Calcutta (11 page)

Carey’s flair for language was now harnessed to Wellesley’s brainchild, though the Governor-General remained cynical enough of Baptists to hire him at a lower salary and status than Henry Colebrooke or any other teacher. Fort William College now became the focal point of intellectual activity among the British, though the campus was not in the fort itself but in the Writers ‘Building. Its young men found themselves writing essays on distinctly non-commercial topics; whether the Asia ticks [
sic
] are as capable of as high a degree of civilization as the Europeans; whether the natives of India under British
Government
enjoy a greater degree of tranquillity, security and
happiness
than under any former government. There were
disputations
in Indian languages, held in Wellesley’s gorgeous new Government House, though this description comes from 1818, when the Marquis of Hastings was in command:’ In a state chair covered with crimson velvet and richly gilt, with a group of aides-de-camp and secretaries standing behind him, sat the Governor-General. Two servants with state punkahs of crimson silk were fanning him and behind them again were several Native servants bearing silver staffs. Next to him, on either side, were seated the examiners, and below them again, the most
distinguished
ladies of the Presidency. Next in an open space were two small rostrums for the disputants, and chairs for the
professors
; the room behind these, and fronting the Marquis, was quite filled with company, and in the rear of all, the bodyguard
was drawn up in full uniforms of scarlet with naked sabres.’

This, then, became much more than a forcing house for loyal civil servants. True, Fort William supplied gold medals for
proficiency
; and William Taylor, winning his in the 1830s, smartly melted it into earrings for his girl friend. But this was also the starting point of literary patronage and a depot of linguistic research. In the first five years of its existence, Fort William
published
more than a hundred original works in oriental languages. The time was not far distant when Mr Lockett, the chief librarian, could boast that he supervised the largest collection of orientalia in the world; the Escorial had 1,851 volumes, Oxford 1,561, the Seraglio in Constantinople 7,294; but
Calcutta
, in 1818, had a grand total of 11,335 printed and
manuscript
sources. Orientalism became its obsession from 1807
onwards
, when the Company Directors decided that the European part of the curriculum should be taught at Haileybury in
Hertfordshire
, where the young men would be indoctrinated with the best British values before exposure to the cultural and other hazards of Calcutta.

Education was generally in the air. Another Serampore
missionary
, Joshua Marshman, published his
Hints
Relative
to
Native
Schools
.
It contained a programme for national
compulsory
education, no less, in which peasant children would learn to read and write with a vocabulary of four thousand words. They would also have simple arithmetic and later become conversant with astronomy, geography, natural philosophy, mineralogy and chemistry; all this would ‘rectify and enlarge their ideas of the various aspects of nature around them’. This was in a city with a population of well over half a million,
containing
educational places for only 4,180 Indian children;
nevertheless
, the Calcutta School Society within a few years was able to report that ‘printed instead of manuscript school books are now in common use. The branches formerly taught are now taught more thoroughly, and instruction is extended to subjects formerly neglected, viz. the orthography of the Bengalee
language
, geography and moral truths and obligations …’ David Hare, a retired watchmaker, assisted in the establishment of the Hindu College, which was mostly the creation of Bengali
nou
veaux 
riches
such as the Tagores, the Mullicks, the Debs and the Ghoshals, and its pupils were soon offering inflated prices for copies of
The
Age
of
Reason
.
Horace Wilson, who had come to India as a Company surgeon, who had worked on the Calcutta Mint and then managed the Hindoostanee Press, now started his Sanskrit College, which was not only Orientalist but
scientific
as well; and though none of the Indian graduates in the College hospital had by 1831 been allowed to perform any major operations, they were regularly allowed to conduct minor ones like ‘opening little abscesses and dressing sores and cuts’.

A result of all this intellectual activity in Calcutta was the birth of the Young Bengal movement and the start of a period which has been glorified as the Bengal Renaissance. The hero of the first was Henry Louis Vivian DeRozio, the Eurasian son of an officer with an English firm. He was educated in one of the private English schools of Calcutta and he was captivated by Robert Burns, the French Revolution and English radicalism. He wrote verse, and one of his poems hailed the liberation of the Greeks at Navarino. He edited Bengali newspapers and he was teaching senior classes at the Hindu College when he was in his teens. His followers were, unlike himself, almost entirely the sons of high-caste Hindus who were rapidly becoming
Anglicized
. He turned them into atheists. It was rumoured that some of the Hindu College boys at prayer would recite passages from the
Iliad
instead of sacred mantras, and one lad, asked to bow before the image of Kali, said ‘Good morning, madam’ as well. And this within a year or two of the treaty of Amiens, when the British community had officially marched down to Kalighat, accompanied by military bands, to present a substantial sum of money to the goddess in her temple as a thanksgiving for an end to a period of war with France. The Young Bengalis also drank, ‘cutting their way through ham and beef and wading to
liberalism
through tumblers of beer’, as a shocked contemporary noted. The French tricolour that the students hauled to the top of the Ochterlony Monument one day might have been disregarded or even been quietly pleasing to their elders, but not this; not this and atheism as well. A scandalized parent complained that his boy now had his hair cut, wore European shoes, ate food
without bathing, didn’t know how to write bazaar bills, uttered unintelligible Bengali and could tell of any mountain or river in Russia but could give no account of his own country. So DeRozio was sacked from the staff of the Hindu College by Hindus, died of cholera soon after, and left a rudderless Young Bengal which did not long survive him.

The Bengal Renaissance was much more substantial; indeed, it became the history of the Bengalis from the moment
Rammohan
Roy hoisted himself from poverty at the start of the
nineteenth
century. His father had been an old-fashioned zamindar, who lost his property as a result of the changes made by the Permanent Settlement, who was imprisoned and who died a ruined man. The son emerged from this wreckage by, curiously enough, starting to lend money to Englishmen. He was also
employed
by one of the earliest students at Fort William College, John Digby, and he was soon in contact with some of the Orientalists. It is a matter for scholastic argument how many of Roy’s subsequent ideas were drawn from them, how many were original to him. But before long he was writing his famous tract denouncing suttee. This was at a time when in three consecutive years – 1815 to 1817 – 253, 289 and 441 women were known to have been burned alive with their husbands’ corpses in Calcutta. He started an Anglo-Indian school, he compiled a Bengali grammar, and twentieth-century Bengali scholars tend to regard him not only as the Father of Modern India but as the founder of Bengali literary prose.

He was one of those men whose reputation is apt to be
enlarged
almost annually with the passage of time, so that now it is a little difficult to see him as he probably was. But he clearly restored a racial pride to the Bengalis when they badly needed such a tonic. He was a man of moderation who could launch a new Hindu sect which eventually evolved into the Brahmo Samaj and which has remained the spiritual refuge of the
intellectual
, the Anglicized, the man who is sceptical of extreme dogma; its propositions were so sympathetic to some Christian feelings that the Unitarians, at least, were happy to reprint pamphlets by Rammohan Roy. Hard-line Hindus, of course, reacted against it and adherents of the Samaj were to know
persecution
from people who shared the same essential faith; they were sometimes smeared with treacle and then covered in wasps, by incensed gurus and their mobs. Roy had fed on Bentham, Montesquieu and Blackstone and two things that he said
suggest
the splendid balance of his intellectual diet.

When Wellesley began to censor the press in fear of
revolutionary
ideas, Roy lobbied for freedom on the grounds that the Company Directors might judge for themselves ‘whether the systems introduced in their possessions proved so beneficial to the natives of the country as their authors might fondly
suppose
or would have others believe, and whether the Rules and Regulations which might appear excellent in their eyes are put strictly into practice’. And when Young Bengal was applauding that tricolour atop the Monument, Roy said, ‘To assert that if the Natives had enjoyed the blessings of the French Revolution they would by this time have been treated like men, and assumed a proper position among the nations of the earth, is to write absolute nonsense. Let him read Thiers and Allison before he again ventures to long for a revolution which would have turned the Hooghly into a revolutionary torrent and established a permanent guillotine in Tank Square.’ Revolution, in fact, was to come to Bengal and it was to be made by the spiritual
descendants
of Rammohan Roy together with those who merely used his name as a watchword. It was to be aggravated by the reversal of a climate that had been fostered unwittingly by Wellesley and Hastings with their support for the influence of Fort William and its Orientalist teachers. And, ironically, the wind began to change just as Roy and his followers were looking West for a temperate salvation, with the arrival in Calcutta of a new British overlord, whose background was radical and whose inclinations were for reform.

This was Lord William Bentinck, a disciple of the Utilitarian philosopher James Mill who had lately written a history of India without ever having been there or knowing any of its languages, who regarded the Indian past as an age of total darkness. Lord William was a vigorous man and, just as Wellesley had forbidden the sacrifice of children to sharks at the mouth of the Hooghly, he now proscribed suttee and began to stamp out Thuggery. He
swiftly changed a deficit of
£
1 million a year in the Indian
economy
into a surplus of
£
1½ millions and he did it partly by
cutting
military allowances. He also dismantled Fort William College, whose students had largely become idle fellows with mounting debts.

He had received the services in Calcutta of Thomas Babington Macaulay, as Law Member of his Council. Before leaving
England
, Macaulay was deep in the controversy between the
Orientalists
and the Anglicists, between those who would synthesize two cultures and those who would Westernize everything
possible
. Now, in 1835, he delivered the famous minute on
education
, which was to establish entirely English standards in India. Lord Macaulay had not found one Orientalist, it said, ‘who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Lord Macaulay believed he was not exaggerating when he said that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’. His conclusions added up to what he expressed more concisely elsewhere, that ‘to trade with civilized men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages’.

That might almost have served as a civic motto for Calcutta. Instead, it marked the end of a period where there seemed to be growth and the promise of greater fruitfulness in every
direction
. Physically the city was, indeed, becoming the first in Asia. When Lord Valentia arrived in 1803 in the course of a world tour he remarked how ‘Chowringhee, an entire village of palaces … altogether forms the finest view I ever beheld in my life’. The patronage of Lord Wellesley was such that in England he was being hailed as another Medici, and the seat of his government as a second Florence. There was soon to be a Lottery Committee to finance construction work, and both Town Hall and Strand Road were to be created from the proceeds. By the time Bishop Heber came, much pleased to discover that his hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand …’ had already been translated into Bengali, he was able to write this: ‘Of European towns I am most reminded of Moscow. The size
of the houses, which are frequently occupied by more than a single family, their Grecian architecture, their number of
servants
, the Eastern dresses and the hospitality of the place which, though much diminished, is still profuse and incessant,
continually
remind me of what I saw in a different climate; and if you will recollect the Russian prints which I had in Hodnet, you will have no bad idea of our China bazaar and our Cossitollah.’

That was in 1823. By then, in spite of the periodic crises of the Company, trade and Calcutta were both flourishing. Where there had been six insurance companies in 1804, there were to be fifteen in 1832. Where the Kidderpore Docks had built 35 vessels between 1780 and 1800, they had launched another
75
between 1800 and 1805. And where, in 1790, there had been 15 managing agency houses in Calcutta, by 1813 there were 14 Scots, 10
English
, 12 Armenian and 2 Portuguese merchants in the city. These private managing agencies were a particularly significant factor in commercial growth here. As the historian of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce has suggested, they were the bone upon which the flesh and sinew of Indian commerce were to grow. They originated in private London anxieties to intrude upon the monopoly of the East India Company, and their function was to run a profitable trade in Calcutta on behalf of absentee
gentlemen
in the City. The system was open to the most notorious abuses. The agent, with his connections and his instincts for profit both sharpened on the spot, could make deals that were not in the interests of his unwitting employers in London and it was not infrequently the case that an agency would flourish while the various companies it managed were drained of all profit – or, at least, kept at the subsistence level necessary to maintain the contracts. Siblings would be installed in sinecures to the accompaniment, no doubt, of some growls in the
boardroom
at home but with the final and unassailable assumption that the local manager must know what he was doing. Thus the agencies grew with Empire and even survived its passing, with fewer Englishmen sitting behind the executive desks after India’s Independence, but still enough to maintain the thin black line of tradition on the right side of the ledgers. When the agencies were abolished in 1969, one of the oldest and most honoured
names in the commerce of Calcutta, Andrew Yule and Co., was still managing nine companies, its origins still unmistakably preserved in the name of a jute factory up the water; Cheviot Mills, no less, on the steaming banks of the tropical Hooghly River.