ব্লগ-টগ

প্রকাশ্যে আত্মপ্রকাশের ঘরোয়া সূত্র

Post Page Advertisement [Top]

To Place your advertisement here call - +917980316633/+918145704098

 - Jhilam Roy




Why do they need the fingertips naked?
They may dip it in any stranger’s blood.
This city which was a banquet of beautiful people—
This city which was the foundation of many a fresh sapling.
This city which was a gathering of the moon-like beauties,
This city which was a quarter of the possessors of charm.
This is the very ground that would throw up gold.
This is the very dust where from we find elixir.
[Zahir Dehlvi, Daastan-e-Ghadar]

It’s oft said that no city is a mere space but a cornucopia of wordless and priceless emotions. It speaks, it jubilates, it hurts, it heals. Yet, as John Updike says, ‘Cities aren’t like people. They live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone down-river and out to sea’. Indeed, cities are synonymous with infinity, an ever-shifting, endless battle-ground of raging human expressions. The sanctimonious manifestation of a thousand myriad imaginations, faiths, convictions. More so if there is a tireless chronology of hundreds of years attached to it. Calcutta is one such city. The Black Hole tragedy, the Bargis attacking the ‘infant’ British settlement, the thrice-sacking of Calcutta … the tales go on. Of late, I have been researching on these stories, and have been fortunate to come across some deliciously appealing ones. I have included them below (bereft of any critical notes for the reader to judge by herself/himself), primary and secondary sources included, and it is hoped that you will find them worth your while.


Job Charnock's epitaph


[1]

A tomb in the corner, with Octagon dome,
Hath of marble a slab in the wall deep imbedded,
Which tells how in hope of redemption to come,
Two pilgrims of this world found here their last home,
Calcutta’s brave founder — the Suttee he wedded.
[Anonymous, Job Charnock]

Any essay on Calcutta remains incomplete without the mention of its valiant founding father, a being forever shrouded in mystery.  This fact was contested by the Shobhabazar zamindars and the Armenians; nonetheless, the fiction and non-fiction involving Charnock qualify for entertaining reads. Charnock was the more fortunate counterpart of John Lang’s Francis Gay, credited with the foundation of a city that considers him with reverence and enigma even today. Like his adopted country, his life in India was more colourful and adventurous than his English gentry life. Of note are his legendary Indianization and his weakness for Indian women. 


 A caricature of the Hastings-duel


Charnock’s encounter with a half-breed named Mary Ann has seeded into oblivion. The ten-year-old a ‘native’ slave of John Elliot, a proprietor at Kasimbazar, was serving Charnock at an inn and in gratitude for his acknowledgement of her English heritage, she had kissed him and became his lover for one night. This would instil in Charnock a yearning for Indian women and it would materialize in 1680 when he would rescue a suttee from a pyre, re-baptise her as ‘Angela’, and marry her. Her memory would be cherished long after her death by an anniversary sacrifice of a rooster on her tomb. She gave birth to two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Following Emperor Aurangzeb’s decree against prostitutes in Patna, Charnock would take as his concubine a dark-complexioned harlot named Motia who had pasted abir on his forehead in a Holicelebration. Charnock reportedly had a blissful marital life, but his associations haunted him politically and socially. He was accused of nearly discarding his religion and proud heritage for their sakes. Such is the power of love! [Taken from P. T. Nair, Job Charnock, The Founder Of Calcutta: An Anthology] 


A second caricature of the Hastings-duel


[2]

If any report different from what I have related should circulate, and you should think them worthy of contradiction, I hope you will not scruple to use this letter for that purpose. – Colonel Pearce in his letter to Lawrence Sullivan

On the morning of August 17, 1780, Calcutta stood witness to a remarkable duel between the then Governor-General, Warren Hastings, and his political rival in the Governing Council, Philip Francis. The latter had questioned Hastings’ administrative and financial dealings, and the former had written a scathing minute in an official meeting wherein Francis’ scandalous liaison with Catherine Grand (one of the celebrated beauties of 18th century Bengal) and his being fined 50,000 sicca rupees for adultery were mentioned. An infumed Francis challenged Hastings to a duel, and the pair selected what is at present called Duel Avenue at Alipore in Kolkata as the battle-field. Duelling is a waging of war by gunfire to preserve the masculine honour, a European ‘sport’ that has its origin in the Dark Ages. Each combatant is placed at 14 paces from each other, accompanied by a Second, and they are instructed to fire at each other on the count of three. Hastings’ Second was Colonel Pearce, the Commandant of Artillery and Francis’ Second was Colonel Watson, the Chief Engineer at Fort William. The duel commenced as planned; fortunately, none of the competitors were no marksmen. Though Hastings managed to shoot Francis, he survived the attempt and returned to England hereafter. The strains of the duel remained, and haunted Hastings during his impeachment trial.


Hastings House [From Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta: Past & Present]


If you wander through the streets of Alipore and find yourself in an antiquarian store, you would unconditionally and endearingly hear of Lord Warren Hastings. Even today, the shots from Hastings’ and Philip Francis’ pistols echo through the air, inspiring stories of all hues. People there know, with filial certainty, the haloed ground where the legendary duel took place over two-hundred years ago. The events are recounted with utmost precision, to the extent of passing as contemporary gossip. The imagination stops not there but extends to the palatial Hastings House where it is said, late at night, Hastings drives up to the house in his carriage, scampers through the front door, and frantically searches for something in the room that was once his study. Myths say that his spectre returns to secure the lost papers that would have deemed him innocent at his trial of impeachment. Typical British! Worried about his reputation from beyond the grave! [Taken from Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta: Past And Present]


Pattle's epitaph

[3]

Oh, the old Pattles! They’re always bursting out of their casks. – Virginia Woolf 

James and Adeline Pattle’s graves are one of the many forgotten graves at St. John’s Church in Calcutta, but little does one know that the elaborate tombstones stand over empty graves. More elusive is the sensational circumstances in which ‘the biggest liar in India’ and his wife met their deaths in that distant 1845. Hear it from Virginia Woolf herself, one of the descendants of this infamous judge:

Julia Margaret Cameron, the third daughter of Janies Pattle of the Bengal Civil Service, was born on June 11, 1815. Her father was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful, reputation, who after living a riotous life and earning the title of ‘the biggest liar in India’, finally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await shipment to England. The cask was stood outside the widow’s bedroom door. In the middle of the night, she heard a violent explosion, rushed out, and found her husband, having burst the lid off the coffin, bolt upright, menancing her life in death as he had menanced her in life. ‘The shock sent her off her head then and there, poor thing, and she died raving.’ It is the father of Miss Ethel Smyth who tells the story (Impressions That Remained), and he goes on to say that, after ‘Jim Blazes’ had been nailed down again and shipped off, the soldiers drank the liquor in which the body was preserved, ‘and, by Jove, the rum ran out and got alight and set the ship on fire! And while they were trying to extinguish the flames, she ran on a rock, blew up, and drifted ashore just below Hooghly. And what do you think the sailors said? ‘Pattle had been such a scamp that the devil wouldn’t let him go out of India. – Virginia Woolf, Julia Margaret Cameron

Woolf’s colonial roots have spilt from her pen and many of her works speak of her lesser-known legacy. Even the guides at the churches don’t deem these two worthies of mention. But their great-great-great-grandchildren, one of them William Dalrymple still visit them. It counts once in a while to remember a notorious ancestor who made for good bedtime stories! [Taken from Virginia Woolf, The Complete Works]


The dissent of the natives of Calcutta [From  Bidisha Chakraborty and Sarmistha De, Calcutta In The Nineteenth Century: An Archival Exploration]


[4]

Quit the city O Mother dear
Don’t ever again come back here.
The woes of Calcutta grow day by day,
So it’s better Ma, that you keep away.
Here learned Justices pass judgements prime,
While city roads lie steeped in grime.
For fear of all the roadway dust
Our mouths and eyes we all keep shut.
Crapping and piddling in public places
Are now treated as grievous offences.
[Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Penchar Naksha]

Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hootum Penchar Naksha is unparalleled in its social portrayal of the Bengali festivities and sensibilities. The satirical accounts of the Autumn festival and the Churuck Puja (celebrations indigenous to the city) are particularly lavish and whelming, boasting of a lengthy history of continuity. But, did you know that the colonial Government sought to interfere in these time-tested traditions only to meet with fierce resistance from the legendary likes of Rani Rashmoni and the aristocrats of Calcutta? Or that the Churuck festival, celebrated with so much aplomb even today, almost bought a ticket to oblivion?

The Autumn festival was not only the time for the worship of Goddess Durga, but also one of emblazoning culture in the form of nautch performances, kobigaan, and British bhakti. Indeed, the denizens of the city worshipped their Bengali Mother and their British Master. Nonetheless, the authorities did not think dearly of the noisy ‘raptures’ caused by these festivities. ‘On June 27, 1849, a notice was published in the Calcutta Exchange And Gazette, imposing certain restrictions on the routes of the Bijoya Dashami procession in the main thoroughfares of Calcutta, especially in the European quarters of the town’. The first voice of protest was that of Rani Rashmoni of Janbazar, and she was joined by a large number of native residents. Mathura Mohan Biswas spearheaded the signing of a collective memorial, and it was forwarded to the government on August 28, 1849. Some extracts from the memorial are provided below:

… the several Hindoo religious Ceremonies, which are performed at these periods and that this liberal concession to their (British) creed and their feeling is directly opposed to the present interference with their most sacred Ceremonials. 
… to conclude each Poojah by taking the images of their Deities in solemn procession from the Takor Barees to the Banks of the River and cast them into waters, and that without their last sacred act the whole rite would be imperfect.
That from the 18th of July 1749 to the present time a century has elapsed, and during that period the Capital of India has been under the rule of ten Governors and eighteen Governors-Generals. Your memorialists might go back to an era “to which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary”, but a usage prevailing for a century to years and sanctioned by so many Rulers, needs no further support.


The Rashmoni Memorial [ From  Bidisha Chakraborty and Sarmistha De, Calcutta In The Nineteenth Century: An Archival Exploration]


It is on these general grounds that your memorialists respectfully remonstrate against a Regulation which interferes with so many of their body in the exercise of Religious Rites, held so sacred and so long enjoyed.

The Under-Secretary of the Government of Bengal, I.W. Dalrymple, promptly responded to the memorial, and the regulations were swept aside with an assurance of ‘preventing any material inconvenience in the quarters through which the Processions may pass’. Yet, not always did the indigenous crowd harbour a penchant for all things traditional. 

The city was filled with the sound of drums. The swingers were itching to have their backs pierced with hooks … They had ghungroos around their ankles, gaudy chains around their waists, dyed gamchas of Tarakeshwar in their hands, garlands of bel leaves around their necks, and topis laced with gold thread on their heads.  Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Penchar Naksha

The Churuck festival almost lapsed to the abhorrence of the upper classes. Largely deemed a carnival of the lower orders residing in ‘Calcutta’s black town neighbourhoods of Kansaripara, Jelepara, Ahiritola’, it was when they ‘came out on the streets to lampoon’ the ‘upstart Bengali babus, the hypocrite Brahmins, the arrogant English sahibs, and the municipal commissioners for failing to solve the civic problems of the citizens’. The educated elite apparently found the swinging from the hooks and banphora (piercing hooks through flesh) barbaric, unethical, and unsuited for an emerging Imperial city as Calcutta. The applications came from the affluent ‘targets of the festival’ and were backed by the Government. In earlier instances, Calcutta proved to be a soft ground where laws could be easily enacted; in this case, not so much. One ‘Juggernauth Dutt of Badool Bagaun’ and one ‘Rampersaud Koondoo of Beltullah’ swung from hooks at the Churuck posts in the suburbs, defying authority. It was said, much to the elitist disappointment, the celebration occurred unabated and undiluted by the hypocritic elite’s reformist compulsions and wrathful dispositions. [Taken from Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Penchar Naksha; Bidisha Chakraborty and Sarmistha De, Calcutta In The Nineteenth Century: An Archival Exploration]

.The Churuck Festival [From  Bidisha Chakraborty and Sarmistha De, Calcutta In The Nineteenth Century: An Archival Exploration]


[5]

… ‘Be warned’ says the author to his male readers
The women of inferior households invariably ignore their husbands;
Indulged beyond repair, their confidence is increased.
[As we have seen in the case of the fisherwoman insulting her husband…]
It is not a good idea to pamper your woman;
Irrespective of high and low families
[J. Shil, Machher Basante Jele Mechhonir Khed]

Judging from 19th-century popular songs and tracts in pamphlets, it seems that the recent meat scandal is another of those frothy food scandals that Calcutta is no stranger to! In 1875, the city was afflicted with worm-ridden fish and the pamphleteers ‘relied on similar tropes of cosmic intervention to right a reversed world order’. Though wiser reportings pointed at the scanty rainfall over the past few years in causing the fishes to pick up diseases from the dried-up, unclean river beds, the readership ‘firmly believed that the catastrophe had been brought upon the city people by their own wrong-doing.’ ‘Cast variously as a curse resulting from the insult by a group of fishermen to the smallpox goddess, Sitala, and the challenging of Kali by the river Ganga, the virulent spread of disease amongst fish in the riverine tracts of western Bengal and Hooghly was seen as causing untold misery amongst the fish-loving Bengali.’

Suddenly, a fisherman came along with a big carp weighing about ten to twelve seers. Thebabu was elated to see the fish. He decided that he’d buy it, whatever the price. He asked the fisherman, ‘How much will you sell the fish for?’ The fisherman replied, ‘Huzoor, the price is twenty hard slipper-strokes.’ The babu was hell-bent on buying the fish, so he agreed to beat the fisherman with a slipper. – Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Penchar Naksha


What was greater than the scandal was its consequences. The calamity affected all, the rich and the poor. The media readily drew a touching image of ‘a beleaguered Bengali population’ sharing in the misfortune and ‘trying to cope with the absence of fish, that vital ingredient in Bengali cuisine and celebrated by poets and litterateurs ad infinitum’. ‘The weakening of constitution and vitality resulting from a long-term deficiency of fish in household diets, it was thought, would have a disastrous effect on Bengalis as a race. Reduced to a meal of rice, lentils, and vegetables, Machher Basante Jele Mechhonir Khed feared, Bengalis would turn into Hindustanis or khottas, both offensive terms describing the supposedly inferior Hindi-speaking up-country migrants in the city. Not surprisingly, the widows rejoiced, for they had been barred from consuming fish by religion and now, others by the sheer force of circumstances were forced to share their dietary deprivation. ‘Buried in the narratives was also a veiled dislike for the usually East Bengali migrant fisherfolk, who were depicted as involved in malpractices and artificially inflating the price of fish even in the best of times’. Evidently, women bore the brunt of ‘sin, guilt, and atonement’ in the event. ‘Bengalis could be delivered from the disaster if their married women in every household could fast for a day, chant from the current tract, worship Sitala, and forego fish for a period of three months’. It was thought that the insatiable demands of the aggressive fisherwomen concocted the undergoing debacle, for, without their aggressive demands, the fishermen would not have indulged in malpractices and brought the reprisal upon themselves. Contemporary literature like Bishom Dhokha, Macchhe Poka and Macchher Basanta endorsed the convictions. [Taken from Anindita Ghosh, Claiming The City: Protest, Crime, And Scandal In Colonial Calcutta]


The cat and the fish ['Bhijhe Beral' or the Bengali babu]


[6]

If they wish to they (the British) can even build a staircase to the heavens,
We have already seen how they can make men fly in balloons in the sky.
Now only if they could bring back the dead to life
(I am sure) all would accept them as Gods on earth.
[Nandalal Ray, Nutan Poler Tappa]

Indeed, only Gods could build something so spectacular as the ‘hanging’ old Howrah Bridge. It was something unheard of and unseen in so ‘primitive’ a city, and songs sprung up in the honour of ‘the floating iron on water’. Besides the building of the wooden bridge, what is of significance is its presence in the cultural imagination and subsequently, in the popular memory:

Oh, what a pole has been built by the sahib company!
How could a bridge be built over the Ganges?
Even Vishwakarma has admitted defeat …
Such intelligence and skill … there is no problem anymore
All can easily cross the river now
The bridge has brought happiness upon this earth
[Nandalal Ray, Nutan Poler Tappa]

Here is another:

Wrapped in copper sheets and shaped as a boat
The bridge is afloat on the river
Iron chains running below secure it onto anchors
Arranged diagonally on a series of boats are a collection of mighty supports
Resembling the mythical moonbeam-drinking bird.
The actual bridge rests on the structure
Itself a fine weave of beams and rafters.
There are attractive footpaths on both sides
Lined with charming railings.
[Aminchandra Datta, Howrah Ghater Poler Kobi]

[Taken from Anindita Ghosh, Claiming The City: Protest, Crime, And Scandal In Colonial Calcutta]

The above tales may be extremely simple, lacking the appeal of epic mysteries. I have had the need to present them in their raw forms for the readers to be familiar with the minutest sensibilities that Calcutta is made of. We encounter blatant ‘Oriental’ sexuality in Charnock, malicious rivalry in Hastings, divine vengeance in Pattle, unconditional piety for traditions in Rani Rashmoni’s memorial, cultural conflicts in the Fish Scandal, and racial worship in the Howrah Bridge. The tales are fundamental in understanding where we, Bengalis, stand as an ethnic race. And yes, we are forever hinged between the East and the West, thanks to our ancestors. Calcutta, in a way, smoothens this understanding of acceptability and rejection. The city is perfectly unfinished, beautifully Plebian. It is so the city of the common man, and this is what makes it special. We have no qualms in relating to it. We lose nothing when we seek to interpret it. Maybe, after all, truth is not as strange as fiction!


The old, wooden Howrah Bridge



No comments:

Post a Comment

Bottom Ad [Post Page]

To Place your advertisement here call - +917980316633/+918145704098