Gari baranda::গাড়ি বারান্দা

In his book Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century, Montague Massey noted the arcade/veranda of the Great Eastern Hotel, and he tells us an interesting story about how it came into being through negotiations with the Municipality. We are told that the "verandah above referred to, overhanging the footpath of the Great Eastern Hotel, was erected by Walter Macfarlane & Co. in 1883". Massey came to know the story through a friend, Shirley Tremearne. Under the existing Act they had to pay a fee of Rs. 100 per month, but with construction set to start, the Municipality refused to sanction it saying that the Hotel would have to pay Rs. 300 per month. Advice was sought but lawyers, Sir Charles Paul and Mr. Hill pointed out that the Hotel had agreed to the terms - how can they now retract? "As he [Tremearne] was leaving, Mr. W. Jackson said: Look here, Tremearne, don't pay that Rs. 300 a month." The Law did its thing and soon, a very angry Sir Henry Harrison, Chairman of the Municipality, started wondering if the damn thing couldn't be pulled down altogether. The Advocate-General is supposed to have said that it could be, but only if it served public interest. And in addition, the Municipality would have to pay a compensation for that. Finally, the Municipality "climbed down, took the Rs. 100 per month fee, and the matter dropped."

The Great Eastern or the Grand Hotel arcades, of course, are a different breed from what we usually understand by gari baranda. Of the Parisian arcades we have learnt much from the writings and reflections of Walter Benjamin. But to turn to a feature that is bordering on extinction, I thought it might be a good idea to look at the gari baranda-s in Kolkata. I wonder if similar private/public complications arose when private houses tried to build these extensions onto the public space. This will be an on-going project and we have just started. A friend of mine, Kalpan Mitra, and I decided to go around photographing buildings with gari baranda. Hopefully, after a significant amount of data has been collected, some clarifications will be possible. The porte-cochère in the true sense of the term is built to accommodate cars or carriages. The idea is to protect the person arriving from rain or sun - to offer an extension of the building itself where they can alight under a shade. In Calcutta, colonial buildings - and many that were built later - often come with such extensions, but I can't recall any of these that projects on to the road. They are mostly within a compound.

I am not sure if the houses built later intended these structures for cars to park under the gari barandas or whether they were built more as an additional veranda, supported by beams or pillars that extended on to the pavements - the shade, so to speak, more a by-product. Several small businesses are run under these verandas, although they do not vary greatly in nature. Perhaps with time, patterns will emerge. For now, let me share some of the photographs we took on the first day. All the photographs unless stated otherwise are taken by Kalpan Mitra. A big thank you to him!

 175/A Park Street

175/A Park Street

The guy behind the counter (left), David Chong, grandson of the founder, Kim Sen Chong, told me that Kim Lee, "Dryers and Cleaners Under Chinese Expert" has been here for the last 40 years. The gari baranda? That's been here for the last hundred or two-hundred years.

179 Park Street

The stretch of pavement under the two gari barandas-s

47/2/1 Gariahat Road

This building, which I am sure every resident of Kolkata has seen at one point of their lives or another, shelters Stop Over, where you can get really nice chicken bharta and roti. They also make a half-decent cold coffee. Does anyone remember a dry cleaners called Three Coins? Was that also underneath the same 'arcade'?

 128 Hazra Road

 Ornamental capitals at the two corners

The pavement underneath.

 126/2 Hazra Road. The house was built in 1927.

128 Hazra Road, built in 1924. 

 The pavement underneath.

Close to the Hazra crossing there are two large buildings with two long extended verandas. One, of course, is the building that boasts of the Bata outlet. The other is bang opposite, on the side of Basusree Cinema.

 Pavement underneath. 96E S.P. Mukherjee Road. (Photograph by me.)

Pavement underneath. 96E S.P. Mukherjee Road. (Photograph by me.)

Pavement underneath. 1/B Sadananda Road.

Hazra, Bata. Which has a long extended 'arcade'. (Photograph by me.)
Again, whether it qualifies as a gari baranda is questionable.

We hope that this series will be updated from time to time, and that by the end of it we will have a fairly comprehensive collection of images of these structures.