The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  Others will disagree but to my eyes the Taj Mahal is perfect while the Victoria Memorial is merely glorious, beautiful, magnificent but ultimately it is just a tad too fussy - it’s just one ornate, one faux minaret, one Renaissance hint too many. The former is like a sculpture, the whole is formed from the whole; the latter is like a construction, built from the inside out. The former is transcendent, reduced by description; the latter needs description to define it.

  Yet there is something more. The Taj Mahal was conceived in grief by the heart-broken ruler Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his third wife Mumtaz Mahal, whom he considered to have been the perfect wife and mother. The Victoria Memorial was conceived in imperial triumph by Lord Curzon as a memorial for his empress, Queen Victoria. However much he might have admired her powers of wifery and motherhood it was her imperial prowess that he thought should be remembered. And there is a subliminal political consideration too: the fact that it was built as a memorial for not just a dead old white empress but for her whole extended royal family - in fact in praise of the whole concept of imperial monarchy - rather than as a mausoleum for a beautiful young Indian princess will always set the memorial at a disadvantage.

  (Lord Curzon, to whom history has been less than kind, keeps an eye on you at the entrance, then passes you on to the suspicious gaze of an overlarge Lord Clive once inside. Warren Hastings and Lord Cornwallis, for reasons obvious yet obscure are dressed as Roman emperors - at least I assume that is why they are togged up in togas. The Empress Queen herself is around every corner: at her coronation, her marriage, her children’s baptism, her first and second jubilees and so on. An inscription from Curzon sets the tone, saying the Memorial is for the benefit of all native classes so they can better themselves by learning from the glorious British history.)

  It would be unfair to blame the Maidan, Calcutta’s Central Park, for the state into which it has fallen these past fifty years, post-Independence. In Twain’s time Indians were not barred from using the park but they had no interest in doing so; the whole idea of a park was as alien to them as a temple compound and ghats were to Europeans. Nowadays the Maidan can at best be described as downtrodden. The race and golf courses are now separate fenced off areas and both are still immaculate but the rest of the park has threadbare grass - if any - and a layer of scattered litter on it. The shrubbery has simply withered away through disrespect. Countless sports clubs have infringed on the Maidan’s edges and no one stops the motorcycles and their inevitable horns using the crisscross lanes as shortcuts. However much it may have gone to the dogs aesthetically the Maidan still fulfils its purpose just as well now as it did then; the hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who enjoy the Maidan on a Sunday afternoon are now enjoying it just as much as the dozens of Europeans did back then.

  As we complete our historical journey across the heart of old Calcutta and new Kolkata we see in front of us Government House that was, or Raj Bhavan that is; the offices and residence of the Viceroy of India and the Governor of Bengal respectively. Here we find an Anglo-Indian reversal: the seat of power is as grandiose as it ever was, but instead of being full of the viceregal household and a throng of administrators and assistant chief to the chief assistants it is now, more or less, believe it or not... empty.

  What a beautiful building! Modeled on Robert Adam’s 1759 Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire in the English Midlands, the ancestral home of the Curzon family (which other?) and built fifty years later, it features four wings connected by two segmentmentally curved corridors. From above it looks like a curved blade propeller-shaped to catch whatever breeze it could. Adam’s original had a south front based on the Arch of Constantine in Rome and a Palladian north front dominated by a massive multi-columned Corinthian portico. The central block was designed solely for grand occasions. In Kedleston Hall’s case there were only two wings, one for the family and one for the servants; not so much upstairs, downstairs, but east wing, west wing. Government House or Raj Bhavan is proportionately bigger all round and has two extra wings for the affairs of state. Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899-1905, must have been in a permanent state of déjà vu all over again: he only had to add a row of urns along the roofline to transform Government House in India into Kedleston Hall back in Derbyshire.

  But how to compare then and now? As a building, a pile of bricks and plaster sitting in 27 beautiful acres, it has seen no obvious signs of decay but its circumstances have changed entirely. The decline started in 1911 when the Raj decided to move the capital of India from here to New Delhi. Government House was no longer the home of the viceroy and the seat of power with dominion over three hundred million souls, one-fifth of the world’s population; it was from then occupied by the Governor of Bengal with no more than ceremonial rights over a quarter of that number.

  Since 1947 the newly named Raj Bhavan has remained the residence of the Governor of Bengal, albeit a much smaller Bengal and, as we shall see later, quite likely to become even smaller. And as we saw in Bombay, the governor’s role is purely ceremonial and titular. As a result nearly all the lesser rooms are mothballed and the grand reception rooms used only once or twice a year and then for comparatively pettifogging occasions. In an evocative throwback, the fifteen- by ten-yard anteroom to the banqueting hall is still called the “little yellow breakfast room”. The old debating chamber looks like a parliament in one of the Channel Islands or a Caribbean colony; it is well preserved but without debates has lost its soul. The Supreme Court, where Mark Twain sat in on a session when the viceroy Lord Elgin presided, is still there, ready and waiting for the accused, who here at least will always be innocent and never proved guilty.

  There’s no doubt that the governors and their ladies loved the palace and a history plaque shows how each incumbent added something to the whole we see today. Lord Hastings imported the gravel, Lord Ellenborough donated the startling Chinese cannon on the brass dragon at the entrance, Lord Northbrook installed hot water, Lord Hardinge replaced the front gates, Lady Amherst started the garden, Lady Bentinck tore that garden up (she thought flowers unwholesome) and started again, Lord Auckland dug the fish pond, Lady Mayo planted more trees, Lady Lytton built a swimming pool, while all Lady Dufferin could find left to do was install the tennis court.

  The strangest part about Raj Bhavan is that it is not open to the public. I had to plead historical research to be allowed in but even that took Sita endless applications and patience. Even then she could only get permission for Gillian to enter without her cameras and me without my iPhone (aargh!); she, being a native, wasn’t allowed in at all. Once inside I couldn’t help asking the aide-de-camp why - if the White House and Buckingham Palace and now even the haughty Élysée Palace are open to the public - Raj Bhavan in all its magnificence was closed to its citizens. I wish I had a video of the three-second look of panic and incomprehension, followed by the two-second shudder at the mere suggestion of the concept I received in return, which summed up perfectly the political-cultural differences between Europe and Asia. It also prompted the heinous thought that if democracy is the world’s least worst option, India has it solely thanks to the British example.

  Talking of which... a round-up of Calcutta in Mark Twain’s time and Kolkata these days wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the change in the British presence. Now that has changed. Where once there was the full pomp and regalia - and absolute power - of viceregal Government House, there is now a rather downtrodden two-story consulate that looks like a low security-risk prison. It houses a small staff led by the very energetic and well-informed Deputy High Commissioner, Sanjay Wadvani, who was kind enough to pop over to the Bengal Club to brief me. Sanjay now has to make do with a staff of only ten, five of whom are concerned with boosting Anglo-Indian trade and investment - worthy to be sure but hardly the stuff of diplomatic subtlety, let alone worthy of WikiLeaks tittle-tattle.

  To rub salt in the wounds the long-running Marxists had changed the address from the Raj-inspi
red Harrington Street to Ho Chi Minh Street, no doubt to annoy the Americans who have their own much larger (although it’s hard to think what they actually do) consulate a few doors down the block.

  Our Re-Tour did, however, draw one blank, much to Sita’s... and Gillian’s.... and Ok, me too, my relief. Clara wrote to her friend Martha Pond that

  I went out this morning with a servant to a Durga temple to see a goat sacrificed and I assure you going to that place was like going into the very lowest parts of New York (I should think). One of their musical bands was playing, crowds of natives were yelling their prayers out, many were throwing flowers and fruits to the idol and all ready to fight for a few coppers.

  A young black priest offered to lead me through the crowd & the creatures in the demand for money hit the priest two or three times because he didn’t encourage me to give them money & several attacked my servant with such violence that he had to scatter coppers all about himself in self- defense.

  I was naturally timid so we hurried along as quickly as possible to the sacrificing block were already 12 goats had been butchered. The pools of a brilliant blood was sickening & the stench enough to knock one down. As we stood there a man brought up a bleating land by the legs but I couldn’t wait any longer, much as I adore horrors I fled from this one, it was a little too much.

  ***

  The next morning we set off to follow Twain’s route around the sites. “The mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole. And so, when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first of all to see the Black Hole of Calcutta - and is disappointed.

  “The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It is strange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone.

  “It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a mighty Empire - the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It was the ghastly episode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive, that young military marvel, raging up from Madras; it was the seed from which sprung Plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose like had not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strong the foundations of England’s colossal Indian sovereignty.”

  All true, but the fact is the memory of the Black Hole was an embarrassment even in colonial times, and is now not mentioned at all. Twain was shown instead an engraved monument outside what is now the landmark GPO[49] building with its high-domed roof and tall Ionic-Corinthian columns. Six years later Lord Curzon had a better memorial made and put it at a quiet road crossing; there’s no such thing as a quiet road crossing any more and after the Marxists took power they encouraged their thugs to vandalize it. The Indians never like being reminded of colonial times and especially so in any incident where they are not shown in the customary heroic martyr guise. The monument has now been moved out-of-sight-out-of-mind to St. John’s Cathedral, the main Anglican church built in 1784[50] and now barely able to muster half a dozen worshippers on a Sunday. Seldom can an event in history have been so ill-starred as the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756.

  What the names on the monument do bring to mind is the extraordinary spirit of adventure that enthused the Honourable East India Company. In the early, glory days they made the rules of up as they went along; they were there for commerce, not to spread a religion or impose a political creed. They soon found that good commerce needed good governance and with the help of some more than willing Indian co-operators the newly-rich British and the already-rich Indians built the City of Palaces and the capital of British India. “John Company” sowed the seeds of its own destruction by greed further inland, but then it was greed that made it all happen in the first place. That ambition overreached itself in 1857, leading to the Sepoy Uprising and the end of Company rule and the halcyon days of unrestrained business. The names of the young hopefuls remind us that Britain’s opportunities lay in its Wild East as much as America’s did in its Wild West. Looking back over our shoulders at the scale and opulence of St. John’s Cathedral, the lesser of Kolkata’s two cathedrals at that, reminds us of the confidence that they must have felt that British rule was going to last forever.

  Twain would have seen that same confidence in the building next to where the Black Hole monument stood. The Writers Building was not as he might have thought a building for ten thousand budding Mark Twains but for ten thousand “writers”, which is how the East India Company termed its clerks. The massive eight-story Italianate Gothic building is a remarkable statement of optimism for a commercial company to build, spending far more than was necessary to house their clerks. Perhaps shareholders weren’t so short-termist in those days. On the roof ledge are giant statues to the seven gods of enterprise: Justice, Education, Faith, Commerce, Agriculture, Charity and Navigation.

  We now head back to the Maidan to see the Ochterlony Monument. In 1896 it dominated the Calcutta skyline, much to Twain’s chagrin: he didn’t approve of the “cloud kissing monument to one Ochterlony”.

  Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; and always when you see it you think of Ochterlony. And so there is not an hour in the day that you do not think of Ochterlony and wonder who he was? It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was for Plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when the revelation came that it was not. Clive would find out that it was for Ochterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle. And he would think it was a great one, too, and he would say, “With three thousand I whipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire - and there is no monument; this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the world.”

  But he would be mistaken. Ochterlony was a man, not a battle. And he did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity. For India has been a fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in war and in the civil service, and as modest as great.

  But they have no monuments, and were not expecting any. Ochterlony could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one. There is a sort of unfairness about it all.

  Sita has been swatting up and as we stand beside the cloud-kisser she tells us all about it. Sir David Ochterlony was an East India Company general who fought against the Kingdom of Nepal in 1828 - and won.

  In gratitude for this new trade route the Company offered to build him a monument. Fine, he said, I’ll have a tower made with a Turkish dome supported by a Syrian column on an Egyptian plinth. When it was finished he opened it with his thirteen wives in attendance, many of them seated on his herd of elephants. As Gillian is snapping away she notices some confusion in the execution: the plinth is Syrian, the dome Egyptian and the column Turkish. Inside there is a staircase for viewing from a Moorish balcony under the dome but it had to be closed after several (post-Independence) suicides.

  Also, after Independence it was renamed Shahid Minar after what the British called terrorists and the Indians call freedom fighters.[51] (The Kashmiri separatists fighting the Indians now are of course “terrorists” and no doubt after their independence will become posthumous freedom fighters.) Naturally everyone ignored the Marxists and still calls it the OM. On the Maidan ground next to the monument is a venue for political meetings, modeled philosophically on Speakers Corner in London. It’s a busy place - Bengalis are political people - and the park there is now just scrubland and covered, inevitably, in trash.

  Kolkata is not an early riser so the sightseer or history hound has a normally-populated city to explore until about 10.30 a.m. when the working day starts. After that you have to take your chances with the broad masses en masse, and boy, are they broad and en masse. There isn’t
one square piece of sidewalk that isn’t being slept on by night or sold from by day - or used by rushing coolies with enormous bundles on their heads. That’s quite a sight as they trot and shout their way through the crowds, a faster form of delivery than the seized solid roads.

  It has to be said that both our visits to Calcutta were made much more pleasant by being in winter, in what is still called “the cold season”. Of course it’s no such thing, the temperature being ideally warm, neither hot nor cold. As Twain explained: “It was winter. We were of Kipling’s ‘hosts of tourists who travel up and down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed.’ It is a common expression there, ‘the cold weather’ and the people think there is such a thing. It is because they have lived there half a lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted.

  “In India ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. It was observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the change to porcelain was not usually made until May.”

  We are on our way back to the Bengal Club when I notice it for the first time. It had to happen somewhere and here in Calcutta someone had the bright idea of fixing their horn to be on permanently. Quite often one would notice that your driver would spend so much time blowing his horn that it would be easier for him just to jam it on permanently. Now a motorcyclist here has done just that: he has replaced the horn button with a horn switch. It plays a “tune” of sorts, simple scales, all the time. Needless to say he is jammed solid and not actually going anywhere.