The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  27 Nothing to do with the children’s book character, Gollywog, but an acronym for Westernized Oriental Gentleman - and used disparagingly. It was originally coined by the British to describe the Eurasian Anglo-Indians, who in turn took it to refer to native Indians, forgetting the meaning behind the acronym.

  28 Now a daily paper, The Pioneer, published from Lucknow.

  29 The standard issue government car, the venerable Hindustan Motors Ambassador is based on the 1946 Morris Oxford III.

  30 Sometimes one sees the English word “queue”, as in a sign saying Queue Here, lost in translation to mean “Push and shove, please use elbows”.

  31 The Kumbh Mela takes place only when Jupiter enters Aquarius and the Sun enters Aries.

  32 Sahib means “sir” or “master” (mem’sahib means “madam” or “mistress”).

  33 Indian Railways timekeeping is as random as the life on its platform. All one can say is that they tend to leave the starting terminus on time - but further down the line... Later at Muzaffarpur we came across one that was 34 hours late. There is even a website devoted to averaging delays, www.indiarailinfo.com

  34 “Coolie” sounds like a rather condescending way of describing a porter but it is what they call themselves, as in “coolie, sahib, coolie, very cheap”.

  35 We are staying at my agent’s half-brother’s Ganges palace on the edge of town.

  36 To awaken the seven safe havens for the soul to visit.

  37 The Buddha is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu.

  38 In the weekly English Courier Twain said: “We traded autographs. I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I suspect.”

  39 Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 as he was about to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by “supporting” the existence of Pakistan.

  Part Three

  Trouble Ahead

  Calcutta

  In 1887 Mark Twain’s friend Rudyard Kipling wrote of Calcutta:

  Once, two hundred years ago, the trader came meek and tame.

  Where his timid foot first halted, there he stayed,

  Till mere trade

  Grew to Empire, and he sent his armies forth,

  South and North,

  Till the country from Peshawar to Ceylon

  Was his own.

  Thus the midday halt of Charnock[40] - more’s the pity! -

  Grew a City

  As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed

  So it spread

  Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built

  On the silt

  Palace, byre, hovel - poverty and pride

  Side by side

  And above the packed and pestilential town

  Death looked down.

  ***

  “A comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us to the capital of India, which is likewise the capital of Bengal, Calcutta.” I assume they must have traveled on the 13152 Sealdah Express which is supposed to take fourteen hours - although yesterday it took sixteen hours.

  The Twain party’s journey was not just comfortable but held some amusement. Twain and Smythe were evidently in a four-berth male compartment, with Livy and Clara in their own female compartment further down the first-class carriage. “Mr. Smythe and I got out at a station to walk up and down, and when we came back Smythe’s bed was in the hanging shelf above and an English cavalry officer was in bed on the sofa which Smythe had lately been occupying.”

  It was mean to be glad about it, but it is the way we are made; I could not have been gladder if it had been my enemy that had suffered this misfortune. We all like to see people in trouble, if it doesn’t cost us anything. I was so happy over Mr. Smythe’s chagrin that I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking of it and enjoying it. I knew he supposed the officer had committed the robbery himself, whereas without a doubt the officer’s servant had done it without his knowledge. Mr. Smythe kept this incident warm in his heart, and longed for a chance to get even with somebody for it.

  ***

  Many Mark Twain enthusiasts have commented on his life-long dislike of imperialism and the resultant puffed-up vanity of colonialism. The one exception to this rule was the jewel in the crown of imperialism, the British Raj reign of India. Not only did he forgive the British for their incursion but on numerous occasions pointed out how beneficial it was to the natives; how lucky they were to have the British to rule over them.[41] Around then he wrote of Warren Hastings that “he saved to England the Indian Empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indians themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse.” His point was - and one easily forgotten these hundred plus years later - that before the Raj the Indians were more oppressed than they were under the Raj. The British had at least, he felt, lifted the stone and let in some light around the edges. The British themselves felt that if they had not made a Raj in India someone else would have done - and they would not have made such a good job of it. Certainly those who know about the cruelties the Dutch inflicted on Indonesia, the piracy the Portuguese dispensed around their seaborne empire, the savagery of French colonialism in Africa or the tribal genocide of the Spanish in their Novus Orbis would agree, if only on a lesser evil basis; and don’t even consider the activities of the Belgians in the “dark continent”. (The American annexation of the Philippines was then still two years hence and his opposition to this move would cause him to be an important figure in the American Anti-Imperialist League.)

  The years have put enough space between India’s colonial era and now for an open-minded view of the benefits - or otherwise - of the British period to be seen objectively, and perhaps there is no better place than the Calcutta of Mark Twain’s time and the Kolkata of today to stand back and take stock.

  Calcutta was a British creation; Kolkata, as Calcutta has become, is an Indian evolution of that creation. The political classes may not like this but the facts are too self-evident for them to be ignored. There is sensitivity in even proposing this locally: while Indians in general don’t like being reminded they have been ruled for most of the last 500 years by the Afghans and British, with smatterings of French and Portuguese sovereignty around the edges, this is especially so in proud Bengal.

  Rudyard Kipling’s famous quip about Job Charnock’s lunchtime halt becoming an empire’s capital only works as a quip because it is so obviously true. What were three tiny hamlets on the east bank of the Hooghly river - one which was called Kalikata[42] - grew into the great Calcutta through the initiative of British traders and administrators, helped increasingly as time passed by Indian princes and powerbrokers, and by whole swathes from the merchant and warrior castes acting out of self-interest. Twain recognized that not only was Calcutta a British invention but a triumphant and tolerant one - at least it was to him in 1896; no doubt later events would have tempered his enthusiasm. “The handful of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws - and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it.”

  He may not have known the care the British took to make sure that this was so. All of India was actually run, executively, by at most 1,300 members of the India Civil Service. Standards of recruitment were exceptionally high, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge and always with a first-class degree, preferably with honors. After graduation they had to study for a further year the root language of Sanskrit and a vernacular language such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi or Bengali as well as attend an intensive course on “something of the history of I
ndia and the law”.[43]

  The next layer of civil servants, although less exalted educationally, were no disgrace to good governance either. Almost exclusively privately educated - and so toughened up by the deprivations of that nineteenth-century penal colony, the British boys boarding school - and often having forbears with Indian government experience, they epitomized what Kipling referred to as the “white man’s burden”. Young men from sheltered backgrounds but classically educated would be sent out to outlying areas, often days’ hard traveling away, to settle disputes, collect taxes, oversee projects or mend diplomatic fences. They may not have had much experience of life but they had learnt all about Pax Romana, the rules of which they now applied to Pax Britannica. This is not so much to defend the colonialism that Twain admired as, like him, to admire it for what is was at the time (and to reflect how very much worse it could have been).

  ***

  There is no better way to see the Calcutta he saw then and compare it with what we see now than to walk between two magnificent Raj buildings: the Victoria Memorial built just after his visit, then a walk across the two-mile-long central park, the Maidan, and at the far end of the park Government House, now called Raj Bhavan, from where the viceroy ruled the sub-continent. After that we will visit all the sites the Twain party saw between 7-14 February, a busy week: the Royal Theatre where he lectured, the Statesman offices where we were both interviewed, what was the Belvedere stately home and is now the National Library, the monuments to the Black Hole and Ochterlony and the Indian Museum.

  But first we both need to check in to our hotels. Ours is straightforward enough: the Bengal Club is a reciprocal of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club and thus able to accommodate us. It’s not exactly what it was, the Bengal Club, and now one scurries into what would have been the servants’ quarters at the back of the building; the front, with its grand entrance, ballrooms, withdrawing rooms, book-lined corridors and uninterrupted views of the Maidan was sold as European membership declined after Independence. Still, Gillian and I as honorary members have a suite of sorts out back but Sita, as a guest, has to make do with a bit of a cupboard. Madam remains unamused. I plug in and find a message from our www.marktwainindia.com website that The Times of India wants to run my Hinduism blog[44] in the “How others see us” column.

  The Twain party took suites in the newly opened Continental Hotel on 9 Chowringhee Road, the best hotel address in town. A series of announcements about the Continental appearing in The Statesman give us a flavor of what it must have been like. On opening we learn that the owners, the Boscolo brothers, had built “extensive premises which are in every way suited to the Requirements of a First Class Hotel which will cater for the Public as heretofore under the style and title of the Hotel Continental”. Further announcements claimed that “Patrons, Constituents and the Public generally are hereby informed that the extensive additions are now complete and form the most Recherche [sic] and Comfortable Residents for families and Bachelors in Calcutta.” Later we read that “special attention has been paid to Improvements of the new Private Tiffin Rooms” and further that “on Wednesdays and Saturdays an Italian orchestra will be in Attendance during dinner hours”. Several years later an advertisement claimed that “among important guests have been Mark Twain and Winston Churchill”.

  After the Twain party’s visit the Continental spread from 9 Chowringhee Road to nos. 10, 11 and 12 and bordered the equally illustrious Grand Hotel. They all closed in the 1930s when six guests died of food poisoning - rumored to have been caused by a dead cat found later in the shared water tank. The hotels emptied, guests cancelled bookings and the hotels never recovered.

  As memories faded nos. 11 and 12 re-opened as the Ritz Continental and when that failed were torn down and rebuilt in the 1970s as the Peerless Inn as stands today; a typically ghastly blob of concrete in a ubiquitous style Gillian defines as Sub-Continental Hideous. The remains of the Grand were rescued by an ambitious 25-year-old Armenian jeweler, Arathoon Oberoi Stephen, and today the Oberoi Grand is the five-star hotel in town - although it too could do with a lick of paint.

  No. 9, where the Twain party stayed, is still standing - just about. Chowringhee Road is now supposed to be called JJ Nehru Road, but of course everyone still calls it Chowringhee Road. No. 9 is in a desperate state of disrepair and the landlords have put signs up everywhere warning people to stay away:

  Pursuant to the Direction given by the Honourable High Court of Calcutta, dated 13th August 2008, Notice is Hereby Given to the Unauthorised Occupants for the exercising of Abundant Caution that this Building at 9, Chowringhee Road, Calcutta is in very Dilapidated Condition and may Collapse at any point of time. As such the Landlord, the Life Insurance Corporation of India has begged the Honourable High Court of Calcutta for Permission to Demolish this dangerous Structure. Therefore, in the Event of any Untoward Incident, the Owner, the Life Insurance Corporation of India, will not be held not be responsible.

  Of course, just like the equally condemned Watson’s Hotel in Bombay, the building is full of offices. The chance of free accommodation on Chowringhee Road is well worth the risk of no. 9 falling down on top of you. Whereas Watson’s Hotel was full of lawyers, the Continental is a microcosm of Indian enterprise. The ground floor is a series of stalls selling everything from stiff collars to flutes to string vests to pirated DVDs. Upstairs the professional classes hold sway. Under a spaghetti cluster of exposed, improvised wiring one climbs up dust-carpeted stairs with wobbly banisters and whole treads missing.

  On the second floor, surrounded by moldy, peeling walls lie the premises of Drs. Smith Bros, Dental Surgeons; In Attendance, Dr. S. K. Basu. Opposite the dentist, a doctor of a different sort, a pen doctor: The Pen Hospital, managed by the Central Pen Corporation of India Ltd. Above them we find the Calcutta Institution for Further Education and opposite them The Calcutta Serological Institute Laboratory (P) Ltd. On the top floor, where the Twain party had their suites, is - in unintentional posthumous honor of Smythe - Messrs. Carpenter & Sons, Theatrical Impresarios & Film Distributors. Theirs is the corner office with the hole in the wall; from the street one can see straight through to the ceiling. Across the passage is an unnamed accountancy firm, which should be called Charles Dickens Accountancy Practitioners Ltd., with, unbelievably, an Underwood typewriter on the desk and still in use.

  Vijay Muni, of the accountancy with the Underwood, told me the backstory to no. 9. Like many owners of historic buildings in Calcutta, the landlords are caught in a bind. One the one hand the authorities of the Archaeological Survey of India[45] are demanding these buildings’ preservation and even restoration, while on the other the Marxist local government of Calcutta, which before being voted out in 2011 had been in power for 34 years, had long since imposed a rent freeze. The owners retaliated by refusing to pay property tax knowing the Marxists would not want to take it over as they would then have pay their own taxes and then deal with the rent controlled tenants who refused to pay rent due the state of building, a state caused by the Marxists’ policy in the first place.

  I tell him of grander times and the letter from Mark Twain to the proprietors, the Boscolo brothers: “Continental Hotel, Calcutta. 18 February 1896. I am glad to be able to say that my ten days’ stay in those houses with my family has been exceedingly comfortable and satisfactory.”

  So let the Re-Tour commence with visits to the Victoria Memorial and the Raj Bhavan. Our main purpose in visiting the Victoria Memorial was to spend some time in the Calcutta Gallery which traces the history of the city from hamlet to capital. It is a superb exhibition, full of wonderful images with factual comments but without the usual burden of political correctness. My only gripe would be that the exhibits are poorly lit and at child height, so that one spends lot of time peering closely, bent double. A better way to see it would be from a wheelchair with a flashlight.

  Twain described Calcutta thus:

  It has a po
pulation of nearly a million natives and a small gathering of white people. It is a huge city and fine, and is called the City of Palaces. It is rich in historical memories; rich in British achievement - military, political, commercial; rich in the results of the miracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings’

  The paintings are all by European artists and of the colonial, central, empty, elegant part of the city - the famed City of Palaces around the giant Maidan park - and of the sprinkling of white people as Twain mentioned. All but a few of the native million are kept off canvas, and no doubt conditions for the local Bengalis were just as grim then as they are now but without the comfort of statehood. We see Calcutta in its prime, still the capital of India, the Maidan with a large racecourse (still the largest in Asia) in one corner of it, a full golf course in another, palaces along its side and the imposing Government House at it head. The park is clean and mown, the palaces clean and sentried, the boulevards clean and lightly trafficked. On them tongas ride hither and thither; no one seems to be walking, as Twain frequently pointed out. From time to time an Indian prince sweeps through the Maidan with an enormous train of men and beasts - and not without a spare man to pick up the mishaps of the beasts.

  Although Twain never saw the Victoria Memorial[46] it would be wrong to leave it without a brief description. Guide books refer to it as “Kolkata’s Taj Mahal” or the “Raj Mahal” and there certainly are similarities. Both are magnificent buildings built to honor the death of a female royal; in fact the Victoria Memorial’s architect, Sir William Emerson,[47] was inspired directly by the Taj Mahal.[48] Both are the only two buildings in India whose lawns, lakes, shrubbery and herbaceous borders are beautiful sculpted and free from litter. Both are seen at their most evocative with a full moon lighting the white marble. Both are perfectly symmetrical and built to a scale that inspires awe yet remains relatable.