the city of palaces, the first one being the Old Court House of Calcutta that had served the township society generously in accommodating formal meetings and public events of every description until 1791 when its construction weakened beyond repair. To find an alternative venue, on May 31, 1792, a meeting was held at Le Gallai Tavern that unanimously recommended erecting a “public building for the general accommodation of the settlement” by crowdfunding through subscriptions. [Carey]

In March 1814, on completion of the Calcutta Town Hall to function as the central hub of cultural activities, became the new icon of the city. The Hall was declared open to visitors under restrictive conditions — it shall be reserved for authorized general meetings of the inhabitants of Calcutta or for meetings of merchants, or other classes of society, for the transaction of mercantile affairs or other business, and for public entertainments on great occasions, in which the community at large is concerned. The elegance of the Town Hall rests in the simplicity of its doric architecture that consists of only a few parts but quite large to strike a clear view from a distance. Structurally, it exceeds the height of the Government House, the iconic British architecture in India, by several feet. It was planned uniquely for its stated purpose. [Rocha] The edifice still perpetuates the memory of its architect, Major-General John Garstin.

Within a year, however, the Town Hall began to show signs of certain structural snags. When its portico partly collapsed, Captain Richard Blechynden, who was called to investigate, submitted to the Chief Engineer Colonel Alexander Kyd that it was not the poor soil to be blamed, as Garstin suggested. Subsequently he was assigned for the restoration work. [Blechynden] At the close of 1815 plans were put in for several alterations involving a further 40,000 Rs. on top of the initial costs of 7,00000 Rs. [Carey] The working committee wished “to see the interior more durably arranged“, and ”make it as lasting as its appearance will be grand and beautiful“. [Sandeman] Some minor corrections and regular maintenance apart, the Hall had been running its multifunctional hospitality as a central place for committee meetings, public addresses, portrait galleries, a public library and often stage performances as well, although the Chowringhee Theatre already came into existence to stage English theatres for the Calcutta beau monde.

AUGUSTO CAGLI’S OPERATIC DEBUT AT THE TOWN HALL

In April 1866, after a spell of long 16 years since Sans Souci, the last of the theatre houses, charred and closed down, the Calcutta elite received the rumour that an Italian opera company, now touring in Bombay, would be visiting them soon. The news was met with ‘mixed feelings of excitement and embarrassment’ [Rocha]. It was totally unacceptable for the Calcuttans that on the plea of not having a playhouse they should bid adieu to the opera company coming to their city on finishing a grand session in Bombay. A rivalry between the presidencies let the white-towners strive under psychic stress to provide a hospitable and profitable environment for the troupe. Ultimately they were relieved to rediscover the best of the Town Hall, which should be appropriately refurbished to meet all the requirements of staging an Italian opera.

Augusto Cagli. Courtesy: Victoria State Library

The Company arrived in late April and greeted with enormous public excitement. The Town Hall, freshly painted and polished, looked bright and beautiful, though the paints not fully dried. That was an occasion of great enthusiasm for the European patrons who came to attend the shows in newly prepared dresses. “Wives and daughters were equipped with new gowns, mantles and gloves, often on credit, whilst many of the men outfitted themselves with new dress coats. Despite the audience coming away from the Town Hall with their seat numbers branded across their new clothes, like a convict or a sheep, the concert was deemed a complete success by the press and public alike. [Rocha] The carriages of the opera patrons clogged the streets of Calcutta in such a chaotic manner that the Calcutta Police had to devise a set of road regulations for the first time to deal with the unprecedented volume of traffic. [Englishman, May 5, 1866, cited in Rocha] Like the recital, the full operatic performances attracted crowded houses and effusive applause. Such success encouraged both the Calcutta public and Augusto Cagli. By mid-May 1866 Cagli and the Opera Committee had decided to present a full session of opera in Calcutta on a contractual arrangement. Cagli ‘s Company will perform twice a week for Rs. 60,000 before 300 audiences against membership subscriptions. It was a great challenge for Cagli and the Committee to endorse the agreement being fully aware of the inherent limitations of the Town Hall.

“The Town Hall acoustics, which the media was complaining for a generation, still remained abysmal, and the stage and poor airing made it unbearably hot for the audience and performers alike. Furthermore, the Town Hall was beginning to prove socially inadequate…” Many believed it improper to house opera, the queen of all arts, in such a utilitarian building. In achieving a longstanding opera culture in Calcutta, the most lamentable drawback was that the city had no appropriate opera house in and around. Cagli and the Opera Committee made every effort to construct new opera houses. As many as three playhouses readied within a very short time to entertain the White Town patrons with plentiful plays. Between 1866 and 1872, Augusto Cagli and his troupe presented seven seasons of opera and established a vibrant operatic culture worthy of the prestige and self-conscious privilege of the ‘City of Palaces’. It was more about fulfilling a social, political and ideological need in Calcutta than a sudden inspiration brought along by Cagil’s enchanting performance that demanded its own Opera House.[Rocha] It may be noted that the first purposive opera house, at Tivoli, was built in the city not by any white-town sponsors but by Augusto Cagli of the touring Italian opera company to serve primarily his personal business interests.

The Grand Opera House 1867-1917

Grand Opera House. 7 Lindsay Street, Calcutta ( Later Globe Theatre). Photographer: DBH Ker. Courtesy: Flickr

Besides the will of the Opera Committee, an association of esteemed men, mostly British, there was a widespread interest in the idea of having a new opera house. While Cagli was away in Italy to hire a grander company, the Committee worked hard for setting up a new opera house. There was a growing concenscious that the opera house should be located somewhere within the white-town of Chowringhee, rather than in the vast open space of the Maidan. As soon as the Committee found a suitable plot on Lindsay Street they acted upon quickly constructing their first opera House. The New Opera House at Lindsay Street was kept reserved for Augusto Cagil’s shows. Cagil’s Tivoli Garden Opera House was henceforth being used by other impresarios, and after a while shifted to 5 Dhurumtollah Street under the banner Corinthian Theatre. There was also a third theatre, the Lyceum, that existed on Maidan.

The Grand Opera House at Lindsay Street was founded in 1867 by the Opera Committee initially composed of all British dignitaries. After a decade Sir Alex Apcar the then Chairman had leased to Mr William B English, an American impresario for the 1875-76 season. There might have been others who owned the house temporarily before or after William B English. The Grand Opera House continued for half a century in its original form until taken over by a Bijou Company Limited of Mr E M D Cohen in 1917. From a High Court correspondence, we gather that it was E H Ducasse, the then owner of the Opera House, who transferred the premises No. 4 Mudge Street, a corner plot at the crossing of Lindsay Street, on the 1st of April 1917 on a five-year lease to Cohen under some partly unclear terms. [High Court] It deems for operational convenience, the new house address no.7 Lindsay Street was registered in lieu of no. 4 Mudge Street. It is not yet clear if Ducasse had purchased ownership right from the Opera Committee or from someone else having the title of the property. Cohen extensively refurbished the house and reopened it as the New Opera House, which was Calcutta’s premier vaudeville venue. Among its new attractions were the roof garden fitted with marble tables around the fountain, and the beautifully appointed bar, There are also luxurious lounge rooms and smoking rooms and comfortable retiring rooms. The body of the house is equipped with comfortable opera chairs and electric fans. The modern ventilating system makes the theatre cool on the hottest nights. One unique feature of the house is that each division, the pit, the dress-circle and the gallery, is separate from the others, with separate box offices and entrances so that the various classes of patrons need not “rub shoulders” with one another – a typical elitist designing disapproved by the Calcutta society at large. Audiences were rigidly divided and separated on socio-economic lines. As a ticket increases in price, the seat becomes more conspicuous and yet more isolated. The house had 1,500 comfortable seats. Prices of admission range were from 8 cents in the gallery to $1 for a seat in the boxes. [Howells] Although the media credited all-new features to Ducasse, in fact, those were the contributions of Cohen instead who took the charge from him a year back. [Rocha]

Elias Moses Duek-Cohen, 1852-1927

Life in Calcutta since then was not the same anymore. The political unrest, the famine, and the war crippled the social and personal lives of Calcutta irrespective of their class. During wartime, all the halls of entertainment were closed, barring Roxy cinema (previously The Empire), which screened day and night only one movie, the ‘Kismet’, without break throughout the barren period. In the mid-1940s, the Grand Opera House was converted into the Globe Theatre – the largest cinema hall in India that entertained the new generation of Calcutta people liberally until closed down permanently in recent time.

Italian Operas on Stage

The Grand Opera House established by the Opera Committee for staging Italian Operas by acclaimed artistes hand-picked by the famous impresario Augusto Cagli to entertain Calcutta’s opera aficionados. Besides full-fledged Italian operas, Cagil also presented some Italian ballets as a pleasant surprise. The performances furnished the white-town residents ‘with the sense of pride, accomplishment and cultivation for which they had been so desperate’. Viceroyalty seemed eager to promote opera in Calcutta. Lord Mayo and the Lady Mayo were, particularly, great admirers of the high arts. Quite often they visited the Grand Opera accompanying some foreign dignitaries. When they did, declared a ‘Grand State Opera Night’ as a gesture of patronization.

The Audience

The hall admitted the audience on seasonal tickets with a price tag of Rs.100, i.e. Rs.6.25 per concert, which was pricey in 1867 but not too high for a white-towner. We may find that determining the admission fee had always been one of the most tricky issues for the survival of the Italian opera in Calcutta because the presentation of the haut art has always been an expensive affair, which could be met either by selling high-priced tickets to the maximum number of heads belonging to the relatively small upper-class community or by selling tickets with discounted price to a much larger working-class community. The first season began with the maximum number of the Calcutta elites occupying the expensive seats letting its hall half-empty – much worrying for Calcutta’s opera aficionados, who soon warned by the press that ‘should the [Italian opera] company slip through Calcutta’s hands the City of Palaces would be guilty of its current reputation for being narrow-minded and mercenary’. Next year, Cagil’s new company represented the single greatest improvement to Calcutta’a operatic culture. The popularity of his new recruit Zenoni and her talent helped Cagli to shape the repertoire and concentrating on modern tragic operas. Cagli knew by experience how fond the Calcutta audiences were sopranos and took care to choose singers more mature than their predecessors from Italy’s best regional opera houses.Repertoires

The Repertoire

During his tenure, Cagli feasted Calcutta aficionado with compositions of Bellini, Donizetti, Flotow Gounod, Mercadante, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi. Among the operas presented his time we notice that the following plays were staged often: La Sonnambula, L’Elisir d’Amore, Linda di Chamounix, Lucrezia Borgia, Il Giuramento Don GiovanniMarta, Faust, Barbiere di Siviglia, Barbiere di Siviglia, Un Ballo in Maschera Ernani, Luisa Miller, Macbeth, La Traviata, Il Trovatore.

Italian Opera had its best time when Cagli ruled Calcutta stages and after him, it waned. There was a long spell of uncertainty when the Opera Committee failed to select a new impresario after rejecting the candidature of Giovanni Pompei. Calcutta, after a long while, had to pass the winter of 1871–72 bereft of Italian opera. The city found instead a variety of lesser performative arts on its stages entertaining people in jam-packed playhouses. One such popular performer was Deb Carlson, a stage name of David Nunis Cardozo. He was an American vaudeville player renown for his Blackface roles that demeaned African Americans. [Chattopadhyay] Dalhousie Institute also launched a series of soirées musicales. The black-face minstrel Dave Carson added quite a few new musical numbers like ‘Coolie’, and ‘Bangali Babu’ specially composed for his India tour, rather than ‘Mammy’ and ‘Negro Dandy’. Carlson stayed in Calcutta for three months only, during 1872-1874, performing in Bengali and English stages.

Hindu National Theatre at Grand Opera House

Interestingly, this was the beginning of the most significant phase of the professional Bengali theatrical movement inspired by the birth of the Calcutta National Theatrical Society. The Society was established in November 1872 by a few native gentlemen of Bagh Bazar with the objective to improve the stage, as also to encourage native youths in the compositions of new Bengali dramas from the proceeds of the sales of tickets. [Englishman Nov. 1872] Immediately after, the Society was split into two groups, one being called ‘Hindu National Teatre’ led by Ardhendushekhar Mustafi and Nagendranath Bandyopadhyay, the other called ‘National Theatre’ led by Sishir Bhaduri. None of these two had any permanent stage of their own, and both were eager to negotiate with the professional as well as amateurish stages inside and outside of Calcutta.

At this juncture, Alessandro Massa took over the office of impresario and realised soon enough his inadequacy in meeting the demands of the local aficionado for the quality Italian opera artistes and attractive repertoires. Massa was honest in his efforts. He did his best to present good Italian operas and made few contributions to Calcutta’s orchestra by introducing some enchanting instruments, like the clarinet and the horn. Massa had a small working committee of his own solely for making liaise with the public and to facilitate administration. We are not sure whether it was Massa himself or his committee was responsible for inviting Hindu National Theatre to stage their Bengali dramatic performances at Grand Opera House during April 1873 for three nights.

An advertisement appeared in the Englishman, 5 April 1873 :

OPERA HOUSE

Lindsay Street
Hindu National Theatre, Calcutta
Grand Opening Night This Evening Saturday 5th April, 1873
The plays advertised were pantomimes including Mustafi
Sahbka Pucka Tamasha and the drama Sarmistha, by Michael
Madhusudan Dutt. Tickets, it was said, would be available at
at the Opera House and at the House of the Late Kaliprasanna
Singha, Baranassee Ghose’s St. The signatory at the bottom was
Nagendra Nath Banerjee. Hony. Secretary.
[The Englishman, April 5, 1873]

Hindu National Theatre performed the following items at Grand Opera House:

5 April 1873

Model School
Belati Babu
Title of Honour Distribution
Aukhil’s Wonderful Feats
Mustafa Saheb ka Pucca Tamassa
Sharmistha of Madhusudan Dutta

[With Nagendra Babu (Yayati), Ardhenu Mustafi (Vakasur), Shibchandra (Shukracharya), Bel Babu (Devajani), Kshetra Mohan (Sarmistha)]

12 April 1873

Tragedy of Vidhova-Vibaha

19 April 1873

Kinchit Jaloyog
Ekei-ki Bale Sobhyota
Charitable Dispensary
Bharat Sangit

Admission Tickets

Private Boxes to admit 5 Rs.20 Lower Stage to admit 4 Rs 16

Dress Circle … Rs 4 Stalls Front … Rs 3

Stall Back … Rs 2 Pit … Re 1

[Dasgupta vol.2]

Mustafa Saheb Ka Pucca Tamassa

The experience of performing Bengali drama with full house attendance on an exclusive modern stage in the white town was amply rewarding to the young institution that was founded to provide public performances of newly-composed Bengali theatre works and to invigorate Bengalis’ cultural pride, and fan the flame of nationalist sentiment. Among the items performed on April 5, there was one extraordinary piece, Mustafa Saheb Ka Pucca Tamassa (Item No.4) that deserves special attention. It was a highly appreciated satire composed and played by Ardhendushekhar Mustafi in response to Mr Dev Carson’s item, the Bengali Babu, a hot favourite caricature he staged a number of times here at Grand Opera House beside Dalhousie Institute, and Jorasako Public Theatre. He used to draw large crowds, earned a good deal of money and was much applauded when he sang :

“I am a very good Bengalee Babu
“I keep my shop at Radhabazar ;
“I live in Calcutta, eat my dalbhat
“And smoke my Hookka.”

[Indian Mirror, 22nd, Jan. 1873.]

Deb Carson stayed only a couple of months in Calcutta and was spoken of with much interest by The Englishman as it appears from the following:

“The inimitable Deb gave his last regular performance on the Bengali stage, however, there was only one man, who was a match for this Saheb and that was Babu Ardhendu Sekhar Mustafi. To give a retort to Debcarson’s above caricature, Ardhendu, dressed as a Saheb with an old hat, torn coat and dirty trousers with Violin (Behala) in hand, used to show Mutafi Sahebka Pucca Tamassa to caricature the so-called Sahebs in the following song, which he used to sing with gestures :

Ham vada sahev hai duniyame
“None can be compared hamara sath ;
“Mister Mustafi” name hamara
“Catgaon me mera Vilat.
“Coat pini, pentaloon pini
“Pini mera trousers;
“Every two years new suit pini
“Direct from Chadney bazar.
…
[The Englishman Friday, Dec, 20, 1872,200 Pucca Tamasa]

Mustafi who was henceforth regarded in the stage as Mustafi Saheb or Saheb by all was a match for Deb Carson and both drew equally crowded houses by their pucca tamassa, though in the opinion of Girish Chandra, Deb Carson’s humour was of a much lower order than that of his Bengali rival. [Dasgupta v.2] The Englishman writes on Dec. 20, 1872, about this show held previously: At the Opera House, on Wednesday night and the attendance was full. Though not such as might have been expected, Deb’s part of the performance was capital and we are glad to hear that he will take a benefit at the Town Hall before leaving Calcutta with his Company. He deserves, and ought to have a bumper house.” The theatre historian Sushil Mukherjee thinks “Ardhendu’s was a fitting retort to Dave Carson’s low comic at the expense of the Bengalis.” He thinks Ardhendu “paid the Englishman back in his own coin through songs and mimicry.” [Mukherjee] We may, however, consider Ardhendu’s mode of paying back a bit differently as will be discussed soon after.

Percy Wyndham
Deb Carson
Ardhendushekhar Mustafi

After Massa, Percy Wyndham, an Englishman, volunteered his service in saving Italian opera culture but could do little in improving the quality of the opera performances. Nevertheless, he gave constant efforts to popularise Italian opera in the wider cross-sections of the Calcutta society. For his own survival, Wyndham wanted to reach audiences beyond the white-town. This he attempted to achieve, against the wish of the elite society, by introducing tickets at the discounted price to working-class and free tickets on Wednesdays to soldiers and their accompanying wives. Wyndham was increasingly disliked by the Opera Committee and the British patrons, except a few. Knowing the uncertainty of his position he took care to build an image of himself as ‘Calcutta’s Impresario’. Toward the end of the Italian opera season, he decided to lease the Lindsay Street Opera House to the Great National Opera – a Bengali initiative. Although Wyndham’s idea reflected a strong business potential to back up operatic culture in Calcutta, while the majority of Calcutta’s elite feared an irreversible loss of social and economic prestige that opera patronage represented. They took pride in believing that ‘the opera as a cultural symbol, never to be sullied by association with native culture’. On February 1875, a spokesman of such discriminatory dogmas, under the penname ‘F’ pronounced, Bengali opera would invade and desecrate the ‘pretty, little theatre’, marking and sullying the house with their ‘disagreeable substances’ (ghee and mustard oil). The Editor of the Englishman hand in hand with the high society Britishers, some Europeans and the opera-house proprietors, promptly supported ‘F’. In a hurry, The Englishman’s Editor momentarily forgot his unreserved admiration of the Bengali opera সতী কি কলঙ্কিনী Sati ki Kalangkini performed by the Great National Opera last January at Corinthian Theatre. That time the Editor found that performance ‘a promising development in Indian culture’ and appreciated the Bengali orchestra composed by Madan Mohan Barman as ‘a very good band’. This support, however, evaporated once the Great National Opera, a product of the Bengali intelligentsia, began to compete, and perhaps usurp, Italian Opera, the symbol par excellence of Western cultural superiority. [Rocha] A good thing, there were some liberal Britishers too to challenge the stands of ‘F’ and The Englishman’s editor. One British man, pen-named ‘G’, retorted ‘F’ that ‘far from undermining Italian Opera, Wyndham’s invitation to the GNO would help to make the Italian Opera financially viable, and that the ‘ungenerous avowal’ admitting racial discrimination was simply an expression of private illiberal opinion of ‘F’ and The Englishman.

While racism and nationalism are two different concepts they are inherently related, which can be observed in many agitated nationalist slogans, posters and advertisements released in support of the swadeshi movements. It required renaissance men to go above the dogma of hatred in reacting to racial/ national issues with humanitarian values and understanding. Mr Mustafi’s ‘Pucca Tamassa’ – a retort to Carlson’s ‘Bengali Babu’ – was an example of an empathetic satire addressed to a fellow ‘native saheb’ pranking him for aping the British snobbery, instead of attacking the Britishers directly with a racial vengeance.

ENDNOTES

The period between the late 1860s and early 1870s was indeed the golden age of the Italian operatic culture in Calcutta. The musical seasons all these years became increasingly meritorious and socially important. The period was also marked glorious for the rise of the Bengali theatre which drew much of its enthusiasm and sparks from the Italian operas and English theatres performed in the white town playhouses and at the Town Hall. More importantly, Bengali stagecraft including architectural designing was initially borrowed from the English stages. The house of the first Bengali theatre, the Bengal Theatre, was built after the wooden architecture of Lewis Lyceum theatre once existed on the maidan. The Bengali professional theatre nevertheless had started with vernacular repertoires freshly created by the contemporary literary giants highly relevant socially and politically to the realities of everyday life in colonial India, Bengal in particular. In comparison, the contents of the Italian and English stage performances in most cases had little relevance to contemporary lifestyle and social issues, and often too sophisticated to be appreciated by an uninitiated audience. This may be the foremost reason why the Bengali stages were being multiplied while the Italian opera houses and the English theatre halls vanished into the ‘picture houses’.

REFERENCE

Bandyopadhyay, Brajendranath. 2002. “বাংলা পেশাদারী রঙ্গালয়i.Pdf.” In বাংলা পেশাদারী থিয়েটারঃ একটি ইতিহাস. Calcutta: Natyachinta Foundation.https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiErKSe8vzvAhUE4jgGHR2wDbAQFjAAegQIAxAF&url=https%3A%2F%2Fia801603.us.archive.org%2F25%2Fitems%2Fin.ernet.dli.2015.265707%2F2015.265707.Bangla-Peshadari.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2_FBQzhFO9b8w3XEMVrEQf

Bandyopadhyay, Brajendranath. n.d. বঙ্গীয় নাট্ট্যোশালার ইতিহাস. 1st ed. Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad.https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjWyYPY8_zvAhVMxTgGHZovD3YQFjADegQIBBAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgranthagara.com%2Fboi%2F322562-bangiyo-natyashalar-itihas-ed-1%2F&usg=AOvVaw2dUzi3Nyvbw5N4YEvinhE9

Bandyopadhyay, Brajendranath. n.d. সংবাদপত্রে সেকালের কথা; ২য় খণ্ড. Calcutta: Sahitya Parishat. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.354540/page/n39/mode/2up.

Blechynden, Richard. 2011. Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries, 1791-1822. Sentiment and Self. Edited by Peter Robb. Kindle. New Delhi: OUP. https://www.amazon.com.au/Sentiment-Self-Blechyndens-Calcutta-1791-1822-ebook/dp/B0746LK6H6.

Chattopadhyay, Devasis. 2020. “British India’s Racist Theatre.” The Quint, no. Aug12,2020. https://flipboard.com/article/british-india-s-racist-theatre-how-blackface-took-centre-stage/a-VQ9gSCafRTCwSnXsr4c_5A%3Aa%3A433591375-01f3630c84%2Fthequint.com.

Carey, William Henry. 1907. The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company from 1800 to 1858; Compiled from Newspapers and Other Publications; Vol.2. Calcutta: Cambray. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.39169/page/n421.

Dasgupta, Hemendranath. 1938. Indian Stage; v.2. Calcutta: M K Das Gupta. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.228124/mode/2up.

Dasgupta, Hemendranath. 1934. Indian Stage. Calcutta: Metropolitan. https://archive.org/details/indianstage029370mbp/page/n21/mode/2up.

High Court, Calcutta. 1920. EH Ducasse Versus EMD Cohen: The Judgement of the Calcutta High Court. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/in/56e13a0b607dba3896625d5a#

Howells, David P. 1918. “Bijou Grand Opera House, Calcutta: Among the Picture Theaters.” The Moving Picture World 35 (Feb. 23). https://archive.org/details/movingpicturewor35newy/page/1100/mode/2up.

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Mukherjee, Sushil. n.d. Story of Calcutta Theatres: 1753-1980. Calcutta: KP Bagchi. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.100095.

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TEA: ITS SOCIOCULTURAL DIMENSIONS IN COLONIAL INDIA

Appliances/ Amenities, Bengal Renaissance, british rule, Company Rule, Cultural, Industrial Houses, Life Styles, People-in-general, Racial Profile, Raj Officials, Ways of Life

Tea, ‘the second most commonly drunk beverage after water’ ^Ellis, is now being cultivated in more than 61 countries (2018), and consumed by not less than 54 nations (2016). There have been so many varieties of tea, prepared and consumed in so many different ways, all tuned in their respective ecological as well as sociological settings. Britain had no tea of its own, India had. Yet it was the British who grew a tea culture of its own since the time of King Charles II, more accommodative than the ceremonial tea of the Chinese and Japanese traditions, which later globally accepted as a standard.

Camellia Sinensis Categories Courtesy:@Leaves of Tea Ring

While the tea culture varies, the tea as such is one and the same everywhere – basically a wild shrub called camellia sinensis. The ancient wisdom of tea processing has been modernized in colonial India. The manufacturing process transforms the tea into six types – black, oolong, green, yellow, white, and pu-erh each having distinctive characteristics requiring special ways of preparing, serving and taking for enjoying the drink most satisfyingly. In the beginning tea was prepared with spices and herbs, and consumed as medicine. The remedial value apart, herbal tea is always a popular beverage in countryside because of its strong aroma and heady taste. Nonetheless, herbal tea is a misnomer as it is made of alternative combinations of herbs and spices, milk and butter, sugars and salts and optionally tea leaves. Gandhian ‘Tea Recipe’, for example, lists no tea at all. ^Sanyal The recent herbal teas sound like new versions of Gandhian tea now being marketed as Tulsi tea, Adrak tea, Malai tea, Rhododendron tea, and the like. The Kahwa tea, is however different being the soul-warming drink of the Kashmiris and a part of their culture. All these refreshment drinks of dissimilar taste and flavour meant for people of different mind-sets than those who enjoyed tea the way Tagore’s Gora did, or a Nazrul did in Favourite Café.

Poetic Tea. Lu Yu’s book, the Ch’a Ching, tea ceremony

The branded tea of the modern society is rooted in ancient culture. Kakuzō Okakura found a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealization. It has no arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. ^Okakura The first book on tea, Ch’a Ching, that the gifted poet and tea-expert, Lu Yü (733-804), penned with precise details on tea’s origins, cultivation, processing, and preparation. A thousand year later the British drew upon the classic when they started producing tea themselves. ^KoehlerIt is important to note that the British accepted the practical and spiritual aspects of tea making believing that the magic of making tea comes, when the leaves begin to develop their unique flavours and aromas, almost mystically transforming into something far richer.

Darjeeling Himalayan Railway 1881. Photocredit:Carsten Bockermann

As the process has been simplified from Lu Yu’s instructions formulated thirteen centuries ago, machines instead of hands do the rolling now. Fermented tea is essentially baked rather than pan-cooked—it sticks to ancient principles. In Darjeeling, tea makers remain ‘stridently, adamantly orthodox’ in their processing. Orthodox tea contains just a handful of steps to turn green leaves into finished Darjeeling black tea before the tea gets sorted, graded, and packed. ^Koehler From the beginning to end, tea, except low-grade commercial tea/ tea-bags, is dealt with human touch, even when the process is mechanized. Tea is not industrialized, but grabbed the full advantage of industrialization for worldwide distribution and marketing of finished products from the remote gardens whence the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway opened in 1881, cutting travel time and transport costs significantly. Darjeeling tea found its final footing within five years as reflected in 1885 statistics of sales reaching 9 million pounds.^Bengal

II

Like most of the colonial things – bungalows, furniture, utensils, dresses or dishes, Indian teas are Indian by origin – pure or crossbred, which the Britishers shaped their way to lead a comfortable and decent life. As we know, Britain never grew tea until 2005, but grew a tea culture over two centuries ago that they enriched a great deal in colonial India, apparently with newly acquired intelligence of Chinese and Japanese tea traditions.
The British tea culture follows the ancient norm that ‘tea drinking should be treated with reverence and be accompanied by beauty but also restraint’, moderation is the very essence of tea. ^Ukers It demands a tad of sophistication nurtured in modern societies. One needs to acquire a taste for the cup of tea that a British queen and a Chinese sage may savour spiritually rather than palatably. When today’s tea culture is overwhelmingly British in character, it is already popular in most of the tea loving nations, including United States. ^Sirkin
Tea grew naturally in Indian soil, while tea culture grew in Indian mind through a long process of social interactions under influences of political and economic events. To my perception, the politics and economics had played a significant part in bringing in the ‘tea habit’, contrary to ‘tea culture’. Taking tea is discouraged by Swadeshi followers on the plea that tea is ‘injurious to heath’ and a ‘foreign’ drink. Gandhian political agenda against tea was directed to ‘tea habit’.

Gandhiji and other leaders during the Swadeshi Movement

Gandhi, once himself a tea lover, recommended his atypical ‘Tea Recipe’ for the mass that had no tea leaves in it to risk habit formation. ^Sanyal It seems to be his Swadeshi fervor that made a scientist like Acharya P.C. Ray to declare tea a poisonous drink ignoring factual findings. In response, the Tea Board did publish a statement of Dr. Meghnad Saha in favour of tea, to counter Swadeshi deterrent. There had been also a section of Brahmos and their sympathizers who boycotted tea in protest of British planters’ inflicting torture on the coolies found and reported first by Ramkumar Vidyaratna and Dwarkanath Ganguly, two volunteers of Sadharan Brahmosamaj ^Banerjee. The political aversion to tea was an issue reflected in Naukadubi of Rabindranath, Parinita of Saratchandra, and possibly many more contemporary stories. Interestingly, both the writers and most of their contemporaries and immediate successors happened to be tea devotees. So was Swami Vivekananda.^VivekanandaThe kind of tea they enjoyed was generally the British black tea, with milk/ sugar, or none just like the one Abdul Rahman served to Syed Mujtaba Ali in 1930’s Kabul (vide Deshe-Bideshe).

When people drink tea, they are expected to acquire certain manners and behave in a particular way, in terms of which a tea culture is defined. Tea etiquette, styles of tea-ware, ambience of tearooms – all contribute to a tea culture distinguished from all others. Close interactions between any two cultures enrich both. We have understood this better in this era of rapid globalization, which is also an era of collaborative entrepreneurship. The manufacturing of Chinese tea-pots in British fashions is a case in hand. The Chinese, so far we know, brewed tea directly in the cup instead of using a teapot, which they never had. The traditional Chinese teacups had a lid but no handles, presumably because they liked to feel the warmth of the tea while holding the cup. If it’s too hot to hold, it’s too hot to drink. Fixing handle, or ear, to a cup is an idea implemented by the British. The design of teapot we use today is basically European. The first teapots created in Europe were of a heavy cast with short, straight, replaceable spouts. “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the East India Company recognized the growing demand for such items as teapots and began importation in larger numbers. The company commissioned china directly from Chinese artists and craftsmen, using patterns sent from England and geared to European tastes, stereotypes, and market values”. Designs fell into four main areas (1) mock-ups of Oriental designs, (2) designs adapted from European prints, (3) coat of arms for major European families,(4) and the innovative teapots -such as those with the now standard internal spout drain. The Company directors were especially concerned that teapots not drip and so stain the valuable linen that they also marketed. ^Anonymous]

Kyūsu back hand(le) teapot), Taishō era ca. 1921-1925

e and white ceramic tea-set of China

Uwade kyūsu top hand(le) teapot

Kyūsu – a common Japanese teapot, often with its handle on the pot’s side and spout crafted with an angle

Gaiwan or zhong is a Chinese lidded bowl without handle used for the infusion of tea leaves and the consumption of tea. Ming dynasty. It consists of a bowl, a lid, and a saucer. Courtesy: Sözdizimi Kullanıcı deneyimi

Not only teapots but the entire range of tea-ware was fashioned by the British, often with Indian motifs and materials, and increasingly by Indian artisans in spite of their being obliged to do work by hand, while the Europeans both accelerated and perfected by means of machinery. ^Williamson The tea-set, including cups and saucers, tea-spoons and tea-strainers, milk-jug and sugar-pot, teapot, tea cozies, tea-mats, sets the mood of a tea drinker before s/he takes tea. Tea-drinkers ‘take tea’ in a special way, which, I fear cannot be described aptly by any English verbs that we know. Surely, it is not that we ‘drink’ tea as we do drink milk or water, or even coffee. We do not sip tea like sherbet either, but do it by faint smacking of our lips inaudibly on the brim of the tea cup and relish slowly the enigmatic taste and aroma of the golden liquid afloat inside.Tea retains a strong association with nature. A good tearoom must be having a like ambience with windows to allow natural light, and flowers around.

Newspaper Reading. Courtesy: @Sholoana Bangaliana

Flury’s 2008. Courtesy: Flury’s

Tearoom at Tea-Pot, Fort Kochi

Tearoom is quite different from a coffee shop, which often tend to be set up more like a bar, offering quick coffee drinks that can be drunk while standing or while seated on a bar stool or similar chair unsuited for long sitting.^Goodwin Tearoom needs everything there should be styled to allow sitting for hours long as tea incites endless parleying – being an acknowledged stimulant for adda, or rap sessions without agenda. Tea and adda are inseparable components of tea culture.

TeaTable @Purwaaii. – Friends Caffe. Courtesy: Kolkata on Wheel. – Adda. Courtesy: @Scoopwhoop. – India Coffee House, Albert Hall

The word ‘adda’, found in Sanskrit and Pali literature was used in various senses by ancient writers, like Bharata and Chanyakya. ^Das As it was broadly indicated, adda once meant a place of assemblage for a purpose, like the ‘Buddhist adda’ once found in old Dhurrumtollah Street. The modern usage of the word broadens its import. As Collins Word online suggests, ‘It is a form of intellectual exchange among members. They talk about almost everything in jovial mood’. In context of tearoom, adda simply means chatting or free discussions with no agenda, participated by regulars and casuals as often as they like. It is a process of exchanging minds on any subjects imaginable. It is a common privilege of the tea-room goers to take part in adda but not without submitting to the unspoken norms of tea-culture prevailing there. While the tea-room-adda is a global trend, its pattern of behavior differs widely depending on the given living standards and traditions.

Japanese takes no sugar in tea, and their teahouse never serves sugar determinedly, but obliges customers cordially if they want it for sweetening an English tea instead. The English, while taking tea, detests letting out audibly a ‘ssss’ sound of breath through the mouth past the tongue. Appreciation of sound depends on one’s culture. It needs a cultured refinement to appreciate a pianissimo in western or Hindustani classical music, when a bursting sound of fireworks needs no cultural refinement at all. Appreciation of a quality black tea can never be expected from uninitiated tea drinkers to whom an herbal tea is the best choice and an orthodox black tea insipid.

Fortune the China Tea Smuggler © 2019 Les Films de la Mémoire

Agents of the Assam Tea Company of Prince Dwarkanath. Source: . @cambridgeDigitalLibrary

We learnt from history that India have had tea before the British smuggled the Chinese tea to India. Along with the tea plants they also brought in India the stolen Chinese know-how of tea gardening, which India never had occasion to know because of not having any tea gardens but forests of tea trees. The tea habit in India was grown initially by the British through massive propaganda launched by the governmental agencies and industries for economic gain. Their objectives were only to introduce tea to the people and promote sales. One has only to glimpse through the old newspaper ads and publicity posters to realize nothing was there to motivate a tea culture. Neither the study books tell about the tea etiquette, nor any leaders spoke anything contributing to the tea culture, yet the India historically speaking has imbibed a strong cultural affinity toward tea. And that culture, largely in British way, but certainly not exclusively British, as we have already exemplified in my last post ‘Ways of life in colonial Calcutta’. The scenario of Calcutta tea culture found in the hundred year old Favourite Cabin crowded by the firebrand intellectuals had little in common with Flury’s grand ambience except that they both served black tea in ceramic cups. It is unthinkable for the Favourite Cabin to keep Flury’s gentle silence with the presence of a buoyant Nazrul at tea table.

ANYTIME TEA TIME Courtesy: Tea-Pot, Fort Kochi

Their tea-table manners were also more like Indian. As the expert admits that whatever tea seeds you sowed in Darjeeling, it grows to a ‘Darjeeling tea’; similarly, the British tea culture grown in India turns into Indianize British tea culture, more Indian than British. European ladies and gentlemen have always some fixed times for socialization over warm cups of tea, while in Indian culture it is anytime a tea time

Here, in India, it is adda that takes the first position in defining tea culture. The old deshi tea-rooms in Calcutta never cared much for manners and etiquette unlike the British ones. The tea-rooms were being used in Calcutta as meeting spots for lively exchange of minds and hearts, sharing views and news with known, half-known folks or even strangers. The spirit was somewhat akin to the Oxford coffeehouses of 1650s, where ‘the mind-stimulating benefits of the beverage complemented the spirit of sober academic discussion and debate evident at the university there’.^White After 1860s, tea took the place of coffee as the major beverage and served in the British coffee houses, including ‘Mr. Lloyd’s Coffee-house’ in London, favoured by ship owners, merchants, and marine insurers – the origin of the celebrated insurance firm, Lloyd’.

Interior of a London Coffee-house, 17th century. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in the late seventeenth century

These archaic coffeehouses were called ‘penny universities, because for a penny any man could obtain there a pot of tea, a copy of the newspaper, and engage in free conversation with wits. They served as a basic model for the English gentlemen’s private clubs popularized by English upper middle-class men and women in the late 19th century and early 20th century. By the close of the 18th century the popularity of coffeehouses had declined dramatically. Already by the 1750s consumption of tea, which many people found to be a sweeter, more palatable drink of choice, easy to make and cheaper, was beginning to rise. ^Cowan

The Club. Engraving by James Doyle

Literary and Political Clubs rose in popularity and the frivolities of coffee-drinking were lost in more serious discussion. Tea was also gaining in importance as Society’s beverage of choice. The East India Company at this time had a greater interest in the tea trade than the coffee trade. The Government’s policy was to foster trade with India and China and it offered encouragements to anything that would stimulate the demand for tea. Tea had become fashionable at Court and in the Tea Houses and was growing in popularity with the public. ^Boswell

India never had a coffee culture parallel to English one, its production and consumption being confined in some South Indian states, yet it seems that the bygone institution of British coffeehouse had surprising similarity with the tearoom culture developed in colonial Calcutta.

III

This century begins with a startling fresh digital memory of billions of terabytes to absorb the swiftly outdating modern-time and an alarmingly fast growing social dementia making the yesterdays already fuzzy in public mind. I fear, we have already forgotten many old acquisitions. The tea culture is one such thing. The millennium citizens become insentient to identify its fine distinctions. We pain to see tea is now being redefined in terms of the medicinal masala chai that was in vogue before the beginning of the tea cultivation – a long stride backward.

The real tea has lost its relevance in the 21st century society. A recent opinion survey of NDTV on Tea versus Coffee discloses the increasing popularity of coffee among Indians. It was ‘a moment of triumph for the coffee shops walked into a tea-drinking country’ offering a luxurious and genteel beverage as alternative.^{Channi-Tiwary} Some historians of coffee-house culture, however, were skeptical of the innate politeness of coffee since there were also some coffee-houses like a Molly King’s Coffee-House, notorious haunts of London’s lowlife.^White

As indicated before, coffee-culture in India has been geographically restricted and historically insignificant, contrary to the British experience. Coffee had the same place in London and Oxford of 17^th and 18^th centuries as the tea had in colonial India. Coffeehouses were then club-house like joints somewhat akin to Indian tearooms in spirit. The rejoinders of NDTV survey marked a reverse trend of opening up across the country tearooms like Chaayos, Taj Mahal Tea House, Bubble Tea Café, etc. These offer the comfort of a beverage many of us love, reinvented and served in a relaxed and casual café environment. ^{Channi-Tiwary}

April this year, Quora published an interesting response to their question ‘Why do the majority of Indians like tea rather than coffee?’ The responder claims it was not tea but coffee, black or espresso, what the majority of Indians prefer. It was also observed that some senior citizens still stick to tea out of habit, and currently many people take green tea because it is good for health. ^Quora The tea habit is a concept closely related to tea culture, which is still being maintained by the senior citizens, and most likely it will end with them, leaving an assortment of reinvented herbal chai for the newer generations broken away from nearly two thousand year tradition of Lu Yü to start a new one from zero.

Before Calcutta bids it a farewell, we may recite a requiem to the tea culture, remembering some good things it did to our society:

The early tearoom in Calcutta was a place to take tea, talk, read news, and collect worldly knowledge paying a thin dime just for the cup of tea; everything else were free. We may call those tearooms by the name of Penny University as the Londoners did for their Coffee shops operated in mid-18^th Century as cheap learning centres. Among other things tearooms in Calcutta helped bringing about necessary attitudinal change to tolerate differences in socio-cultural values and political idiosyncrasies.
Tea has been popular among rich and poor. It had an egalitarian character that incited rich social mixing. Vernacular tearooms, or deshi tearooms, offered space for meeting with friends and strangers free from the social conventions of class and deference.
Tea has no arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, neither the simpering innocence of cocoa. ^Okakura The cups that cheer but not inebriate.^Cowper The tearoom has a ‘civilizing’ atmosphere, and a role in urbanizing the migrants from less advantaged locations. It was analogous to musafirkhana where travelers get first taste of the city life, or where students get oriented to new campus life.
Tea was instrumental in bringing family together. Even before the introduction of instant tea bag, making a cup of tea has always been a simple and quick process for anyone to perform. Taking tea comfortably at home prepared by the caring hands of fair ladies was a good reason for meeting family members and family friends more frequently.
Tea-making happens to be also a new occupation for a housewife. Women for the first time through tea parties, take leading position in social gatherings, administering tea-shops or running tea-stalls.
Tea in India and many other places, like Ireland, is served as a gracious offering to guests as welcoming gesture. Tea has been a symbol of bonhomie in tribal as well as in civilized society. To the writer of Religion of Man, Rabindranath Tagore, making tea personally for his guests was always a pleasure. ^{^Chanda.}
Tagore with Count Okuma, PM Japan at tea in 1916

Every human institution decays, so does the tea culture. History records ups and downs, and often interprets every step in terms of their relationship with immediate past and latest trends. Likewise we may consider the followings as possible reasons why the tea culture goodbying Calcutta, the city that nurtured it.

It is the altering value systems of the city that destabilized the climatic condition necessary for the tea culture to sustain. To the millennium everything advertised in the name of ‘tea’, for example, gulabi tea, mallai tea, etc. are readily acceptable as tea. Except the manufacturing companies, not many are there who can smell the difference between a bagged black tea and orthodox leaf tea..

The litterateur and intelligentsia, like Nazrul Islams and Subhas Boses, ceased to be seen in deshi tearooms. The plebian city sticklers occupied the empty seats there for quick energizing sips.
The newspaper in tearoom has lost importance. Current affairs and general knowledge are now readily and cheaply available in social media. The dwindling leisure time in modern life is almost entirely used up by mobile chatting, which is largely responsible for making the generation lonely and egocentric, apathetic to tearoom culture.

∞

REFERENCE

Anonymous. (2009). History of Tea, LGOL27 Portal. Last updated : 23-Feb-09. https://www.gol27.com/HistoryTeaChina.html
Banerjee, Dipankar. (2006). Brahmo Samaj and North-East India. Delhi: Anamika. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GE2o4QQV7UgC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=Ramkumar+Vidyaratna+and+Dwarkanath+Ganguly&source=bl&ots=6ominLanpJ&sig=ACfU3U2mTX2VU3Z25u5yr1of9Og3mh2bBQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiNgLjk7cbmAhV_zjgGHYewBpQQ6AEwA3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Ramkumar%20Vidyaratna%20and%20Dwarkanath%20Ganguly&f=false
Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling ; Ed.by Arthur Jules Dash. (1947). Calcutta: G.P.Press. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150149
Boswell, James. (1791). The life & times of Doctor Samuel Johnson. Stories of London – portahttp://stories-of-london.org/samuel-johnson-5/
Chakraborty, Sumita. 2016. “শান্তিনিকেতনে চিন ও জাপান.” Parabas, 2016. https://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/pSumita_china-japan.html
Chanda, Rani (2007). Gurudev. Calcutta: Visvabharati. https://archive.org/details/Gurudeb-Rani-Chanda
Channi-Tiwary, Harnoor. (2018). Tea vs Coffee: Which is India’s Favourite Hot Beverage? In: NDTV Convergence, Updated: March 12, 2018 https://food.ndtv.com/opinions/tea-vs-coffee-which-is-indias-favourite-hot-beverage-1246860
Cowan, Brian. (2005). The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. Yale UP. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjq4JGVmsfmAhUpzjgGHb0hB-MQFjABegQIAhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbhsecglobal.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F03%2Fsocial-life-of-coffee.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2ynOBv82H95N20ip5E-Ikg
Das, Jnanendra Mohan. (1917). Bangla Bhasar Abhidhan ( বাঙ্গালা ভাষার অভিধান). Allahabad: Indian Press. https://archive.org/details/Bangla_Bhasar_Abhidhan_1917_by_Jnanendra_Mohan_Das
Ellis, Markman. (2014). Tea, the second most widely consumed drink, after water — a meme. Tea in Eighteenth-Century Britain April 21, 2014. https://qmhistoryoftea.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/tea-the-second-most-widely-consumed-drink-after-water-a-meme/
Goodwin, Lindsey (2017) Coffee Bar Definition. The Pruce Eats Portal. Updated 11/27/17
https://www.thespruceeats.com/coffee-bar-definition-765033
Koehler, Jeff. (2015). Darjeeling: a history of the world’s greatest tea. London: Bloomsbury. https://www.goodreads.com/user/new?remember=true
Lu Yu. (1974). Cha ching. The classic of tea. Boston; 1st ed. Little, Brown
https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Tea-Origins-Rituals/dp/0880014164/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1/147-0179330-7137150?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0880014164&pd_rd_r=dddc49fc-6a1f-4754-b82c-ffc76e13cbcb&pd_rd_w=zAATb&pd_rd_wg=mR0UB&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=HC08A16M8H6139AZTY99&psc=1&refRID=HC08A16M8H6139AZTY99
Mandelslo, Johann Albrecht von. 1669. Voyages Celebres & Remarquables, Faits de Perse Aux Indes Orientales. London: John Starkey, and Thomas Basset. https://archive.org/details/voyagescelebresr00mand/page/n8.
Okakura, Kakuzō . (1906), The Book of Tea. London: Putman’s
https://archive.org/details/bookoftea00okakrich/page/n8
Quora, Opinion survey (2015).Why most of the Indians like tea but not coffee? Quora Portal. Ap 14 2015
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-majority-of-Indians-like-tea-rather-than-coffee
Sanyal, Amitava. 2012. “Mahatma Gandhi and His Anti-Tea Campaign.” BBC News Magazine, May 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17905975.
Sirkin, Austin. (2013). Hey, America—You’re Drinking Your Tea Wrong! In: WonderHowTo Portal. 01/10/2013. https://steampunk.wonderhowto.com/how-to/hey-america-youre-drinking-your-tea-wrong-0141235/
White, Matthew. (2018). Newspapers, gossip and coffee-house culture. In: British Library newsletter; 21 June 2018. https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/newspapers-gossip-and-coffee-house-culture

TEA: A BRITISH GIFT TO INDIA

british rule, Company Rule, Cultural, Industrial Houses, Life Styles, Living Conditions, Natural Environment

BACKDROP
Tea might have been tasted by an Indian in around 1040 AD while the British did it before 1662 AD, and in no time the British Tea Culture came about some three centuries ahead of India’s courtship with tea. Around 1040 AD when Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna, the great preacher of Buddhism, was in Tibet, the Dharma King made offerings to all lamas and served tea and victuals to monastic congregations. Atiśa being the King’s honoured guest must have enjoyed drinking tea that time. His experience with Tibetan cup of tea died with him in 1054 AD at Lhasa. By that time, according to the oral history of the Singphos, India must have started growing tea forest in the North-East.

AtisaDipakar — Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna Buddhist Preacher in Tibet c.1054 AD

THE WILD TEA OF THE SINGPHO
Singphos are the same people as those called the Kachin in Burma and the Jingpo in China – a colourful tribe of Mongolian origin. Singphos have a very rich heritage of oral folklore, leaving deep traces in history of Assam. They spoke of their ancestors migrated from somewhere in the highland of Mongolia in B.C. 600-300 to their abode in the hills of Singra-Boom in Tibet . From there they formed several groups among themselves. Of these groups one went to China, one to Myanmar and one of them migrated to the Indian hilly region. Around B.C.300– A.D.100 the Singpho entered Brahmaputra valley. They brought with them their linguistic traditions and culture, and their affinity to tea being an integrated part of their mode of living. They speak Jingpo language in Singpho dialect that shares a degree of similarity with Tibetan and serves as lingua franca among Kachins.
Singphos were the most powerful and influential tribes of Lushai mountain range in Mizoram. The John Company remained indebted to them for building its tea empire on the borrowed resources generously provided by the Singpho chief, Beesa Gam in 1883. Singpho people are believed to be among India’s first tea drinkers and traditionally engaged in tea cultivation. To this day, they continue to process tea by first heating the leaves in a metal pan until they brown, and then sun-drying them for a few days. When processed and brewed correctly, a cup of Singpho tea, which is had without milk or sugar, is a lovely golden-orange colour. The leaves can be reused to brew three or four cups, the flavour getting better with each infusion. Singphos also use white tea flowers, pan fried and served with rice. The traditional processing of tea, they believe, retains its medicinal value. [Sarita]
Not only in India, as the history reveals, tea has been introduced everywhere as a health drink. Taking tea as refreshment is a recent phenomenon comes in vogue before tea turns out to be a mode of socialization.

Because the term ‘tea’ often used to mean ‘herbal tea’, other than to a Camellia variety, we are not sure of the significance of some rare references to ‘tea’ (or ‘chay’) in Vedic literature found in Caraka Samhita’s ‘Pancha Karma’ prescribing heating pastes, teas, and keep them in warm chambers.’ [Charaka Samhita] There have been, however, some evidences of tea consumption found amongst the people of Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh.

Okakura Tensing (1863-1913)

I-tsing a 7th century Chinese Buddhist

Shennong as depicted by Gan Bozong, Tea God

Cha Dao Lu T’ung author of ‘Song of Tea’ (618–906 ad)

They follow the ancient tradition of preparing beverages Thang by boiling Camellia/Taxus /Acacia in water like decoction, and the Ccha Chah, a salty tea, by adding dry walnut powder, black pepper, milk (optional), butter and salt. [Negi] I-tsing a 7th century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who left behind an account of his ten-year sojourn (676-685) in Nalanda said to have noted semi medicinal use of tea brew in India. [Achaya]
Much later in 1638, in a curious account of Albert de Mandelslo, a young gentleman of Holstein who visited Seurat that time described how they took only thè (tea) “commonly used all over the Indies, not only among those of the country, but also among the Dutch and the English, who take it as a drug that cleanses the stomach, and digests the superfluous humours, by a temperate heat particular thereto.” [Wheeler]
Mandelslo’s tea account incidentally coincides with the initiation of Tea in England of King Charles II, discarding our notion that Britain discovered tea before India did. Moreover, contrary to the popular views, tea no more considered a foreign breed, but a native crop of India. If not in Vedic age, tea must have been here since the beginning of the Christian era when the Singphos crossed Brahmaputra and made India their home amidst the tea forests they grew as a part of their mode of living. The tea trees remain in the Singpho land hidden from modern civilization until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

TEA EXPLORERS
The modern history of Indian tea begins in 1823 when the tribal chieftain Beesa Gaum graciously handed two tea plants to Captain Robert Bruce in exchange of a musical snuffbox – a gift from Bruce. This exchange of friendly gifts took place because of the initiatives of two protagonists of native tea, Captain Bruce and Dewan Maniram.

Maniram Dewan (1806-1858)
Maniram Dutta Baruah, was a nobleman domiciled Assamese from Kannauj ever remembered for his lifelong commitment to native tea plantation, besides his activism. In the year 1839, Maniram joined Assam Tea Company at Nazira as Dewan but quitted the job next year to try his hand in tea cultivation

Dewan Maniram Dutta Baruah (1806 – 1858)

Chinnamara Tea Garden of Dewan Maniram

independently. Finally in 1845 he developed Chinnamara and Toklai Tea Gardens, the first plantations owned by any native Indian, much to the dislike of his rival European tea planters who, according to some, by instigating the Company administration against Maniram for his alleged anti-British role succeeded in getting Maniram’s tea estates confiscated and illegally auctioned to one Mr. George Williamson at a very nominal price. Maniram was sent to gallows on 26th February, 1858 on the plea of his involvement in Assam uprising, otherwise called India’s First War of Independence. Maniram Dewan became a martyr, the first Tea Martyr of India. There is yet another assumption that Maniram, once a loyal ally of the British East India Company, wanted to take the opportunity in 1857 mutiny to uproot British rule in favour of Ahom rule; and he did that particularly to avenge the interference of the white with his tea business. [Ghosal]

Captain Robert Bruce (1789-1824)
Captain Robert Bruce (1789-1824), born in Edinburgh, joined the army and eventually found himself involved in establishing opium plantations for the East India Company. Sometimes he was described as ‘a soldier of fortune’. [Bruce] It was presumably on the advice of the East India Company he arrived at Rongpur in 1823 to contact Maniram Dutta Baruah who had informed them earlier of the existence of indigenous tea in Assam. Captain Robert Bruce (1789-1824) died in 1824 just a year after he met Maniram, leaving his younger brother Charles to take up his lead.

Charles Alexander Bruce (1793-1871)
Charles Alexander Bruce approached the Singpho chieftain Beesa Gaum once again and obtained a canoe full of wild tea plants and seeds that he dispatched to officials in Assam and Calcutta, particularly to Captain David Scott, first Commissioner of Assam, and the rest he distributed liberally to all whom he thought might take interest. With the exception of one ‘army officer in Lucknow’ [Johnson] none of the recipients had an inkling of wild Assam tea. Captain Scott having realized its huge possibilities himself wrote to Wallich, the Empire’s arbiter on botanical matters, at Calcutta, for their cognizance and actions without any reference to Charles Bruce as his source. Nathaniel Wolff Wallich (1786- 1854), an FRCS surgeon and botanist of Danish origin, was however never serious about indigenous tea as he staunchly believed that true tea grew nowhere but in China. Moreover, as it seems, the samples consisting of mere tea leaves and seeds might not have been sufficient for identifying the species. The lots that Scott sent to Wallich in 1825, 1826 and then again in 1827, all reckoned as Camellia drupifera and not ‘true tea’. The Company authorities remained nonchalant so far Assam tea was concerned. They neither believed nor had any interest in India breed tea. Assam tea had to wait seven years more for getting recognized and finally certified through a zealous effort of an adventurous Lieutenant Andrew Charlton.

Lieutenant Andrew Charlton (≥1800- >1840)
Charlton was appointed in May 1826 to command the military post at Sadiya (Assamese সাদিয়া )in Upper Assam – he was there to serve as the official channel of communication with the Singpho and Khamti Chiefs, as well as exercising criminal jurisdiction over the tribes and promoting commercial relations etc. [Appointment Record. BL] In 1831 while working in the Assam Light Infantry, Charlton found tea growing in eastern Assam in the hill tracts around Sadiya . He had learnt to recognize tea trees during his sojourn in the Dutch East Indies. With the help of his resourceful gardener he acquired some tips about tea growing and some young tea plants that he cultivated in his own garden in Jorhat. Charlton sent four young tea trees to Dr. John Tytler in Calcutta, who planted them in the Botanic Garden, where they withered and died before they could be botanically investigated. [Driem]
When in October 1831 he came to Calcutta, Charlton brought with him a few plants which he presented to the Agricultural and Horticultural Society that was ignored by the Society as the sample size found too small. Next time, in November 1834 he sent tea plants with fruits to Wallich, which was found on examination convincing and finally declared that ‘Assam tea was as real as the tea of China’. Wallich wrote to the just established Tea Committee of Lieut. Charlton’s discovery of Assam tea on 6 December 1834.

Nathaniel Wallich. Lithograph by T. H. Maguire, 1849

Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911)

William Griffith (1810-1845)

Charles Alexander Bruce (1793-1871)

Tea Committee
The little attempts earlier made to cultivate tea in India and that too half-hearted. As long as the Company’s monopoly over China tea lasted, Calcutta, including its science establishment, closed their eyes to the possibility of tea in Assam. When the monopoly was broken by the 1833 Charter, the Company had nothing to hold on but to the prospect of new-found Assam tea or to cultivating imported tea plants on Indian soil. A 12-member Committee of Tea Culture was set up by Lord William Bentinck in 1834 to explore the possibility of a tea industry in India, with George James Gordon (Secretary), James Pattle (Chairman), J. W. Grant, R. D. Mangles, J. R. Colvin. Charles E. Trevelyan. C. K. Robison, Robert Wilkinson, R. D. Colquhoun, Dr. N. Wallich, C. Macsween. G. J. Gordon, Radakant Deb, and Ram Comul Sen.

Francis Jenkins (1793-1866)
The Committee sent out a circular asking for reports of areas where tea could be grown. The circular was responded almost immediately by one Captain Francis Jenkins. Jenkins joined the East India Company and sailed from England in 1810. He was deputed by the Company to undertake a survey of Assam, including Cachar and Manipur, during October 1832-April 1833, following its annexation by the British. Early 1833, Bruce told Jenkins privately and wrote him publicly that ‘the tea plants were growing wild all over the country’ [Kochhar]. Jennings must have been convinced also by the findings of Lt. Charlton of Assam Light Brigade under his jurisdiction. Jenkins reported the Committee of Tea Culture recommending strongly for Assam tea. Based on his report an experimental nursery was set up at Sadiya. Excellent tea was soon being produced. With help from Jenkins, commercial production rapidly developed, and by 1859, more than 7,500 acres in the region were devoted to tea cultivation. Jenkins reluctantly retired from service in 1861 but remained in Assam, dying at Guwahati in August 1866. A set of Jenkins’ journals and letters dating from 1810 to 1860s were brought to auction at Sotheby’s in 2009. The genus Jenkinsia Hook. (Lomariopsidaceae) was named for him. [JSTOR]

Tea smuggling form China

A Wardian case. sealed protective container for plants

Karl Friedrich Gutzlaff in Chinese garment

Robert Fortune (1812-1880)

Gardening Assam Tea replacing Wild Tea Forest
On 11 February 1835, the Committee appointed Charles Bruce as the in-charge of nurseries to be developed in Upper Assam, at Sadiya and other places. Two years after, Bruce was designated Superintendent of Tea Plantations. It was Charles who pioneered the use of the term ’tea garden’, a meaningful linguistic shift from ‘tea forest’ signifying the way tea produced in colonial environment, employing semi-mechanized systems . Charles Bruce, regarded as the Father of Indian Tea. [Sharma]
Upon the whole, there seems little reason to doubt that Assam then was physically capable of producing that important article, on which eight or nine millions of money was annually spent in the United Kingdom. Eight chests of Assam teas were auctioned in London in January 1839. This was the beginning of the end of Chinese domination of the tea market that had lasted a century and a half. [Gazetteer for Scottland]

Assam Tea Companies
The same year Prince Dwarkanath had formed the Bengal Tea Association in Calcutta – the first Indian enterprise to start tea cultivation [ Majumdar], and a Joint Stock Company was formed in London. These two companies got combined and formed the first Indian Tea Company called the ‘Assam Company’ – the first Joint Stock Company in India. Tea Plantation spreads beyond Assam across Indian landscape.

Camellia sinensis (China)

Camellia sinensis foliage

Camellia sinensis Assamica (India)

INDIANIZATION OF CAMELLIA CHINOIS
In spite of the incredible agronomical and commercial success of Assam tea, there remained a large section in East India Company unconvinced about its worth in comparison to the Chinese camellia. They were more eager to avail the Chinese saplings for domestication because of their qualitative supremacy over the wild Assam. To report on the earlier amateurish findings, a scientific delegation, headed by Wallich, the celebrated Danish-born botanist geologist, including the surgeon-naturalist John McClelland, and another celebrated botanist William Griffith, was sent to Assam in July 1835. Dr. Wallich maintained that since the native plants were actually tea, there was no need to import seeds from China.
The ‘young Turk’ Griffith, however, had completely a different view and pronounced emphatically that only by importing ‘Chinese seeds of unexceptionable quality’ could the ‘savage’ Assam plant be reclaimed as fine tea. As this wisdom was unquestioningly accepted, a young botanist, Robert Fortune working in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. Alongside, G. J. Gordon was instructed by the Calcutta Botanic Gardens to “smuggle tea seeds out of China.” [Ukers] A deputation, consisting of Messrs. Gordon and Karl Friedrich Gutzlaff, was then sent to the coasts of China to obtain tea seeds. They succeeded in obtaining seeds from southern China that arrived in Calcutta in January 1835, and being sown, vegetated and produced numerous plants. In the beginning of 1836 about 1326 saplings sent to North-East. The tea nurseries were formed at Kumaon and Gurhwal in the Himalayas, and immediately began to grow with all that vigor aided by a small band of Chinese tea-makers whom Dr. Wallich recruited for them in April 1842.
In January 1843, the first sample of Himalayan tea was received at the tea table of the British Chamber of Commerce and reportedly pronounced by the members that the fine kind of tea – Oolong Souchong, “flavored and strong, equal to the superior black tea generally sent as presents, and better for the most part than the China tea imported for mercantile purposes.” [Carey]

Robert Fortune, (1813 -1880)
Fortune was commissioned to undertake a three year plant collection expedition to southern China in 1842, and in 1848. Finally, it was on behalf of the East India Company, he went to remote Wuyi Mountains in Fujian Province and in mid-February 1851 Fortune brought tea-filled especially designed ‘Wardian’ cases consisting of no fewer than 12,838 plants, 8 illegally immigrated Chinese tea-workers and tools of trade to Calcutta port via Hong Kong. Dr. Hugh Falconer, who had recently taken over from Wallich as superintendent of the Botanic Garden, received Fortune at Shibpore ferry ghat to take the sprouting tea-plants smuggled from China under his care. The tea plants then dispatched to Saharanpur, formerly a Mughal garden, at the lower foothill, and from there distributed to various Himalayan plantations. Some of that exceptional stock nurtured in Kumaon plantation made its way to Darjeeling, where it would eventually produce the world’s finest and most expensive teas. [Ukers]

DARJEELING TEA
Coming of tea to Darjeeling was something almost accidental. It was never considered as a place good for planting tea. Even Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911),

Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894)

Sir Joseph Hooker (1817-1911)

founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin’s closest friend, thought of Darjeeling as a place too high with too little sun and too much moisture to grow tea. Dr. Archibald Campbell proved it all wrong within two years of his arrival at Darjeeling as the newly appointed Superintendent in 1839. Previously, when he was in Kathmandu working under renowned ethnologist and naturalist Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894), Campbell was inspired by him to care the native flora and fauna with love. Among other plants in his home garden at the height of 7,000 feet, Campbell in 1841 sowed tea with stock that came from the nurseries in the western Himalayan foothills. The trees came to bear in the second half of that decade, and the Company inspector reported in 1853 that both Chinese and Assam varieties were doing well in Campbell’s garden.
Campbell established government sponsored tea nurseries in Darjeeling and Kurseong. While both types of leaf varieties were planted, Chinese ones were unexpectedly, successful. Plants from stock Fortune had smuggled out of China thrived in Darjeeling’s misty, high-elevation climate. The Company opening up land and clearing plots for tea gardens began to circulate plants for individuals and small companies. [Bengal District Gazetteers]
The commercial cultivation of tea was started in 1852-53 in Darjeeling with the Chinese variety of tea bushes. Today tea is grown in forty-five countries around the world, summer-flush Darjeeling has always been the best choice of the global connoisseurs, and the most expensive as well. [Koehler]

About 10 million kilograms of Darjeeling tea are grown every year spread over 17,500 hectares of land. [Marketing Analysts] India on an average produced 1233.14 million kilograms of tea between 2011 and 2016. North India produces nearly 5 times more than South; and West Bengal produces 329.60 million kg, which is little more than half of Assam. Darjeeling tea seems quantitatively too insignificant but qualitatively the highest among the best teas of the world. [IBEF]

TEA AND ITS SOCIAL DIMENSIONS
In a nutshell this is the story of Indian Tea, which the Britishers discovered, harvested, industrialized and monetized to secure their sovereignty, and left the tea legacy to India when they lost it. This over two hundred year long story tells us how the India’s own wild tea forests turned into tea gardens, and how the smuggled China tea was Indianize imbibing the essence of the mystic Himalayan, Western Ghats, Kanan Devan’s biodiversity.

Tea history, you might have already sensed, is highly illustrative for appreciating the process of cultural shifts leading to acculturation that took place in colonial India, Bengal Presidency in particular being the playground of both the Assam and the Darjeeling teas. Allow me to elaborate in my next post a few elements of the tea history for you to connect the ideas of acculturation I discussed earlier.
Happy New Year

REFERENCE

Achaya, K. T. (1997). Indian Food: A Historical Companion. Oxford: UP. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Indian_Food.html?id=CKIJAAAACAA
Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling ; Ed.by Arthur Jules Dash. (1947). Calcutta: G.P.Press. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150149
Bruce, Charles. (1840) The First story is an 1838 Account of the Manufacture of Black Tea as practiced at Suddeya in Upper Assam. In: Koi-Hai. December 6, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20061220204732/http://livn-an.com/tearoom/bruce/
Carey, William H. (1964 ). The good old days of Honorable John Company; being curious reminiscences during the rule of the East India Company from 1600-1858, complied from newspapers and other publications. Calcutta: Quins. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Good+Old+Days+Of+Honorable+John+Company+From+1800+To+1858%3B+W.+Carey

Charaka Samhita; Edited by Gabriel van Loon. (2003). Handbook on Ayurveda; Volume I. Durham: Center for Ayurveda. https://archive.org/details/GabrielVanLoonCharakaSamhitaVol1Eng/page/n1
Driem, George L. van . (2019).The Tale of Tea: A Comprehensive History of Tea from Prehistoric Times to the present time. Leiden: BRILL. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Z6WODwAAQBAJ&pg=PA625&lpg=PA625&dq=Lieutenant+andrew+charlton+tea+Assam&source=bl&ots=baf_hPx8hM&sig=ACfU3U0t3UX-zqmLIVkXUuoXF3VXwdFEvQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjfpf2KuLTlAhXQbn0KHa9mAHwQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Lieutenant%20andrew%20charlton%20tea%20Assam&f=false

Gazetteer for Scottland. (2017). Robert Bruce (1789–1824). In: Gazetteer for Scottland. Edinburgh: University. https://www.scottish-places.info/people/famousfirst3224.html
Ghosal, Ranjan Kumar (2019), Indian history buff. Quora July1, 2019. https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-role-of-Maniram-Dewan-in-the-Revolt-of-1857
Griffith, William. (1847). Journals of travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Afghanistan and the
neighbouring countries. Calcutta: Bishop’s College. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15171/15171-h/15171-h.htm
(2018). Tea Industry and Exports in India. In: India Brnad Equity Foundation – Portal. Last Updated: December, 2018. https://www.ibef.org/
Johnson, George W. (1843). Stranger in India; or, Three years in Calcutta; v.1. London: Golburn. https://ia902702.us.archive.org/22/items/strangerinindia00johngoog/strangerinindia00johngoog.pdf
Global Plant Resource. [Search Engine] https://plants.jstor.org/login?redirectUri=%2Fstable%2F10.5555%2Fal.ap.person.bm000329174%3fsaveItem=true%5D
Kochhar, Rajesh. (2013). Natural history in India during the 18th and 19th centuries. in Journal of Biosciences 38(2) June 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236674827_Natural_history_in_India_during_the_18th_and_19th_centuries
Koehler, Jeff. (2015). Darjeeling: a history of the world’s greatest tea. London: Bloomsbury. https://www.goodreads.com/user/new?remember=true
Majumdar, Sumit K. (2012) India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution: Democratizing Entrepreneurship. Cambridge: Univ. Pres.
Negi, Vineeta, and ors. (2018). Tea Kinnauri, Thang & Namkeen chai: an Ayurvedic In: World Journal of Pharmaceutical Research. Volume 7, Issue 18, 638-649. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328802003_Tea_Kinnauri_Thang_and_Namkeen_Chai_an_Ayurvedic_Perspective_A_review
Santoshini, Sarita. (2016). Singpho Tea Party. In: Traveller India, Natgeo, february 22, 2016 http://www.natgeotraveller.in/singpho-tea-party-the-story-behind-the-brew/
Sharma, Jayeeta (2011). Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India. London: Duke University. https://books.google.com/books?id=W2dtxgZba6MC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=a+significant+linguistic+shift,+from+%E2%80%9Ctea+forests%E2%80%9D+to+%E2%80%9Ctea+gardens&source=bl&ots=3_FfCbYj0-&sig=ACfU3U03VGNWmyb4pgp4UskXlr7w-ZBkZQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiI5a62mKvlAhXyxlkKHV9wA3oQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=a%20significant%20linguistic%20shift%2C%20from%20%E2%80%9Ctea%20forests%E2%80%9D%20to%20%E2%80%9Ctea%20gardens&f=false
Wheeler, J Talboys (1878). Early Recods of British India: A history of the English settlements in India. Calcutta: Newman. https://ia800208.us.archive.org/17/items/earlyrecordsofbr00wheeuoft/earlyrecordsofbr00wheeuoft.pdf
William Ukers. (1935). All about tea; v.1. New York: Tea & Coffee Association Trade Journal Company. https://archive.org/details/AllAboutTeaV1/page/n9

ARMENIAN GHAT PAVILION: An update of 28 May 2015 post

bathing ghats, british rule, Ferry Ghats/ Harbors, Life Styles

আর্মেনি ঘাট মণ্ডপ

This is one other instance of mistaken identity of Armenian Ghat, which is often being called Mullick Ghat or Mullik Ghat by laymen and scholars alike. The root cause of such a mistake probably lies in our inattention to the fact that the river ghat and the ghat pavilion are two distinctive entities. It becomes a knotty problem when a new ghat replaces a ruined one by reconstructing its ghat-steps, and erecting a new pavilion. As we all know, Armenian Ghat and Mullick Ghat existed close to each other with their separate structure and unique history, but a few know how close they were in terms of yardsticks and timetables so that their identities never get lost . We already discussed these issues in earlier posts.

Photochrom Zurich, is the company behind the production and distribution of this type of event, this photochrome is an authentic photochrome of their house. Every image produced by them is referenced in gold letters in the lower left corner: 20036.PZ. The photochrome is a process that borrows applications from photography and lithography. The proof is produced from a black-and-white negative and then processed using a color lithographic method. The invention was deposited in 1888 by the Swiss company Orell Fussli, then presented to the public at the 1889 World Fair in Paris.

A black-and-white negative used for colored lithograph of Armenian Ghat

Besides the identity issue, the publisher provided us with a misleading information about the pavilion structure, which was made of wrought iron and not ‘of wood’ as stated. “A singularly beautiful lacy cast iron canopy with arches and pillars – distinguishes Armenian Ghat from all brick and stone pavilions of those days. In the mid-18th century, the rich Armenian trader Manvel Hazaar Maliyan had shipped in an elaborate cast iron facade for the Armenian Ghat ..”
Sebanti Sarkar, who did a fascinating study (2017) on colonial architecture in consultation with celebrated architect Professor Manish Chakrabarti, observed that the elegance of the lacy floral motif fashioned in cast iron aroused a general interest in using ornamental wrought iron to beautify public places, corporate buildings as well as family mansions. Calcutta elites assumed the ‘newer aesthetics of living’. The merchants and, zamindars, munshis and baniyas found it appropriate to adopt the new hallmark and style of power. Gradually innovative patterns evolved admixing different European with traditional Bengali motifs. Local variety of cast iron grilles, bells and whistles, sometimes twined with religious icons or family insignia became affordable and popular by early 1900s. [See: Sarkar]

Living in Style in I9th Century Calcutta. Courtesy: Timorous Traveler

REFERENCE

Ajantrik. 2015. “Armenian Ghat, Calcutta. 1734.” Puronokolkata.Com. 2015. https://puronokolkata.com/2015/05/28/armenian-ghat-calcutta-1734/.
Ajantrik. 2018. “Mallick Ghat and the Jagannath Steamer Ghat.” Puronokolkata.Com. 2018. https://puronokolkata.com/2018/08/22/mullick-ghat-and-the-jagannath-steamer-ghat/.
Park, Keith. 2010. “Introduction to Photochromes.” Photographers Resource. http://www.photographers-resource.co.uk/photography/history/introduction_to_photochromes.htm.
Sarkar, Sebanti. 2017. “Tudor Roses at the Ghoses.” Hindu. 2017. https://www.thehindu.com/society/history-and-culture/tudor-roses-at-the-ghoshes/article19819052.ece.
Timorous Traveler. 2010. “Poetry in Iron- The Charm of Old Kolkata Balconies.” Sights and Sounds of Kolkata. 2010. https://pedantictraveler.blogspot.com/2010/03/poetry-in-iron-charm-of-old-kolkata.html.

DHURRUMTOLLAH STREET: WAY TO BENGAL RENAISSANCE

Appliances/ Amenities, Bazaars/Superstores, Bengal Renaissance, Blacks, british rule, Communications, Company Rule, Educational Institution, Export/ Import, Industrial Houses, Life Styles, Living Conditions, Locales, New Township, People, Racial Profile, Religious Profile, Shops/ Markets, Ways of Life, Whites

A triple portrait of the East India Company ship Royal Charlotte – Indiaman (1758-1770. Oil on canvas by Robert Dodd. Couresy: National Maritime Museum,

নবজাগরণের যাত্রাপথে ঐতিহাসিক ধর্মতলা স্ট্রিট

LEAD UP
As early as in May 1772 when Dean Mohamet (1784–1851) arrived, Calcutta was already a major center of commerce for the English East India Company, prosperous and entrepreneurial. [Dean Mahomet] Calcutta was then just a township desperately in need to grow into a city to fulfill the common ambition of the Company Bahadur and the British colonialism under the administration of Lord Clive and his immediate followers. It is interesting to note that the Industrial Revolution, the critical turning point in modern history, had its origin in village Sutanuti cotton market that allured the British traders to settle and exploit. The wave of Industrial Revolution, which had started a decade ago in Britain with manufacturing of textiles, reached the shore of river Hughly by then, and let its impact felt in the planning for Town Calcutta expansion beyond the up-coming Fort William at Govindpore. Its chronicle gradually discloses a co-relation between industrialization and urbanization.

It all started with the initiation of the new Fort that set off huge mobilization of the Europeans southward and of the natives of Govindpore to Kumartooly, Sobhabazar, and Burrabazar at north and to Taltola at east. Both the parties had to spend lengthy time experimenting with new realities before they settled themselves in changed environment. That was the time since when new occupations being introduced as the unheard-of opportunities coming up as a result of scientific inventions and industrial diversification. Calcutta in the process of urbanization started experiencing effect of industrialization. The external economic orientation of Calcutta to England emerged in18th and 19th centuries, provided the young city with an industrial prospect. It took however pretty long time to develop some minimum indigenous technological systems of production, transportation, construction, and the logistics required for large concentrations of people in urban areas. [Ghose] The progress slowed down because of the typical political apathy and cultural lethargy of colonial Calcutta.

Merchant Ship at Old Fort ghat Calcutta. c.1798. Artist Francis Balthazar Solvyns. Source: Peabody Essex Museum

Calcutta Merchants. Diversified group of Persians, Arab, Jews, Marwarrees, Armenians, Mundrazees. Cashmeerees, Malabars, Goojratees, Goorkhas, Affghans, Seiks. Turks. Parsees. Chinese, Burmese, and Bengalees. 1849. Lithograph byColesworthey Grant.

THE CLIMATE

Until 1813 the commercial relations between India and England was free from industrial capitalist exploitation. Trade with India had been relatively small. Its huge potential, however, was foreseen by the industrial capitalist who wasted no time to frame policies for maximizing capital gain to feed British machine industry. They defined their policy with the objective, set out by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, to make India an agricultural colony of British capitalism, supplying raw materials and buying manufactured goods. British rule brought the destruction of traditional handicrafts as well as their technical proficiency, carried off plunder, and revenue extraction. [Sarkar] By 1814 the Company servants themselves had begun to invest their capital in Agency Houses born out of an alliance between the private trading interests of the Company’s servants and the Free Merchants. This unseemly alliance had been continuing since early days of East India Company. We understand from a scholarly note on the Company’s ship Royal Charlotte – Indiaman (1758-1770) featured at the top, that the Company placed bulk orders for official goods with the ships’ captains and supercargoes encouraging the flourishing network of private trade that supported the regular inflow of luxury commodities into Europe. This form of ‘regulated corruption’ was sanctioned through indulgences in Company policy. [Davies]

Despite all the mighty negative forces driven by the political machinery, industrialization happened in Bengal as well as other provinces in India at uneven pace mostly on European initiatives, excepting few instances of Indian entrepreneurship. Calcutta and its neighborhood were on the threshold of a small scale industrial revolution. The local business community embarked upon a broad range of steam-powered industries. Calcutta became ‘a seat of numerous extensive manufactories, vying with many British cities.’ [Stocqueler] The scenario changed in the second half of the 19th century. Faster transportation, and a uniform legal framework, in particular, expanded possibilities of capital and labour movements. ‘The Empire encouraged factor-market integration, increased the scope of public-private partnership and the separation of banking from trading and of trading from manufacturing. This diversification of risk was a key impetus to the industrialization drive.’ [Ray] It was the English who exploited the opportunities most. The natives of Calcutta missed it almost because of their so called entrepreneurial backwardness – a deeply-seated socio-cultural attitude. ‘Power over land, not mercantile or industrial enterprise, was the economic hallmark of social statuses.’ Trade was associated with low ranking castes, Brahmins and Kayasthas considered only the intellectual and administrative professions as proper occupations. Thus the indigenous Bengali elite turned its back on business and left modern industry and international commerce in Calcutta to Europeans. [Sarkar] Neither the shrewdness of colonial policy nor the apathy of general Bengalese toward business could stop Industrialization Revolution that brought forth radical and innovative changes in manufacturing and transportation from manual to mechanical mode. We may note in this context that it all had started with the bonanza of British textile industry at the cost the death of Indian cotton hand mill tradition. The first textile industry in India, Bowreah Cotton Mills, was established in 1818 by British at Fort Gloster near Calcutta; the first jute mill at Rishra started spinning in 1855 when they brought its machinery from Dundee. Industrialization produced a new market economy, and most importantly, a new society desirous of using innovative products and transports to set the revolution go.

Dhurrumtollah Bazar – a section of the coloured lithograph depicting Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart created before 1838 (pub. 1848) by Sir Charles D’Oyly. Courtesy Heidelberg U Univ.

DHARRUMTOLLAH IN CONTEXT

Walking around the Dhurrumtollah Street we may still find few footprints of Industrial Revolution that modernized the ‘process of manufacturing consumer goods and capital goods and of building infrastructure in order to provide goods and services to both individuals and businesses.’ The industrial orientation was discernable more markedly in the new township around the Fort covering the entire southern expansion up to Surman’s Park including villages of Govindpore, Birji, Chowringhee and sections of Colinga – the area commonly understood today in terms of east and west Dhurrumtollah. That time Taltola, or Talpooker, with its segment Jaunbazar was an undeveloped swampy land of Colinga mouza nearest to ‘Bazar of Govindpore on the site of Fort’ (also referred to as ‘Dhurrumtollah Bazar). The only landmark it had was a shrine of Dharmathakur, or the Dharmatala. A road to Dharamtala that known to exist in 1762 as a causeway immediate north of Dingabhanga or Jala Colinga was reinforced with Birbhum gravel in 1796 just after the new Dhurrumtollah Bazar established. [Setton-Kerr]

Old Jaunbazar Native Shops. Chromolithograph By William Simpson. 1867. Courtesy: BL

Portrait of Rani Rashmoni recreated based on an anonymous painting.

As we have already noticed, during the time of expansion of the Town Calcutta and construction of the new Fort, there had been massive mobilization from all directions. The Europeans moved toward south, the Govindpore villagers toward north and east where the later had to take up new occupation for living. In addition, there had been a steady inflow of people from outside India of varied cultural background and expertise for doing business or working as professionals or employees in government and private institutions. The uprooted Govindpore folks gained prospect of living in civil areas and availing new job opportunities in exchange of homes they lost. The opportunities were not limited to serving the European and the Native aristocracy as domestics, but also in public places and at the Fort site as coolies, road-labourers, or palanquin-bearers who in those early days were customarily natives of Bengal. So far we understand, the Hindu settlers from Govindpore had no serious involvement in the process of developing Dhurrumtollah into a neighborhood of historical importance. In our collective mind, the area of ‘Dhurrumtollah’ today no more includes the eastern part of Jaunbazar, which found its own identity after Pritaram Das had built his palatial house in 1810s – the hallowed site where Rani Rashmoni, his daughter-in-law, lived her distinguished life of spiritual, social and political significance. As we conceive, Dhurrumtollah of recent time comprises the entire area between the Lindsay Street and the Dhurrumtollah Street. The road was widened up in 1836 allowing the adjacent land to develop fast into a modern colony next to Chowringhee, but unlike Chowringhee, it was for people of all shades, not white alone. So to speak, such liberal inclusion was a striking exception to the administrative directions pronounced for removing ‘native inhabitants from the black town and to build houses for themselves on another spot, at a greater distance from the fort’. We gather from the English traveler, Edward Ives that this was ‘owing to the governor and council’s resolution in consequence of Colonel Clive’s advice, to enlarge and well secure Fort William, which could not be done, whilst the Indian town was standing. [Ives]

Roman Cathooic Church on Dhurrumtollah Street. (post card picture)

Dhurrmtollah Street in 1880s. Photograph: Johnston and Hofman. c1880s

Westward view of Dhurrumtollah Street. n,d. (picture Postcard) Courtesy: Ebay

Methodist Church from Wellington Crossing

From The Statesman House rooftop. Glenn S. Hensley. 1944

The White Town concentrated around the Tank Square. The region centering on the Govindpore Fort, including Chowringhee, Park Street, Dharmatala, Esplanade, formed the European part of the town. [Wallace] Dharmatala, though commonly designated as a European district, can hardly justify so by its mixed populace and liberal lifestyle, which has been encouraged to diversify further culturally and economically, keeping pace with the changes taken place in global societies through ever increasing Calcutta connections.

Of the Nations Most Known in Hindoostan. Solvyns, Les Hindous, Vol. III. 1811

The crowd of Dhurrumtollah Street is always different from anywhere else in Calcutta – “full of the People of India, walking in family parties and groups and confidential couples. And the people of India are neither Hindu nor Mussulman — Jew, Ethiop, Gueber, or expatriated British” (like James Augustus Hickey, Justice Le Maitre, or a David Drummond). “They are the Eurasians, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them in Dhurrumtollah now.” [Kipling] Because of the presence of British insiders, Dhurrumtollah milieu is essentially more inclusive than the grey town Murgihatta, and may be justly called a global town. On this road, Rev. C Cesry found in 1881 many faiths, many occupations, and many institutions existing next to each other. [Cesry] The road becomes congested with swelling population and their multifarious activities – commercial, professional, humanitarian, devotional, and recreational.

Calcutta may aptly be called ‘a city of shop-keepers’ if ‘getting and spending’ proves to be the essence of its economic life. This was what Sambhoo Churn wrote in Mookherji’s Magazine in 1861. The most respectable of its inhabitants were merchants, and the next might be the judiciary and law practitioners in Calcutta. Those days their profession found highly profitable. So were the medical practitioners. Englishmen in those days carried on other professionals as well. They were jurymen. Besides, they were engaged in different trades as coach-making, watch-making, tavern-keeping, tailoring, wine-dealing, shoe-making, hair-dressing, tanning and the like. [Biswas]

NEW PHENOMENA
A glance through the street directories of late 18th century or early 19th century Calcutta should show the changing pattern of occupations in Dhurrumtollah Street with “addresses of Engineers, Under¬takers, Chemists, Doctors, Midwifes, Photographers, Professors of Music, Horse Doctors, Auctioneers, Jewelers, Book-sellers, Publicans, Barbarians, Scythians, Bond and Free. [Cesry] There were more, most importantly the teachers who contributed singularly to awakening of a new Bengal. The role of Dhurrumtollah Academy of David Drummond and certain other extraordinary institutions carried out gently their grand missions on this rowdy street of ‘shops and bazars’. To Rudyard Kipling the street was like Hammersmith High¬way – the main shopping street in Hammersmith, London.

Bourne & Shepherd. Initially established by William Howard in 1840 as Calcutta Studio. ; renamed in 1866 by Samuel Bourne and Charles Shepherd.

Daguerreotype camera used in the early 19th century in the physics lab Presidency College Courtesy@TimesFreshFace

Annapurna Dutta, a Bengali photographer, appeared on the scene in the 1920s.

Gauhar Jaan. The first singer recorded in gramophne in 1902

As we have elsewhere discussed at length about the old bazars of Dhurrumtollah, including the Chandney Market that still exists. [puronokolkata] The old Chandney was altogether a different class of market. It was set to cater raw materials like cloth lengths, threads and needles, or tools like scissors, knives, hammers or a fishing rod, but barely any ready-made consumer goods like garment to wear or fishes to eat. It was also a good shopping centre for household wares. I believe it still continues with the tradition to a large extent. This apart, I like to draw your attention to the variety of specialty shops in Dhurrumtollah locality that sale, repair and offering services and products of modern technology.

Madan Theatre by Night” by Gaganendranath Tagore. Held at National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Image Courtesy: NGMA

There was no dearth of photographic studios, camera shops, professional cameramen, gramophone players, and music records, projectors and films, and above all there was the pioneering Indian cinema production company, the Madan Theatres to show how very receptive the ambience of Dhurrumtollah has been to innovative merchandise. Even today one goes there for a treasure hunt for rare music records, and some finds the master mechanic for gramophones and cameras in its lanes and bi-lanes. Such experience veritably takes us back to the old days of Dhurrumtollah.

Camel Carriage. Coloured lithograph by F. Jones after Captain G.F. Atkinson. 1860

The scenario Kipling described did not grow overnight but an outcome of a slowly built tradition since 1762 – the time when Dhurrumtollah Street was a muddy road frequented now and then by animal-drawn carts pulled by bullocks, horses, and possibly elephants and camels.
The road became wider in 1867; building plots were numbered in 1843 and revised in 1869. Along with the continuous improvement of the Street and its surroundings, changes take place not only in mode of transportation, or form of vehicle, but in people’s lifestyle and the design of the institutions within the orbit of Dhurrumtollah Street.

OBSERVATIONS
Dhurrumtollah Street is, as we see, one of the few roads of the 18th century Calcutta that may claim to be a distinctive reserve for augmenting the history of making Calcutta a modern City out of the colonial ‘Town Calcutta’. The Street carries the traces of the socio-cultural progress on the route to urbanization basking in the glow of Industrial Revolution. It turned up in Dhurrumtollah rather than in any other part, because of two reasons, I believe. First, it was a free society and a learning society, continuously adjusting itself with new ideas and technological inventions. Second, the resolute role of institutions and few little-known, liberal forward-looking people that made it all happened.

CHAPIN PUMPING ENGINE.Dwarkanath imported this technology from England for his business ventures

Contrary to this view, there is a general notion that ‘the early and prolonged exposure to British administration resulted in the expansion of Western education, culminating in development of science, institutional education, and social reforms in the region, including what became known as the Bengali renaissance.’ [Bengal Chamber] When there is no denying that India owes to the British for the revival of its heritage, the British had little to contribute to the formation of the liberal spirit of Bengal Renaissance simply because they never had such values in their national character founded on the rock of convention.

Neither the contemporary business world had much to effect a change in Bengali mind-set. We know many illustrious names of the 19th century business and industrial leaders, British and Indian, from Andrew Yule to Octavius, from Dwarkanath to P C Ray. Among the Indian entrepreneurs there were many great public figures but hardly any persuasive leader capable of being an agent of social change. When Dwarkanath launched his firm, Young Bengal found a hero, and expected the Bengalis to ‘compete with the nations of Europe and America, not only in English literature, but in fine arts, sciences and commerce’. [Sarkar]

Lithograph by C. E. Pierre Motte (1785 – 1836), after a painting by A Geringer, published by Marlet & Co., later hand coloured c1830

‘Dwarkanath Tagore. Portrait by Count D’Orsay – an album assembled by Lady Georgiana Codrington. [1850s] Cortesy:Alamy

David Hare

William Carey and Pundit. Engraved by J Jenkins after Home Courtesy:NPG

There had been however many renowned adorable renaissance men, including foreigners like a David Hare, and many more unacknowledged people who readied the Calcutta society at large with their open and inquisitive mind imbibed with liberal values. The society was shaped by those extraordinary minds behind the scene that produced leaders to instill new values in public mind, and influence politics of the land. While the industry, the political power, the social elites all had their respective roles to back the new society to flourish, essentially it was the work of the unaccounted activists – the mind-makers.

ENDNOTE
To illustrate my views I shall present few cases, starting with Chandney Bazar, an obscured offshoot of the industrial age. It will be followed by profiles of some magnificent men who left their invisible signatures on some very important chapters of Calcutta history leading to Bengal Renaissance. They came from dissimilar walks of life at different points of time – two horsemen, one Caribbean the the other French by birth, a atheist teacher of Scottish birth, and one Brahmoite American Unitarian activist. Hopefully, you would enjoy their stories so far unheeded, when come out on puronokolkata pages before long.

REFERENCE
[Anonymous]. 1816. Sketches of India; or, Observations Descriptive of the Scenary, Etc in Bengal. London: Black, Purbury and Allen. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=tEcVAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Bengal Chamber of Commerce. 2016. Discover Bengal: A Guidebook Of Business Prospects In West Bengal. Calcutta: Bengal Chamber. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi77uKz1PnhAhUk63MBHQ8vDkYQFjAAegQIAxAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bengalchamber.com%2Feconomics%2Fdiscover-bengal.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1V8wDJ0_pSUMaxTwj7VrZ9.
Bengal Hurkaru. 1838. Bengal Directory and Annual Register 1838. Calcutta: Samuel Smith. https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.14012/page/n5.
Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calcutta and Calcuttans From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma KL. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149376.
Cesry, Rev. C. 1881. Indian Gods Sages And Cities. Calcutta: Catholic Orphan Press. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.128152.
Chunder, Bholanauth. 1869. Travels of a Hindoo; to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India; Vol.1. London: Trubner. https://archive.org/stream/travelsahindoot00chungoog#page/n9/mode/2up.
Davies, Pauline. 2013. East India Company and the Indian Ocean Material World at Osterley, 1700-800, East India Company at Home (May 2013). https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/osterley-park-middlesex/osterley-case-study-winds-of-trade/
Dean Mahomet. 1997 The Travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-century journey through India; ed. By Michael Fischer. California: UCPress,1997 https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520207172/the-travels-of-dean-mahomet
Forbes, James. 1834. Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India; Vol.2. 2nd ed. London: Bentley, Richard. https://archive.org/details/orientalmemoirs00montgoog/page/n10.
Ghose, Benoy. 1960. “The Colonial Beginnings of Calcutta Urbanisation without Industrialisation.” The Economic Weekly, no. August 13: 1255–60. http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/1960_12/33/the_colonial_beginnings_of_calcuttaurbanisation_without_industrialisation.pdf?0=ip_login_no_cache%3Dfc8386086015fc6e2268f71b76bece16.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. City of Dreadful Night. New York: Alex. https://archive.org/details/citydreadfulnig02kiplgoog/page/n7
Puronokolkata. (2018). Durrumtollah And Its Old Bazars. Retrieved from https://puronokolkata.com/2018/05/08/dhurrumtollaha-bazars/
Roy, Tirthankar. 2014. “Trading Firms in Colonial India.” Business History Review 88 (1): 9–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680513001402.
Sarkar, Suvobrata. 2013. “Bengali Entrepreneurs and Western Technology in the Nineteenth Century: A Social Perspective.” Indian Journal of History of Science 48 (3): 447–75. http://www.insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol48_3_4_SSarkar.pdf.
Sen, Amit pseud. [i.e. Susobhan Sarkar] ]. 1947. Notes on Bengal Renaissance. Bombay: People’s pub. https://archive.org/details/notesonthebengal035527mbp/page/n6.
Setton-Karr, W. S. 1865. Selections from Calcutta Gazettes; Vol.2. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.44506/2015.44506.Selections-From-Calcutta-Gazettes–Vol-2#page/n3/mode/2up/search/beerbhoom.
Stocqueler, J.H. 1845. Handbook of India: A Guide to the Stranger and the Traveller, and a Companion to the Resident. 2nd ed. London: Allen. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=SelHAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA348&lpg=PA348&dq=a+seat+of+numerous+extensive+manufactories,+vying+with+many+British+cities.&source=bl&ots=O-V1sg-gc6&sig=ACfU3U1bRKpuM94feKVkwAc3A7wwaWsOPg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8hbmhlO3hAhWKP48KHYEm.
Wallace, Robert Grenville. 1822. Fifteen Years in India; or, Sketches of a Soldier’s Life Being an Attempt to Describe Persons and Things … U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries. London: Longman. https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-6870(73)90259-7.

THE EDEN GARDENS – A PARADISE LOST

british rule, Company Rule, Lake / Talao, Life Styles, Maidan/ Esplanade, Parks/ Pools

ঈডেন উদ্যান কলকাতা
In 1940, John Barry, the Calcutta Journalist, finds Calcutta “admirably served in the matter of ‘lungs’. There is no part which is not provided with a park or open space.” Besides the vast green of the Esplanade around the new Fort William, there have been as many as seven parks in the south of Tank Square, the Eden Gardens being the prettiest of them all. It served as the Promenade of Calcutta as Perrin’s Garden did long back in 1740s.

Garden City Calcutta
Calcutta has gardens of varying descriptions and many luxurious garden houses of upscale European and native families; a few of those turned later into institutional gardens like Horticultural Garden and Zoological Gardens. Two of the oldest gardens, Perrin’s Garden and Surman’s Garden were the most inviting entertainment grounds for the early English genteel in Calcutta.

The Perrin’s Garden at the extreme north of the town, now Bag Bazar, was named after Captain Perrin, owner of several ships. Perrin’s Garden was a pleasure resort, once the height of gentility for the Company’s covenanted servants to take their ladies for an evening stroll or moonlight fête. [Long. It began to be less frequented when the English left Sutanuti. By 1752 it was altogether out of use and sold out for Rs. 25,000.. The other old garden, Surman’s Garden, lay at the extreme south of the town. Surman owned both Belvedere House and its garden which were sold on his behalf by public auction to Captain Tolly. It was afterwards purchased by Hastings for the Governor’s garden-house. [Calcutta Census 1905]

Topography
Between Government House and Garden Reach there was a broad open plain, about 150 acres in extent, called the Esplanade or maidan in Hindustani. It was laid out with fine broad macadamized roads, bordered with trees. The space between the roads is plain turf. As seen in Thacker’s Guide of 1906, the Calcutta Gate of Fort William.

Strand Road west of Eden Gardens. Photographer: Samuel Bourne. c1868

leads out in a straight line to the Eden Gardens at the north-west extremity of the Maidan, bounded on the north by Auckland Road and on the west by Strand Road. [Thacker’s 1906] On Strand Road where the Bank of Bengal now stands, the native boatmen careened their craft at Cutcha- goody Ghaut before the English occupation. Later, when Supreme Court stationed in Calcutta, an avenue of trees marked this spot along the river-bank up to the Creek as King’s Bench Walk. A more elegant avenue was planted by the Lottery Committee stretching from Chandpal Ghaut to the New Fort, known as Respondentia Walk. [Blechynden] The Calcutta society took their constitutional, evening after evening, while the more wealthy drove round in palanquins —facetiously called “coach and four ” —or chaises. Others still went up and down the river in budgerows, over exactly the same ground as their successors do in carriages or motors ; for the Hughli at that date flowed along what is now the Strand. [Minney]

Strand Road north of Eden Gardens. Photographer: Samuel Bourne. c1868

The Strand Road was laid on the land resulted from alluvial deposit. The Municipality contributed largely in the reclamation of this valuable land, or chur (চর) by depositing the sweeping of the town upon the alluvium so formed for many years. In 1848, the sweeping, which were reported to cause a nuisance, were covered up and consolidated by the Municipality. The property became valuable and the income formed the Strand Bank Fund, which was utilized by Government not only for improving itself but for draining and painting trees on the Maidan, the Eden Gardens, and works on the Esplanade. The Lottery Committee constructed Strand Road and Strand Bank , in 1820-21,that passed through two Zamindaries, Calc utta and Sootanaty. [Friends of India. 8 Sept.1853]

The Calcutta society took their constitutional, evening after evening, while the more wealthy drove round in palanquins , facetiously called “coach and four “, or chaises. Others still went up and down the river in budgerows, over exactly the same ground as their successors do in carriages or motors; there were no Eden Gardens, which came nearly half a century occupying most of the old walks. [Minney]

Genesis
There are different unverified stories about acquisition of the land. According to some, it was Babu Rajachandra Das (Marh) who gifted it to Lord Auckland [Wiki]; some suggested Auckland himself purchased a plot for the garden in 1841 [Ency Date]. Whatever might be source of procurement, it is obvious that Auckland tended the garden when it formed part of the Governor’s Estate. [BL Annotation to Band Stand Photo by Malitte]
That the Eden Gardens is named after Emily and Fanny Eden is now a common knowledge, but a few know why it was not after their brother George Eden instead. Something similar happened with the Barrackpore Eden School which was established and grew under personal care of Lord Auckland, often erroneously credited to Emily Eden. Around 1842 the Eden Gardens of Calcutta came into existence with the name Auckland Circus Gardens, or just ‘Auckland Garden’. We are yet to know when it adopted the new name ‘Eden Gardens’ and why the change needed at all. {Ency. Indian Dates} Some believed that the makers of the Gardens being ‘inspired by Garden of Eden in the Bible’, changed its name. What we gather from the words of Curzon and Cotton, that it were Misses Eden, the sisters of Lord Auckland, whose ‘liberality and taste’ contributed most in making the gardens to benefit Calcutta society [Cotton] . Unfortunately, their claims appear somewhat inconsistent with the details Emily recorded in her Letters from India.

Emily and Her Sister

Miss Emily Eden. Portrait Artist: Simon Jacques Rochard. 1834

There is no denying that Edens had a genuine love for gardening. Gardens were their means to secure Englishness in India. At each of their houses in Calcutta, Barrackpore, and Simla, George and Emily made sure they had a garden. But the letters Emily Eden left with us provide little or no indication to establish her involvement in making Eden Gardens. Emily’s ‘new garden’, which comes up frequently in her correspondences, refers to the Park Gardens, or the Ladyship Garden at Barrackpore where she stayed mostly, happily engaged in overseeing her ‘new garden turning out very pretty, observing that her plants doing a great deal in six weeks, enquiring about the Gloriosa–superb growing almost wild there. [August 2. (Finished August 9), 1836] – all these mentions were about their private garden in Barrackpore where she planted seven hundred flowering plants that Dr Wallich of the Botanical Garden gifted. This was the garden the two sisters and their brother George Eden had built for enjoying privately their Englishness in continuity of their Greenwich days. Historically, Emily and Fanny Eden had no more than accidental relations with Eden Gardens and, if any, that should be hardly enough to justify changing of the name of Auckland Circus Park into Eden Gardens, in other words, replacing Lord Auckland with the names of his two sisters in public mind for some external reasons .
We have also difficulty in accepting Eden sisters as liberal-minded as Curzon and Cotton suggest disregarding their highly opinionated conservative mind-set uncovered in great many private letters Emily.
“Eden’s place in English society developed out of a permanent class hierarchy, from birth. Being dropped into the contrasting classes of Anglo-Indian society made Eden psychologically uncomfortable”. In fact, hardly ever Emily minded her language in expressing her aversions, as we see in her letter of 24^th March 1824, Emily describes their dinner with Anglo-Indian guests: ”have great dinners of 50 people, ‘fathers and mothers unknown’, to say nothing of themselves”. March 24, 1836. Eden sisters were upset seeing the loss of British identity in those white people of Calcutta. They abhorred ‘the black naked creatures’ – the native Indians. The status and prestige Emily enjoyed as George’s sister made her “royalty” among the inhabitants of Calcutta, yet unlike their brother George they detested Calcutta, and sometimes thought India a barbarous country.

George Eden, Earl of Auckland
George Eden, earl of Auckland was different being liberal and concerned for the welfare of the people many of the stiff neck Britons looked down, as did his two sisters. He was known as ‘Cold-mannered, reticent, shy, good-natured, robust of figure, disliking all pomp and parade, and delighting in regular official work’. He was said to be least fitted to organize wars and gain victories. He took charge as Governor- General of India in 1836. During his tenure, the first Anglo-Afghan war gave a severe blow to British Prestige in India. He was termed as most unsuccessful Governor–General of India and is known for his follies in Afghan wars. Though Auckland was found “least fitted to organize wars”, he “eminently fitted by temperament and long experience to discharge the most exacting duties of quiet times,”[Trotter] The then British authority, as we see, preferred a war-hero to a good statesman in India. Auckland was called back in 1842 as a failure notwithstanding the immense good he had done for India and its people.

Earl of Auckland, George Eden. Portrat Artist: Simon Jacques Rochard. c1843

During his six year administration Auckland amply proved his will and ability to improve the living conditions and opening opportunities for self development. Launching the Fever Committee programs, introducing the basics of municipal governance, abolishing Pilgrimage Tax, empowering religious endowments, improvement of the medical and general education, extending government scholarship to studying Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian, designing Slavery Act of 1843, are some of his lasting contributions to the colonial India, Calcutta in particular. Lord Auckland’s despatches and State papers impressed Fitzgerald, as President of the Board of Control. He perceived, Auckland “was, with the sole exception of Lord John Russell, by far the ablest member of his party; his views most statesmanlike, and his government of India particularly just.’ “If modern Calcutta has ever a thought to give to the citizens who have made her what she is, she will find many a name worthy of honour among those who recognized Moira and Bentinck and Auckland and Dalhousie as king in turn.”[Cotton] The new Viceroy astonished the inhabitants by showing himself on foot at times and places where he would be least expected. ‘He walked,’ says his private secretary, “to the Eden Gardens in the gloom of these January evenings, and, like the Sultan in the Arabian Nights, heard with amusement or with interest remarks about him as he mingled with the crowd. [Thaker’s Guide to Calcutta 1906]

As already said, Auckland loved gardens, and that wherever he lived maintained a garden there. Government House apart, Auckland had owned one of the most magnificent Garden houses, the Belgachia Villa, which later passed to the hands Dwarkanath Tagore. Auckland’s deep sense of living in harmony with nature prevented him to sanction a plot of ground “at the south-east corner of the enclosure of Tank Square ”for the purpose of erecting Imperial Library. He thought that those spaces of the town which are appropriated to light and ventilation ought not to be given up for purposes of building.” [Cotton]

So far what I have said is only to suggest that George Eden had by far the most appropriate candidature for being the ‘Eden’ of the Eden Gardens, previously called Auckland Circus Garden, or simply ‘Auckland Garden’, though it is being said in chorus that the garden was named after ‘Emily and Fanny Eden’.

A Garden of Eden
The garden was the best of its kind in English colonial states. The Eden Gardens along the river’s bank had been a place of “great show of fashionables out for the purpose of enjoying a drive— ‘eating the air’ (howa-khana) as the Indians express it.” [Carey] Entering the Strand Road we turn to the North, and on our right we pass the Eden Gardens. A large space has been turfed and is well patronized by hundreds of citizens who may be seen taking their evening exercise on the green sward. [Cotton] Thirty years ago, the evening walk in the Eden Gardens was sacred to the Calcutta elite, and, if not in uniform, one had to assume a top hat and frock-coat in order to mingle there with the great ones of the land. Then a wave of liberal sentiment break the order, and the pleasure of listening to the military band discoursing sweet music ceased to be a monopoly for Europeans. The hierarchy since then has not patronized the Gardens as in the days of old. [Thaker’s 1906] The Eden Gardens complex sprawls over a lush green land of 50 acres many gardens, lakes, a Pagoda and a Bandstand of special historical importance. The gardens themselves are laid out with winding paths and artificial water, interspersed with a profusion of flowering trees and shrubs. A pleasanter place for a morning or evening stroll cannot be found. The portion devoted to promenading is well illuminated with the electric light [Carey]

eden gardens calcutta ( kolkata ) frith 5

eden gardens, calcutta by francis frith 2

eden_gardens,_calcutta_by_francis_frith_(1)

The prettily decorated Pagoda and its reflection on the adjacent lake water was a favourite spot of the visitors. This Burmese Pagoda, a specimen of Tazoungs architecture, was built in 1852 in Prome by Ma Kin, wife of the then Governor. It was then removed from Prome after the Burmese War in 1854, and re-erected here in 1856. Within the Pagoda there was an image of Gautama Buddha with its forehead set with precious stones, used by Buddhist Priests for worship. [Thaker’s 1906] The lake alongside the Pagoda, where giant lilies bloom in plenty, is a pleasing sight. For the happy holiday-makers there were two rowing boats, very appropriately named Adam and Eve. These can be hired at the rate of four annas per head per hour. [Barry 1939/40] Round the whole is a broad grassy ride for equestrians, enclosed by shady walks and plantations. [Carey]

Town Band & Operatic Culture
Thanks to the fact that Calcutta was the seat of the Governor-General, brass bands had been of enormous import since the city’s earliest days. The town’s regimental bands, or the Governor-General’s own private band, had initially provided Calcutta with this public music. Curzon reminded us that for the first time the Governor General’s Band was played at his Party in the new Government House to celebrate the King’s Birthday on 4th June, 1803. But it was much later in 1820s a separate Band for the Vice-Roy was formed on assured basis. Since then ‘visitors to Government House have always noticed and as a rule expressed much admiration for, the Viceroy’s Band. Emily Eden, writes on 16 March 1836:

Bengal Levee- a tradition. Lord Cornwallis shown in a crowd of sycophans. Artist: Gillray James. 1782

“To-night there was the concert, at which the natives came, besides all the same society that was at the ball. Fanny said there was nothing very splendid about the rajahs. I heard the music in my bedroom, and it did not sound ill. Our own band is a very good one, and plays every evening when we have company.” [Emily 16Mar1836]

In the late 1850s, after the Rebellion, promenade band concerts became a regular part of White Town life. By August 1861, the concerts had grown in popularity and the more musical residents of Calcutta established a Town Band that entertained the town each night. A large sheltered bandstand was erected in the Eden Gardens. By the winter of 1861-62, the Town Band had become a musical and social institution; evenings would find the bandstand occupied by the Town Band, an ensemble of twenty-five performers supported entirely through voluntary private donations, with crowds of townsfolk coming in carriages, on horseback or on foot to listen. The Band’s best contributions to operatic culture were the regularity of its offerings and its low-cost. [Calcutta Premiere]

The repertoire for each day’s concert was published in the morning edition of several Calcutta newspapers, including The Englishman. Although the individual pieces varied each day, the programmes followed a fairly standard formula: one or two opera overtures, a dance such as quadrille, waltz or march, an arrangement of an operatic set-piece, an arrangement of a British ballad or song, especially of a patriotic nature, and occasionally an arrangement of a parlour song or Hindoostannie (sic) air. We find Sisir Bhaduri, the maestro of Bengali theatre, staged DL Roy’s Sita at the Eden Gardens during Christmas in 1923. [Christiansen] The recitals of the city’s professional musicians and the daily promenade concerts given by the Town Band were invaluable contributors to Calcutta’s operatic culture.

The Statue of Auckland
This noble statue of Lord Auckland was installed in the Eden Gardens, or the Auckland Circus Garden as it was called then. Facing the river, the statue remained prominently visible from strand. The height of the statue itself is about 8 feet 6 inches; and on the whole, including pedestal, 20 feet only. The casting, as well as the model, was sculptured by Henry Weekes, R.A. The monument was complete in 1848. A fee of £.2000 was paid to the sculptor from the fund collected by the people of Calcutta for making the statue of the Earl after his departure from India as a token of their love and gratitude.

Earl of Auckland. Marble Statue. Sculptor: Henry Weekes, R.A. 18481848

The statue of George Eden comes in view when one walks past the Burmese Pagoda and close to the northern gate. The inscription on the pedestal upon which it stands declares that the statue was erected by men, of whom some were the instruments of his government, of whom many knew that government only by its benign effects, all of whom agreed in the affectionate desire to perpetuate the memory of the six years during which be ruled the destinies of British India — for this just reason that, throughout the whole course of those years, he laboured earnestly and unremittingly to make security from rapine and oppression, freedom of internal trade, the medical science of Europe, the justice which is blind to distinctions of race, and the moral and intellectual affluence which it opens, a common and perpetual inheritance to all the nations who inhabit this Empire. 1848.” [Steggles] It was ‘an almost fantastic panegyric’, Curzon commented, and regretted that the name of Auckland was forgotten in Calcutta by then, ‘except the Eden Gardens, which Calcutta owed to the liberality of his sisters, and for its own statue’. [Curzon, v2] Today, none of those two, the Eden Gardens and Auckland’s statue, survives to bear out the loving memory of the Earl in this city. It seems Auckland was covertly stripped of everything he achieved while in India because of some untold sins he committed –failure in Afghan War, or for some good he did for Indian people that proved bad for the British interest. It might also be a streak of his character. As Charles Greville, who knew him well, found in him some very best qualities for a statesman but ‘a certain diffidence in his own judgment, a diffidence which was soon to lead him, his party, and his country, into disaster. [Trotter]
Firstly, Auckland Park lost its definite identity by changing its name into Eden Gardens in an attempt to cut off Auckland from Calcutta people very unkindly, indeed. The new name convenience spreading of the make-belief story, that it was a gift to the townsfolk due to liberality of the Eden sisters, who had been in real life conservative British aristocrats utterly disrespectful to the native Indians and Anglo-Indians on different counts.
View of Eden Gardens and its Burmese Pagoda. Photographer: Hoffman and Johnston. 1865Besides Auckland’s statue, there had been two other monuments located in Eden Gardens. On its north side, the grave of Charlotte, Lady Canning was buried and remained there until moved to Barrackpore Park. On its south side stood the statue of the Naval Commander William Peel until reinstalled at Temple of Fame, Barrackpore. No memorials of Emily and Fanny Edens ever installed to acknowledge their supposed involvement in making of the garden. The statue of Auckland that stood in Calcutta from 1848 was taken away to Auckland City in 1969, after a short stay in Victoria Memorial Hall being a part of its statuary collection. The cost of transportation and its erection on site was arranged and financed by the New Zealand Insurance Co. Ltd. as a gift to its home city. Calcutta bade adieu to the last of Auckland.

A Paradise Lost

The garden that was steadily being developed since early 1840s under the care of Lord Auckland and his successors into an enchanting sphere of natural beauty and peace for the people of Calcutta, encountered a threat in 1864. The Calcutta Cricket Club, after many refusals of their prayer to the successive Governors-General obtained permission to move to the eastern end of the Eden Gardens. The garden authorizes did never mind accommodating such events as of Bengal Lawn Tennis Championship, Kennel Club Dog Shows, Presidency Sports, Rowing Club boating, but not a game that may ruin the delicate natural atmosphere and its exquisite garden architecture with the tumult of the maddening crowd from the stadium. The stadium has since grown into a large walled realm larger than Roman coliseum ruled predominantly by the law of fashion, entertainment and commerce in the name of sports. It was an unholy marriage that ultimately reduced the Eden Garden, once so much loved, next to nothing but its name, which now stands for:
”a cricket ground in Kolkata, India established in 1864. It is the oldest cricket stadium in India. It is the home venue of the Bengal cricket team and the IPL franchise cricket team Kolkata Knight Riders, and is also a venue for Test, ODI and T20I matches of the India national cricket team. The stadium currently has a capacity of 68,000.” [Wikipedia]

This shows how we like to redefine our past and ourselves giving a damn to our roots.

REFERENCE

Blechynden, Kathleen . 1905. Calcutta: Past and Present. London: Thacker. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/calcuttapastand02blecgoog).

Carey, W. H. 1907. The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company, Being Curious Reminiscences … during the Rules of the East India Company, from 1800 to 1858; Vol.2. Calcutta: Cambray. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.116087).

Carey, William. 1882. Good Old Days of Honorable John Company; Vol.1. Calcutta: Quins Book. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/goodolddaysofhon00careuoft).

Christiansen, Amy Marie. 2012. Discomforts of Empire: Emily Eden’s Life in India, 1836=1842 -. Auburn: Auburn University. Retrieved (https://etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/3271/AChristiansen-Thesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y).

Cotton, Evan. 1907. Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: Newman. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/calcuttaoldandn00cottgoog).

Firminger, W. K. 1906. Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/thackersguidetoc00firm).
Gupta, Hemendranath Das. 1944. The Indian Stage; v.4. Calcutta: M K Das Gupta. .(https://www.amazon.in/Indian-Stage-Vol-IV/dp/1178594637)

Marquis Curzon. n.d. British Government In India Curzon 2 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. Retrieved January 21, 2019 (https://archive.org/details/BritishGovernmentInIndiaCurzon2/page/n3).

Massey, Montague. 1918. Recollections of Calcutta for Over Half a Century. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjRr_WylsPXAhUDV7wKHTWJAXcQFggxMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2Frecollectionsofc00massiala&usg=AOvVaw3uvydXqyjqB3xbkOOZe4jp).

Minney, R. J. 1922. Round about Calcutta. London: Oxford U P. Retrieved (https://archive.org/stream/roundaboutcalcut00minnrich#page/n5/mode/2up).

Ray, A. K. 1902. Calcutta: Town and Suburbs; Pt.1 A Short History of Calcutta. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books?id=-Lo5AQAAMAAJ&q=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&dq=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDnrz11MnXAhUCN48KHdgEDQUQ6AEIJzAA).

Rocha, Esmeralda Monique Antonia. 2012. “Imperial Opera : The Nexus between Opera and Imperialism in Victorian.” 1833–1901. Retrieved (https://api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au/portalfiles/portal/9844782/Rocha_Esmeralda_Monique_Antonia_2012.pdf).

Steggles, Mary Ann. 1993. Empire Aggrandized: A Study in Commemorative Portrait Statuary Exported from Britain to Her Colonies in South Asia, 1800 to 1839; Vol.1. Leicester: Leicester. Retrieved (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44103641_The_Empire_Aggrandized_A_Study_in_Commemorative_Portrait_Statuary_Exported_From_Britain_to_Her_Colonies_in_South_Asia_1800_to_1939).

Trotter, L. J. 1893. Earl of Auckland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books?id=1ypnW6TwjQAC&pg=PP2&lpg=PP2&dq=captain+trotter+auckland&source=bl&ots=vKMRrW9x7i&sig=rCHTnT2EZ0Z_FyF0dtIz_uFAREU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiBspPbhejfAhWIQI8KHbqfDLUQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=captain trotter auckland&f=fals).

Wikipedia . Eden Gardens. 12 Jan. 2018 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Gardens)

FINDING DHURRUMTOLLAH

british rule, Company Rule, Land View, Living Conditions, Maps / Charts, New Township, Roads & Streets, Uncategorized

Calcutta. a steel engraving. 1839. Source: Meyer’s Universalism 1850.

ধর্মতলা সন্ধানে

DHURRUMTOLLAH STREET Away From Durrumtollah

Dhurrumtollah Street, nicknamed ‘Dhurrumtollah ka Rasta’, is an approach road to Dhurrumtollah – a vaguely indicated locality north of village Chowringhee that anonymously spreads over the marshy terrain known as Colinga at one time. None of the old maps of Calcutta specifies the place of Dhurrumtollah, though the Dhurrumtollah Street invariably shows up in its place since Mark Wood’s map of 1784-85.
The Dhurrumtollah Street came up in around 1762, so did Jaun Bazar Road (later ‘Street’), both running eastward leaving Dingabhanga in between [Mark Wood, 1784]. Originally it was a causeway raised by deepening the ditch on either side of a land then owned by Jafer, a zamadar in the employ of Warren Hastings.”[Cotton]

COLINGA

Topography
It was the time when the English territory south of Town Calcutta was partly jungle, an extension of Sunderban, where Hastings said to have had the pleasure of tiger hunting.
Before coming of the English, Calcutta topography had been much simpler as Barrel’s 16th Century Bengal map reveals. The vast surrounding area, where the English later founded their first zamindari, looked like populated by only three distant villages – Chitpore, Kolikata, and Kalighat, connected by an unnamed jungle path. The 1680 map ‘Calcutta before the English’ adds few more names pointing to Sutanuti, Govindpore, Chowringhee, and also the Creek, and Jannagar at the eastern end.

Bengal. 1550. River: From Hughli to Sea; according to Joao de Barrel and the Bengali poets. Source: Wilson.Annals.v.1

The landscape in the vicinity of the Creek was then viewed as an extension of village Chowringhee – unworthy of any distinction. It was for the first time, the map Mark Wood prepared in 1784-85 charted the chunk of land separated from Chowringhee as Colinga. Colinga includes two subareas: Talpooker and Jala Colinga within its boundary. The two villages, Colinga, and Jala Colinga, however, were already enlisted in 1717, as ‘Colimba’ and ‘Jola Colimba’, among the 38 villages the English Company was permitted by the Emperor to buy. [Ray]
Talpooker was not in the buying list of villages. In Upjohn’s Mark Wood’s maps, Talpooker was prominently placed and it still exists as Taltola, an old quarter of metropolis, bearing one of the most common rural-names in Bengal, featuring habitations centred on ponds bordered with palm trees.
Jala Colinga is better known by its sobriquet ‘Dinga-bhanga’, which originated after the great 1737 cyclone that wrecked a dinga, i.e. large boat, on the swampy shoreline of the Creek – the vanished man-made canal for carrying cargo boats from Chandpal Ghat toward Beliaghata at the east end. [Blochmann]

The Creek was also referred to in Company documents as Calcutta khal. The vast territory extending from Calcutta Khal to the Tolly’s Nullah, covering the whole of the maidan spread a jungle tract of heavy undergrowth and giant trees. “This jungle was intersected by numerous creeks and watercourses, where the muddy yellow waters of the Hughly swept in with the rising tide or ebbed with the drainage of the surrounding rain-drenched country”. The old bed of the Creek remained, long after the closing of its connection with the river had deprived it of its stream, and turned it into a ditch. [Blechynden]
We normally accept unquestioningly whatever presented in a historical map, while the opposite may not be true in all cases. Whatever not presented, cannot be read as non-existent for sure since the possibility of their being existed namelessly can never be overruled without verifying the circumstantial evidence. Colinga is one of such cases. With all its parts: Talpooker and Jala Colinga appear separately in the list of 19 mauzas, and Dhee Calcutta, composed during 1767-1857.

Colinga and the newly enlisted villages were not expected to come up suddenly out of nothing. Normally, it takes ages for a geographic entity to acquire a name of its own, unlike the modern way of deciding street names on board meetings, as did the English Company in 1792. For a prolong period, when it remained essentially a part of village Chowringhee, Colinga had been a thinly populated uncultivated landscape occupying north-east segments with Dingabhanga and Talpooker on the peripheries.

Etemology
The name Colinga, assigned in Upjohn’s and Mark Wood’s maps, is a derived form of a rare Bengali word কলিম্বা (Colimba), has multiple meanings. It poses a serious challenge for us to distinguish between the etymological and the popular sense of the word in the current context. Vernacular lexicon shows 25 different sets of meanings, of which the followings are found plausible attributes contributing to the naming of the village Colimba (কলিম্বা), or Colinga:
(1) Trees: পাকুড় (Ficus religiosa, sacred fig) / শিরিষ (Lebbek Tree)/ কামরাঙ্গা (carambola) / তরমূজ (watermelon) (2) Terrain: marshland (হাজা। “হাজালে কলিঙ্গ দেশ”) (3) People: Kol tribe, a worshiper of Bonga (বঙ্গা) [Jnanendramohan]
On the basis of such semantic interpretations we may imagine how Colinga might have been before the increasing homesteads changed its ecology. Colinga and its surrounds, by lexical interpretation, apparently looked like a jungle of Sirish শিরিষ and Pakurh পাকুড় trees and a marshland (at Jala Colinga) with an abundance of kamranga কামরাঙ্গা vegetation; lived by Kol কোল and such tribal folks.

The Banks of the Hooghly River, Calcutta, Source: The Graphic, v.24, no 646, Ap.15, 1882

Ecology
The soil of Calcutta, marshy and damp, has always been displeasing, particularly in the rainy season, and more so because of the proximity of the river and a widespread lake – about 3 to 4 miles long and in no part above 18 inches deep, frequented by innumerable flocks of wild geese, duck, teals, etc. The site of Colinga was the nearest to that lake [Chattopadhyaya]

Coconut palm tree, jackal, adjutant stork, vulture, cobra, kite, and centipede of India. Handcoloured copperplate drawn and engraved by Andrea Bernieri after Francois Solvyns from Giulio Ferrario’s Ancient and Modern Costumes of all the Peoples of the World, Florence, Italy, 1844.

Indian tiger underneath a tamarind tree. Handcoloured copperplate drawn and engraved by Andrea Bernieri after Francois Solvyns from Giulio Ferrario’s Ancient and Modern Costumes of all the Peoples of the World, Florence, Italy, 1844.

Colinga happened to be the last of the “typical swamp-type of vegetation including mangroves throve in and around Calcutta” for about 3000 years, as experts find. Perhaps, with the rise of land as a result of continued river silting and increased population the forest has since migrated southwards giving rise to the swampy forest of the present day Sunderbans. [Biswas]

Biodiversity

Since prehistoric eras the birds and animals travel Gangetic Bengal, migrate and settle colonies enriching natural resources contributing to improving quality of the soil and its landscape. As we all know, birds transport seeds and twigs from far and near across lands and oceans to germinate new variety of plant life, and they do it selectively by the atmospheric condition of a terrain. The birds living in and around Calcutta, and those visiting seasonally during the last two centuries, have been systematically recorded by birdwatchers. Frank Finn is one of them. His Birds of Calcutta is more relevant to our theme than elaborated work, Pet Birds of Bengal [Law]. We find 24 species of birds, all familiar to us but some like Paddy-bird – once so prevalent in the City of Palace, gone out of sight for good. Those are:

House Crow পাতি কাক, Oriental Magpie Robin দোয়েল, Seven Sisters ছাতারে, Bulbul বুলবুল, King-Crow দাঁড় কাক, Common Tailorbird টুনটুনি, Oriole, বেনে বউ common? Mynah ভাত শালিক, Dhtalধুলাল, Sparrow চড়াই, Honey-Sucker মৌটুসি, Woodpecker কাঠঠোকরা, Coppersmith Barbet বসন্তবাউরি, Blue-Jay নীলকণ্ঠ, Kingfisher মাছরাঙ্গা, Swift বাতাসি, Koel কোয়েল, Parrot তোতা Owl প্যাঁচা, Vulture শকুন, Kite চিল, Dove ঘুঘু, Gull গাং চিল, Paddy-Bird ধান পাখি।

Company School painting of a Haunaville, India, 19th century, watercolour on paper, depicted in flight, inscribed ''Martin'' above and ''Hauwaville''

barn owl, possibly Company School, India, late 19th century

Haunaville বাতাসি. Watercolor on paper. Company School. 19th century. Inscribed: ‘Martin’

Company School Painting of a Mynah Bird, Beng

Company School painting of a Hoodhood (19th Century) By Indian School, 19th Century; watercolour on paper;

An Eastern Goshawk, by Bhawani Das, from the collection of Lady Impey Company School, Calcutta, circa 1780

A cursory glance through the list may suggest that not all the species were fit for habitation in early Colinga environ. Flocks arrive at in stages with different compositions, adaptable for the ecological diversity, to contribute in transforming Colinga landscape from a marshland to cultivable woodland, orchard and paddy-field. There were no woodpeckers, honey-suckers at the beginning but gulls, kingfishers, snipes and the like. [Finn]

Route dans le Bangale. c1791-1823. Artist: François Balthasar Solvyns.

The landscape of Colinga before mid-18th century, so far we see, was much dissimilar to woody Govindpore, Birji and Chowinhee villages. Colinga remained a vast inhabitable wetland for centuries, infested with insects and aquatic creatures including water-birds. Initially, a number of coarse weeds began to invade the territory and a variety of thorny shrubs and other plants, not attractive to grazing animals advanced slowly, their seedlings sheltered by the weeds until large enough to escape the trampling. Eventually a thicket of small trees and shrubs appeared, of which, the commonest constituents should have been the thorny beri কুল, benchi বৈঁচি,and their near relative dumar ডুমুর,- a quick-growing, shrubby plant with coarsely hairy leaves, also arrived early on the scene.

Finally appear the large trees – the lofty palms তাল raise their crowns of fan-shaped leaves, mangoes আম, tamarind তেঁতুল and the lighter green of a neem নীম amidst them can probably be seen, and in the cold season – the naked branches of a simul শিমুল, or the spreading crown of a siris শিরিষ covered with yellowish pods stands out conspicuously from the green around them. There were some 69 trees only that Benthall considered naturalized in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, 41 were thought to be truly indigenous, 20 are natives of other parts of India, 6 originated in America, and 1 each in Africa and Malaya. On the other hand several plants, which seem to have been fairly common even in 19th century Calcutta have become scarce or lost forever, like Croton Tiglium Linn জায়ফল. [Benthall]

Orange Headed Ground Thrush. by Shaikh Zain al–Din. Calcutta 1778

Bird. Painting Artist: Shaikh Zayn-al-din. 1778

Fish. Calcutta Journal Of Natural History, 1841

Chita. After Shaikh Zayn-al-din

Benthall writes in early 20th century, “Not much more than a hundred years ago the wild rhinoceros roared near Alipore, and panthers were often hunted in what is now part of the city of Calcutta. In those days jungle must have stretched from the Sunderban to the edge of the city … Around Calcutta the country consists of treeless swamp and lake, and broad expanses of paddy-fields, interspersed with roads and paths and villages.” In such country, Benthall maintains, wasteland suitable for the growth of trees and shrubs is scarce, but here and there patches may be found which for some reason or other are neither cultivated nor planted with useful trees. [Benthall]

Banyan Tree. Artist: Unidentified. Source: Journal of Residence In India By Maria Graham. 1813

Colinga was certainly one such place of marshy land that remained till recent time uncultivated, in an atmosphere totally different from the then Kalighat, Govindpore, Calcutta areas. It was then wild marshy woodland lived by tribal in hutments making minimal anthropogenic hazards barring the manmade canal created for navigation by the early village dwellers. The scenario discourages us to believe of a presence of grand shrine revered by people of all faiths as a holly place. If at all any such generally acceptable shrine erected as a place of dharma (ধর্ম), it must have been created long after, but not later than, 1764 when ‘Dhurrumtollah ka Rasta’ was rolled over a muddy beaten track that supposed to lead to the holy place.

Modern Scenario
The reconstructed view of the expansive area of Colinga, earlier a part of the forested Chowringhee for about three centuries, may prove to be a rude contrast of what we see in the colonial paintings and photographs documented by the contemporary artists and lens men. Upjohn’s 1793 map gives an idea of the expansion by marking the site of Colinga Bazar Street, and of the Colinga Tank. Colinga Bazar Street stood at the south of Jaunbazar Street, and Colinga Tank, later Monohur Doss Tank, was shown on Maidan opposite the house of Messers Stone and Hoffmann. In Bailie’s map of 1792 Chowringhee contains 45 houses and plenty of paddy-fields. Europeans have moved eastwards and southwards to Bow Bazar Street and Circular Road, while Taltola, Colinga, and Fenwick Bazar are inhabited by native Indians. [Ray] During the end of the 18th century, Europeans came to stay here. The Bengal Gazette editor, James Augustus Hickey, Justice Le Maitre resided in this neighborhood. Since mid-19th century the Colinga Street became an infamous locality of European and Eurasian harlots.
In a Calcutta Municipal Corporation meeting of 17 July 1912, the previous name ‘Collingabazar Street’ was changed into ‘Collin Street’. By dropping the last two letters from its name,‘Collinga’, a variant of ‘Colinga’, turned into ‘Collin’, which the commissioners found necessary to make the Street sound more respectable and attractive to the prospective buyers of lands and houses. Following the decision, not the street alone but everything else known by its name got changed. Colinga was erased from Calcutta map and collective mind of the people, leaving Dhurrumtollah homeless, faceless unidentified geographic entity.

View of Circular Road, Calcutta. Artist: Edward Augustus Prinsep. 1848

There is perhaps another way of finding Dhurrumtollah by applying our mind more toward human elements than to the physical elements of issues. So far we attempted to understand the natural condition of the venue, now let us question how the human folks lived there when Colinga became habitable. We knew that on the plains of Bengal, two trees, peepul(অশ্বথ) and banyan(বট) tend to dominate all others, and Colinga might not be an exception. We may question now why the two are called sacred fig-trees, and try to examine how far Bentham was correct when he said, “Both these trees are venerated by the Hindus and are often planted for religious reasons near houses and temples and in villages. Beneath their branches may be seen little shrines marked by the presence of rounded stones, and sometimes small temples are erected in their shade” (my emphasis). [Benthal]

Endnote
The scenario reminds us of the beaten jungle path of pre-colonial days leading to a widely acknowledged dhurrumtollah, or ‘divine place’, where worshipers arrive from distant villages taking the eastward route that the present Dhurrumtollah Street follows. This street may not lead to a locality ‘Dhurrumtollah’ as the Chowringhee Road and Jaunbazar Street did – one to locality Chowringhee, the other to Jannagar. Instead, it can be in all probability a sacred location and not a locality. Before exploring new directions, it is important to settle a few questions bothering our focus. Should this dhurrumtollah necessarily be an outstanding devotional edifice like temple, mosque or a church? If yes, its location must have been somewhere off the street and not on the street or its sides. Secondly, how far realistically we can think of such an architecture erected before 1764 – the year Dhurrumtollah Street constructed?
I would like to take up these questions in my next post: THE HOLLY STREET DHURRUMTOLLAH

REFERENCE

Books

Bagchi, P.C. 1938. The Second City of the Empire. Calcutta: Indian Science Congress Assoc.
Benthall, A. P. 1933. Tree’s of Calcutta and Its Neighbourhood. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/TheTreesOfCalcutta).
Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calmtta and Calcuttans From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma KL. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149376).
Blochmann,H. 1978 ‘Calcutta during the Last Century’ in Alok Ray edt. ‘Calcutta Keepsake’, Calcutta: Rddhi-lndia. (https://www.amazon.com/marsh-township-east-Calcutta-Department/dp/8170740738)
Cotton, Evan. 1907. Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: Newman. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/calcuttaoldandn00cottgoog).
Chattopadhyaya, Haraprasad. 1990. From marsh to township east of Calcutta: A tale of Salt Water Lake and Salt Lake Township. (Department of History, University of Calcutta, monograph) (https://www.amazon.com/marsh-township-east-Calcutta-Department/dp/8170740738)
Frank Finn. 1904. Birds of Calcutta. 2nd ed. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/birdsofcalcutta00finnrich).
Kathleen Blechynden. 1905. Calcutta: Past and Present. London: Thacker. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/calcuttapastand02blecgoog).
Law, Satya Churn. 1923. Pet Birds of Bengal; v.1. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/petbirdsofbengal00laws).
Ray, A. K. 1902. Calcutta: Town and Suburbs; Pt.1 A Short History of Calcutta. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books?id=-Lo5AQAAMAAJ&q=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&dq=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDnrz11MnXAhUCN48KHdgEDQUQ6AEIJzAA).
Wilson, Charles R. 1895. The Early Annals of the English in Bengal; Summarised, Extracted, and Edited with Introductions and Illustrative Addenda; Vol.1. London, Calcutta: Thacker. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/earlyannalsofeng01wilsuoft).
জ্ঞানেন্দ্রমোহন দাস. n.d. বাংলাভাষার অভিধান. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/bub_man_c3ef006702a4d6c876970cc35b669346).

Maps and Plans

Bengal. 1550. River: From Hughli to Sea in the 16th century; according to Joao de Barrel and the Bengali poets. [Reprinted See: Wilson. page 129]
Calcutta. 1680. Calcutta before the English [map] [Reprinted See: Wilson. page 126]
Calcutta. 1792 & 1793. Map of Calcutta and its environs; by A Upjohn (http://www.museumsofindia.gov.in/repository/record/vmh_kol-R565-C1737-2914)
Calcutta. 1792-93 Map of Calcutta and its environs From the accurate survey taken in the year 1792 & 1793 by A Upjohnhttp://www.museumsofindia.gov.in/repository/record/vmh_kol-R565-C1737-2914
Calcutta. 1793. Plan of Calcutta; reduced by permission of the Commissioners of Police from the original one executed for them by Lietn Colonel Mark Wood of 1784-1785. Published in October 1792 by William Baillie. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Kolkata_Old_Map.jpg
Calcutta. 1847-49. Map of Calcutta from actual survey. Contributors: Simms, Thillier, and Smyth. London: Chapman, 1858 (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g7654c.ct001429/?r=0.604,0.19,0.07,0.03,0)

DHURRUMTOLLAHA AND ITS OLD BAZARS

Bazaars/Superstores, british rule, Life Styles, Shops/ Markets

Dharamtala Mosque on the Corner of Chowringhee Road. WilliamPrnsep-c1840-45 — Tipu Sultan Mosque on the Corner of Chowringhee Road & the Dhurrumtollah Street opposite the old Bazar. An oil on canvas by William Prinsep, c1840. Courtesy: ANU

ধর্মতলা এবং আঞ্চলিক প্রাচীন হাটবাজার

Looking through the lenses of John Saché , the Belgian-American photographer, a long stretch of the Esplanade Row leading to Dhurrumtollah Street comes in view beyond Chowringhee Square. The photograph was taken, from the East Gate of new Government House in around 1865.

From Gov.GateJohn Edward Saché_ Views of Calcutta (ca 1865-1882) — Esplanade Row leading to Dhurrumtollah Street. Photographed by John Ward Saché. c1865. Courtesy: BL

The location of Dharmatala that we recognize today is virtually the same as when it was called Dhurrumtollah in colonial Calcutta to mean the Esplanade or Maidan in broad sense. The huge tank excavated in 1790 at the north-east corner of the Esplanade was known as ‘Dhurrumtollah Tank’ where it existed until the dawn of the 19^th century.

Dhurrumtollah had been a part of the ancient jungle remaining at the south of the old Calcutta township till the jungle cleared after 1757. The Dhurrumtollah Street came up in around 1762, so did Jaun Bazar Road, both running eastward leaving Dingabhanga mouja in between. Originally a causeway raised by deepening the ditch on either side of a land owned by Jafer, a zamadar in the employ of Warren Hastings.” [Cotton] Dhurrumtollah remained for a long while “an open and airy road lined with trees leading to Beliaghata. The Street, then called Dhurrumtollah ka rustah, goes in a line with the northern boundary of the Esplanade commencing at no.1 Chowringhee Road.“ The Street is nearly equal in dimensive character to Chowringhee Road, but Dhurrumtollah Street has the distinction of being on each side bordered by a row of houses of good elevation, and many of them even splendid in their outward appearance — with but comparatively few native hut-edifices on its line — it would claim to be considered a first-rate street in any western capital”. [Handbook of India 1844]

The old scene of Chowringhee Square, where meet four highways – Dhurrumtollah Street, Cossitollah Road, Road to Rusupagla, and Esplanade Row – has been captured by contemporary painters, and the presence of a visiting bird in one of them brings about the idyllic environ of the then Dhurrumtollah.

Maidan Cor. Dharamtala ByJohnWardSache_collections.carli.illinois.edu — Dhurrumtollah Tank. Photographed by John Ward Saché. c1865

Dhurrumtollah is relatively old a district. Chowringhee, which grew along the New Fort and groomed in spot-less English style unrelated to the local traditions and culture of community living, which have always been focused in the street life of Dhurrumtollah. The good bad and ugly in Dhurrumtollah Street scenario expose the weakness and strength of ethnic fusion and liberal thinking – a breeding ground of radical forces for social change. Dhurrumtollah can be distinguished as one of the most remarkable streets in the world of happenings toward formation of new society.

The crowd of Dhurrumtollah Street has been of a different kind than anywhere in Calcutta. To Rudyard Kipling the street is like Hammersmith Highway – the main shopping street in Hammersmith, London. “Dhurrumtollah is full of the People of India, walking in family parties and groups and confidential couples. And the people of India are neither Hindu nor Mussulman — Jew, Ethiop, Gueber, or expatriated British. They are the Eurasians, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them in Dhurrumtollah now.” [Kipling]

On this road in 1881, Rev. C Cesry found many faiths, many occupations, many institutions existing next to each other. The Union Chapel, the American Mission Home, the small old and new large Methodist Churches, the Corinthian Theatre, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the only good looking Masjid, boarding houses, institutions, societies – all have had their part in defining the history of the street. All the largest livery stables of Calcutta were also here. About the centre is Wellington Square with a Maidan on which troops of little children frolic and gambol of an evening. Dhurrumtollah was full of shops and bazars. Here are also Engineers, Undertakers, Chemists, Doctors, Midwifes, Photographers, Professors of Music, Horse Doctors, Auctioneers, Jewelers, Book-sellers, Publicans, Barbarians, Scythians, Bond and Free. [Cesry] What Rev Cesry misses in his short list is the schools – particularly the Dhurrumtollah Academy of unforgettable David Drummond.

The stories of Dhurrumtollah Street I fear might take more space than what can be managed at one go. Hope, you would bear with my plan of publishing it in few instalments. Here I take up Dhurrumtollah bazars keeping other facets on hold for a while.

DHURRUMTOLLAH BAZAR

So far we know, the Dhurrumtollah Bazar, situated at the crossing of the ‘Road to Chowringhee’ and the Dhurrumtollah Street. Cotton maintained that the plot was in one of the sites thought of for the erection of present Town Hall. It was ‘a very eligible situation for the new bazar’, so writes Calcutta Gazette in September 1794. The bazar has ‘already contributed much to the convenience of the community at large. Such an establishment, from the great increase of the inhabitants and the situation of the Chowringhy [sic] houses, has long been wanted. [Setton-Karr Vol.2] The report indicates that the new bazar was established before 1794 and not in 1794, and that it served the demands of Chowringhee households as well. It was still called – by a generic name, Natun Bazar. Cotton suggested without any clue that the Bazar was known once upon a time by a quite unexpected name ‘Shakespeare Bazar’. There has been another supposed name ‘Memba Pirer Bazar’ mentioned in Harisdhan’s book with no reference, which sounds improbable for naming a bazar created to feed the Chowringhee residents. The Dhurrumtollah Bazar was actually referred to as the Bazar at Chowringhee – the first edition of the modern New Market.

We come to know from an advertisement issued by Messrs Tulloh & Co. dated 18^th April 1799 that the Dhurrumtollah Bazar, termed as Bazar at Chowringhee, was on sale by the auctioneers. The bazar was “bounded by General Stibbert’s house on the east, by the Dhurrumtollah road to the north, by the Chowringhee road to the west, and by the Jaun Bazar to the south.” It stood on the ground measured about nine beegahs [sic] on which there were 207 pucka built rooms or shops, 143 arched ditto, and 36 large cutcha godowns, yielding a gross monthly rent of Rs. 1,043 [Carey] We needed to know a little more of General Stibbert’s house, which luckily came handy through a different advertisement announcing the shifting of new Calcutta Academy from Cossitollah to General Stibbert’s House. The house was described as a large, airy, commodious, and eligibly situated house in the west end of the Dhurrumtollah and in the vicinity of the Esplanade, of which, as well as of the river, it commands a view. [Setton-Karr Vol. 3]

Rev. Long put forward another hint to spot out where exactly the Bazar stood ‘half way between Wellington Square and Government House’. He held that the Bazar actually occupied the site of the residence of Colonel De Glass, the then superintendent of the gun manufactory, which has since been removed to Kasipur. [Long]. The account of Rev. Long, however, leaves some doubts as to Colonel De Glass’s occupancy since the said ‘gun manufactory’ was actually established in 1802 as ‘Gun Carriage Agency’, and only in 1830 it was shifted to Cossipore renaming as ‘Gun Foundry’. The history of Dhurrumtollah Bazar so far revealed disallows any chance of De Glass’ occupancy in either no.1, or no.2, Dhurrumtollah Street where Dhurrumtollah Bazar housed. The street directories authenticate that the first two premises, number 1 & 2, on the right side of Dhurrumtollah Street was where the Bazar stood.

The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register reported the government approval of the Tipu Sultan’s Mosque to be erected at “the corner where the Dhurrumtollah and Cossitollah roads join each other, opposite Jackson’s Bazar” revealing the fact that the Bazar at Dhurrumtollah was once named Jackson’s Bazar. [Asiatic Vol 29]

From a news published in December 14, 1844 we knew more of the Dhurrumtollah Bazar. It was nicknamed ‘Jackson’s Bazar’ after one Dr. Jackson who owned the Bazar until he sold out the property to Mootee [Mutty] Lall Seal. Thereafter the name ‘Dhurrumtollah Bazar’ came to stay. We still have no good guess what the Bazar was called before Dr Jackson, but we know by now the formal name of the Bazar, its exact position and the names of the owners since 1839. [Ben.Catholic vol.8]

As it appears, Dhurrumtollah Bazar was being managed ably by Hira Lall on behalf of his father Muttee Lall Seal, and mainly responsible for its commercial success and reputation competing against rival forces. The first contender Anandabazar of Ananda Narayan Ghose went out of competition after a while, but the second one, The New Market of the Municipality, that came up in 1874 proved to be too powerful and desperate to fight out. The two cases of rivalry are being summarized before ending the story of Dhurrumtollah Bazar.

Dhurrontallah Steet scene from Govt Housec_byJohn Edward Sache_Collections.carli.illinois.edu — Dhurrumtollah Street with Tipu Sultan Mosque on the left and the spire of the Sacred Heart Church on the right behind the Dhurrumtollah Bazar opposite the Mosque. A hand-coloured print from the Fiebig Collection: Views of Calcutta and Surrounding Districts, taken by Frederick Fiebig in 1851. Courtesy: BL

ANANDABAZAR AND DHURRUMTOLLAH BAZAAR

Around 1844, when Mutty Lall Seal bought up Dhurrumtollah Bazar, a new bazar was established at no. 157 Dhurrumtollah Street, next to Hospital Lane, by Baboo Anandanarayan Ghosh, uncle of Khelat Chunder Ghose as a rival enterprise of Dhurrumtollah Bazar, which was variantly known as ‘Ananda Baboo’s Bazar’, new Dhurrumtollah Bazar, or Anandabazar. This has led to a number of assaults. The two belligerent powers have hired clubmen,—(this in the city!) and the Police has been vigorously employed in preventing disturbances. The new market will cost Eighty Thousand Rupees, and the competition will reduce prices”. [Ben. Catholic vol.8.] The ambition of Anandabazar never fulfilled. Their objective was failed. The proprietor has leased it out. Miscellaneous shops were established throughout; but no market is held here.

NEW MARKET AND DHURRUMTOLLAH BAZAAR

It was long felt by the Europeans of the posh Chowringhee neighbourhood that the old Dhurrumtollah Bazar was no good any more to meet their everyday needs. To cater all kinds of food for European consumption they resolved in 1866 to construct a large-scale market on the ground of the old failing Fenwick’s bazar and its surrounding bustee areas. The New Market, as it is still called, was housed in an extensive building, forming three sides of a quadrangle opened in 1874. The land and the building cost about Rs. 6,65,000.

Newmarket-_Sir_Stuart_Hogg_Market — Vintage Postcard with view of Sir Stuart Hogg Market Dharmatala Calcutta. A Pre 1914 anonymous photograph. Courtesy: oldstratforduponavon.com

At the outset of its career, the new market suffered severely from the competition of the Dhurrumtollah Bazar, and its fortunes did not prosper until the Justices subsequently bought the bazar for seven lakhs. The whole of this money was raised by Government loan, the interest of which is far more than met by the rents of the stalls and shops in the market. The municipal executive tried to entice stallholders and butchers away from the Dharamtolla Bazaar. There were unseemly scuffles, followed by “criminations and recriminations”. A local paper predicted that the Stuart Hogg market would soon be seen as a “white elephant”. [Furedy]

Hiralall brought a suit against the chairman of the municipality charging that he had no right to use municipal funds for the market and for the opening ceremonies. The Dharamtolla Bazaar owner did not win his case. The government of Bengal hastily passed an act to legalize the decisions of the Corporation. [Furedy] A few years later Hiralall had to sell the market premises to the Justices of Peace of the Calcutta Corporation at 7 lakh to let their newly created Municipal Market, later Hogg Market, runs out of competition. The old Dhurrumtollah Market was demolished and its ground was distributed in small plots and a lane in between. In 1890 the Calcutta Corporation was generous to name this new lane as Mattiloll Seal Lane in memory of Hiralall’s father.

Besides Dhurrumtollah Bazar and Ananda Bazar, there is another deshi daily bazar called Napit Bazar on nos. 103-5, Dhurrumtollah Street. There is also another food bazar, Gopee Baboo’s Bazar situated between the Jaun Bazar and Dhurrumtollah Roads [Setton-Karr Vol.2]

CHANDNEY BAZAR

Chandney Bazar has never been for fresh food retailing as the other ones were, but a sort of native shopping complex mainly for domestic accessories and handymen’s tools. Chandney shops and entrances are on no. 167, Dhurrumtollah Street, standing at the crossing of Chandney Choke Street, or Chandney Choke Bazar ka Rastah, on the north side of Dhurrumtollah.

Chandney Bazar is a labyrinth of ill-kept passages, lined with shops, in which may be found a wonderful collection of sundries, from a door nail to a silk dress. [Cotton] The list can be lengthening endlessly by adding items like “Brass and iron hand-ware, clothes, umbrellas; shoes, stationery, and various other articles of domestic use.” Cotton left a piece of helpful advice for shopaholics that “very similar shops and stalls may now be found, but under conditions infinitely more advantageous and comfortable, in the Municipal Market in Lindsay Street, off Chowringhee”. [Cotton] While shopping in modern New Market was more comfortable and reassuring, it lacked the adventurous spirit of shopping, getting favorite picks at pocket-friendly price by bargaining at your heart’s content. For that, one must essentially be guarded with sharp shopping skill. Besides, the shop-goers should be extra-cautious as Chandney has been apparently a notorious receptacle for all stolen goods, and such encourages theft by domestics”.

R.J Minney in 1922 penned a typical picture of the Chandney Market, its inside and outside, in few lines. The following passage on Chandney may also contribute to our understanding of Dhurrumtollah characteristics in its totality:

“Gharis wait outside shops, the horses hunched up in their shafts and harness, limp-legged, asleep. The drivers are asleep on the box and syces slumber behind. Water and rubbish on the pavements. The air is heavy with a fetid smell of hookah and food; paint, oil and cycles. In the shadow of the gold-tipped minarets women swathed in sheets clatter their slippered feet along the road. Children’s garments flutter in the wind from the line that dangles outside the open shop front. Shopkeepers glare expectantly but have too much self respect to solicit custom. A stout undressed Bengali sits on the mattressed floor, laid with white clean linen, fanning himself lazily. By his side stands a hookah with a long stiff spout. There is more bare body than shop. He probably does not depend on his shop for a living. An inquisitive passerby, who peered in to gaze at his stock, was not even hailed as a possible customer. Idle barbers sit by their doors hailing passers-by. The patrons of the Chandni bazaar, scowling, busy; bargaining, wrangling; smiling, smirking. Cycle shops, camera shops, pigeon stalls for cigarettes and sherbet. Pavement vendors with their wares in their baskets, pavement barbers assisting the needy with their toilet; street hawkers who pause on the roadway at the hailing of a customer; quarrelsome ghari men lashing their whips at one another.” [Minney]

Chandney market has its own world of business. They operate in their own style and communicate with their European and Eurasian customers in typical Chandney-English – a pidgin dialect of Anglo-Bengali concoction. Chandney salesmen were not always as unconcerned as Minney had found in his visit. A funny dialogue of Chandney bazar touts was in circulation in my boyhood days: “Take, take; no take, no take; একবার তো see!”, or in plain language, “You take it, or you don’t, why not give a quick glance for once?” This may serve as an instance of how Chandney salesmen approach their nonchalant customers in typical Chandney-dialect. It represents a proactive selling approach, often hatefully nagging and annoying, but can hardly be defined as unfriendly or indifferent as Minney suggested.

UPDATES

New Market

Richard Roskell Bayne (1836-1901)designed the New-Market. The unique architecture of this public market of some 7.200 square meters exerted substantial influence on the design of large urban markets throughout South Asia. [Welch]



REFERENCES

Asiatic Journal. 1839. “Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register.” 29. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books/download/Asiatic_Journal.pdf?id=vCsYAAAAYAAJ&hl=en&capid=AFLRE71UN1fNXSmO80NUacGNXrTijYacn5XNM0vBRP4b3jb4htcUQHOMuHowsJWtwtIw7k70PPOyXbnuS46vH3aR0-16f5ZTsA&continue=https://books.google.co.in/books/download/Asiatic_Journal).
Bengal Almanac. 1851. Bengal Almanac , With A Companion and Appendix. 1851st ed. Calcutta: Hurkaruh. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books/about/The_Bengal_Almanac_for_1851.html?id=4UNBAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y).

Bengal Catholic Herald. 1844. Bengal Catholic Herald. Calcutta: D’Rozario [printer]. Retrieved (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=YmKXiWDrh8QC&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false).

Bengal Hurkaru. 1838. Bengal Directory and Annual Register for 1838. Calcutta: Harkau. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.68584).

Carey, William. 1882. Good Old Days of Honorable John Company; Vol.1. Calcutta: Quins Book. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/goodolddaysofhon00careuoft).

Cesry, Rev. C. 1881. Indian Gods Sages And Cities. Calcutta: Catholic Orphan Press. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.128152).

Cones. 1877. Directory and Almanac, 1877. Calcutta: Cones. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.91820).

Cones. 1874. Calcutta Directory, 1874. Calcutta: Cones. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.94126).

Cotton, Evan. 1907. Calcutta, Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City. Calcutta: Newman. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/calcuttaoldandn00cottgoog).

Firminger, W. K. 1906. Thacker’s Guide to Calcutta. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/thackersguidetoc00firm).

Furedy, Christine. 1979. “Retail Trade in Calcutta.” Capital 183(4587):4–10. Retrieved (https://www.google.com/search?q=RETAIL+TRADE+IN+CALCUTTA+Offshoot+from+the+land+of+shopkeepers+by+++CHRISTINE+++FUREDY&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b).

Hobbs, Major H. 1944. John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old Time Taverns in India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53429).

Hurkaru. 1841. Bengal-Directory and Annual Register for 1841. Calcutta: Harkaru. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.68587).

Kipling, Rudyard. 1899 The City of Dreadful Night. New York: Alex. https://archive.org/details/citydreadfulnig02kiplgoog

Long, James. 1852. “Calcutta in the Olden Time – Its Localities.” The Calcutta Review 18:275-. Retrieved (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002715346).

Minney, Rubeigh James. 1922. Round about Calcutta. Calcutta: OUP. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/roundaboutcalcut00minnrich).

Ray, A. K. 1902. Calcutta: Town and Suburbs; Pt.1 A Short History of Calcutta. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat. Retrieved (https://books.google.co.in/books?id=-Lo5AQAAMAAJ&q=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&dq=calcutta+town+and+suburbs+ak+Ray&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDnrz11MnXAhUCN48KHdgEDQUQ6AEIJzAA).

Setton-Karr, W. S. 1864. Selections from Calcutta Gazettes. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press. Retrieved (https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.195937/2015.195937.Selections-From-Calcutta-Gazettes-1864#page/n5/mode/2up).

Setton-Karr, W. S. 1864. Selections from Calcutta Gazettes; Vol.3. Calcutta: GOI. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.531269).

Setton-Karr, W. S. 1865. Selections from Calcutta Gazettes; Vol.2. Calcutta: Military Orphan Press. Retrieved (https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.44506/2015.44506.Selections-From-Calcutta-Gazettes–Vol-2#page/n3/mode/2up/search/beerbhoom).

Stocqueler, J. H. 1844. Handbook of India: A Guide to the Stranger and Traveller and a Companion to the Resident. Calcutta: Hurkaru. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/handbookofindiag00stoc).

Thacker Spink. 1876. Bengal Directory, 1876. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink. Retrieved (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.68578).

Welch, Anthony, and ors. 2009. Building for the Raj: Richard Roskell Bayne.
Canadian Art Review.Vol.34, No.2 (2009) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630806?read-now=1&loggedin=true&seq=10#page_scan_tab_contents)

হরিসাধন মুখোপাধ্যায়। ১৯১৫। কলিকাতা সেকালের ও একালের / Kalikata Sekaler O Ekaler / কোলকাতা। পি এম বাগচি (https://archive.org/details/Kalikata-Sekaler-O-Ekaler-Harisadhan-Mukhopadhyay#page/n0/mode/2up)

THEATRE ROYAL

Backdrop

‘Theatre Royal’ Announced

The Location and its Surroundings

Construction and The Interior

Inauguration of the Theatre Royal

English Theatre Was For The Englishmen

Newborn Bengali Critics

Rose Lewis

Overall Appraisal

Lewis’S FAREWELL TO Calcutta

END OF THE THEATRE ROYAL

END OF ENGLISH THEATRE

A Note on the Featured Image

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Backdrop

Lewises in Calcutta

Lyceum Royal Theatre

Winding-up of Lyceum

II A STEP TOWARD BENGALI PUBLIC THEATRE

Theatre In Schools

Bengali Private Theatres Before Lyceum

LYCEUM: A BOON TO YOUNG BENGALI THEATRE

CAMARADERIE BETWEEN GIRISH AND MRS LEWIS

BAGHBAZAR AMATURE THEATRE

Hunt For A Model Theatre

End Notes

REFERENCE

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Operatic culture in colonial Calcutta vanishing into the new wave of professional Bengali theatre

PRELUDE

The Town Hall

The Grand Opera House 1867-1917

Italian Operas on Stage

The Audience

The Repertoire

Hindu National Theatre at Grand Opera House

OPERA HOUSE

5 April 1873

12 April 1873

19 April 1873

Mustafa Saheb Ka Pucca Tamassa

ENDNOTES

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II

III

∞

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DHURRUMTOLLAH STREET Away From Durrumtollah

COLINGA

REFERENCE

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