Cities of Empire
Page 23
Yet Indian critics of British rule in Bengal had no need to look as far as Surrey or Devon to track the plunder of colonialism. The tribute of Empire stood there before them in the City of Palaces.29
LACE, SPANGLES AND FOIL
‘Calcutta, you know is on the Hoogly, a branch of the Ganges, and as you enter Garden-reach which extends about nine miles below the town, the most interesting views that can possibly be imagined greet the eye.’ If accounts of arriving at Cape Town evoked the journey in from the Atlantic and the dramatic lifting of the tablecloth, seeing Calcutta was an enchanted tale of steady revelation, travelling up river from the Bay of Bengal. ‘The banks of the river are studded with elegant mansions … These houses are surrounded by groves and lawns, which descend to the water’s edge, and present a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye, or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners.’30 ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is,’ explained one junior writer. The scholar and tea magnate Thomas Twining, arriving in 1792, was equally rhapsodic at catching sight of the ‘City of Palaces’, ‘with its lofty detached flat-roofed mansions and the masts of its innumerable shipping’. Maria Graham, the writer, illustrator and wife of a naval officer, stepped ashore in 1810. ‘The river was covered with boats of every shape, villas adorned the banks, the scene became enchanting, all cultivated, all busy, and we felt that we were approaching a great capital,’ she wrote in her Journal of a Residence in India. ‘On landing I was struck with the general appearance of grandeur in all the buildings … groups of columns, porticoes, domes, and fine gateways, interspersed with trees, and the broad river crowded with shipping, made the whole picture magnificent.’31
After the humiliation of Siraj-ud-Daula’s capture of Fort William, the construction of a new stronghold after 1757 signalled the determination of the British to hold on to Calcutta. Positioned south of the city in the cleared village of Govindapore abutting the Hooghly, the new fort was a bricks-and-mortar testament to the Plassey settlement. With an irregular heptagon design of seven gates that conformed to the very latest in siege technology, able to mount 600 guns as well as accommodate 10,000 soldiers – and costing £2 million – it far outclassed the Castle of Good Hope. Its sophistication seemed to suggest that the fort was built as much as a bulwark against other predatory European powers as against domestic insurgents. ‘No ship can pass up or down the Ganges without being exposed to the fire of this fort,’ noted the Dutch admiral Johan Stavorinus when he sailed from the Cape to Calcutta in 1768–71. ‘This nation [the British] have thus so firmly rooted themselves in Bengal, that, treachery excepted, they have little to fear from an European enemy, especially as they can entirely command the passage up and down the river.’32 Around it stood a moat, then a wide expanse of scorched grassland, and finally cleared acres of jungle and marsh providing open sight lines and, in time, the landscape of the modern Maidan. Inside were the mansions of the British army top brass, the barracks for the soldiers and the Anglican St Peter’s, often described as the finest garrison church in India.33
It was Fort William’s size and modernity, the sense of permanence and power, which so impressed and assured European visitors. ‘The new fort, an immense place, is on the river side about a mile below the town,’ recorded Mrs Jemima Kindersley in 1768. ‘If all the buildings which are intended within its walls are finished, it will be a town within itself; for besides houses for the engineers and other officers who reside at Calcutta, there are apartments for the company’s writers, barracks for soldiers, magazines for stores etc.’ Another Calcutta chronicler, Mrs Eliza Fay, was equally enthusiastic. ‘Our Fort is … so well kept and every thing in such excellent order, that it is quite a curiosity to see it – all the slopes, banks and ramparts, are covered with the richest verdure, which completes the enchantment of the scene.’ For Maria Graham, after an evening spent bobbing aboard HMS Fox moored on the Hooghly banks, staring at the compound, ‘nothing can be more beautiful than both the outside and inside of Fort-William’.34 Today, the beauty of this military complex, headquarters of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, is more difficult to grasp behind the fumes of the six-lane Khidirpur Road and the necessary security apparatus. But its self-separation from the city of Kolkata, its might and pugnacity remain eminently tangible.
With the new fort in place, British Calcutta grew rapidly. In the so-called ‘White Town’, around Lal Dighi or Tank Square, large merchant houses sprung up. ‘The town of Calcutta is daily increasing in size, notwithstanding which, the English inhabitants multiply so fast that houses are extremely scarce,’ noted Mrs Kindersley with pride. But construction often proved a clumsy affair as Calcutta was:
an awkward place … and so irregular, that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand: people keep constantly building; and every one who can procure a piece of ground to build a house upon, consults his own taste and convenience, without any regard to the beauty or regularity of the town.
Similarly, the attorney William Hickey commented on how during the 1770s the old Bengal style of mud houses was ‘being replaced by well-constructed solid masonry’ in the city-centre district around Chowringhee Road. Foreign visitors were even more amazed by the speed and style of Calcutta’s growth. ‘The city now contains around 5,000 two or three storey houses of stone or brick and stucco,’ noted the Persian nobleman Abdul Lateef Shushtari in 1789. And the sanitation and refuse systems were just as impressive. ‘Seven hundred pairs of oxen and carts are appointed by the Company to take rubbish daily from streets and markets out of the city and tip it into the river. All the pavements have drains to carry off the rain water to the river and are made of beaten brick so as to absorb water and prevent mud forming.’35
British residents would have been delighted by such commendations of modernity, for a fiercely Enlightenment notion of progress and improvement, crucial to European self-approbation, was evident in the development of Calcutta. Out of the dense jungle of Bengal and the thick swamps of the Hooghly there arose a glistening tribute to Western civilization protected by the might of Fort William. It was, as William Dalrymple puts it, ‘as if Regency Bath had been relocated to the bay of Bengal’.36 For Company denizens, neo-classical architecture was the order of the day, with white colonnaded verandas, arched porticoes, open terraces, Ionic and Doric columns all suggesting prosperity and permanence, the European ideal of civilization as transplanted to the subcontinent. In the words of Samita Gupta, British architecture ‘reflected a classical vocabulary adapted to a tropical setting. Glistening white mansions, pedimented and porticoed set amidst the abundant greenery created exotic images which excited the admiration of visitors’.37 Contemporaries were undoubtedly impressed. ‘Gardens tastefully laid out and houses more resembling the palaces of Princes than the abodes of private gentlemen, certainly contribute to give the stranger a most favourable idea of the metropolis of the British Empire in the East,’ purred one British surveyor of the city in 1809.38 With a relatively small armed force, limited capital and a still jumpy East India Company all that supported British rule in India, the impression of invulnerability was expressed through the urban fabric. It could be seen most obviously in Calcutta’s notoriously extravagant domestic architecture. ‘Of European towns I am most reminded of Moscow,’ thought the visiting Bishop Heber.* ‘The size of the houses … their Grecian architecture, their number of servants, the Eastern dresses and the hospitality of the place … continually remind me of what I saw in a different climate.’39 When Bengal’s ‘Prince of Merchants’, the trader John Palmer, sought to consolidate his place within Calcutta society in the early 1800s he commissioned the master builder Richard Blechynden to demolish a large house on the shores of the Hooghly and reconstruct it on a more palatial footprint. He boasted to Blechynden that money was no object, as he had lavished over £2,000 on the c
ompound alone. One of the most popular fictional accounts of eighteenth-century British India, Hartly House, Calcutta: A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings (1789), described the travails of heroine Sophia Goldborne as she falls for a young Brahmin, tries to avoid being made a ‘nabobess’ and eventually fulfils expectations by becoming Mrs Doyly. She enters the eponymous Hartly House as a guest of Mr and Mrs Hartly, ‘by means of a double flight of stone steps, at the top of which we found a spacious balcony called a veranda, covered in by Venetian blinds, and lighted up with wax candles’. Again and again, the anonymous author returns to the grandeur of this domestic palace – ‘the roof whereof covers a most magnificent hall, or saloon, the whole length and breadth of this central space ornamented at both fronts with balconies or verandas, that open by folding glass-doors of inconceivable grandeur’.40
These domestic palaces provided the stage set for the dissolute, Hogarthian life of Calcutta’s ex-pat community. There were the young Griffins holed up in the Writers’ Building hurling bread rolls at each other, downing bottles of ‘lol shrob’ (lal sherab – red wine) and belting out their favourite after-dinner ditty of ‘A Lass and a Lakh a day’, a pun on ‘Alas and Alack-the-Day’. ‘The costly champagne suppers of the Writers’ Building were famous,’ as one observer had it, ‘and long did the old walls echo to the joyous songs and loud rehearsing tally-hoes.’41 There were punch houses, horse-race days and repeat visits to the expanding array of brothels. There was a similar lowlife air to Calcutta high society. ‘At the time I arrived in Bengal, everybody dressed splendidly, being covered with lace, spangles and foil,’ William Hickey recalled in his memoirs of Calcutta in the 1780s. ‘I, who always had a tendency to be a beau, gave into the fashion with much goodwill, no person appearing in richer suits of velvet and lace than myself. I kept a handsome phaeton and a beautiful pair of horses, and also had two noble Arabian saddle horses.’ Hickey also had a strong constitution, vital for the endless array of socializing, dinner parties and conversations which took place in the new palatial, but domestic setting. ‘It being the general custom of Bengal in those days to drink freely and to assemble in numerous parties at each other’s houses, I, who had always been disposed to conviviality, soon rendered myself conspicuous, and by the splendour of my entertainments gained the reputation of being the best host in Calcutta.’42 To his shame, however, Hickey disgraced himself at the consecration of St John’s Church in 1787 by ‘pouring down claret until eight in the morning’ before rushing to the service with his drinking pals. ‘It may easily be believed that in such a state we sadly exposed ourselves, drawing the eyes and attention of the congregation upon us as well as that of the clergyman, who took occasion to introduce into his sermon a severe philippic against inebriety.’43 For the less exuberant, there were evening drives along the Course, a roadway which ran south from the Esplanade through the midst of the Maidan and east of Fort William; assembly balls; trips to the theatre; boating on the Hooghly – all promoted through the pages of John Hicky’s Bengal Gazette or the Calcutta General Advertiser, the essential source of society gossip in Calcutta.
At the centre of this socializing, there squatted the groaning English dinner table. ‘We dine at two o’clock in the very heat of the day,’ explained Eliza Fay. ‘A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a fore quarter of lamb, a rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread, excellent Madeira.’ ‘Dinner was served with a scrupulous exactness, the hour being four during the hot months, and three in the cooler,’ reported William Hickey of hospitality at Government House.
He [the governor-general] sat at the table for two hours, during which the bottles were in constant circulation. If any one of the company … inadvertently stopped their progress, or what was quite as serious an offence, passed them without putting in the corks, his lordship instantly attacked the defaulter … ‘Pass the wine, Mr –’, and in the latter, ‘Fie, fie! Sir, how can you omit to put the cork into the bottle before you pass it?’44
With good reason, this meal was followed by a solid two-hour sleep, before the early evening social whirl kicked off again. ‘Formal visits are paid in the evening; they are generally very short, as perhaps each lady has a dozen to make and a party waiting for her at home besides,’ continued Mrs Fay. ‘Gentlemen also call to offer their respects and if asked to put down their hat, it is considered as an invitation to supper. Many a hat have I seen vainly dangling in its owner’s hand for half an hour, who at last has been compelled to withdraw without any one’s offering to relieve him from the burthen.’45
ORIENTAL CALCUTTA
‘I had often admired a lovely Hindustani girl who sometimes visited Carter at my house, who was very lively and clever. Upon Carter’s leaving Bengal I invited her to become an inmate with me, which she consented to do, and from that time to the day of her death Jemdandee, which was her name, lived with me, respected and admired by all my friends by her extraordinary sprightliness and good humour.’46 William Hickey’s account of his relationship with the Bengali woman Jemandee, after the death of his beloved wife Charlotte, points to a more cosmopolitan sensibility than his boorish Englishness might suggest. Calcutta was, like Cape Town, an expressly multicultural city. ‘Chinese and Frenchmen, Persians and Germans, Arabs and Spaniards, Armenians and Portuguese, Jews and Dutchmen, are seen mixing with the Hindoos and English, the original inhabitants and the actual possessors of the country,’ as Maria Graham recounted it.47 The Portuguese, of course, had come in the 1500s; the entrepreneurial Armenians arrived in the 1700s, setting up import-export businesses in muslin, indigo and spices; a Baghdadi-Jewish community developed soon after, with a similar commercial bent, alongside Parsis from Surat, in western India. In turn, these commercial enclaves competed with the Bengali trading castes such as the Subarna Baniks, Kayasathas and the Brahmins – among whom could be counted the celebrated Bengal dynasty of the Tagores. The Chinese became involved in Calcutta’s sugar mill industry from the 1780s, before branching out into cabinet-making, ship-repair and shoe-making. And from the early 1800s, Calcutta’s Muslim community began to grow more obviously.48 Even the European residency was not a uniform British bloc. According to a ‘List of Inhabitants Residing in Calcutta’, drawn up in 1766 for Lord Clive, only 129 out of 231 European men were English, Welsh or Scottish. Twenty were Irish, another twenty from German states, and the rest from Greece, France, Denmark and elsewhere. ‘Inhabitants of every clime might be seen in the streets, in their diversified and picturesque costumes,’ said one novel of early 1800s Calcutta, which reflected an increasingly racialized language.
Here a group of princely looking Persians, there a knot of majestic Turks, in flowing garments. Flat faced Chinese with their great straw hats like umbrellas, fans always in motion, and hair in a plait reaching to their heels; broad featured Malays and Birmans … muscular robust Arabs, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Danes and Germans; native processions, and European carriages, palanquins and hackeries filled up the streets.49
This was the strange, foreign world which the young writers of the East India Company – after an often gruelling five-month passage to India – confronted in Calcutta. Many of them embraced the cultural and sexual liberation it offered – dressing in Bengali attire, swapping ‘roast fowl’ and ‘good cheese’ for curries, fathering children and cohabiting with Indian women. ‘It is a very general practice for Englishmen in India to entertain a cara amica of the Country,’ decreed a popular 1805 guide for Company men. In the years 1780–85, one-third of wills filed in Calcutta included a bequest for Indian wives or companions or their natural children (sadly, Hickey’s bibi Jemandee was to die giving birth to his son).50 In the same period, over half of the children baptized in St John’s Church were illegitimate. For while marriage was very rarely an option – less than 7 per cent of all European men were known to be married (to either European or Indian women) while serving in India – anywhere from 20 to 50 per cent were known to be involved in some sort of sexual liaison w
ith a local woman. These relationships were rarely publicly acknowledged or legitimized and often resulted in a series of complicated legal cases for the East India Company.51
Such cross-cultural cohabitation had been sanctioned from the very top with the arrival of Warren Hastings as the first governor-general of India in 1773. He was born in 1732 to an established family of Worcestershire gentry, only to see his father abandon the family for Barbados, leaving the young Hastings to fend for himself as a junior East India Company official. Despatched to Bengal in 1750, his first period in Calcutta ended when the governor, Henry Vansittart, was recalled to Britain in 1765 after the Battle of Buxar, and the extension of territory which came with it, forced the Company to rethink its India strategy. But by then Hastings had been bewitched by the East. He drew up plans for a ‘Professorship of the Persian Language’ at Oxford and on his return to India in 1769 – first to Madras and then Calcutta – he sought to promote a new strategy of cultural engagement. If British influence was to be sustained in India, the writers needed to ‘know’ India: to be able to speak Urdu and Bengali, to immerse themselves in the literature and appreciate the history. So ancient and exotic a country as India had to be ruled according to its ‘own’ tradition and the governor-general lavishly subsidized those willing to study Indian languages and culture. Hastings himself collected Indian paintings, patronized Indian musicians, arranged for the Sanskrit scholar Charles Wilkins to translate the Bhagavad Gita into English for the first time and organized the publication of A Grammar of the Bengali Language. Indeed, he all but inaugurated the printing industry in Calcutta, which would come to be such a hive of literary and journalistic culture. Hastings also served as patron of a newly established ‘Society for enquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’. The Asiatick Society of Bengal, as it became known, was the prime vehicle for British officials to begin to understand Bengali arts and learning. ‘Such studies,’ Hastings hoped, ‘independent of utility, will diffuse a generosity of sentiment … [the Indian classics] will survive when British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’52