Calcutta (37 page)

There are portraits of other Great Britons who were in
Calcutta
at one time or another; Macaulay, of course, and Kipling and Bishop Heber and William Hickey with the closest of his sixty-three servants and his little dog. William Makepeace Thackeray gets his bust in because he was born here and Florence Nightingale hers because, like the Queen herself, she took a
distant
interest in India. From time to time an Indian face is
displayed
without discrimination among these alien images – Keshub Chandra Sen, poor Michael Madhusudan Datta who was so nearly an Englishman himself, Rabindranath Tagore and his enterprising grandfather Dwarkanath. There are documents,
including
the forgery which had Nuncomar judicially executed. There are treaties, among them the one Clive made with
Siraj-ud
-Daula after he had recaptured the city. The Permanent
Settlement
is here. So is a model of the battlefield of Plassey. And an antique musical grandfather clock by Whitehurst of Derby. Yet nothing that the Victoria Memorial contains is more memorable than the gallery displaying Mr Finden’s Portraits of the Female Aristocracy of the Court of Queen Victoria – all fifty-six of them, with the occasional damp stain having intruded upon the ladies since they were engraved in 1849. Lady Georgina Toler, Viscountess Canning, Miss Blanche Bury, Caroline Countess of Mount Edgecumbe, The Lady Ashley, the Honourable Mrs Fox Manie and the rest – there they all are in two long rows, almost all of them bonneted, with ringlets, with chins carefully poised on slender hands and with variously arch expressions; though Lady Agnes Buller, much the most individual, looks faintly Sultanate and fingers a harp. And on Sunday afternoons small Indian
children
, being towed round the premises by elders with a fine sense of history, pause for a long time before Mr Finden’s Portraits
and gaze at them silently with large and wondering eyes; as well they might. For the Victoria Memorial cost Rs 10,500,000 to build and, under the gentle persuasion of Lord Curzon, their great grandparents paid every last anna of it by loyal and dutiful subscription.

Balancing this monumental expenditure of glory a couple of miles away, on the north side of the Maidan, is Raj Bhavan – the Government House in which Viceroys sat and ruled India as though they were Emperors themselves. This was quite the grandest gesture Lord Wellesley made to his subject peoples, Fort William College perhaps being the most careless. Before Wellesley came to Calcutta, a strong-minded dapper little man with a refined taste for Classics, the Governors-General of
Bengal
and India inhabited a Buckingham House on this site, rented from the local Nawab. Wellesley at once decided that this was
insufficient
to his position; India, he let it be known, should be ruled from a palace not a counting house, with the ideas of a prince, not with those of a retailer in muslins and indigo.
Without
bothering to consult the Directors of the East India Company, he summoned architects and began to build, and there was much anguish in Leadenhall Street when the bills began to roll in –
£
87,000 for the structure,
£
71,000 for the land,
£
18,000 for the furnishings and over
£
3,000 for the two new roads laid
alongside
; Wellesley could scarcely complain when his flabbergasted Directors, hearing that he had started building a second residence at Barrackpore, stopped its foundations in their tracks.
Government
House when finished was seen to be almost identical to Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and, by a noble coincidence, a Curzon of Kedleston was to move out of one into the other within a century.

It was – and is – not exactly like Kedleston. Where Kedleston has only two projecting wings to the main building, two others never having been finished, Government House was given all four to catch every suspicion of breeze that might come its way. Where Kedleston has two floors, Government House has three. Where Kedleston’s upper salons are illuminated from above by skylights, Government House gets its light from the sides. Where Kedleston is made of sandstone, Government House
was built of bride with colour-washed plaster on top. Otherwise, no one could tell the two places apart, particularly after Lord Curzon himself had placed a row of urns along the roofline, to establish the details just as they were at home. Wellesley had already ordered the busts of twelve Caesars to be situated in the Marble Hall, to conform with the model, and among these each night, it was said, he would sit plotting his moves and counter moves against opponents military and political. His main
staircase
already terminated in a pair of sphinxes, whose breasts were amputated shortly after installation on the orders of a discreet aide de camp, who thought they might offend his
Lordship
.

From the moment of its completion, Government House
became
the scene of such entertainments as Calcutta had never known before, though the most memorable was not held until Curzon mounted a centenary ball at which he set the pace by dressing in the style of Wellesley, and so inspired a guest to write that ‘We became our grandparents again, imitating in spirit, language and dress the high-waisted ladies and stately men who danced in these very halls a century ago.’ Scarcely a British ruler of India lived here without making his contribution to the place. Lord Hastings imported the finest gravel from Bayswater for the paths. Lord Ellenborough bequeathed a Chinese cannon mounted on a brass dragon for the front terrace. Lord Elgin introduced gas. Lord Northbrook laid on hot water. Lord Curzon
provided
those urns, experimented with the plasterwork after having the plans of Chatsworth sent out, and put in a lift as flimsy as a bird cage which still works today. Lord Hardinge replaced the front gates when he heard that his King Emperor was coming to town. The ladies of the household were no less interested in their direction of the grounds. According to Emily Eden, it was Lady Amherst who started the splendid garden, though Lady Bentinck, coming close behind her, had everything uprooted within the first week because she thought flowers unwholesome. The Eden sisters recovered this lost territory when their brother Lord Auckland was in command and added a fish pond for good measure. Lady Mayo started planting trees, Lady Lytton
installed
a swimming pool and, by the time dear Lady Dufferin
arrived, there wasn’t much left for her to do except to suggest a tennis court.

From this building were sovereign and imperial rights
exercised
over a people who had grown to 300 millions, a fifth of the world’s population, by the start of the twentieth century. The men who exercised that right generally believed that in the whole hierarchy of British Empire they and their position were second only to the imperial monarch, not excepting the British Prime Minister himself. Sir Herbert Kitchener was so cast down when Lord Hardinge got the nod he thought should have been his, that he went into hiding for ten days to conceal his
disappointment
. Apart from their aspirations and their belief in the
rectitude
of their rule, they were a mixed bunch of men. They could be as arrogant as Lord Amherst, who never moved from one room of Government House to another without being preceded by a column of mace bearers and who, during morning exercise on the Maidan, would not suffer his wife to approach closer than his horse’s backside. They could be as homely as Sir John
Lawrence
, who used to work stripped to his collarless shirt with slippers on his feet, who preferred rambling through a bazaar to attending the races (he even declined to present the Viceroy’s Cup), and who would continue to play croquet on his lawn long after dark, when great crowds would gather to watch him by lamplight through his railings. They could be as genuinely loved by their subjects as Lord Canning, who ruled during the
detestable
years of the Mutiny and after and of whose departure the normally caustic Girish Chandra Ghosh could even then write: ‘If India grieved at the loss of one who had proved himself so worthy to rule, it rejoiced on the other hand at the presence in England of a friend whose mature judgement and intimate acquaintance with local politics, feelings and requirements, would at all times offer Her Majesty’s Government a true criterion by which to settle Indian questions.’ A Viceroy might be as effectively nonconformist as Lord Lytton, who set up a famine control scheme and who startled the exclusive society of Simla by smoking cigarettes between courses at dinner. Or he might be as thickly imperious as Curzon himself, who wrecked almost every good thing that had preceded him with one insufferable
assessment of his situation the moment he arrived, and who was himself startled to discover that guests at his levees would stuff their pockets with his cigars and his cigarettes before bidding him good night. A Viceroy could be as thrifty as Lord Lansdowne, who told his successor Hardinge that he had managed to save
£
20,000 out of his salary of
£
16,700 per annum. A Viceroy could eventually be remembered less for what he had done than for the guests he had entertained in Calcutta.

Such is the plight of the banker-Viceroy Lord Northbrook, a Baring who happened to be an old friend of the Queen’s former tutor, Edward Lear. Notwithstanding his own imperial
connections
, Lear shocked British Indian society during his
fourteen-month
tour round the country because he brought a white man with him as servant (to whom General Palmer politely passed the cake at tea one afternoon, as he did to everyone else at the reception). Lear was not himself much impressed by the British of Calcutta. He mentally divided them into Cummerbundians and non-Cummerbundians, let it be known that he preferred Tolly’s Nullah to Chowringhee, thought the main staircase of his lodging and its mutilated sphinxes preposterously
magnificent
, not to say awful, and immortalized Government House and its contents as Hustlefussabad. People were always dropping in at Government House. Young Winston Churchill spent days on end shut up in a room along the South-east wing, writing
The
River
War
about the Omdurman Campaign; and, having
occasionally
ventured forth into this reception or that, he would report back to Mama in London that ‘Calcutta is full of supremely uninteresting people endeavouring to assume an air of heartiness suitable to the season’. The visitors continued to come even when Government House had been relegated to
provincial
status with the departure of the Viceroys to New Delhi. George Mallory stayed here before making his first attempt to climb Everest in 1922. Noël Coward strolled in while he was entertaining troops in Calcutta during the last war; and, having been taken on the obligatory tour of the establishment by his host, paused amidst the Caesars, swept the gallery with an
appraising
and thoughtful eye, and murmured – only half to
himself
– ‘Pokey place’.

Viceroys and their staffs were always dropping out whenever the weather became too impossible, after Lord Bentinck decided that Simla was a better place for summer imperialism. Gladly they would forsake the Calcutta of Cockle’s Pills (for dysentery) and interminable subscriptions (for the sake of appearances) and take to the healthier hills; though Curzon was to reckon that never in his life had he been fitter than during his Viceregal years in spite of a recurrent pain in his leg and an intermittently
nagging
toothache. But at Simla you could enjoy polo at 8,000 ft, and wander round a perfectly adequate Viceregal Lodge whose rose garden and herbaceous borders had been first organized by Lady Minto. You took your very strict sense of courtesies with you, of course, including all the people involved in the sixty-three official ranks of precedence, which started with the Viceroy, finished with the superintendent of a telegraph workshop, and had the Archdeacon of Calcutta neatly inserted between a brigadier-general and the Tea Controller for India. You also, by and by, had to put up with a great deal of criticism from the British who remained in Calcutta, who believed that the nation’s government was not being effectively conducted unless it was being conducted where it could be effectively lobbied. Many a Viceregal heart must have been heavy when the time came each autumn to strike camp in Simla and return to the city, to those awful levees where you had to shake 1,900 hands and make 1,900 little bows before you could even moisten your lips on the first cocktail of the evening, where you had to walk 250 yards to get from your own room to your daughter’s, and where you might be required to endure the more pungent parts of Calcutta once or twice a year, like the student hostel attached to the university, because you had scarcely been able to refuse the appointment of Rector when it was obediently offered you.

Most of the Viceroys survived all this well enough to enjoy an authority in the House of Lords and a stately pension in Gloucestershire or elsewhere. But Elgin died here and so did Lady Canning, as well as a couple of Governors of reformed Bengal, while Mayo, whose agricultural policies were among the better Viceregal fingerprints laid on India, was assassinated on a visit to the Andaman Islands. The rest came and went,
leaving Government House and its staff to be slightly modified by the whims of the next man. And eventually this too became part of India’s legacy, to be translated at once into the Raj Bhavan, but still to be maintained with a staff of liveried
flunkeys
and to be occupied lately by a Hindu but non-Bengali Governor of West Bengal, whose son was simultaneously
presiding
over the Union in the University of Cambridge.

Raj Bhavan is not the only building in Calcutta that looks distinctly familiar to a visiting Englishman, who may find
himself
wondering where he has seen the outline of that large church before, the one just across the road from the Victoria Memorial. The answer is that the church is Calcutta Cathedral (another St Paul’s, as it happens) and that the tower is a painstaking copy of the Bell Harry at Canterbury, which the Primate of All England knows so well. The walls, moreover, have something of Norwich Cathedral about them, and there are bits and pieces of
decoration
(a capital here, a pinnacle there) which might set some vague old ecclesiologist to thinking that perhaps the master masons of York Minster had wandered rather farther afield than he had supposed. There is a West window by Burne-Jones and, indeed, once you get inside Calcutta Cathedral it would be possible to lose yourself in a reverie which persuaded you that you were now meditating in some splendid wool church of the Cotswolds rather than an outpost of God’s Empire on the Tropic of Cancer. One thing, however, soon dispels hallucination. For the wide white roof, with its moulded Tudor roses all shining with gilt, is
partially
obscured by the network of ironmongery necessary for the suspension of forty-six great fans one after the other above the choir and the nave; which has never been known to happen anywhere in the see of Gloucester. There are other churches in the city even more eerily imitative than this. Both St John’s and St Andrew’s, the first just behind Dalhousie Square, the other on one of its corners, could quite easily have come from the drawing boards of a Wren, a Gibbs, possibly a Hawksmoor;
refined
and elegant exercises in Anglo-Greek architecture on the outside, they contain galleries, fonts, lecterns and reredoses just like those you have seen only a few weeks ago on the edge of Trafalgar Square or somewhere just past the Bank of England.