Calcutta (36 page)

The most impressive of the imperial remains are all to be found within a mile or so of the Maidan, which is itself the most splendid of the lot. Calcutta is not desperately short of public parks, though most of them are tiny and overrun with garbage, refugee families and a perpetual feeling of imminent invasion by anything that cares to stake its claim. Alone, and quite
remarkably
when you consider what has become of this pullulating city, the Maidan feels like a very wide open space; and, truly, it might be a dangerous place for anyone with a touch of agoraphobia. The Honourable Emily Eden likened it to Regent’s Park in
London
, but it is twice as big as that and only half as exclusive. It is two square miles of parkland, essentially, though it used to have more trees until the cyclone of 1864 blew many of them away. It
is crossed by half a dozen thoroughfares and one of these, the Red Road, was laid down especially so that Viceroys and their Emperors could make a very imperial progress towards their Government House at the top. George V and his Queen were carried in state up here to pacify Calcutta after they had dropped that unforgiveable bombshell in 1911. Security ordained that the Maidan should stretch away green and empty on either side of the Red Road that day; and what with the royal carriages, the outriders, the Mogul triumphal arches put up for the occasion, the lining of the route by Highlanders standing at the present, with white pith helmets, red tunics, white blancoed gaiters up to their knees and tartan capes draped in regulation neatness over their left shoulders, it all looked like a cross between the first day at Ascot and the penultimate scene from
Gunga
Din.

The edges and the intersections of these roads were where the British put up the statues to their idols. George V himself was here in bronze and so were Lords Curzon, Kitchener, Roberts, Minto, Northbrook, Canning, and many of their peers who had known Calcutta well, together with men like Sir Robert Peel, whose relationship with the city was more elusive. Two or three were put down in the first few years of Independence because they were occupying sites of more obvious usefulness without them. But it was not until the middle of 1969 that the last
sixteen
were removed. A few were handled as the museum pieces they had become and were simply parked inside the boundary of the Victoria Memorial at the bottom of the Maidan; two or three were fondly procured by Canada, New Zealand and other parts of the old Empire where they still retain an affection for such things; the rest were unceremoniously dumped in a
Corporation
yard out at Barrackpore, leaving behind on the Maidan a series of stumpy plinths to keep company with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at one end, and with the Mahatma, who is peering down the length of Park Street half way towards the other. And nothing in this highly confusing land is more inconsistently
bewildering
than the memory of Lord Mayo, still trotting on his horse at a cross roads in the middle of the Maidan, twenty-two years after Independence, above an inscription which read: To the honourable and beloved memory of Richard Southwell, 6th
Earl of Mayo, Humane, Courteous, Resolute and Enlightened. Struck down in the midst of a Patriotic and Beneficent career on 18th February 1872 by the treacherous hand of an assassin. The People of India, mourning and indignant, raise this statue.’

The Maidan is much used. It is used by people who like to keep clean and who are forever dhobying themselves or their garments in the three great tanks – the Manohar Das, the
General’s
and the Elliot – which are set one after another down the edge of Chowringhee. Parts of it are stockaded during Durga Puja and other festivities, to become a sort of fairground. One of its roads is lined with tiny bungalows belonging to the
Calcutta
Kennel Club, the Rajasthan Club, the Armenian Sports Club, the Wari Athletic Club, the Engineers Club, the Calcutta Tramways and Athletic Club and many another organization that likes to build a bunker in a small garden, surrounded by a high thick hedge, in which its members can take refuge and amusement at the weekend. There is a middle section of the Maidan devoted to cricket every Saturday afternoon and every Sunday morning, with a dozen or more pitches heaving with figures in natty white flannels, who are dripping with sweat below their floppy white hats and their gaudy club caps. Indian cricket began on the Maidan indeed, with a two-day match in January 1804 between Old Etonians employed by the Company and ‘Calcutta’. Robert Walpole’s grandson Richard opened for Calcutta and one of Sir Elijah Impey’s sons scored thirteen for the side; but the Etonians won by 152 runs, being fortified by a Vansittart and (inevitably) by a Metcalfe major and a Metcalfe minor – one of the brothers later becoming a Governor-General of India. And on almost the same length of turf now stands the Eden Gardens stadium, where they play Test matches and where the spectators are rather more liable to lay on a riot than the batsmen a century.

People play crown green bowls under floodlights at night on the Maidan. They hold the biggest political rallies on earth on the Maidan. They wander with large flocks of hornless,
pimple-headed
, flop-eared goats across the Maidan. When they are young and Indian they play hide and seek in the ditch that
surrounds
the glaring white walls of Fort William on the river side
of the Maidan. When they are older and British they go for a constitutional before dusk down at the Racecourse end of the Maidan and, on meeting each other, they exchange a polite good evening without stopping, just as they would on Hampstead Heath. In the terrible heat of high noon, travellers from one end of India to the other shelter beneath their long-distance buses, which are also resting on the edge of the Maidan by Strand Road; and, a mile away across the spinneys and the grass and the ditches, taxi-drivers are doing the same thing beneath the trees which flank Chowringhee, with cardboard cinema posters
dangling
from their branches; and a handful of idlers are slumped beneath the filigree ironwork shading a fountain there, which was presented to the Municipality in 1884 by Mr Ezra, who had it made (as you can still just make out) by Walter Macfarlane and Co., Glasgow.

The Maidan’s biggest old totem is still in place, presumably because it was too big even for a Communist Government to shift into limbo with all the other monuments to the Raj. There are 165 fluted feet of the Ochterlony Monument, which is forty feet less than the Monument to the Great Fire of London. It starts with an Egyptian base, proceeds through a Syrian column, and is topped by a Turkish dome; a confection which is usually passed off as a deference to Sir David Ochterlony’s taste for all things Muslim. And conceivably the monument was raised in the first place not only to commemorate Sir David’s annexation of Nepal, but also to salute the days when he and his thirteen wives would take the early morning air by the banks of the Hooghly, on one elephant after another; or possibly because he was that very rare bird indeed among the eighteenth century rulers of India, the man who died almost penniless because he had not bothered to graft for a fortune. Ochterlony was half Scots but he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, though this does not explain why Mark Twain was so besotted with the monument when he was in the city, for he seemed unaware of Ochterlony’s background. His journal of a trip round the world spent only seven pages on Calcutta, though Benares rated forty, and he spent most of his space ruminating on the ‘cloud-kissing
monument
to one Ochterlony’. Today, the Monument (having been
rechristened Sahid Minar, a title unused by anyone but the Communist Minister who insisted on the change) tends to be in the middle of all those colossal rallies at which the name of even a half-American is implicitly considered worse than Hooghly mud. It is also the focal point of those splendid weekend
happenings
on the Maidan, a Mukta Mela here, a man juggling with spinning things there, someone whirling by his feet from a rope lashed to a tripod round one side, someone else trying to charm a dozy snake from its basket round another; and all these
entertainments
are watched and applauded by scores of people who are, given the circumstances of the city and their lives,
unaccountably
merry. The Monument is used by the police as a watchtower during the Maidan rallies and anyone else needs constabulary permission to climb to the top, just in case he should be a Pakistani spy wishing to take a long-distance look at the Howrah Bridge.

From the top you can pick out one by one the other
outstanding
monuments to the Raj. Almost by your elbow is
Chowringhee
, which Edward Lear thought a fearful humbug of palaces and distinctly inferior to the Promenade des Anglais at Nice. Bishop Heber took more kindly to it, for he occupied one of the palaces and there he would sit drinking his favourite Bass ale, enjoying the company of his wife, whom he was always loth to leave; whenever he had a prolonged visitation to make upcountry he would write her long love letters, which Mr Gladstone later translated into Latin for amusement and
intellectual
exercise. Lord Macaulay, who lived almost next door,
alongside
the rising Bengal Club, agreed with Lear, for ‘a lodging up three pairs of stairs in London is better than a palace in a
compound
of Chowringhee’. He must have been the only titled
visitor
to the dry from the early nineteenth century onwards not to have been mightily impressed by that very self-satisfied road. And if, today, it has no reason at all for self-satisfaction it still has the presence of an international thoroughfare. Once they rise above the scruffy trade of the pavement arcades, its buildings are
presentable
and gleaming with creamy stucco, as they should be with all the money tucked inside them. Its roadway is wide and sweeping, almost the only one in Central Calcutta where traffic
can usually proceed at the rush, sometimes being thrown into great confusion when a herd of white Brahmani bulls decides to advance down the centre lane at the stroll, ten or twenty at a time, while the taxis and the buses pile up around them.

Chowringhee is nicely counterweighted across the Maidan by the sprawling octagon of Fort William, which is where the
Central
Government of Delhi maintains a thoughtful and secure foothold in this frequently rebellious city. It is almost a small town, as you can see from the top of the Monument, for it can garrison ten thousand men, but in all the years since Robert Clive started it, not one shot has yet been fired in anger from its battlements, though they are said to be well mounted with guns. And though the Fort keeps much to itself, a distant and
enigmatic
colony on the edge of potential insurrection, just
occasionally
it yields up an old-fashioned delight to the connoisseur of the Maidan. For on a Sunday morning you may see,
emerging
from one of its portals, a troop of cavalry in splendid line ahead. Delicately the horses pick their way across the grass, stiffly moving with the animals each trooper rests a hand by his bucketed sword, chatting with composure are the two officers at the head. The tone is khaki, not scarlet or blue, but for a moment or two, until the column disappears down Strand Road for
exercise
along the river, it is as though the Raj were still firmly in the saddle here. Five minutes later a lorry swerves round the corner onto the Red Road, full of young Communists in red berets, thumping their staves in time to some rousing chorus, on their way to yet another rally beneath the Monument. And it is as though the revolution had already broken out.

A vision of white marble dazzles at the bottom of the Maidan. When W. H. Auden was here in the fifties, some enthusiastic guide told him that the Victoria Memorial had been designed by the man who did the Taj Mahal. This is not quite as comical as you might suppose, for you would certainly swear that it was at least George Gilbert Scott heavily inspired by the Taj; a sort of St Paneras by the Hooghly, but Classical not Gothic. Instead, it was the work of Sir William Emerson, President of the British Institute of Architects in his day, whose only building in England worth a moment’s attention (if you laboriously investigate the
forty-odd volumes of Pevsner) was the Hamilton House he put up just past King’s Bench Walk on the Victoria Embankment in London. The idea of the Memorial was Lord Curzon’s, of course; its foundation stone was tapped into place by George V on his princely excursion to Calcutta in 1906, and whatever
professional
frustrations Sir William may have suffered from at home, he let them all loose in one majestic throw right here. They landed amidst sixty-four acres of lawns, ponds, shrubbery and herbaceous borders and nothing in Calcutta ever had more pleasing or more amply open surroundings. Here, as you walk up one of the drives, past the bronze Victoria on her throne, or the bronze Edward VII on his horse, or the marble Curzon
looking
very stern and ruly, you behold something which is more palatial than memorial; a great white cliff which in Calcutta’s light hurts the eyes, with its vaguely Renaissance sides ending at each corner in a sort of minaret, with its entrance arches soaring through two high storeys, with its entire rambling, derivative, nostalgic and impressive rectangle dominated by a colonnaded dome (the Taj, with concessions to St Paul’s Cathedral, maybe) which is itself capped by three tons of bronzed and victorious angel.

It echoes inside, as it was doubtless meant to echo for ever and a day. It echoes most resonantly under the dome, in the Queen’s Hall whose walls have been deeply graven with the text of
Victoria’s
proclamation of herself as Empress. But reverberations from those illustrious days pursue the visitor to the Memorial wherever he goes along its galleries, its armouries, and its
ennobled
chambers. Many of India’s old rulers are represented here in stone, quite often dressed in Roman togas, like Warren
Hastings
and Lord Cornwallis. And where they have not been
immortalized
with a chisel they have most certainly not been forgotten with a brush and a palette of oils. The Queen herself, quite naturally, comes first in all things. You have her in paint at her coronation, at her marriage, at the baptism of her son and heir, at her first and then her second jubilee celebrations in her cathedral church, at her son’s wedding, at her residence of
Frogmore
, and at exercise with dear old John Brown holding the horse’s reins. You have one or two of her possessions: the
pianoforte 
(that’s what the label says) at which she received tuition in childhood, the writing desk and chair occupied for daily
correspondence
at Windsor, the last letter she wrote to her people in India thanking them in person for their sympathy on the loss of her grandson in the Boer War (‘she cannot deny that she feels a good deal shaken …’). You make the unexpected discovery that from her favourite Indian attendant, Abdul Karim, she learned Hindusthani.