Kolkata’s decision to rename Park Street after Mother Teresa is a perplexing one, since she had little to do with the thoroughfare and its environs, but the street’s name change is hardly a new occurrence.

In 2004, Mayor Subrata Mukherjee announced that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation would be renaming several streets and roads in the city after prominent Indians and residents of the city, a change that would divest street names of their colonial identities. The renaming of city streets continued for the next decade by subsequent governments but for residents of the city, British colonial street names have been remnants that have been hard to shake off. Despite the name change, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Park Street, is rarely referred to by its relatively new nomenclature, Mother Teresa Sarani, even on most government documents and during government-organised street programmes. The street’s colonial nomenclature is thus as iconic as the street itself.

Documented records of the street itself can be traced to 1760 when the city was still called Calcutta and was the capital of British India. The city’s decision to rename Park Street after Mother Teresa is a perplexing one, since she had little to do with the thoroughfare and its environs, but the street’s name change is hardly a new occurrence. Since 1760, the street has seen several name changes as Calcutta consistently swelled and developed into a larger metropolis. The first known name of the street can be found in the ‘Bengal & Agra Directory of 1850’ where it went by the name of ‘Ghorustan ka Rastah’ or ‘Badamtallee’ and “open(ed) on Chowringhee opposite the ‘Chowringhee gate’ of the fort, (ran) easterly to circular road.”

In 1760, the East India Company appointed Henry Vansittart as the Governor of the Presidency of Fort William in Calcutta and set him up in a large three-storey colonial mansion at No 5, Middleton Row, a relatively small street that was a bylane off the main thoroughfare that is now Park Street. That three-storey residential structure had a large garden attached to it, as was the common architectural layout during that time and served as the residence of Vansittart during his four-year governorship in Calcutta.

Vansittart’s tenure in Bengal was rife with misconduct and reports of widespread corruption that resulted in him being forced to step down followed by his departure for England in 1764. His residence was emptied and occupied by Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William, Calcutta in Bengal.

Impey too took advantage of his position as Chief Justice. A friend of the then Governor-General of Bengal Warren Hastings, Impey tried Maharaja Nandakumar, a diwan in Birbhum, on charges of fraud. But Hastings had framed the charges after Nandakumar reported him for wrongful appropriation and embezzlement of public property. Impey himself oversaw the trial and pronounced Nandakumar guilty of the charges. The Maharaja was hanged in Calcutta in 1775.

After the hanging of Nandakumar, Thomas Macaulay accused Impey of judicial misconduct and Hastings of misconduct and corruption and brought on a seven-year-long impeachment hearing against the two. At the end of the impeachment process, both were exonerated by the British House of Commons, mainly owing to domestic political reasons in Britain and not because of findings of any investigation. Both went on to live comfortable lives in Britain.

Historian P. Thankappan Nair traces the origins of the name Park Street to the expansive gardens around Impey’s residence. The area occupied by Impey’s residence and the adjoining gardens were so large that it included the grounds on which Loreto College now stands. Some records say the residence extended all the way from Middleton Row to Russel Street and included the grounds that now belongs to the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, now unused and in dire need of maintenance. Other records claim the gardens had deer running around, because of which the grounds began to be called a deer park, but there don’t seem to be any existing documents that confirm this.

Other names of the street through the city’s history have included Badamtalla, or Almond Street, Vansittart Avenue, Burial Ground Road and Burial Ground Street. Henry Ferdinand Blochmann, a German scholar who was fascinated by the Indian subcontinent and studied and taught Persian during the 1860s in Calcutta, has documented the history of the city and it’s streets during the 18th century in his book ‘Calcutta During Last Century’. Park Street, writes Blochmann, was called Burial Ground Street and “had about ten houses lying along it”.

In A. Upjohn’s map of Calcutta, 1794, Park Street is referred to as Burial Ground Road, because it was the path that funeral processions took to reach the South Park Street Burial Ground that opened on August 25, 1767. Due to this, for a long time, the street was not a preferred choice of residence. The Park Street area also had the North Park Street, Mission and Tiretta burial grounds before they were flattened to make way for other establishments. The Apeejay School now stands on the remains of a razed French cemetery and while the Assembly of God Church Tower stands on the site of the North Park Street Cemetery. The only visible remnant of the North Park Street Cemetery is the Robertson Monument, a grave for the Robertson family whose members served in Kolkata Police. According to historians who have traced the structure’s history, it was only this connection of the family  with the Kolkata Police that prevented the monument from being served the same fate as the rest of the tombs on the North Park Street Cemetery. Today, the monument stands in one corner of the pavement, outside the Assembly of God Church Tower, coated in grime from passing vehicles and drowning under surrounding billboards and the hanging mass of tangled wires and cables, easy to miss if one isn’t paying attention.

It isn’t clear when the name changed from Burial Ground Road to Park Street, but given its association with Impey’s “deer park”, it can be assumed that the transition occurred sometime around the 1760s during Impey’s tenure in the city. According to city records, Park Street extended from Chowringhee to Lower Circular Road till 1928 when the Calcutta Improvement Trust extended the portion on Lower Circular Road to the city’s railway lines at E.B Railway Bridge Number 4. The extension of Park Street at its southern end was completed in 1934 and found mention in that year’s government gazette.

Despite its earlier association with the four burial grounds in its area, the long stretch of the street rapidly developed over the centuries to accommodate residential mansions and educational and religious institutions like St. Xavier’s College, the Freemason’s Hall, the Asiatic Society of Bengal etc. In recent decades, especially post the Second World War, many of the city’s iconic structures on Park Street have been steadily razed to make space for modern construction and the architecture of the street has changed. Today, the mansions are fewer, as are the neighbourhood’s residents who have seen Park Street rapidly change over the past four decades. Restaurant chains, cafes and sari shops with neon sign-boards have taken over the colonial structures that once housed residential apartments and government offices. The last burial ground of Park Street may soon be the only remaining witness of what the thoroughfare once was and its history.

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Cities> Kolkata / by Neha Banka, Kolkata / December 03rd, 2019

‘The Nightingale of Bengal’ died of tuberculosis on her 21st birthday.

I heard about Uma Bose from my mother when I was a child. She spoke of her with unusual regard, and with sadness and wonder. Uma Bose was born to an eminent, well-to-do family in Calcutta on January 21, 1921, and she died on her 21st birthday of tuberculosis, in 1942. I was told her younger brother had already died of TB and that this had broken her heart.

The wonder and sadness in my mother’s references were mixed up with each other when she dwelled on the symmetry of the life and death, the cruelty that had cut off Uma Bose’s life as a singer and the abundance of fortune that had given her a singular timbre and astonishing mastery well before she died, when she was still half a child.

Uma Bose learned Hindustani classical music for a period from Vishmadev Chatterjee, but her métier became a new kind of modern song that was emerging in Bengal after Tagore, a rival to, and precursor of (in terms of musical and orchestral innovation), the revolution that would change film music in Bombay in the 1950s and ’60s.

To this kind of music she brought a classical proficiency, and a classicist sophistication and calm, whose character was absolutely modern, and I think unheard-of in the 1930s – prefiguring the contained virtuosity and the classicist poise that Lata Mangeshkar would bring to film-music singing in the 1950s.

Her reputation was built on being among the first interpreters of the songs of Himangshu Dutta, one of the great innovators of the popular song in the twentieth century (I’m not qualifying this with “in Bengal” or “in India” for good reason), and on her renditions of the songs in the demanding, eccentric repertoire created by the scholar-poet-singer-mystic Dilip Kumar Roy (1897-1980), son of the poet and songwriter Dwijendralal Ray (1863-1913).

The two songs I’ll first draw attention to here – their tunes are composed, and music arranged, by Himanshu Dutta – are Akasher Chaand (The moon in the sky) and Chaand Kahe Chameli Go (The Moon Says, O Chameli). The first is from 1940, when Uma Bose was 17 years old; the second from 1938, when she was just 17. These are part of a series of songs whose words Dutta got his lyricist friends to write, about the abortive love between the moon and the chameli flower.

Listen first to the curious but arresting mix of instruments – the electric slide guitar; a horn; the sitar; the mix of a three-note orchestral bass line and very light tabla in the 1940 song; the deliberate abstention from tabla in the 1938 arrangement, where rhythm is provided solely by bass lines on strings which don’t, however, interfere harmonically with the song’s ethos but add an unprecedented texture.

I can hear no Indian instrument in Chaand Kahe Chameli Go.

Notice the tunes themselves. Akaasher Chaand sounds like it’s based on a raga, but it’s a mix of three – Kamod, Kedar, and Gaud Malhar – that all approximate the major scale and all use both the ma and tivra ma; that is, the natural and sharp fourth. These two notes are revisited to extraordinary effect midway through the song by both Dutta’s composition and by Uma Bose. It’s the kind of subtle but revolutionary modulation on compositional thinking made possible by Tagore, which Dutta extends also to his arrangements.

There is nothing comparable to this testing of demarcations in the Western popular music of the time. In Aakasher Chaand, Bose uses her classical training to play with complex melodic phrases from 1.16 to 1.20 minutes, but brings to the song a deep tonal tranquility and fullness that she takes from her training in, and deep feeling for, the khayal: there is nothing “light” about her approach.

In Chaand Kahe Chameli Go, the melody, which has no counterpart in a raga (the closest is Chhaya Nat), is transformed into an Indian song by the singer and the composer through the use of meend, or North Indian classical music’s glides between notes. You wouldn’t notice that the tune isn’t an actual raga, given the interpretation – but if you sing the opening notes without the meends, you’ll see the melody is very like a Western marching tune or drinking song.

These compositions and renditions aren’t attempts to mix things up; they are a new way of thinking about music.

Uma Bose’s mentor was Dilip Kumar Roy, the son of a great poet and songwriter, a cosmopolitan who went to Cambridge to do his Tripos but turned more and more to music (he was a gifted and trained singer), experiments in musical composition, and mysticism. To understand figures like Roy – and others before him and contemporary to him – and their particular rebellion, you’d have to imagine what our present-day cultural landscape would be like if some our public intellectuals, social scientists, historians, and commentators began to compose songs, turned out to be deeply tuneful singers with classical training, artists attempting to create a secular vocabulary in poetry and music to express a kind of surrender.

One recalls Nietzsche’s loathing of Socrates for his habit of over-determined theorising, but his warming to the Athenian because the latter set aside philosophy as a condemned man and began to learn music shortly before his death. To understand the revolution that people like Roy (and before him his father Dwijendralal, and his father’s contemporary Tagore) undertook against the colonial self, which could be figured as a kind of Socrates, one must understand the release that the arts, especially modern music, constituted. This release made them extend themselves and their sphere in a way unknown to our intellectuals today. It’s in the midst of this revolution in the educated middle class that we should also place Uma Bose’s singing.

Here are two compositions of Dilip Kumar Roy’s, sung by Uma Bose, both combining devotional elements with Hindustani classical ones, their taans or complex melodic patterns containing echoes of operatic coloratura. They’re like idiosyncratic blueprints of projects that could only have been attempted by an inventor who had access to a multiplicity of cultural languages, techniques, and experiences. They are abstractions, really; it takes Uma Bose’s voice and abilities as an experimental singer, which is what she becomes in these songs, to breathe life into them.

This is Rupe Barne Chhande, loosely based on Khamaj, and Jibane Marane Esho, an invocation of a devotional mood in raga Asavari.

I’m adding a third song here Ke Tomare Jante Pare, Dilip Roy’s father Dwijendralal’s peculiar but compelling riff on the kirtan form.

Uma Bose was conferred with the well-intentioned sobriquet “Nightingale of Bengal” by Gandhi in 1937. She’s little listened to today, in Bengal or outside it. Partly this may have to do with the unclassifiable character of Dilip Kumar Roy’s songs, which are also too difficult to hum to yourself. But mainly it owes to the dominance of an anodyne and sentimental version of the Tagore song that ruled over Bengal from the 1960s, and to a form of tremulous singing that Bengalis began to hold close to their hearts. (If you compare the 1966 version of Chaand Kahe Ghameli Go by Hemanta Mukherjee to Uma Bose’s, you’ll have an idea of this pervasive tremulousness.)

Outside Bengal, our understanding of the history of the popular song in India has been both enriched and curtailed by Hindi film music. It provides a definition that’s full of excitement and variety; but it is, itself, by no means definitive. Uma Bose, like the experimenters whose work she was integral to, was a pioneer. Her emphasis on purity of tone, and a technical accomplishment that goes well beyond precociousness, presaged a new era for vocal music.

Amit Chaudhuri is a writer, a Hindustani classical vocalist, and a composer of crossover music. Listen to his music here.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Acts of Retrieval / by Amit Chaudhuri / June 23rd, 2020