Calcutta (4 page)

This is Calcutta, too.

*

It was, all the same, lunacy for anyone not born and bred in Bengal (or, at least, in India) to settle down here and make an Empire from it. Everything in Nature was against it, the climate most of all. Calcutta is tolerable in winter, when the
temperature
is often in the 70s and when it can become even cooler in the evening; there was a freakish day in January 1899 when it dropped to 44.2 degrees, though it is hard to imagine the cold winds and foggy nights that made Winston Churchill think of London. But by the middle of March the heat is beginning to sear the city to the bone. Between then and the start of the monsoon it can rise to 120 degrees in this part of the world, the thermometer can stick over 100 for days on end, and it rarely falls below 80 even in the middle of the night. It becomes so hot that the tar liquefies on the roads and goes oozing down the drains, and the colossal steel mesh of the Howrah Bridge is habitually four feet longer by day than by night. People go out with black umbrellas for shade, including the policemen trying to sort out the chaos of traffic at the top of Chowringhee, who have umbrellas with special handles that slot into the holsters at their belts so that their arms can remain free; and people
without
umbrellas are apt to hold briefcases and newspapers, books and letters and folds of saris between their heads and the sun; and men walk holding the hems of their dhotis out like sails, to catch any trace of breeze. When Calcutta has a heat wave – which means something well over 100 degrees – the cinemas are packed, like the libraries and reading rooms, because they are almost the only public places in the city which run to air-
conditioning
. On top of the blistering heat comes the humidity, and it is commonplace for that to register 100 per cent.

There is occasional relief from this awful combination. There are odd evenings in April that bring a shower with blue electric flashes in the sky. You can get a storm mat has the
thermometer
down and up again through 30 degrees in half an hour
while the city is bombarded with hailstones an inch and a half across; and the crows caught in mid-flight twist and dodge like fighters in anti-aircraft fire to avoid them, while small boys
alternately
squeal with pain and yelp with delight as they try to catch the pieces of ice before they land. But, generally, Calcutta before the monsoon means being soaked with sweat after
walking
a slow fifty yards; it means not having an inch of dry skin except in air-conditioning; it means shivering with the shock as you walk off the street into a highly-equipped restaurant that feels like a refrigerator for the first few minutes.

And then, about the middle of May, the occasional puffs of cloud that have been in the sky for a week or two begin to roll up more thickly. This is the worst time of all unless the
monsoon
fails and anyone in his senses who could possibly get away would do so then. The monsoon breaks in the first week of June, unless there is to be calamity. It comes down in a torrent to a smashing of thunder. It rains for several hours in solid straight shafts of water. Then it stops and the city steams like a laundry in the sun. Then it rains again as before. It goes on like this for four months, while Calcutta collects almost all its annual quota of 64 inches rainfall. It comes down so fiercely and in such quantity, and Calcutta is so ill-equipped to bear this sudden blessing, that the streets are awash, the motor traffic is stalled, the trams can no longer move and only the
rickshaw
-pullers keep going through the floods, up to their knees and axles in water. This, too, is an awful time and the air is stickier than ever when the rain is not actually pouring. But without it
Calcutta
would be utterly lost. If the monsoon is delayed the city becomes insane with the tension of waiting in that smothering atmosphere; for it knows that if the monsoon failed, terrible things would happen to its people.

This is probably the filthiest climate on earth, then. But apart from the balmy uplands to the North around Darjeeling, it is much the same wherever you go in Bengal, which sits sodden astride the Tropic of Cancer. The thing that makes this the most impossible place of all in this part of India for metropolitan and imperial ambitions, is the structure of the landscape here. Calcutta lies within the wide flat wedge of delta country
containing
the outflows of both the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. The Hooghly is a diversion from the Ganga (which only the English-speaking have known as the Ganges) as it plunges
towards
the Bay of Bengal, eighty-odd miles to the South; and the Mother of the World finds her way to the sea through a
hundred
smaller channels besides. The whole area, thousands of square miles, is simply untamed tropical fen; ‘new mud, old mud and marsh’, as a geographer has called it. The only firm ground is by the river banks, so that villages straggle along the watercourses, surrounded by mangoes, palms, bamboos and
endless
expanses of swamp. When the rains come and the rivers flood, this delta becomes a gigantic inland sea. At any time, it is a perfect breeding ground for malaria and any other disease that thrives on moisture; some of Charnock’s sailors found it so
unhealthy
that they christened their landing place Golgotha. Yet on this bog the British created their capital in India. Nothing but commercial greed could possibly have led to such an idiotic decision.

THE
British were not the first Europeans to come nosing round here. The Portuguese preceded them in Bengal, just as they
preceded
them in India at large. By the start of the seventeenth century they had their powerful stronghold at Goa in the West, and on this side of the sub-continent they had been in and out of favour with local Nawabs for the better part of a hundred years. In favour, they conducted themselves as merchant
seamen
, and another early visitor, the Venetian Cesare Federici, who was in the river in 1578, notes that trade was in ‘rice, cloth of Bombast of diverse sorts, Lacca, great abundance of sugar, mirabolans, dried and preserved, long pepper, oyle of zerzeline, and many other sorts of merchandise’. Out of favour, they
resorted
to piracy in the mouth of the Ganga, from bases on the farther side of the Bay.

The erratic history of the Portuguese in Bengal is more or less summarized by what happened to them in the last few years of their dominance there. In 1630 the Muslim rulers of this
country
had defeated Sebastian Gonzales, in spite of the fact that he commanded 1,000 Portuguese, 2,000 Indians, 200 cavalry and 80 vessels, and had seen him flying in disgrace to Goa. Not all of his compatriots retreated with him, though. Many stayed behind and they were allowed to resettle their old trading post on the west bank, twenty-seven miles upstream of Kalikata, with Michael Rodriguez as governor. For a couple of years there was peace, until the Mogul Emperor appointed a new Governor of Bengal, Cossim Khan, who at once accused the Portuguese of exacting payment from all boats passing their factory and
drawing
off commerce from the ancient port of Satgaon. For three and a half months Cossim Khan besieged the Portuguese, who repeatedly offered to surrender and pay 100,000 rupees in
tribute
, but kept firing on the enemy at the same time. Eventually,
their fortifications were mined and there was much slaughter; the Portuguese skipper of a boat carrying men, women and children blew up his magazine and sank with all hands rather than fall into Muslim hands. Some young people were spared, however, and packed off to the Imperial court in Agra; the girls to the Emperor’s harem, the boys for circumcision and
indoctrination
into the true faith. And there, presumably, they were incorporated into the life of a disconsolate Shah Jehan, and watched him building the Taj Mahal as a shrine for his beloved Mumtaz.

The British had been on the move for a generation by now. Eight businessmen of London had met in Founders’ Hall on 24 September 1599, petitioning their Queen for a charter that would enable them to enjoy ‘a quiet trade’ in the East She had been pleased to grant their request in fine Elizabethan tones: ‘
Whereas
our most dear and loving cousin, George Earl of Cumberland and other our well-beloved subjects … have of our certain knowledge been petitioners unto us for our Royal assent and license to be granted unto them, that they, of their own
Adventures
, costs and charges, as well for the honour of this our realm of England as for the increase of our navigation and
advancement
of trade merchandise … might adventure and set forth one or more voyages, with convenient number of Ships and
Pinnaces
, by way of traffic and merchandise to the East Indies …’ The East India Company had thus been launched and by the time the Portuguese had been thrashed from the village of Hooghly, the British had a secure foothold of warehouses at Surat in the West; elsewhere, they were still probing for
opportunity.

They found it in Bengal when yet another misfortune befell Shah Jehan. In 1636 one of his daughters was badly burned but she was successfully treated by Mr Gabriel Boughton, surgeon of the ship
Hopewell
,
which was trading in the Deccan. He was asked to name his reward by a grateful Emperor and ‘with that liberality which characterizes Britons, sought not for any private emolument, but solicited that his nation might have liberty to trade, free of all duties, in Bengal, and to establish factories in that country’. The comment is by Charles Stewart, writing
loyally after enjoying a majority in Calcutta and a professorship at Haileybury, over a century later. Nevertheless, Boughton’s characteristic request was granted and when, in the following year, he treated a lady in the harem of the Emperor’s son (we are not told what the complaint was this time) the British were permitted to open more factories at Ballasore and Hooghly. And although the indispensable Dr Boughton died soon afterwards, his countrymen were now at liberty to export vast quantities of saltpetre, apart from other local merchandise, which was
profitably
much in demand in their Civil War at home.

The scenery was being assembled for Job Charnock’s entry. He arrived in India in 1655 and at the start of 1657 appears on the Company’s registers as a junior member of the Council of the Bay of Bengal at a salary of
£
20 a year. For a man who started so much we know disappointingly little of him; the trading registers and the diaries that he kept are merely log books, giving nothing away of the man himself. We are left with a series of observed impressions which, more than not, sound more like gossip than precise reporting. But they are all very colourful. He is first up at Patna as chief of the factory and it is there, in 1663, that he picks his wife; the beautiful widow Maria, who has been condemned by suttee to perish in flames alongside her husband’s corpse; but Charnock, who has simply gone to gape at a heathen practice, is smitten by her appearance and snatches her from the pyre. They move down to Hooghly, to more factory management. For the next twenty years they are domestically preoccupied with raising a family of four in a variety of Company posts in Bengal, and it seems to have been a love match; after Maria died, Charnock is said to have sacrificed a cock each year on the anniversary at her tomb.

Otherwise, life is difficult. Charnock is involved in Company arguments about precedence but there are more serious disputes with the local Muslim rulers, after one of which Charnock is flogged. The Muslims become more belligerent, which calls for retribution and Admiral Nicholson is summoned to provide it. Although he cannonades and burns 500 buildings (including a Company factory with
£
300,000 worth of goods inside) the
British
for the moment are fighting a losing battle. Charnock by
now, in 1686, has been made Governor of the Bay of Bengal, answerable to a Council of Directors based in Madras. He is in Hooghly again but he and his men are forced to retreat
downstream
to Sutanuti, which is one of three villages almost on top of each other on the east bank; the other two are Govindpur and Kalikata. A large army is chasing them so they fall back again to the island of Hijili, in the mouth of the Ganga, which is diseased and without water, and where half these Europeans are dead within three months. There are peace talks and Charnock returns to Sutanuti, but by the beginning of 1687 there is
hostility
again and this time Charnock sails out of Bengal and down to Madras in the frigate
Defence.