Scallan's Illustrations for The Adventures of Bairam Khan

I had written an article on Frank Clinger Scallan for Scroll. Scallan also did the illustrations for C.H. Donald's The Adventures of Bairam Khan, published by Rai Sahib M. Gulab Singh & Sons of Lahore in 1930. Here are low-res versions of these wonderful full-page engravings.

The Death of Much Machee, the High Priest of Ghee Hung Chinese Church

H.E.A. Cotton

Going through one of H.E.A. Cotton's copies of Calcutta Old and New I came across several newspaper clippings the author had retained probably for future use. Among them is this report of unknown provenance on a Chinese funeral, which was mentioned in the Empire.

Let us all be buried in the ways that we severally prefer. Who is for the ceremonial recently observed at a funeral ceremony in Calcutta? It was the occasion when the remains of Much Machee, the High Priest of Ghee Hung Chinese Church, were interred in the Chinese burial-ground of that city. ''The body,'' says the ''Empire,'' ''was placed in a long box, and at the feet of the corpse was placed a table loaded with roasted sucking pigs and lambs and a variety of Chinese sweets. Two Phoophoo bands''--all Anglo-Indians will recognise with a shudder what that means--''were in attendance, and the music included pieces like 'The Raja of Bhong' and 'Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.'''

"The Raja of Bhong" appears to be some sort of musical drama written by Adrian Ross (1859-1933). Ross was a renowned writer of musical comedies, popular in his day. In 1902 he had written in The Tattler a comic critique of Kipling's attempts at writing verse:

Give us the blending of East and West, of new and of old;
But don't go writing verses in the style of a common scold.
For it makes the metre rocky and it makes the rhyming weak,
And you never were a master of poetical technique.

Of "The Raja of Bhong" I have only so far found these stanzae that were added later:

There's a writer of rhymes that appear in The Times,
Who is down upon football and cricket,
And he pours out his soul on the oaf at the goal,
Or the flannelette fool at the wicket!
There was violence feared when his poem appeared,
But the poet was hardly a dreamer;
When the oafs in the mud came to look for his blood,
He was off to the Cape on a steamer!
Peace ! peace ! leave him in peace!
Though he pitches it rather too strong;
We'll forget how he sails if he'll tell us some tales
Of the beautiful valley of Bhong!

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" was a Civil War time song, composed by George F. Root in 1864. Here is a rendition -- trying to imagine what the funeral must have sounded like!

Gauhar Jaan as Hamlet

1898 onwards, Munshi Mehdi Hasan had written a number Urdu of adaptations from Shakespeare's plays. His Khun-e-nahaq (1898), Vikram Singh Thakur notes, "was transformed into a musical. The play opens in the court of Claudius 'celebrating the nuptials of Claudius and Gertrude with dance and music.'" Music became an integral part of these performances.

Thakur mentions that trained singers such as Amir Jan, Moti Jan, Gauhar Jaan, and Munnibai became associated with the Parsi stage.

In 1905, we are told, the Corinthian Theatre in Calcutta was hosting a Parsi theatre version of Hamlet in 1905, alongside "the tableaux dance of Kamr-al-Zaman-Badoora" on "bioscope worked by electricity." (Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollyood)

Gauhar Jaan, born Angelina Yeoward, was of Armenian descent. Her celebrity as a vocal performer reached foreign shores in the form of recordings and postcards and matchbox labels, as Vikram Sampath notes.

I am not aware of any reference to Gauhar Jaan playing Hamlet, or even posing as Hamlet for postcards, but here we are at the Corinthian Theatre, looking at this unlikely but amazing combination.

The postcard is currently part of my personal collection.

Canasta in Bombay

An attorney and an architect walked into the Jockey Club. In fact, it appears one of them lived half his life there for a while. Philip E. Orbanes writes that the Uruguayan  attorney, Segundo Santos, had become addicted to Bridge some time in 1939. He decided to switch to something lighter and with his friend, Alberto Serrato went on to invent a game called "Canasta" -- "a combination of the best elements of Bridge, Rummy, and a Rummy variant called 'cooncan.'" Canasta is the Spanish word for "basket", and the origin of the name is attributed by Orbanes to an act of whimsy.

The Illustrated Weekly of India reported on 18 March 1951, that the game had hit Bombay, and it like in many other great cities before it, had swept through the city's card-playing community.

As a non-card-player, I have often wondered at these phases that the communities of players seem to go through. Is it possible that the game-fatigue is perhaps not realized until something fresh suddenly appears on the horizon behind the hands they hold? I like thinking of how games travel -- of the figure of this magician, who cannot suggest something too unfamiliar to the players for then they may be taken for an outsider. Yet they know how to defamiliarize the familiar, how to make the shapes and numbers dance to a subtly different tune.

"Jayee," who wrote the Sportfolio column(bad puns are as old as language), reported that the "card game which began in an Uruguayan roadside cafe a couple of years ago, and soon swept the United States like a forest fire" has a "large portion of card-playing Bombay...in its thrall." It seems s/he had taken the trouble of learning that game, declaring it as a reasonably easy process. Among the game's most famous devotees, Jayee lists Dwight Eisenhower and Clifton Webb.

Is the game still played widely in Mumbai? Canasta seems to have reached Houston, via a few India exponents of the game.