Hobnobbing with the unusual
The absorbing accounts of the Europeans based in Calcutta put into shade the cruelness of colonialism
Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and
Other Forgotten Lives
by Devasis Chattopadhyay.
Niyogi Books.
Pages 316.
Rs 595
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She used to work in a circus. So she could vault over the bar with ease and give a tight slap to the drunk. The drunk had tried to put her down thinking he could ‘shine’ with her. “So, you are the maid, are you?” he had asked. The events unfurl in slow motion in the mind’s eye.
A century-and-a-half later, a journalist friend’s schoolteacher wife was pushed for time. In South Calcutta’s busy Gariahat crossing, her regular minibus was still looking for passengers. In the early 1990s, private buses would wait to gather passengers before setting off, often frustrating those who had already boarded.
“Ta holey, aapni-i chalan, so why don’t you drive?” the driver taunted her. The schoolteacher hauled her saree to the knees, stepped over the box that housed the engine and around the rattling floor-stick of the gear, pushed the driver away and began driving.
In the early 1990s, there were fewer women drivers, and probably rarer still any who could drive a bus. The story is the stuff of urban legend for it gripped a swathe of South Calcutta in a paroxysm of fear.
The two incidents are set apart by a century and more but both happened in Calcutta. The second is known from lived experience. The first is from Devasis Chattopadhyay’s languidly elegant book, ‘Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and Other Forgotten Lives’.
And that is exactly where the book demands more. In the nine lives that the author has portrayed, the women are little more than props. Sure, women in the 19th century had not yet earned the right to vote in England. Their role in social life was still prominent.
The book itself notes that among the 35 written accounts left by Europeans of the events in Calcutta in the 19th century, most were by soldiers of the East India Company but at least seven were by women. I would have loved to know more about the circus-trained vaulter.
Calcutta was then British India’s capital of course and arguably the most thriving city east of the Suez (opened in 1869). It has always had its characters.
The protagonist in the title — Major Harry Hobbs — was not really a soldier in the regular army. He was in the reserve corps. He arrived in Calcutta at the age of just 19 years in 1883 and lived on Esplanade Row East till his death in 1956 — for 73 years. He was a piano-tuner, chronicler, raconteur and general man-about-town.
Chattopadhyay did say at a litfest in Kolkata last month that few know about Hobbs now. In fact, at the National Library of India, no one has sought his works in 30 years, that is none in this (the 21st) century.
Apart from Hobbs, the characters are middle to junior civil or military officials and puisne judges, an entertainer/comedian, a mercenary, an opera impresario, Calcutta Police’s first detective and a journalist/publisher. He calls them ‘subalterns’, all of them white-skinned (Caucasians), who were not really in the top echelons — not Hastings or Curzon, not Governors and Viceroys or military commanders.
The 19th century was the time when European modernity interacted with elements of Indian nationalism. It was also the century of the great soldier uprising (1857), the century of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the birth of the Indian National Congress (1885).
Some of the anecdotal history is well known. Like that of Nahoum’s, the confectioners in New Market where even now queues go around two blocks for Christmas cakes from a Jewish shop, baked by Muslims for a largely Hindu clientele on a Christian festival.
But some not so. I personally am fascinated with the story of Shirley Tremearne. He was probably India’s first financial journalist, and his tabloid, Capital, the first business journal, the precursor of all the pink papers.
The absorbing accounts of the personalities put into shade the cruelness of colonialism. As Partha Chatterjee, a founder of the Subaltern Studies project, wrote in ‘The Nation and Its Fragments’, “Curiously though, the notion that colonial rule was not really about colonial rule but something else was a persistent theme in the rhetoric of colonial rule itself.”
In Chattopadhyay’s engaging work, colonial rule fades into the background because the characters are so much fun.
— The writer is a journalist based in Kolkata
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