Calcutta (38 page)

The secular has been cribbed as freely as the sacred. The most marvellous bartering place in Calcutta is Sir Stuart Hogg’s old New Market, just behind Chowringhee. For almost a century it has been possible to obtain here practically all that imagination could conceivably want to buy. You can get anything between dangling charms from a Tibetan stall and a baby crocodile from the adjacent bird and animal mart – though you need a very strong stomach and preferably no sense of smell if you are going to patronize that. As you approach the New Market you also do well to select the first porter who rushes up to you with a basket, for if you think you can purchase and then carry one packet of liver salts yourself without assistance, you are liable to move around with an entourage of half a dozen basketeers, all
negotiating
quite fiercely for a temporary position on your payroll. All of this – the demanding porters, the purposeful memsahibs, the small boys who offer you blandishments with their trade – is housed under one long and very rambling roof. Without the local colour, these interminable rows of stalls, this endless maze of small shops, would be scarcely distinguishable from the Grainger Market in Newcastle, the Pannier Market in Barnstaple and the covered daily markets to be found in any self-respecting town from one side of Lancashire to the other of Yorkshire. They even have a clock-tower by the entrance to the New Market which is so completely Northcountry Victorian, with stone
buttressed
corners, Gothic louvres piercing the red brickwork, a steep slate roof above the dial which is then topped by a lightning conductor surrounded by a small iron fence, that many people have supposed some Anglophile Maharajah transported it once, brick by brick from Huddersfield, like a rich American taking an obscure fancy of his own across the Atlantic. Which is not the case, any more than it happened that someone once brought Calcutta High Court over from Belgium. For that great bastion of Gothic, with its files of pinnacles doing sentry duty along the roof and its columns ornamented with Caen stone capitals, each subtly different from its neighbours, bears such a close
resemblance
to the Staad-Haus of Ypres that the two buildings are now linked in legendary fashion. It is said that when the Belgians lost their Town Hall by bombardment during the Great War they
immediately sought the plans of Calcutta High Court so that they might rebuild their original faultlessly – though no one can ever lead you to the source of this stimulating myth.

There is nothing at all fanciful about the origins of Calcutta’s most suggestive buildings. Most of them were designed as a military operation, by officers of the Bengal Engineers. Apart from Emerson’s Victoria Memorial the most notable exceptions are the High Court and the General Post Office, which both came from Walter Granville, Architect to the Government of India, and the Writers’ Building, whose architect was probably Thomas Lyon, a former carpenter who had come out to work on the construction of the new Fort William. It was quite
customary
for young Sappers to put up the odd public edifice in the growing years of the Raj, even though their professional
equipment
was minimal. Permanent buildings were not beginning to rise in Calcutta until about the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, and by then the Company as well as the regular Army was giving its engineers some basic training before leaving for India. Once in Calcutta, however, they usually had only their notebooks to guide them, together with a handful of standard architectural works like
Vitruvius
Britannicus,
The
Antiquities of Athens and
A
Book
of
Architecture
which James Gibbs had
published
in 1728, just after finishing St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. It was this last volume, with its plans of the London church, that allowed Lieutenant Agg to design St John’s as he did half a century later. Captain Wyatt, who was a nephew of the
professional
British architect James Wyatt, was able to imitate Kedleston Hall so well when Wellesley invited ideas (and selected Wyatt’s plans for Government House in preference to those of the Company’s Italian architect Edward Tiretta) because the architect of Kedleston, James Paine, had published his drawings in
Plans,
elevations
and
sections
of
Noblemen’s
and
Gentlemen’s houses
in 1783. Having absorbed this, having copied it carefully, and having finished his splendid Government House in 1803, Wyatt went home with money in his purse and became the MP for Sudbury.

His superior officer Colonel Garstin was by then designing the Town Hall to Doric specifications, though with rather less
success; shortly after its opening the front portico collapsed, somewhat later the ballroom floor began to spring and the whole structure had to be overhauled, which caused Sir Charles D’Oyly (sometime opium agent up at Patna, always an amateur artist and now gentleman about Chowringhee) to write a mocking little verse that would have come well out of a production much later on by his family’s light opera company. Soldiers, however, take these things as they come, and Major Forbes was proceeding with his plans for the Mint, which was so strikingly impressive that he was commissioned to design the Cathedral after it. The Mint, naturally, was a copy as well. Its portico was nothing less than a half-size replica of Minerva’s Temple in Athens.
Everything
in Calcutta was derivative. The gates of Government House were a mixed reproduction of those belonging to Syon House in Middlesex and Wilton in Wiltshire; the Turf Club’s frontage could have been seen before by anyone acquainted with West Wycombe Park; many of the handsome town houses now going up carried obvious traces of John Nash and his terraces round Regent’s Park; people were even having open fireplaces
installed
.

What the original artists in the city thought of all this we can only guess from the occasional oblique hint they dropped; the Daniells wrote that ‘The streets are spacious, and from the
diversity
of European and Oriental manners present a scene of
inexhaustible
variety and amusement’; which perhaps meant
buildings
as much as people, but it wouldn’t do to laugh too loudly in Calcutta’s face, for she was a considerable source of patronage to painters at the time; though, curiously, they seem to have vanished by 1836. Emily Eden remarks that by then there is only one professional in town, and he is capable of nothing better than a second-rate sort of sign-post; it was one reason for her own prolific output. The first to discover what a wealth of prospects lay here was Tilly Kettle, who arrived in time to be empanelled on the jury at Nuncomar’s trial and whose work is frequently confused with that of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
*
After him came
William Hodges, recently returned as artist aboard the
Resolution
on Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. It was Hodges who tipped off his old friend John Zoffany to catch the first boat to the Hooghly.

Zoffany was a glittering character who had started life as a cabinet maker in Prague, who called himself Sir John at this stage (with the uncertain permission of George III), who had earlier been dubbed ‘the Baron’ by Marie Thérèse of Austria, and who had just been making himself a reputation for portraiture in London, particularly among the theatrical acquaintances of David Garrick. As soon as he reached Calcutta in 1783 he found the Nabobs falling over themselves to sit for him. He would rarely paint a solitary individual, for his nose for profit was as sharp as anyone else’s in the city and he charged Rs 1,000 for every figure on his canvas, usually finding himself much too busy to oblige anything less than a family group unless someone very important like Impey or Hastings approached him. His paintings are therefore generally well-crowded compositions, and they were sometimes a means of settling scores, for Zoffany was a quarrelsome man. He excelled himself when the Reverend
Tally-Ho
Johnson and the Vestry of St John’s commissioned him to paint The Last Supper to hang behind their altar. Zoffany had lately been bickering with a Mr Paull, a Company official, and now he made him into Judas. A Mr Blaquiere, a police
magistrate
of effeminate good looks whose hostility to Christianity was notorious in the town, appeared as St John the Divine. Christ was represented by Father Parthenio, a Greek priest of Calcutta, in what seems to have been a mark of approval. The Vestry, after much testy debate, finally settled with Zoffany for Rs 2,500 when the painting was worth at least three times the amount at his current rates.

The Daniells were more assiduous than colourful. Thomas Daniell had been a bricklayer’s labourer who learned to varnish carriages when he was later apprenticed to a coach builder. He also learned to paint and by the time he was twenty-three the Royal Academy had accepted one of his flower pieces. When his brother died he agreed to look after nephew William, and thus the famous partnership began. William was only fifteen when the
Daniells received the Company’s permission, in 1784, to sail for India to make engravings of this fabulous land. They arrived two years later, by way of China, and they at once opened a
subscription
list in Calcutta for a dozen aquatints of the city by Thomas. William’s part in the enterprise was to fetch and carry, to operate the camera obscura and to make simple sketches, though eventually he was to become an artist in his own right; Thomas was made a Royal Academician in 1799 and William twenty-three years later. For almost ten years they travelled all over India, sketching steadily as they went, and they produced hundreds of landscapes, from the Himalayas to Ceylon.
Sometimes
they slipped themselves into a composition, riding on a horse or in a palanquin or sitting by their drawing board while an Indian servant held a large umbrella over them; but they never allowed themselves to be more than tiny figures in a landscape, a device to establish its scale. No other place on the sub-continent was as thoroughly pictured by them as Calcutta; it is largely
because
of the Daniells that we know what the city looked like at the end of the eighteenth century.

Ironically, while men in the Indian capital were building in the styles of Europe, their counterparts in England were
beginning
to create follies in the native idioms of India. Sometimes they had served in the East; invariably they had been stimulated by the now celebrated Daniell prints; and from time to time they would ask Thomas Daniell what he thought about this or that project they were planning. He was consulted by Sir John Osborne, formerly Colonel of the Nawab of Oudh’s Light
Infantry
Battalion, about a garden temple in honour of Mr Hastings (who was to be represented as an incarnation of Vishnu) at
Melchet
Park in Hampshire, and Thomas eventually supplied the designs. He was consulted by Sir Charles Cockerell, who had just come home from Calcutta with a fortune after some years as the Company’s Postmaster there, about his new mansion at Sezincote in Gloucestershire, for which Daniell designed a garden temple, grottoes, fountains, a bridge and an ornamental pool. The Prince Regent was so impressed by this work when he visited Sezincote that he drew the attention of his own architect, William Porden, to Daniell’s prints and designs; a by-product
of this encounter was the Dome at Brighton, and probably the whole of the Royal Pavilion there, though Daniell was
unmoved
by John Nash’s major part in the work.

The Victoria Memorial is well stocked with Daniell prints, and occasionally some lucky fellow manages to unearth one among the secondhand bookshops of College Street. In the High Court you may inspect Zoffany’s portrait of Sir Elijah Impey, a portly figure in a red robe, with a blue cummerbund and with his right hand raised in a kind of archiepiscopal blessing. The Vestry of St John’s eventually had to shift The Last Supper’ from behind the altar, where it was being attacked by rising damp, to the Lady Chapel, and there poor Mr Paull still is, fixed forever as Judas, sitting at the front of the table with a hand reflectively on his chin, looking very sinister and plotting. And these are only two of the imperial ghosts that are apt to haunt you at almost every turn in Calcutta.

Cross Dalhousie Square after finding (if you can) the tablet marking the Black Hole, and you run into the Great Eastern Hotel, where the businessmen mustered their unnecessary
vigilantes
during the non-existent local Mutiny; and where Rudyard Kipling stayed while he sent those despatches back to the
Civil
and
Military
Gazette about the work of the Hooghly pilots and the night he spent in Calcutta with the police vice squad, when he observed Dainty Iniquity and Fat Vice at their
accommodating
trade. Go shopping in the New Market: if you take one side street to it off Chowringhee you pass a tailor’s shop which still mounts an impressive coat of arms above its doorway ‘By
appointment
to the Marquis of Linlithgow’; if you take the only other approach you pass the Empire Cinema, which may be showing
Blow
Hot,
Blow
Cold!
this week, but which is where Harry Lauder once performed, not to mention Anna Pavlova, Marie Tempest, Matheson Lang and Dame Clara Butt; and where, according to one local historian, ‘as a frightened amateur Merle Oberon stared across the footlights’. Follow Chowringhee to its conclusion beyond the Racecourse and you run into the Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital, which was once the Presidency General, where you can see a small pink-washed hut which is now used as a dump for unwanted hospital junk.

Malaria was finally defeated in that hut, when it was a
laboratory
, and on the hospital gates they have fixed a plaque with the verse that Ronald Ross composed to celebrate his triumph: