In 1780, an Irishman took on the British in Calcutta with a tell-all weekly that covered everything from corruption to politics
It was 1780. Great events were shaping and shaking the world. Four years earlier, in 1776, Britain had lost its first colony; a new nation was born, namely, the United States of America. And nine years, later, in 1789, the French revolution ushered in a new era of freedom and hope in Europe.
At a time when the western world was changing rapidly a new spirit was also taking shape in one of Britain’s eastern colonies. Calcutta, then capital of British India, though the East India Company ruled only a small part of India at that time, was witnessing developments that were new not only in India, but in all of Asia. As free thought and freedom of expression swept across the world, an Irishman called James Augustus Hicky gave Calcutta and India its first printed newspaper in 1780.
Taking on power
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, according to the young American scholar Andrew Otis, was a four-page weekly newspaper priced at ₹1. And it took on the rich and mighty of British Calcutta. What did Hicky publish in the pages of his newspaper? “He tried to cover everything that might be important to Calcutta, devoting many sections to politics, world news and events in India.” Topics that featured regularly were poor quality of sanitation and lack of road maintenance. Houses of poor Indians had thatched roofs, prone to catching fire. The outbreak of fires was frequently reported in Hicky’s paper. Through the letters he solicited and published, the editor gave voice to Calcutta’s poor.
He attacked corruption in the East India Company and in high echelons of society. The Bengal Gazette reported that the Governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Rumbold, had been recalled to England to answer charges of corruption in front of Parliament. “Hicky sarcastically wrote,” Otis tells us, “Rumbold was a great man for only amassing a fortune of about 600,000 pounds while in India, much of it from bribes and extortion.”
Hicky did not spare any institution. He exposed the problems of low pay for soldiers in the subaltern ranks of the Company’s army. Failed wars of the Company also came under its gaze. The Company’s army suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Pollilur at the hands of Hyder Ali, then ruler of Mysore. As the news of the disaster trickled in, Hicky questioned why the British were fighting in India. He accused the Company of squandering the lives of its soldiers. He even praised the noble actions of Hyder Ali in his treatment of the captured soldiers of the Company.
But as Hicky continued his fearless mission against corruption, the powers of the day did not sit idle. A rival newspaper was born in Calcutta. The India Gazette of Messink and Reed differed from Hicky in every possible way. The two papers represented two sides of the political spectrum.
Tough rival
Hicky emphasised independence while the India Gazette made no secret that they had the support of Governor Warren Hastings. So much so that Hastings had given the facility of free postage to India Gazette. There were hardly any opinion columns in it, a clear sign of their obeisance to Hastings’s authority. And they did so for a good cause, that was monetary rewards. India Gazette became the Company’s de facto mouthpiece; the Company’s departments placed advertisements and notices in that paper.
Press freedom
But Hicky took on the might of the establishment. He alleged through his pieces in the paper how one Simeon Droz had sought a bribe from him and wanted to get favours for him from Marian Hastings, wife of Warren Hastings, in lieu of the bribe. Hastings fumed that someone could show such imprudence. He passed an order that the Post Office would no longer extend its facility to the Bengal Gazette.
Hicky fought back. He hired 20 hircirrahs (courier men) to deliver his newspaper, and his newspaper’s popularity soared. He continued his fight against the most powerful man of the day and his entourage.
Hastings hit back and the Chief Justice Elijah Impey decreed that Hicky be imprisoned on charges of libel. A grand jury sat to decide the fate of Hicky.
After a fierce courtroom battle, the jury acquitted him. Hicky won, Hastings lost. As Otis tells us, “He had proven that it was possible to protect the Press against the most powerful people in British India.”
There were still three more trials to come that tried to muffle the voice of Hicky. What happened; did freedom of the press triumph? For that you must turn to Otis’s book, as he sketches a riveting tale of the struggle of India’s first newspaper editor.
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper; Andrew Otis, Westland/ Tranquebar, ₹899.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Reviews / by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury / July 14th, 2018
Nearly one in five “Bengalis” — or people who have listed Bengali as their mother tongue in the 2011 census — now lives outside Bengal. India has 9.6 crore Bengalis, of whom 1.8 crore (or 19%) stay outside Bengal, data from the 2011 census on mother tongues has revealed.
Maharashtra has the maximum number of Bengalis in India if you discount Bengal and its neighbouring states like Orissa, Bihar and Jharkhand, and states and union territories like Tripura and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which have always had a large Bengali population.
Maharashtra has 4.4 lakh people who count Bengali as their mother tongue, which is way more than the number of Bengalis in Uttar Pradesh, the National Capital Region of Delhi, Karnataka (which has Bengaluru, home to a large number of Bengalis), erstwhile Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
Maharashtra topping the list of these states has come as a surprise to many. Of these states and union territories, Delhi is traditionally supposed to have a high concentration of Bengalis. “But Maharashtra has a high growth rate with a quite a few cities that are very well off,” social theorist Ashis Nandy felt. “Bengal, incidentally, is one of the biggest suppliers of labour to Maharashtra,” he added.
Linguist Pabitra Sarkar attributed the lure of the film industry in Mumbai as a reason for the high Bengali-speaking population there. “The education sector in Pune and the diamond industry based in Maharashtra are big draws among migrants who speak Bengali,” Sarkar said.
Also, Nagpur — the headquarters of erstwhile Bengal Nagpur Railway — has a large Bengali population of settlers who migrated to take up employment in BNR. Besides, Delhi is geographically much smaller than Maharashtra — a huge state — though the concentration of Bengalis there may be more.
Social theorists Ashis Nandy also pointed out that Bengalis were “assertive” about their language. “Even when Bengalis shift to Maharashtra, they continue to speak their language,” Nandy said.
Chhattisgarh is second to Maharashtra among states that do not share a border with Bengal (and states and UTs other than Tripura and Andaman and Nicobar Islands) to have a large Bengali population; it has 2.4 lakh Bengalis. Madhya Pradesh, from which Chhattisgarh was carved out in 2000, has a much lower figure of a little more than 1 lakh.
Andaman and Nicobar Islands has a similar number of people who count Bengali as their mother tongue. Sarkar attributes this to the migrant Bengali population. “They were refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan. Their children and grandchildren speak Bengali as their mother tongue,” Sarkar explained.
Among the five southern states, Karnataka — because of the large Bengali population settled in Bengaluru — tops the chart; it is followed by Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Goa.
The percentage of people in India who have listed Bengali as their mother tongue has gone up to 8.3% of the total population (from 8.1% in the last census of 2001). Sarkar says he would not want to ignore the influx of the migrant population from Bangladesh to various parts of India.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> News> City News> Kolkata News / by Priyanka Dasgupta / TNN / June 28th, 2018
Kolkata Gate, a steel-and-glass structure with giant arches at the Rabindra Tirtha crossing of New Town, is almost ready. The two steel arches that criss-cross each other 55m above the ground can be spotted from several kilometres away.
A circular viewing gallery made of steel and toughened glass has been set up at 25m above the ground level. The 10ft-wide and 60m-long gallery has been constructed by interlinking four prefabricated structures that resemble aerobridges. These structures in turn are welded and attached to the steel arches at designated points. The facade is made of toughened glass with laminated silicone sheets that can withstand gale-force winds, hailstorms and extreme heat.
A bird’s-eye view of New Town clicked from a landing a few feet below the viewing gallery of the Kolkata Gate. The view from the gallery will be unhindered as nothing taller than the gate will come up in the area, New Town being a planned city and with pre-determined floor levels for every plot.
Programmable LED lights and flashers have been placed along the length of the steel arches to give it a snazzy look at night. The viewing gallery will have a snacks counter during the day and a fine-dining restaurant after 7pm. At night, only diners will be allowed inside the gallery that will offer a panoramic view of the township. The walls of the gallery have been painted with murals with an entire wall dedicated to the schemes and achievements of the state government.
“The restaurant will offer a one-of-a-kind experience. It will be unlike any other in the city and will offer cuisines from across the world,” said Debashis Sen, the chairman of Hidco. It is likely to open doors in June, officials said.
Two lifts with a glass facade made of toughened glass similar to that used in the viewing gallery will take visitors up to the gallery. The lifts are equipped with telephones at every level so that the operators can get in touch with visitors in case of an emergency. Hidco is mulling a Rs 30 fee per person for a visit to the gallery. Diners at the restaurant won’t need to pay the fee.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Snehal Sengupta / Photos by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya / April 30th, 2018
Conservation experts from the United Kingdom are voicing concern over the loss of Calcutta’s architectural heritage.
Conservation architect Philip Davies, who campaigns for the “shared heritage of Calcutta and Britain” and James Simpson, OBE, architect and vice-president of ICOMOS, UK, a heritage and cultural organisation, have lent their support to the protest march that Calcutta Architectural Legacies (CAL) is organising on April 18, the World Conservation Day.
Simpson believes Calcutta is facing a situation that Edinburgh faced 50 years ago. when development had threatened to rob the Scottish capital of its architectural heritage.
“Calcutta is… eminently worthy of recognition by Unesco as a World Heritage City. When chief minister Mamata Banerjee came to the Scottish capital last November, she saw in Edinburgh a beautiful city, whose heritage has made it one of the best places in the world in which to live and to do business, and to whose economy tourism makes a significant contribution,” Simpson wrote in an email sent to Metro on Sunday.
The Calcutta Municipal Corporation had last year downgraded the heritage status of the building that housed the old Kenilworth Hotel near the Middleton Street-Little Russel Street crossing, enabling its demolition by the present owners. Conservation activists have alleged that a builder-authorities nexus was behind the downgrading and the subsequent demolition.
The civic body had said the heritage downgrade of the building happened in accordance with law.
Amar Nath Shroff, the chairman of Alcove Realty, has said his company has not done anything outside the law. Alcove Realty is part of the consortium that owns the plot where the hotel stood and is promoting The 42, Calcutta’s tallest building.
Simpson said Calcutta’s heritage is its greatest asset, on which its future should be built. “Amit Chaudhuri and his supporters in CAL and PUBLIC are fighting for the very survival of the city. Without the architecture and the culture which makes it uniquely special, Calcutta will, in global terms, sink into mediocrity,” said Simpson.
London-based architect Philip Davies, who believes citizen’s movement is important to force governments into action, said: “Amit Chaudhuri, CAL and PUBLIC are to be applauded for taking to the streets to protest against the de-listing of buildings and the refusal of repeated administrations to designate conservation areas to protect its historic centres. Kolkata is one of the world’s great historic cities. Its remarkable heritage is enshrined in the very fabric of its buildings, neighbourhoods and public places. They desperately need strong statutory protection.”
Lamenting the loss of many such buildings, like the Strand Road warehouses, Davies said: “What is happening is a scandal. The Strand Road warehouses have stood vacant and decaying on a prime central riverside site for over 50 years losing crores and crores of potential revenue. The Botanic Gardens are of world significance and the oldest in Asia, but they are appallingly neglected with no coherent strategy for their future.”
He also lists the Silver Mint and Mint Master’s House, among the finest neoclassical buildings in India, that have been lying dilapidated for decades. The buildings that made Calcutta “a city of palaces” are threatened with development, he said.
Historic buildings and neighbourhoods are a huge economic and cultural asset, feels Davies. “A successful city can, and must, have both. Conservation is not an optional extra luxury, but crucial for sustainable urban regeneration and change. Heritage-led regeneration works,” he said.
Experience across the world – from London to Cape Town – demonstrates that waterfront cities can, and do, reinvent themselves. Calcutta can do the same and reap huge economic benefits for all, but it needs vision and leadership, felt the architects.
Grateful for the support from the UK, Chaudhuri said: “They have long been interested and invested in conservation in Calcutta.”
Talking of the UK experience in conservation, he said: “We can learn from Edinburgh, which never lost any of its architectural heritage, unlike Glasgow. We can learn from Scotland and London. But we can also learn from our own Mumbai, which has its own heritage precincts like the Churchgate and Oval Maidan, and the art deco of Marine Drive.
All these places are not museum-like but lived spaces shared by the affluent and the ordinary people. Calcutta too has the same mix of livelihoods and buildings that would form an attractive part of the city.”
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Anasuya Basu / April 16th, 2018
Chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy and Ajay Mukherjee inaugurating the Salt Lake reclamation scheme on April 16, 1962. A Telegraph file picture
It has been 22 years since he retired as administrator of Salt Lake Reclamation and Development Project, having handed over the reins of the township to the newly formed Bidhannagar Municipality the year before, but Pran Kishore Chatterjee still has data related to the formative years of Salt Lake at his fingertips.
Seated in his AD Block home, the 80-year-old reminisces about the time when chief minister Bidhan Chandra Roy visualised founding the Calcutta Eastern Garden Suburb. “The city was bound on the west by the river, the southern fringes were becoming refugee colonies which would have been tough to dislodge. So the east was the only direction to expand. He had once travelled by launch till the house of Hem Chandra Naskar (former Calcutta mayor) near Mahisbathan and I have heard it was during that voyage that the idea came to him.”
The idea was to reclaim about 6 sq miles of the marshland by dredging the bed of river Hooghly and pumping in the slush. An estimated 124 crore cubic feet of earth would be needed to raise the area to +12. This was a unit followed by the public works department to determine how much higher the land level of a place would be compared to the Hooghly water level. “Salt Lake was originally a low-lying saucer-shaped area, where the waste of Dum Dum Park and Bangur would be drained. That also helped pisciculture practised here. The area was now to be raised to a level high enough to ensure that it would never suffer inundation. That is why Sector I and most parts of Sector II have no need for drainage pumping. Water naturally gravitates to Kestopur Canal. A drainage pumping station was built much later for Sector III opposite Nicco Park when the area was found to be too far from Kestopur Canal. The Eastern Drainage Canal was excavated for the purpose.”
The dredging started on April 16, 1962 and 11 floating units (two dredgers, two tug pusher boats, two bergs and two survey launches and three boosting stations) were deployed.
A survey had earlier been done on the Hooghly to check where the riverbed level was highest. A shoal at Ghushuri, near Chitpore Lockgate, was deemed the closest. That is where the dredging started. Using a booster pump, the slush was sent to Ultadanga, near Golaghata. The soil would be dumped at the site while the water would be drained into Kestopur Canal.
By 1967, about 90-95 per cent dredging was done. By then, the young engineer had participated in the government’s Re 1 lottery for distribution of plots in 1965 and got three cottahs at Rs 2,750 per cottah. “We used to stay in Jodhpur Park then. Since there was no transport, the Salt Lake Project ran a bus from Ultadanga crossing just to show prospective buyers how the area was developing. Still there was little interest as people thought houses built on a bed of sand would sink.”
One day, he brought his wife and father-in-law to show the plot. “A few houses dotted the expanse amid dense overgrowths of bulrushes. There was not a single tree in sight. The wind blew sand into the eyes and nostrils. I still remember my father-in-law’s sombre face when he set foot here.”
The Chatterjees did move into their newly built house in 1979 and stayed for two-three years before he was transferred. They settled permanently in 1988. He took over as administrator the year after. The Bidhannagar Notified Area Authority came into being in 1990.
Pran Kishore Chatterjee at his AD Block residence on Wednesday. (Sudeshna Banerjee)
“Initially when we were planting trees, we avoided fruit-bearing trees so that there would be no disputes over the fruits. But that kept the birds away. So we changed our decision and planted mango, wood-apple, jamun later.” Another lesson learnt along the way was keeping space for cooperatives and not just individual plots. “That is why you see all the cooperative complexes in Sector III which was the last to come up.”
Three types of roads were planned — arterial, spinal and local i.e. inside blocks varying in width from 48.46m to 9.14m. Interestingly, First Avenue is not the widest because it was never meant to be the primary gateway it has become.
“Second Avenue was supposed to be the arterial road. But when dredging started the familes that stayed in the area relocated to the highland which later became Duttabad slum. We never bothered about them then as we could carry out our work. But later when their presence blocked the exit from Second Avenue to the Bypass, an alternative exit had to be found in CA Block.”
He takes a lot of pride in pointing out that 23 per cent space was kept for roads. “At that time, the figure was barely 7 per cent for Calcutta.”
And though New Town was born long after his retirement, he likes to believe he made a contribution there too. “Gautam Deb (then the chairman of Hidco and the housing minister) had sought my advice. I told him not to repeat the mistake made with Salt Lake where no one from outside could make out how the township was developing. I asked him to first curve out a road to the airport through the project area so that people could see the development being undertaken,” he smiles.
DID YOU KNOW?
Originally 15sq km of marshy land was supposed to be reclaimed. But there was hue and cry about drainage getting clogged so Nalban and Chinta Singh Bheri were left out and the remaining 12.35sq km was reclaimed.
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Calcutta / by Sudeshna Banerjee / April 13th, 2018
From ship builders, dentists, shoe-makers — to chefs. How did the Chinese in India get stuck with the identity of the Chinese chef? A report from Kolkata, the only Indian city with two Chinatowns where the Chinese came 220 years ago
(R) Monica Liu with her husband. Liu, an Indian Chinese, is one of the most successful restauranteurs of Kolkata. (Photo courtesy: Monica Liu)
You could almost say Tong Atchew was a good mushroom growing on foreign soil. A mushroom does wonders for the soup, the stir fry and as stuffing. No flash, no permanent dash, but it still stands on its own even as it adds to the flavours of the mix into which it is thrown.
Atchew, a middleman, believed to be the first Chinese immigrant in India, arrived in 1798. He managed to strike a deal with Warren Hastings, the governor-general of British India, and became the owner of a sugar mill near Kolkata.
In the late 18th century, Kolkata was the terminus, the port and the transit point to pretty much everywhere else. The Chinese in India, especially the Chinese of Kolkata, the only Indian city with two Chinatowns –– the first in Tiretta Bazaar has existed since the 1800s, the second, in Tangra since 1910 –– consider Atchew The Ancestor. Here was someone who made ‘leaving home’ a success story, in contrast to staying put, the established wisdom for that age. He consolidated the image of the Chinese as a hardy migrant who slogs for his success, is a credit to his community, and keeps his own counsel.
At Tangra, the second Chinatown, of Kolkata. (Samir Jana/HT PHOTO)
The Chinese who came to Kolkata were mainly from coastal China, then ravaged by civil wars; many landed in between the two world wars too. All had different skills and traditions, which they innovated, in order to survive. The Hubeis, who were “teeth-setters”, became dentists. The Cantonese were ship-fitters; by the ’50s they had moved into carpentry. The Hakkas were talented shoe-smiths and leather manufacturers. All of them came to India to work. None of them came here to cook.
But as the example of Monica Liu, a Hakka housewife who has become Chinatown’s most well-known businesswoman over the past 10 years, shows, the restaurant business can become an area where race or ethnicity may find accommodation, and success –– if it does not challenge established tastes too much.
In the ’90s, Liu cooked for the late chief minister Jyoti Basu at his home after his return from China. In 2012, writer Amitav Ghosh did a lunch with the Financial Times at Liu’s flagship restaurant, Beijing. Here, he discussed the opium trade, linguistic adjustments made by men who met at sea featured in his Ibis trilogy over beer and steamed bhetki. In 2018, Liu is preparing to face cricketing legend Sourav Ganguly in the popular Bengali television game-show, Dadagiri.
Two Bengali boys watching Liu, as she does the rounds of the tables at the Beijing restaurant, delay stuffing the last tiger prawns into their mouths and greet her saying they have seen her appear in some TV programme. In block heels, cropped hair and thinly pencilled eyebrows, Liu’s is as public a public face as is possible in a community that shuns the media.
Proprietor and head chef Monica Liu at her Beijing restaurant in Tangra, Kolkata. (Samir Jana/HT PHOTO)
Image issues
“Our food is suited to Indian tastes,” says the owner of five restaurants in and outside Chinatown, returning to our table. Liu opened Kimling, her first, in 1991. “In my restaurants, I always keep a chilli-garlic gravy, popular with customers, ready. Sometimes they want their chicken dry or with gravy. But this is not to say my food is Indian-Chinese. It is Chinese,” says Liu playing the elder stateswoman of Chinese cuisine to the hilt.
Restauranteurs in Tangra, riding the restaurant boom in the ’90s, had no problem saying they sell Indian-Chinese to create a space, as it were, for selling their food. “It was part of their entrepreneurial logic to boost saleability,” says anthropology researcher Piya Chakraborty. But the renown of many Chinese restaurants now owned by non-Chinese (such as hotelier Anjan Chatterjee’s Mainland China, which he started in Mumbai in 1994 and which he brought to Kolkata, and musician Debaditya Chaudhury’s Chowman chain in 2010) has produced a new kind of anxiety. So the assertion of ‘authentic Chinese’ to be got at Tangra, and not just at central Kolkata, the original Chinatown, is important now.
Food networks
The small eating houses in Tiretta Bazaar, central Kolkata, was originally meant to feed the local Chinese working men, numbering around 25,000 till the early ’60s, before the outbreak of the Indo-China war of ’62. Central Kolkata was a Cantonese stronghold. When a new throughfare split the area, the Hakkas, the other sizeable Chinese immigrant group, re-located to Tangra. The collective sense of security in mixed neighbourhoods, where each minority recognises the other as such (central Kolkata had substantial Anglo Indian, Jewish, Sindhi, Bihari populations), however, stopped many Hakkas from moving out.
Dominic Lee, a Hakka, who owns Pou Chong, one of the most well-known brands of sauce and noodles made by the community near Tiretta Bazaar, is perceived as Mr Lee, the sauce-maker, not the Indian-Chinese sauce-maker by the neighbourhood. His professional identity, he says, has never felt eclipsed by his racial identity. (That is why he is able to field questions of “authenticity” without feeling defensive about it.)
This is not to say that the Chinese do not maintain strong community networks. Lee’s products are used by Tangra outlets like Liu’s Beijing, as much as all over central Kolkata eateries. When casting directors of the Salman Khan-starrer Tubelight were scouting for a youth to portray “a Chinese”, Lee recommended Thomas Chen, a Cantonese mechanical engineer and singer in Kolkata, for the cameo.
David Rocco, the popular Canadian-Italian TV host, has interviewed Lee for his programme Dolce India. When quizzed about the ‘authenticity’ of his sauces, Lee’s answer is pat: “It’s authentic for this area. The Hakkas are gypsies. Each group of Hakkas has its own Hakka cuisine.” No two Bengalis, he says to further explain his point, make pulao or paturi the same way.
Owner of the Pou Chong brand, Dominic Lee at his shop at Tiretta Bazaar, the first Chinatown. The combination of the Pou Chong tomato and Pou Chong green chilli sauce is usually used with the Kolkata kathi roll. (Samir Jana/HT PHOTO)
The Pou Chong brand, started by Lee’s father to cater to the large Chinese population, was badly hit, a second time, when families were uprooted at the outbreak of the Indo-China war in 1962. “It was a collective trauma for the community, which may explain the wall of silence it maintains now,” says Chakraborty.
The war with China nearly emptied central Kolkata; hundreds of Chinese were deported to and jailed in camps in Rajasthan on mere suspicion of being ‘Chinese agents’. Monica Liu and her family were picked up and sent to a prison camp as was Thomas Chen’s mother in her teens; they were released without compensation or apology after several years. In a cruel twist of fate, the role he had to enact to crack the Tubelight audition was to play a Chinese soldier interrogating an Indian spy.
“I can never touch a potato or a gourd since then. Even the smell of their cooking scares me,” says Liu. They were a staple in her prison camp. For many Indian Chinese with similar experiences, family traditions around food have just not come together because of interrupted family life. Chen says he learnt to make a Chinese-style whole steamed fish, but not from his mother. The lack of schooling, because of formative years in jail, may also have pushed many of those from the earlier generation towards informal sectors like food, other than ‘office jobs.’
By the ’70s, the situation stabilised. Local Chinese boys entered the city’s five-star kitchens as hotels opened their first Chinese restaurants. “They popularised our products. Chinese, by then, had become part of the city’s street food. Every street corner had someone selling chow on carts. The combination of the Pou Chong tomato and Pou Chong green chilli became the Kolkata kathi roll sauce,” says Lee.
The eating culture of the central Kolkata Chinese developed in close contact with other migrant communities at the margins of Bengali society. Their restaurant clientele – fellow Chinese – was assured due to their still sizeable population in this area so they were under no pressure to suit their food to a ‘Bengali’ palate. Jayani Bonnerjee of OP Jindal Global University, a specialist on the Indian-Chinese community, talks of a dish called ngapi, a shrimp paste of Burmese origin, that was eaten at both Chinese and Anglo-Indian homes on Bentinck Street, though it’s not clear who influenced whom.
“The Chinese and Anglo-Indians had an affinity for one another; for ease of schooling and professional networks, many Chinese had become Christians. They shared schools, met each other in church, visited each other’s homes,” says Bonnerjee. When Waldorf, the famous Kolkata Chinese restaurant on Park Street, changed hands, the ownership went to an Anglo-Indian family, the Mantoshes, most probably in the ’90s, she points out.
At Bow Barracks, central Kolkata. The Central Kolkata Chinese stay in mixed neighbourhoods. (Samir Jana/HT PHOTO)
Indianisation
The Supreme Court ultimatum in 2002 to shift out 592 tanneries in Tangra, where the Hakkas on leaving central Kolkata went, was another big jolt for the community. It nearly emptied out Tangra. Most left for Canada. Those who could not; converted the godowns into restaurants. This is where the Indianisation of Chinese restaurants began.
The story of Tangra’s Indianisation is classic migrant-nama: left with lemons, they made lemonade. But when they did, that was inadvertently the first step taken by the community to build, with the Bengalis, a shared culinary mythology.
Chinese eating houses probably took their initial reluctant steps towards serving ‘Indian Chinese’ when Kolkata’s office-goers passed through the tannery areas in Tangra on their way home and showed up at the factory-cum-kitchens of the Chinese to request for fried chicken to go with booze.
Bengalis who frequented these Chinese joints wanted Chinese food, but on their own terms — fried, spicy and saucy. Enter the Chilli Chicken (chicken nuggets dipped in corn slurry, deep fried and finished up with soya sauce) and Schezwan Chicken (made by tossing deep fried chicken with a reddish sauce out of a bottle and Sichuan pepper, a key ingredient). Sichuan pepper, when it met Bengalis inside Chinese restaurants, began to be called ‘Schezwan’, so goes the joke.
Authenticity-seekers eat in Central Kolkata places like Eau Chew and Tung Nam now; Tangra is the spice-lovers’ haunt. Such customers might, says Monica Liu, on the rare occasion, ask her the passive-aggressive question, “what is your cooking medium?”, which she knows how to answer. “We use the same oil, or as much oil – the way you like your biryani,” she says fixing the customer with gimlet eyes.
The last Chinese waiter to take orders at the tables of Chinese restaurants like Liu’s Beijing, is not known. Till the ’70s, the Chinese restaurant was not the first place where Bengali boys looked for jobs. Now they do. This is now Beliaghata boy Babu’s stage. In Liu’s kitchen, Biharis are firing up the woks, and two Hakkas are chopping the vegetables and supervising them. The word is in many ‘Chinese restaurants’ Nepalis and south Indians are doing the cooking. Peter Chen, who runs the famous carpentry firm in Poddar Court, central Kolkata, says as much but won’t identify the restaurants. “They are doing a fine job, let them be,” he says.
Mechanical engineer Thomas Chen with his son, Travis, at his home in Bow Bazaar, central Kolkata. ‘I am almost Bangali,’ he says. Chen has done a cameo in a Salman Khan film and also sings in Bengali, Hindi and Mandarin. (Samir Jana/HT PHOTO)
The Chinese have taken up Indian food as well. When dal poori entered Chinese homes has not yet been documented, but Peter Chen, the businessman likes it. Chang Chen Fa, a Hubei chef loves it. Thomas Chen, the singer, eats it. Chen, who welcomes us into his home with tea and Chinese prawn wafers, says his pork is spiced with Everest turmeric masala. “I am almost Bangali,” says Thomas Chen, who speaks the flat, unaccented Bengali spoken in urban Kolkata.
Many young Indian-Chinese like Chen, especially those who were born in India, say experts, are increasingly trying to define their Chinese-ness in the context of their immediate surroundings. Chen and his family participate in community art projects around Tiretta Bazaar, the area he grew up in. He is not looking to be Chinese in China.
As we leave Kolkata, two images remain with me. Monica Liu barking at her employees to slice the carrots well, which pretty much sounds the same in every language. And Chen singing khayal at his home, which he says, helps him hit the high notes when singing in Mandarin.
People often say the Chinatowns of Kolkata are going or gone. Both, I think, daily renew themselves.
source: http://www.hindustantimes.com / Hindustan Times / Home> Lifestyle> Art & Culture / by Paramita Ghosh, Hindustan Times / March 10th, 2018
On February 26, 1873, sailship Lalla Rookh set off from what is now known as Suriname Ghat with 410 passengers on board. Nearly all of them were from places that are now in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The men and women had been recruited as ‘coolies’ or indentured labourers by the Dutch who owned sugarcane plantations in Suriname. The ship docked at Paramaribo on June 5 with 279 men, 70 women and 50 children. Eleven did not survive the voyage. In the years that followed, 63 more ships left Kolkata port for Suriname.
Nearly 145 years later, a descendant of one of the 34,304 Indian labourers who were transported to a distant land in the northern tip of South America returned to the very ghat from where her ancestor had set sail and survived the arduous journey. It was a poignant moment for Aashna Kanhai, the Surinamese ambassador to India, as she stood at ‘Mai Baap’ Memorial on Suriname Ghat and looked at the shimmering waters of the Hooghly.
“Today, there are 170,000 people of Indian origin in Suriname (the total population is 558,368). There are also 200,000 of them in Holland who decided to leave Suriname when the country became independent 42 years ago,” said Kanhai as she folded her palms in a namaskaar in front of the Mai Baap Memorial.
Surinam ambassador in India Aashna Kanhai, Union minister of state for external affairs M J Akbar, Netherlands ambassador in India Alphonsus Stoelinga and Kolkata Port Trust chairman Vinit Kumar at the unveiling of the plaque at Mai Baap Memorial in Surinam Ghat, Garden Reach on Saturday. photo by – Avik Purkait
The occasion that had brought Kanhai to Kolkata was Suriname Day. “My ancestors must have stood here for the last time before leaving India forever. The men carried two dhotis and two kurtas each. The women carried two saris each. Apart from this, some carried religious books like the Ramayana, Mahabharata or Quran,” Kanhai said, her voice choked with emotion.
Aashna Kanhai, the Surinamese ambassador to India, celebrated Suriname Day on the banks of Hooghly on Saturday, accompanied by minister of state for external affairs MJ Akbar, who unveiled a plaque at the Mai Baap Memorial on Suriname Ghat.
The memorial comprises a sculpture of a man and a woman, each carrying a potli, to commemorate the landing of Indian labourers at Paramaribo. The original sculpture is in Paramaribo and its replica was inaugurated in Kolkata in 2015.
Her great grandmother’s father was among the indentured labourers who landed in Suriname. During an earlier visit to Kolkata, she had heard the name Bhawanipore and it rang a bell. “I recalled that my ancestors were kept at the Bhawanipore Depot before they boarded the ship,” Kanhai added.
Initially, the transport and living conditions of Indian labourers in Suriname was worse than it had been prior to the abolition of the Dutch slave trade. Many died during the journey.
But why did the Dutch planters require Indian labourers? “In 1863, slavery was abolished by the Dutch and they entered into an agreement with the East India Company to recruit labourers from India to work in the sugarcane plantations in Suriname. Men, known as Arkatias were sent out to recruit people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They entered into a five-year contract and came to be known as the Contrakees or Agreemanees. They were to receive 25-pence a week for their labour but payment was often delayed. Of the 34,000-odd Indians who reached Suriname, 65% stayed back. Indentured labour was finally abolished 100 years ago in 1917,” the Surinamese ambassador said.
During the event, videos of renditions by Surinamese singer Raj Mohan were screened. In a Bhojpuri song, the singer brought out the feelings of a ‘coolie’ after he realized that he had been cheated. The second song by Mohan was Tagore’s Ami Chini Go Chini Tomarey, Ogo Bideshini. Kanhai, who speaks fluent Bhojpuri, said that the only Bengali she knows is the Rabindrasangeet which is extremely popular in Suriname.”That one stanza of the Bhojpuri song says it all. It reveals how the labourers from India had gone to Suriname with plans to return after five years with small fortunes. Once there, they realized that they were cheated. They were taken there as replacement slaves. Such was colonialism. They just played with words to make things sound better. The Hooghly wasn’t a river of hope. It was a river of no return. The peasants left their lands in the first place because of the huge taxation imposed by the colonial government in India. They had no surplus during lean seasons. Through such programmes, we celebrate the resilience of human spirit,” Akbar said.
While Dutch ambassador Alphonsus Stoelinga recounted how his country shared a piece of history with India and Suriname, Kolkata Port Trust chairman Vinit Kumar said there are plans to improve the surroundings of the memorial. “The first labour ship to leave Kolkata for the Mauritius was in 1834. Later, ships left for several countries. We have plans to organize heritage tours to the Suriname Ghat and create a larger indenture memorial. We shall also upgrade the surroundings,” Kumar said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Kolkata News / by Jayanta Gupta / TNN / November 26th, 2017
The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta Kushanava Choudhury (Bloomsbury Circus 241 pages; Rs 499)
Calcutta is personal. And the front flap blurb contains all the trigger words: immigrant, Princeton, British Raj, mosquitoes, hawkers, fish-sellers. Would this be another book balancing nostalgia with wide-eyed wonder? Or would it hit the road running in one more case of parachute authoring? Or, worse, would it be a supercilious outsider’s take on a city that is easy to love, easy to hate, but hard to know?
Calcutta, that most storied of cities, has been subjected to all kinds, right from Geoffrey Moorhouse’s 1971 work to Amit Chaudhuri’s Two Years in the City (2013). In recent years, it has been best served by Strangely Beloved: Writings on Calcutta (2014), a compilation of essays and excerpts that, by virtue of its format, held up special-interest mirrors to facets of the city, from the Eastern Calcutta wetlands to the soundscape that birthed India’s first rock band. The flipside is the academic undertone that robs the city of some of its joy, and the nostalgia shoehorn that depletes some immediacy.
Superficially, The Epic City has none of those problems: Kushanava Choudhury spent some of his childhood years in Calcutta and then comes back to work in the city as a reporter at The Statesman (peeve: the article is part of the masthead, so why lose it?) at the turn of the millennium as a fresh Ivy League graduate. “Like the revolutionaries of my parents’ generation, I wanted to change things…My best hope for making a difference was to work at a newspaper.” To translate those efforts to “make a difference” into a book would be a straight card into disaster zone. Where Choudhury scores emphatically is in twinning his heart, mind and soul — his own story — with the city’s to forge a work that is as gritty as the Beleghata canals, as wondrous as Kumortuli, as determinative as the Partition.
Groomed in the shoe-leather reporting The Statesman was once renowned for (the newspaper’s decline is an obvious parallel for the city), Choudhury lends depth to his observations with lightly worn erudition to produce one of the most readable accounts of a world city. Casual chats with relations, friends, colleagues merge seamlessly with purposeful conversations with trade unionists, little magazine archivists, impoverished scions of Calcutta’s oldest families, descendents of refugees, small publishers, idol sculptors. Underlying it all is an understanding of cultural crosscurrents — Satyajit Ray, of course, but more (and more powerfully) Ritwik Ghatak, Michael Madhusudan Dutt but also Mujtaba Ali — and an instinctive sense of history that burrows into unarticulated spaces, uncomfortable silences.
Cleverly constructed and utterly relevant as each of the 14 chapters of the book is in conveying Choudhury’s clear-eyed vision of the city, two, in my mind stand out. In ‘College Street’, the essay that opens the core section, the author uses a favourite trope for all city chroniclers to eviscerate one of its most fondly held myths: Of Calcutta as a centre of learning. Traipsing through the portals of little magazines and past “rainwater and dog shit” of university avenue, Choudhury trains his guns on the “notes business”, which finesses the education system to ensure intellectual stagnation more effectively than the much-reviled brain drain ever could.
The mood of The Epic City grows darker as it investigates the methodical de-industrialisation of Calcutta — the old factories in the southern reaches memorialised only as bus-stops such as Bengal Lamp and Usha — the rarely acknowledged Hindu-Muslim divide (including at The Statesman, as cosmopolitan as the city likes to think itself to be) and, in ‘Russian Dolls’, it culminates in a familial account of the run-up to Partition and its aftermath.
Weaving together the devastating sequence of the World War II in Europe, the Churchill-directed Bengal famine, the consequences of Direct Action Day with his own grandparents’ displacement from East Pakistan and pitching forward to the rise of the Communists and the Naxal rebellion to his father’s decision to migrate, Choudhury creates a stunning, tight fabric of continuum. Always empathetic, mostly sharp and frequently insightful, this is a heart-full work on a heartbreaking city, notwithstanding the gaping hole of the post-2011 Mamata Banerjee years. While it might even impress the resident Calcuttan, it is definitely recommended for anyone else ever touched by the city.
Sumana Mukherjee is a writer in Bengaluru
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Lifestyle> Books / by Sumana Mukherjee / October 07th, 2017
‘During my trip to Kolkata, I could only think of one word.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYg2dmJO4Lg
Ever since City of Joy, Kolkata has been a foreign filmmaker’s joy, its dizzying roll of sights, faces, sounds, and activities offering exciting possibilities to documentary-makers in particular.
Cuban-born, Netherlands-based filmmaker Yuribert Capetillo Hardy aptly summed up the feel of Kolkata in the title of his short film – Roller Coaster. “During my trip to Kolkata, India, I could only think of one word: rollercoaster,” he wrote in the film description. “This film rollercoaster is the visualisation of my feelings, fears and emotions.”
Hardy’s film moves just like a rollercoaster, swooping low and soaring high to create an exhilarating collage of scenes from the city. He shot his film in just one week, while on assignment for a Dutch non-profit organisation, 1000Children. “The one thing that stays on my mind was a little baby sleeping alone in the streets, which made me think of my own daughter who grows up protected and loved,” Hardy noted.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
source: http://www.video.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Around The Web / by Scroll Staff / October 14th, 2017
Painstaking effort: In this British-era map of Kolkata, water bodies are shown in blue and concrete structures are marked in pink.
The newly-discovered Kolkata maps, created over a seven-year period, plot buildings, trees, lakes and even dustbins
Almost a hundred years before satellite-based mapping made information available to people at their fingertips, a municipal survey done in Kolkata by British surveyors documented not only streets, houses, landmarks and water bodies but also trees, telegraph and telephone posts, urinals, wells, hackney carriage stands, and dustbins, among others.
The maps of the first major municipal survey of the city carried out over a span of seven years from 1887 are so precise that they follow a scale of 50 feet to an inch. The survey was conducted by Lt. Colonel W.H. Wilkins, who had surveyed Bassein in British Burma. The exercise involved ₹2.38 lakh.
The West Bengal State Archives is now ready with a publication comprising 38 such maps detailing the city’s north division, from Mahratta Ditch in the north, the Hooghly river in the west, the Circular Road, Panchanna Gram in the east and Jorasanko and Kasaripara area in the South.
Titled ‘Calcutta Municipal Maps 1887-1893,’ the publication provides a rare glimpse into the urban history and landscape of Kolkata with the minutest details.
Simonti Sen, the director of State Archives said the painstaking detail in the maps was impressive.
“These maps will not only serve as a milestone to those interested in urban history of the city but can be of immense use to environmentalists who can look up information on water bodies and clusters of trees that existed between 1887 and 1893,” Ms. Sen told The Hindu.
The maps were discovered rolled up in a corner of the State Archives when the renovation of its premises was taken up in 2015. Archivists came across 20 inch x 18 inch sheets with alphanumeric markings that did not make much sense in the beginning.
After a thorough search, scores of such maps were found and it was ascertained that the alphanumeric markings were the order of the maps. The maps were marked on the basis of street names and names of landmarks. Consultations with experts showed that they were part of the survey done by W.H. Wilkins. Each map sheet bears the names of nine or ten surveyors, mostly British, including that of Col. Wilkins.
First effort
“The Calcutta Municipal Corporation was set up in 1876, and this may be the first major survey after that. We believe that the aim of the survey was to increase the tax base of the corporation. One can see the pucca houses and katcha houses being marked differently. Moreover they take into account all municipal infrastructure from sewage lines and drains to telegraph and telephone posts,” Sarmistha De, archivist who has worked extensively on the publication said.
Both Ms. Sen and Ms. De are convinced that the maps, which are being brought to the public domain for the first time, served as the basis of the survey conducted by Major R.B. Smart between 1903 and 1914, which historians call the most “noteworthy of all surveys made on the city till date”.
A changed city
One important thing that the maps point to is the significant change in Kolkata’s green cover and water bodies. They have distinct symbols for different kind of trees, while water bodies are shown as blue spaces, concrete structures are marked pink, and katcha houses, grey.
Almost all 38 maps indicate large open spaces and green. These areas have turned into the most congested parts now.
The maps highlight important educational and cultural institutions of 19th century Kolkata. For instance Bethun College and School, one of the first educational institutions exclusively for girls has been marked as Bethune Female School.
The historic Scottish Church College set up by Alexander Duff in the beginning of 19th century is described as The General Assembly’s Institution in map sheet no. S9. More landmarks such as Duff’s Hindu Girl’s School (sheet no. Q7) and Free Church Institution (sheet no. O3, O4) are also mentioned.
The Star Theatre which conducted its first show on 21 July, 1883 can also be seen at the crossing of Cornwallis Street and Grey Street. (map sheet no S7).
Historians can also find details about the Bengal Music School founded by Rabindranath Tagore, in 1881, referred to in map sheet numbers P4 and P5.
These map sheets also provide a glimpse of the transformation of urban geography.
The name change of some old city streets becomes immediately evident: European names have yielded to Indian ones.
For instance Cornwallis Street changed to Bidhan Sarani, Schalch’s Street to Durgacharan Banerjee Street and Grey Street is now Shree Aurobindo Sarani.
After the current publication, the State Archives plans to reveal 68 other maps.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kolkata / by Shiv Sahay Singh / Kolkata – September 30th, 2017
