"Sans Souci"

You may be wondering why I have so little to say that is original. The happy reason is that, contrary to expectations with which I too had set out, there is a great deal that has been written about the city. If it isn't "primary research" I usually prefer to cite or even quote from my source. Paraphrasing, unless the text itself is confusing, seems a little lame, and I can't possibly assume an authoritative voice when I'm culling facts from elsewhere.

First of all, let me share the scanned image of the daguerreotype (somewhere Plato is turning in his...grave?) of the "Sans Souci" Theatre referred to in my earlier post. ["The "Sans Souci" Theatre of Calcutta. c. 1840. Photo: Siddhartha Ghosh. The earliest known example of a daguerreotype picture taken in Calcutta, which has survived only as a reproduction."]

When I was discussing the problem (of sharing or not) with my father, he suggested that I take a look at his copy of the St Xavier's College Centenary: 1960. The first article, "From Theatre to College" offered three interesting images and a bit of history. I find the language a little difficult to follow, especially since rhetorical flourishes often get the better of clarity. Some of the historical facts are clearly presented, while others not so. For the foundation story of the college, I think it worth going back to Radharaman Mitra (earlier referred to). He tells us:

A group of English Jesuits came to Calcutta on 8 October 1834 and established on 1 July 1835 the first St Xavier's College on Portuguese Church Street. In 1838 it was shifted to 3 Park Street, to a rented house. From there it moved again to 28 Chowringhee Road, to another rented house, in January 1841.
Trouble ensued between this group and Vicar Apostolic Carew. They closed down the college and left India in 1845. In September 1849 Carew purchased the building that currently houses St Xavier's College, which earlier used to be the "Sans Souci" Theatre, on premises numbers 10 and 11. Currently this is 30 Park Street. In the next month he transferred St John's College (of his own establishment) from its Entally premises to the Park Street address. He died in 1855 and the college shut down shortly afterwards.
A renewed appeal persuaded a group of Belgian Jesuits to come and work in India. On 28 November 1859, some of them arrived in Calcutta. They established St Xavier's College on 16 January 1860. Another version claims that St John's College did not in fact shut down in 1855. It lingered on and was rechristened and inaugurated as St Xavier's College on 16 January. (My translation.)

The essay in the Centenary volume quotes one Father Shea, who describes the old theatre:

...a showy building, with all sorts of what in theatrical language are called 'properties', and something like an acre of ground. The building is oblong; a good deal of it is devoted to a very fine portico and entrance hall. The audience part has the ordinary horse-shoe wall for the support of the boxes, etc., and this cannot be got rid of. You may easily imagine how much room is thus lost. The theatre was adapted to its present purpose in the following manner. A floor was raised about 12 or 13 feet from the ground, and the regions, commonly supposed to be the abode of ghosts and blue-fire, to which wicked barons and villains in general are consigned, are now a boy's purgatory - schoolrooms and so forth.

It provides an excellent photograph(?) of the premises, apparently taken in 1846. The "Sans Souci" building is still extant - you can identify it by the columns in the front. I wonder what the towering structure we are seeing in the background is. If I'm not getting the direct all wrong, we could be looking at St Paul's Cathedral. The Cathedral, it appears, was completed in 1847, but the spire could easily have been constructed a year earlier. This of course would be the old spire, modelled on the Norwich Cathedral, which broke as a result of the earthquake in 1934. (The new one was inspired by the "Bell Harry" Tower of Canterbury Cathedral.) I can't think of any other building of similar eminence in that direction with respect to St Xavier's College.

The article also says that the good Father H. Depelchin, "that shameless beggar", turned the fortunes of the school in the mid-1860s. The next bit is only by way of annotating the very interesting photograph that follows. "A British Company of buses had been started in Calcutta. It failed for want of travelling public. Fr. Depelchin acquired three of the conveyances for the paltry sum of Rs 400/-. They began going round, morning and evening, a moving advertisement to the spirit of enterprise of St Xavier's."

The other illustration in the volume that I found rather interesting is this "Sketch of the Old "Sans Souci" Theatre, about 1850." I admit that the angle is fairly obvious for viewing a building, but you will see that it matches line for line the daguerreotype from Sri Siddhartha Ghosh's collection. Could this be a hand-drawn reproduction of a mechanically produced daguerreotype image that had been taken four years earlier?