Jewish Family Postcards - New Year's Greetings

A couple of years back, Ronnie Gupta allowed me to photograph some of their old family postcards exchanged around New Year. His mother's side, were members of an old and well-respected Jewish family in Calcutta, the Hyams. These postcards (dating back to the sixties or seventies, I think), were exchanged between friends and family. Some were printed in Germany, but there's no publication detail visible on the three presented here. The background is usually a gorgeous multi-coloured reflecting surface.

My sincerest thanks to Ronnie for sharing these images.

Hallam Tennyson

I don't remember what I was looking for--probably something to do with Hallam's relationship with Alfred Lord Tennyson--when I came across this wonderfully named person, Hallam Tennyson. Turns out that he spent a few eventful years in Calcutta. I started reading his autobiography The Haunted Mind (London: André Deutsch, 1984) and decided that I must acquire a copy. At a modest price, a second-hand volume was located soon enough, and it has turned out to be one of my favourite autobiographies.

Who was Hallam Tennyson? He was the English poet laureate's great-grandson. Besides the autobiography he has written a novel, a collection of short stories, a couple of volumes on travel, and so on. We don't normally do book reviews in Calcutta Confusion, but for now I'd like to share my experience of reading the book.

When our author was born, he was announced in The Times as Beryl Augustine Evelyn. A great-uncle who was residing in the Isle of Wight intervened and reminded the family that his name ought to be commemorated. Thus, Evelyn was replaced by Hallam--I don't know how the rest of it came about.

HT talks about a deeply troubled relationship with his mother--and the memoirs on the whole, are more reflections and meditations upon life than they are a plain narrative of events. HT's mother, Ivy, also seems to have had a rather interesting affair with Bertrand Russell. Between his relationship troubles with Alys and the beginning of his affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, it appeas Russell "took time off from the Principia Mathematica" to swoop in to "rescue" the young lady from a certain personal crisis. Remember, Russell also "rescued" Vivienne and Thomas S. Eliot.

Russell remembered Ivy well into her old-age. In characteristic manner he expressed this when HT once met him, as the latter recalls: '"Tell her I never go without thinking of her for more than a--" (and he [Russell] paused in order to consider the exact period of time: then added with great precision and finality) "--for more than a week." Ill as she was, my mother greeted this message with a roguish twinkle.'

Many years back, in the Tennyson family mansion in Farringdon, HT recalls getting into great trouble with his mother when she discovered an unfinished letter by him to a friend, where he was describing her as "horribly bourgeois and irritating."

Hallam Tennyson appears in his autobiography to be quite a remarkable man, given to introspection and contemplation. While at Eton he had several opportunities to explore his homosexuality--something he had never really tried to repress even as a child it seems. But he also experimented with heterosexuality, trying hard to feel attracted by the opposite sex. This he hoped to achieve by sleeping with pictures of Betty Grable and Ginger Rogers.

One of the most amusing characters to have entered into his life was a non-Etonion, who was "dark, clever, handsome and over six feet tall." This young man claimed that he HT had psychic powers and begged to be hypnotised. "Thereupon, in a pretended 'trance', he declared himself passionately in love with me: a declaration which he swore, on 'coming round', that he had completely forgotten." Later this man got himself thrown into prison for posing as a RAF officer and stealing lady's handbags. (Almost out of Wodehouse?) He became a stage actor, a film star, and a well-known writer, "each under a different pseudonym."

With another friend, Roddy Owen, HT started reading Freud in the newly published Penguin edition. "Our shrine, set up in his rooms," he writes, "consisted of a retable with a dove on top representing the 'super-ego' and a teddy bear in the middle representing the 'ego'. I have forgotten (significantly?) whatever it was we used at the bottom to represent the 'id'."

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, HT joined the University Ambulance Unit. The self-proclaimed Marxist, was also a vegetarian. He wore synthetic leather boots, protesting against the unnecessary slaughter of animals, but in characteristic self-deflating style, he mentions that "the soles parted company with the uppers at their first experience of rain, so that gesture came to a sticky end."

HT was to marry a lady by the name of Margot, with whom he spent many years. Margot was of a German-Jewish family, and she had lost every one of them in the War. They "became conscious of each other" some time in 1943 around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes night. Soon after he was sent to Egypt on service, from where he wrote a large number of letters in very small handwriting. The projects he had to manage are extraordinary. As his first assignment, he had to help Yugoslav refugees who had been evacuated off the Dalmatian coast. He describes a few scenes, such as the following:

In Sinai, following now established practice, I was put in charge of the camp kitchens. The Dalmatians who worked with me were a cheerful, even inspiring, band. They peeled spuds or stirred goulash to the accompaniment of endless folk and anti-fascist songs (the latter based on Slav folk tunes anyway). They all seemed to have this gift of song and modulated automatically into four-part harmony...Singing was indeed the refugees' only form of entertainment and expression(...) (78)

Towards the end of the war, HT was sent to Italy to survey the number of Jews missing and to take stock of the total destruction of property. Here he met Bernard Berenson and Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude Stein. Leo Stein had written a book on Art and Psychoanalysis which was largely a product of his memory and imagination since he had no access to a library. Leo was being disguised as his wife's servant in their home some where in the hills above Florence. The manuscript, which he had offered HT to read, got lost in transit. A version written later was published eventually.

The couple arrived in India in early 1946 after a three-week voyage. They landed in Bombay and quickly befriended Sachin Chaudhury, a Bengali gentleman, who comes across in the memoirs as a colourful character. Chaudhury was the General Manager of Bombay Talkies and carried with him a large supply of paan which "he had been too shy to chew in England" during a recent trip. With "his mouth stained a brilliant carmine", he offered HT and Margot "idiosyncratic" hospitality. He could quote at length from The Four Quartets. In a most remarkable passage the author offers a description of the whirlwind days in Bombay, which I personally identified very much with.

He refused to plan anything in advance and we seemed to pass the mornings wondering whether we were ever going to move out of the flat. Then at two o'clock in the afternoon we started weaving across the city by taxi, picking up friends for a lunch party which had only been decided on twenty minutes before A certain museum was chosen for an afternoon visit, but at three o'clock we had still not eaten, leaving two restaurants in disdain because they were unable to provide a sufficient variety of vegetarian food for one of our freshly gathered guests. We reached the museum at closing time but Sachin's charm kept it open for another two hours and afterwards the curator brought out his private collection from a locked safe. (98)

In Bengal, their work was mostly surrounding the famine-ridden areas surrounding Calcutta. HT was in Calcutta during the riots in July 1947 and witnessed great brutality in the streets. On one occasion he was mis-recognized as a Muslim person and Hindu Bengalis turned their attentions to him after he tried to save three defenceless Muslims from a gutter. I found his views on Calcutta quite honest--not patronizing in the least and far from romantic.

When he was offered the Star of India (Second Class) for their work in the Port Canning and Diamond Harbour area, he wrote back saying that any such effort should rather acknowledge the work of one Swarn Sarin. Swarn Sarin was a Punjabi woman, who had surveyed the area and bullied the Ministry into taking charge of the embankment attempts. "Swarn was the only person I ever met who could slowly masticate a large red chilli while continuing to talk about the problems of the jute industry."

In the middle of extensive surveys around Raghabpur, the couple also met Mahatma Gandhi at Ashram Sevagram. "The old man was jumping about on his mat and giggling in a frisky manner--his normal spirits in fact, as we were soon to learn." Continuing his deeply introspective vein, HT offers his analysis of Gandhi's sexuality (and later, of the question of feminism and women in Bengal)--written with nuance and incisiveness that I had not expected even half-way through the work.

After their return to England following a spell of bad health for Margot, Hallam Tennyson eventually served for several years as Assistant Head of the BBC's Radio Drama department and even went on to umpire at Wimbledon despite his general suspicion of sports. (I found quite to my horror that he was found dead in his apartment in 2005, in circumstances that are far from being pleasant.) The autobiography is well worth a read, and perhaps, some day I'll get down to reading the short stories as well.

Batman

This time it's Batman in Calcutta. Calcutta Confusion heartily thanks Eamon Lahiri for our second guest post.
The author is currently in his third year of pursuing a bachelor's degree in English at Jadavpur University. When he’s not watching sport, Eamon digs up cartoons, music, and random sights and sounds from his past to get nostalgic about. He claims to do precious little else.

I recently rewatched the Batman: The Animated Series episode titled 'The Demon's Quest', where Batman and Ra'as al Ghul make a very brief, and quite pointless stop at Calcutta on their way to rescue Robin and Talia al Ghul, who had supposedly been kidnapped.

Screen-grab from the Tv series

This two-part episode was based almost entirely on the Batman comics issue #232 published in 1970. Titled “Daughter of the Demon”, this was incidentally the issue that first introduced Ra’as al Ghul as a character.

While I quite enjoyed the story in itself, I found the portrayal of the city (in the comic as well as the television series) rather unsatisfactory. Everything from the art, to the colour schemes made it resemble a slightly toned down version of something out of an Arabian Nights tale.
Disgruntled with an inaccurate and hollow representation of my city, which I felt stemmed from misplaced notions that stereotype the vastly varied regions and cultures of the Eastern world, I set out in search for something more relatable. Thankfully, I didn’t have to look too far beyond Batman.

In 1996, DC published Batman #534, written by Doug Moench, who was on his second run under the Batman title, and was already known for contributing to the Knightfall arc in the 80’s.
This particular issue was a part of Legacy, a crossover story-arc that spread over issues from the Catwoman, Robin, and Detective Comics series’, apart from Batman. The overarching storyline concerns the return of the lethal virus that wreaked havoc in Gotham in the Contagion arc (to which this is a sequel), and Batman and his allies’ attempts to find its origins, and a possible cure, in the Middle East.

Unlike #232, #534 is set almost entirely in Calcutta, that too during the time of the year when the city is at its best: Durga Pujo.

But more importantly, unlike #232, #534 presents a much more realistic picture of the city.
For one, it moves beyond the ‘land of magic and snake-charmers’ stereotype and presents a view of the city from two distinct levels through the eyes of the caped crusader. At ground level, images of beggars lining the dingy lanes, urchins and street-dogs engrossed in play go a long way in juxtaposing the pomp of the festivities with the abject, perilous conditions in which the lower strata of society eke out a survival. Higher up, the unrealistic domes and minarets of #232 make way to tiled roofs and old Bengali bungalows that make for a much more familiar skyline.

Complete with Jim Aparo’s illustrations and Moench’s lines, nearly every panel strikes a poignant note with any reader who happens to be a resident of the city. A touching dialogue between Batman and a street-boy (who plays a crucial part in the story) hits too close to home for comfort when the latter is asked to go home when he encounters Batman late at night, to which he replies that the streets are his home. Anyone who has had a minimum amount of exposure to any part of the Batman franchise will be aware of Batman’s/Bruce Wayne’s deep concern and empathy for Gotham’s delinquent children, and as a true mark of a great work of fiction, the reader is able to get inside the head of a fictional character and almost sense the moment when he possibly realizes that the city he finds himself in, and the city he calls home are more similar than he’d like them to be.
Some of the lines, such as the ones in the panels below, are pertinent even today from a real-world perspective.

But where I feel this story scores a lot of brownie points, not just over #232 but in the broader context of Batman stories set overseas, is with the character of the aforementioned homeless child. While most of the stories in the arc are set in Africa and Asia, this is the only one that includes a local character who doesn’t just make up the numbers as a passive onlooker, but plays a major role in the plot.

Even though we never know his name, the boy turns out to be much more than a tertiary character. In fact, he is arguably the main supporting character despite Lady Shiva’s presence in the story. The writers ensure that his role is not restricted to being an object of sympathy and helplessness. His conversations with Batman evoke a sense of endearment towards him as well as humour (in contrast to the grim backdrop) as he continues flooding him with questions on his costume and whether he’s English or American, despite the Dark Knight’s best attempts to persuade him to stay away. Even after being shooed away, he continues to follow the duo from the shadows. Soon after, Batman does something quite out of character when he takes a ring off the finger of a hired assassin. As it turns out, he uses the ring to buy some food for the boy, a favour he later returns with interest when he (brace yourselves) comes out of the shadows and risks his own life to save Batman’s. This, I feel, epitomized the whole “Anybody could be Batman” motif that has gained so much of popularity after The Dark Knight Rises rocked the box-office in 2012, sixteen years before the release of Nolan’s film.

On a broader scale, the issue is also hugely successful in its streamlining of an out-of-the-box setting into the general mood and atmosphere of the DC animated universe within which Batman operates. Set as it is during a festive occasion, the squalor and decadence of the city is on full show. The stern reminder that evil isn’t far away even in the rare moments of joy is a staple of Batman stories set in Gotham, and the manner in which the same idea is evoked in a different setting is extremely refreshing.

Far from merely making up the background scenery, the city itself is portrayed as a multi-faceted character that actively engages with the plot and the other characters. We find the best example of this during the climax, which revolves around the immersion of the idols on Bijoya Doshomi,.
Batman discovers that the virus he has been seeking is hidden inside one of the immersed idols, put there with the aim to effect a contagion by contaminating the city's water supply.
With a great deal of help from his young friend, Batman manages to dive into the Hooghly amongst the idols, recover the virus, and save the day. Like all good Batman stories, a ray of light always breaks through at the end.
What I find particularly impressive is that despite the portrayal of the city being in line with the basic tropes of the fictional DCAU, one does not for one moment get the sense that it is forced. Through subtle hints, it encourages one to draw parallels between Calcutta and Gotham, while still enabling Calcutta to hold its own unique identity which is largely congruent with reality.

In an exchange with Lady Shiva, Batman articulates the enduring message that pervades throughout the story. It is the people of the city who make it what it is, and decide what it shall stand for. In spite of the chaos and corruption Calcutta (much like Gotham) finds itself surrounded in, the individual stories of the people who live in it are nothing short of inspirational. Their laughter, their spirit, and their very desire to survive despite the odds they face, nothing short of heroic.

Livierato's Egyptian Cigarettes

I came across this advertisement in Calcutta: The First Capital of British India, an illustrated guide to places of interest with map by Herbert Andrews Newell, published by the Caledonian Press in 1920. I have not been able to track Livierato with any degree of certainty, but there is a Livierato Bros. founded by Gregory B. Livierato at Port Said "with branches at Aden and Marseilles", who were dealers in coffee. His home town was in Cephalonia, Greece.

This is what Clive Street would have looked like around the time, although the postcard (from my personal collection) is from about 15 years before the book was published. Originally I had thought of posting only the advertisements out of a kind of antiquarian interest in the everyday, but then I ventured to look a few things up.

Kitchener Sirdar? Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener led several imperial campaigns 1898 onwards, and became a particularly popular face in Britain during the First World War. Of him, Margot Asquith remarked "He is not a great man, he is a great poster", for his was the original "I want you" face. The "Lord Kitchener Wants You" that called for war volunteers, was designed by Alfred Leete. Kitchener's face was used in cigarette and cigar ads and in 1915, one R.L. Orchelle criticised the poster and claimed in an essay titled "The Soul of England", "The idea is stolen from the advertisement of a 5c. American cigar." [source: Wikipedia] Interesting that arguably the poster's most iconic adaptation is the American recruitment poster by James Flagg (1917). A few of Kitchener's cigarette ads are also available online on Getty Images.

Kitchener was noted for his cigarette smoking, and the poster-boy made it quite fashionable too. In Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, Relli Shechter writes "Another British celebrity, Lord Kitchener, helped to poularise the Melachrino's cigarettes after he first smoked them in Cairo." (p. 57)

In Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation, John Pollock says

Each day Kitchener would arrive at the War Office precisely at 9 a.m. having been driven in the borrowed Rolls from Carlton Gardens…At lunchtime, when the generals and colonels walked or drove to their clubs, Kitchener would eat a cold collation sent across from Carlton Gardens in a napkin. He then smoked a cigar. Brade, the Permanent Under-Secretary, said that ‘while he is smoking this he is the most amenable to any request. He is very approachable and interviews a constant stream of all sorts.’ When the cigar made him too amenable he took to disappearing for fifteen minutes into George Arthur’s little room, not to be disturbed on any matter while he smoked a rather special Havana.

Egyptian cigarette export was big around the turn of the century and demand for Egyptian cigarettes lasted into the '20s, as is evident from the advertisement. One reason for this popularity, the Wiki page suggests, is that because of a state tobacco monopoly in the Ottoman Empire, tobacco merchants fled to Egypt which was outside the monopoly laws. These merchants were mostly ethnic Greeks. The British began to be stationed there in 1882 and soon after their taste for these cigarettes turned it into a UK and subsequently global fad.

The Wiki section on popular references lists Hergé's Cigars of the Pharaoh and a section in "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, where Professor Coram offers Holmes a cigarette. "I can recommend them, for I have them especially prepared by Ionides of Alexandria." The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, however, refers to a cigarette manufacturer based off Regent Street, London, called Ionides & Co., but is unsure about the "Alexandria". It may well have been a joke--using a local but Greek name to make it sound all hard-to-get.

As for Samsoun, I can again only hazard a guess. "The tobacco growing region of Anatolia tributary to the Samsun market covers the districts of Samsun, Baffra, Alatcham and Tashova" says a Commerce Report from 1921. The district, Samsun, in Turkey is on the Black Sea. One of its few claims to fame is that Atatürk started the Turkish War of Independence here in 1919.

Any more annotations to this ad? Please help if you can.

Kolkata Documentary with Sue Perkins on BBC

I read a few mixed responses on Facebook to Sue Perkins's Kolkata which aired earlier this week on BBC 2. Although I am in the U.K. at the moment, not being a regular Tv-watcher I missed it completely, until a friend of mine pointed out this oversight on my part and helpfully emailed me a link. (Thanks, Ariadne, for the link. I would never have watched it otherwise.)

To be honest I was completely unaware of who Sue Perkins is. I understand that she has a number of fans and I found her quite pleasant on the show to be honest. When I was told later that she is a comedian, some moments of fine comic timing in the documentary made perfect sense. I realize that the documentary was made for a specific viewership and on the whole I didn't find it quite as horrendous as some of my friends seem to have found it, and I would be happy to engage on specific points if more problems with the documentary are pointed out to me. For my part, let me try and put down my thoughts on it.

As opposed to the older tourist guides--and by old I mean early 20th century--which were mostly in the form of books and took the form of annotated journeys through the city, Perkins did not take the city by places of interest. Nothing absolutely new in that either, but it's refreshing all the same not to see the oft-repeated images of the Writers' Building, of the Raj Bhavan...you know the list. Although strangely, a blast from the past, the Jain Temple did make an appearance. I thought recent tourism had all but forgotten it despite the fact that it is one of the enduring images from the first half of the twentieth century.

There were some shots that were truly breathtaking, probably taken from a helicopter: views of the city that aren't so common at all. A literal detachment and height that few cameras that ply their everyday art in the city can achieve. Apart from panoramic sweeps, there was one shot I enjoyed in particular where some of the courtyard designs of even the taller buildings became evident. A few top-shots of the bazars were also quite impressive.

I personally disagreed on several counts with Abhra, who was guiding Perkins for the first thirds of the film. Unlike him, I don't think that we have inherited the train, the tram, (the tea) and the grand buildings from the British, and that because the past is past, it's all good now. “Post-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end. Not past a thing.” Sure, but surely it's not quite so easily dismissible? Also I couldn't agree that it's quite common for people eating at the next table in a restaurant to swoop in on the conversation at your table. And I personally have never had someone from another group claim food from my plate! I'm not sure if he's joking, but he seemed to say in the same vein as the claim regarding conversation-joiners.

As for Perkins's narrative: I don't think Kolkata is “known to the locals as the City of Joy”, although I am willing to concede that some of us may have a tendency to internalise and reproduce tags that catch our fancy. (The strange and vague claim that it is a “city with a heart” comes to mind.) I personally would also have been more comfortable with a more nuanced view of the "white town/black town”--it seemed as though she was suggesting it was a clear divide planned by the British administration--even with the grey town thrown in. It certainly is a most fascinating aspect of Kolkata. The phrase full of “Armenians, Chinese, Jews and Arabs”, again, rung somewhat inaccurate. For one thing, there were other European settlers here, such as the Portuguese who were based roughly around the neighbourhoods in Bowbazar that are home to the Bowbazar branch of Kolkata's diminishing Chinese population today. And secondly, because I thought it was misrepresenting things a bit to give the impression that these communities are still there in significant numbers.

From tea, Perkins takes us to a cup-maker's family. It was refreshing to see clay-work other than Kumartuli for a change, although, yes, I do admit that the clay-cup too is fast emerging as a stereotype. And from there they go to an Anglo-Indian household, via Bow Barracks. A member of this family believes that it would be much better if the English were to come back to rule. They have a dog called Brooke Shields. (Named after the actor and model??) And from there to the Kolkata sewers--a marvel of Victorian engineering, as she said. These are glimpses that I had never seen earlier and was quite amazed to learn about them, but I'm not sure they are easy to access for a lay person.

One of the Tagore houses got coverage, where Souraja Tagore takes us around. We get a few rare glimpses inside, but perhaps the most embarrassing moment comes when the host is asked what she thinks of the view that people without a place to live in grudge the older families their enormous property. She says that she does see the other side of the coin as well, “But you have to understand that life is not about just having a space to live. Give them…give them culture.” I'm glad that Perkins clarified her misgiving following this dialogue, and on that note a few words about what I thought of her role.

In almost any documentary that involves the host working with people who may not know her language, things can get tricky. Some of the people shown in the documentary can understand English (the boys at Rajarhat, Souraja Tagore, Abhra, et al), but there are many who can't. The English viewer can. Many Indian viewers likewise. But there are a few jokes that are shared with the English-speaking/comprehending viewer that may not be so evident to the people in the film. For example, the joke about the rickshaw puller winning the moustache of the year award. It need not operate only at the linguistic level but can work on cultural divide as well. Such as Perkins comparing a moment at the Laughing Club with Michael Jackson's “Thriller” video. This sounds like a dangerous thing that a host can employ, but in my opinion Perkins doesn't make any really mean joke at any point.

A glimpse of the lives of street and pavement -dwellers, ends in a somewhat fraught valorisation of ambition--“So there's been plenty of times tonight where I've wanted to cry my eyes out at the things I have seen and the things I have heard,” she says, “which have sometimes been too unbearable and probably too difficult to broadcast, but at the end of it we have someone like Rakhi, who is, through the Hope Foundation, getting an education, speaking English and wants to be a doctor.” There are other things as well that are worth celebrating surely, but I suppose certain images and phrases strike us as more dramatic.

From there we go away from the city centre, as Perkins says, to see the transformation the economic miracle is delivering over the last few years. In Rajarhat we encounter a group of property developers who sport their Ferraris and Lamborghinis. One of them believes that the “car [a Lamborghini] is so beautiful, it should inspire other people to work hard, to be honest, and to be successful in life.” Funnily, one of the Ferraris (a Testarossa I think) blows the clutch when they try to take Perkins out on a drive! She has a good laugh but I'm not sure all parties concerned saw it as a funny incident.

Kolkata has been projected, fashioned in ways that have suited Western ideologies of viewing. It has been a City of Palaces, a City of Dreadful Night, a Dying City, a Living City, a City of Joy, and of Rumours. This particular documentary seemed to hint at the dominant discourse of the present day: that it is a city of poverty as well as development. Communities, social organisations, idiosyncrasies that seem to hold out a promise of retaining all that is strangely marked off as the “human” elements of the city being retained while its moneyed class propels it forward economically. That there is much between these is somehow lost. The point a lady at the Laughing Club makes about the city developing and how most of their children are moving abroad after education, isn't examined for its (not-so-obvious?) contradiction. This is true geographically as well, because like most other guides of Kolkata, this documentary too does not seem too familiar with South Kolkata's residential areas, for example. When the Black Town is spoken off, the two images that are shown are of a person sweeping the street, while an office-goer deftly dodges the broom-stick and a street vendor. When refugees are referred to, the dominant image seemed to be that of the street-dweller or hawker.

Likewise when Perkins talks to Souraja Tagore about those who want to break these houses down, the visual is that of these street-vendors; who, I am sure, entertain similar questions. But the decisions probably are taken higher up, by those who stand to gain from it rather than those who claim ideological opposition to such mansions. Much that is between the two binaries, I thought was lost. The economic class I refer to would be somewhere closer to Abhra or the lady who shows Perkins around the pavement dwellings, but whose name I couldn't catch (was it mentioned?).  The colonies around Jadavpur are ignored completely as are neighbourhoods such as the ones surrounding Gariahat, or places further South. Even without a systematic geographical exploration an hour-long capsule shouldn't find it difficult to locate narratives in these parts that are pertinent to an understanding of the city. Is it not good subject matter for the camera, I wonder.

The final thing I wanted to mention is the music. I'm not too sure why I come away from most BBC documentaries of India with a Hinustani classical track playing in my head. These serve the background, theme music for the documentaries. When we enter the Tagore palace there is Western classical, which my lack of training didn't allow me to identify correctly. There are other kinds of music too, but perhaps the Western audience will not easily identify those with “India”. So on the whole I can't say I disliked it much more than I dislike most Western documentaries on India. I found Perkins pleasant enough, although that too isn't unqualified and at points I found myself getting fairly irritated. But I think it was well-intentioned on the whole. There is much that the documentary stays silent on, and I can't help fear that a new discourse of what the city stands for is gradually being consolidated even as I write.

The Lee Memorial Mission in Calcutta

This must not be something new for those who have grown up in and around the Subodh Mullick Square area (or Wellington Square if you will). I am often amazed at how spaces open up in cities. You know what I mean? You see them from the roads as you pass them by, but when you enter them there's this entire world that unfolds. You feel stupid to have reduced this to a part of the map all this while. Anushka and I got involved recently with some work that took us to the Lee Memorial.

The old yellow building, just across the road from Subodh Mullick's palace, is fairly well maintained. I find it quite impressive. Upon entering the building, one sees a plaque describing in brief the lives of the founders of the Lee Mission, earlier known as the Bengal Mission. It was a great tragedy that led to the founding of the Mission, but first let's go back a bit.

David Hiram Lee spent his student days in Ohio and came to India in 1875, working alongside William Taylor. Ada Hildegarde Jones was born in West Virginia. At the age of fourteen an aunt took her to Ohio, where she went to Scio college. After a bout of typhoid fever she is said to have had a vision where God asked her to "live for India". A few weeks later a letter arrived from a certain Mrs. Doremous of the Union Missionary Society, "stating that Dr. Thoburn, in passing through on his return to India, had handed to her Miss Jones's name as a candidate for missionary work in India." (All photographs are from Ada Lee, Seven Heroic Children, London: Morgan and Scott, 1906, available at archive.org.)

 

She arrived a year later as part of the Woman's Union Mission. A fairly sensationalist article in The Milwaukee Journal says, "[s]he was the first woman sent by other women to save women." The same article describes her as "a spunky type" and suggests that she was following "the man of her choice half-way round the world to marry him." The details are up for verification, but the two got married in Madras in 1881, after Ada apparently was rejected in Calcutta by "neglected sufferers" and inhabitants of harems, whose souls she was trying to save. When Hiram's health started to decline, they went back to Ohio, returning to India a few years later. It was during this phase that the tragic incident took place. On 24 September 1899, six of their children, Vida, Wilbur David, Ada Eunice, Esther Dennett, Lois Gertrude, and Herbert Wilson, who were studying at Queen's Hill School in Darjeeling, were swept away to death in one single landslide. The school had its premises in a building known as Arcadia where one Miss Emma Knowles served as the first principal. It was then supposedly regarded as a branch of the Calcutta Girls' High School (this is not surprising considering the American missionary connections). The school is known today as Mount Hermon School.

Wilbur was the only one who lived to tell his parents of their last moments, but he too died within a few days of the disaster. Along with the six, claimed by the landslide was also Jessudar, a Bengali girl who had become part of the family.

Jessudar, Ada Lee tells us, was born of Hindu parents.
She lost her father early in life after which the family lived in great poverty. Through out the narrative, the missionary tone strikes one as deeply problematic, but this is only to be expected I suppose. "A wicked man" tried to buy the little girl from her mother for eight rupees (translated in the account to 2 dollars 25 cents), but her mother resisted. Soon after the family converted to Christianity through some "native Christians of the village". One day Jessudar was carried away by the wicked man, but she was rescued and deposited with the Lee family for safety. There is a highly dramatic story of how she decided once and for all to turn to God's service, discarding symbolically the Hindu bangle that she wore. The Lee family also used run a Sunday school, where Vida taught. A couple of photographs fascinated me from Ada Lee's book. (See below.) The book by Ada Lee is a disturbing read, as it contains many of the letters exchanged with the children and an account by Wilbur of the fateful event.

Following the disaster, money flowed in and enabled the founding of the Lee Mission. Dr. and Mrs. Walter Griffiths took charge of the school from the late 1930s. (The rhetoric as reported by The Milwaukee Journal seems to have remained as problematic as ever even post-independence.) The Lee school in Darjeeling was reported by Gordon Sinclair (special correspondent for The Milwaukee Journal) as one of the best in the Himalayas. At the same time, around 1949, there were 400 students and a teacher's training programme for 30 and an orphan home in the Mission in Calcutta. It is also supposed to have provided accommodation for missionaries travelling in India.

Ada survived David Hiram and died in India in 1948. She is buried at the Lower Circular Road Cemetery. For now, I am quite grateful that they allow their premises to be used for diverse activities without interference.

The Calcutta Rhinoceros, The Fashion Statement in Eighteenth Century Europe

Calcutta Confusion is very happy to publish its first, inaugural guest-post written by Dr. Souvik Mukherjee.

Portrait of Madame Grand (1783)
by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun
Source: Wikipedia 

Long before that renowned Calcutta beauty, Madame Grand, left the city and enthralled high society France as Madame Talleyrand, another celebrity-export from Bengal had already become the cynosure of all Europe. She toured through the Netherlands, travelled to Berlin, met the Austrian emperor, was visited by King Louis XV and finally ended up in Lambeth, London where she might have met the English royalty–I speak here of Clara, the rhinoceros. 

Replacing the famous rhinoceros woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, paintings and sculptures of Clara became the rage in Europe. The French aristocracy adopted a rhinoceros-like horn as part of their wigs, the naturalist Buffon commented on Clara and she also featured in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Songs, poems and letters were written about her and the French navy named one of its ships, Rhinoceros. Three famous portrayals of Clara exist: the first one is a painting by Jean Baptiste Oudry, the second is an engraving by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus called The Rhinoceros and the Human Skeleton and the third, a painting by Pietro Longhi from Venice, now hangs in the National Gallery, London. The last shows Clara without her horn, which was supposedly removed a year earlier. The painting shows Clara as an exhibit in the Carnevale of Venice and was purportedly commissioned by the Grimani couple. Clara has even made it to modern-day tote bags and the Barber Institute of the University of Birmingham will sell you these for five quid. The institute’s website states that ‘Thomas Bodkin, a former director of Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts, paid £575 – about £21,000 in today’s money – for the 45cm (18in) piece in 1942’ referring to a two hundred and sixty year old statue of Clara. There were glazed ivory statuettes of Clara made in Nymphenburg and you might be lucky to still find one for your collection–if you can afford it, that is.

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros (1515). Source: Wikipedia

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Portrait of Clara in Paris (1749). Source: Wikipedia

Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, The Rhinoceros and the Human Skeleton (1749)
Source: Wikipedia

Like the earlier rhinoceros in Dürer’s woodcut (also from India and probably sent to Europe by the Portuguese governor, Alphonse Albuquerque), Clara travelled across various places in Europe. In fact, she went to places such as Krakow, Prague, Hanover and many others that we do not have records of. About her origins, however, we can be quite certain. She was probably rescued by the Dutch governor of Chinsurah (near Calcutta), Jan Albert Sichterman, and lived in his house, roaming about in his large garden and often, even coming to the dinner table where he entertained his guests. Sichterman, also called the King or Nabob or Groningen, was a collector of exotic objects and his house in his hometown, the Sichtermanhuis, still contains some of his huge porcelain collection. He apparently even tried to ban Sati while in Bengal although without success. You can read more about him here at the Dutch cemetery in Chinsurah website.

Pietro Longhi's painting of Clara,
Venice (1751). Source: Wikipedia

Clara seems to have been a favourite in the Sichterman household but when she grew too big, the Dutch governor probably donated or sold her to a VOC (Dutch East India Company) sea captain called Douwe Mout van der Meer. Van der Meer took her to Rotterdam and during the voyage, the sailors fed her beer, cheese and choice tidbits while regularly massaging her skin with fish oil (instead of the mud the rhinoceros is used to) to prevent it from drying up. Van der Meer quickly realised the value of Clara as an exotic exhibit and travelled with her across Europe showing her off in various cities and to high society. He became rich overnight, gave up his VOC job and was even awarded a baronetcy by the Austrian emperor. As for Clara, she became the celebrity animal of Europe and indeed the first rhino to be painted accurately by European artists. Glynis Ridley tells the story of Clara’s journey across Europe in her Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2005). Just a year after the English victory at Plassey and the rise of the star of the East India Company in Bengal, Clara died in 1758 in London, far away from home and in the capital city of the would-be rulers of India.