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.

"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?