The Synagogue with No Jews

One of the hidden treasures of old Calcutta is the Maghen David synagogue along with the remains of the Neveh Shalom Synagogue immediately next door. It is located just north of the area known as Old China Bazaar, which is no longer a China bazaar, and similarly, the area that once housed the Jewish population of the city no longer boasts any Jews. Once, it is reported, there was a sizeable Jewish presence in the city - many thousands - and the remaining synagogue is evidence of the fact. But, just as the Chinese population has dwindled to nothing, so too the Jews. Today, the present writer was informed, there are no more than about twenty Jews resident in Calcutta, too few to constitute an active congregation of observant worshippers. Accordingly, the synagogue lays idle, although it is fully preserved. It is hidden behind rows of street vendors and the mad bustle of the modern city. It is difficult to locate, and the entry door even more so. The writer tried several entry ways, all of them barred up or barricaded, before finding an iron gateway that opened into the yard of the synagogue. It was padlocked, but a young Hindoo motioned to come forward and wait and in due course a Mohametan fellow emerged from inside with the keys. 

It is the irony of the Maghen David synagogue that, these days, there are so few Jews in Calcutta that the building has to be minded by a Muselman. He was happy to open up the building, turn on the lights and give a tour, explaining a few points of history in his broken English. There is an old Jewish lady of Calcutta, he said, who has been resident since before Partition, and she visits the synagogue every sabbath, largely to check upon it and to ensure the building is still intact. There are not enough Jews to form a quorum, though. Two copies of the Torah lay unused behind curtains. In every respect, though, the building is in magnificent condition - the synagogue with no Jews. It was built in 1884 at the sole expense of Mr. Elias David Joseph Ezra, Esquire, on the grounds of the older adjoining synagogue, the Neveh Shalom, as an inscription at the entry way explains. 

There is a large sign at the entry way explaining that photographs are strictly forbidden, but the young Muslim who allowed the present writer into the building insisted. "You take picture," he said. "May I?" "Yes, yes." He received twenty rupees for his trouble. Some of the resulting snap shots are below. (Click on a picture for a larger view.) 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Mircea Eliade of 82 Ripon Street

Leaning against the walled edge, I looked down into the courtyard. I remembered the day I had seen Maitreyi stretched out on the steps, laughing - a day which had seemed to last for several years. Years had also passed since Maitreyi had come to ask me nervously, "When will my father be back, please?"... I did not understand her. She seemed a child, a primitive. Her words drew me, her incoherent thinking and her naivete enchanted me. For a long time, I was to flatter myself by think­ing of our relationship as that of civilized man and barbarian...

From BENGAL NIGHTS, Mircea Eliade

Once the ‘City of Palaces’, the ‘London of the East’, much of Calcutta – 70 years after Indian independence – is in advanced decay. The colonial buildings of the city are rotting from sheer neglect. A prime example is 82 Ripon St., formerly a large, elegant, colonial boarding house at which the great scholar of religion, Mr. Mircea Eliade, was resident during his eventful but personally tragic sojourn in the city in the late 1920s. The present writer made the journey down to Ripon St. on foot yesterday and found the residence in complete disrepair. It is still there, but now boarded up, and occupied by families of poor people who elsewhere would be described as ‘squatters’. It is a sad spectacle and underlines the melancholy story of Eliade’s time in the city. It is a story worth relating, since readers may not be aware of it.

Eliade had been invited to Calcutta by the foremost Indian scholar on Samkhya Yoga, Mr. Sarundranath Dasgupta, author of a voluminous and prestigious history of Indian philosophy, and one of the most important and most celebrated Indian scholars of his day. Young and brilliant, Eliade took a room at 82 Ripon St., then owned and managed by a Mrs. Perris, and from there attended Dasgupta’s lectures and received personal instruction in Indian languages. At this Eliade excelled. It is said that he acquired Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali concurrently in a matter of months and showed such promise that Dasgupta embraced him as a protégé. Once or twice a week he would travel from Ripon Street to visit Dasgupta’s home and there began assisting the Indian scholar’s young daughter, Maitreyi Devi, herself a poetess, in the arduous task of compiling an index for her father’s masterwork.

A terrible misunderstanding followed. Dasgupta saw the European student as a vehicle for relocating his family to Europe. The political situation in India was increasingly agitated and Dasgupta needed medical care difficult to access in India. Accordingly, he set about “adopting” Eliade and approached various contacts in Europe using Eliade’s name. To this end, he invited Eliade to move from the boarding house in Ripon Street and to take up residence in the Dasgupta household in a role that Eliade described as “his favorite pupil and, in a certain sense, his adoptive son.”

Eliade, however, interpreted this gesture differently. It seemed to him that Professor Dasgupta was very deliberately grooming him as a son-in-law and that the father had engineered a situation of intimacy between Eliade and Maitreyi Devi. The two young people worked together in the family library for hours every day and spent more and more time in each other’s company. Then, as Eliade relates it, the inevitable happened, and one day their hands met over a box of index cards and both of them found it impossible to let go. They fell madly in love. Eliade was twenty-three at the time, and Maitreyi Devi sixteen. Living together in Dasgupta’s house, they began a romance which consumed both of them until, on a fateful day in September 1930, Dasgupta discovered what had been going on.

He was enraged. A huge scandal broke. Dasgupta’s own plans came undone. He believed his hospitality had been betrayed. The terrible force of Hindoo propriety had been violated by the foreigner. The very sanctity of the household itself had been violated. The aggrieved father immediately threw his “favourite pupil and adoptive son” out of his house. Crushed, shocked, heartbroken, Eliade scuttled back to Ripon Street before fleeing Calcutta altogether. The love-stricken Maitreyi Devi was shamed and eventually moved by her father into the countryside where she was made to marry a Bengali man.

The matter did not stop there, however. Repercussions – terrible repercussions - continued for many years. Most famously, Eliade later wrote a loosely fictionalized version of the events in a novel entitled Bengal Nights in which he made it clear that his relationship with Maitreyi Devi was a physical one. He portrays her coming to his room in secret in the night. This account was published in Europe but, for various reasons, did not reach Calcutta until decades later, except by rumor. Maitreyi Devi had heard that Eliade had written a novel about their love affair but she did not read it until quite late in life. When she did, in 1972, she was outraged that the novel compromised her virtue. She, in her turn, wrote a rebuttal entitled It Does Not Die, in which she vehemently denies that her romance with the foreign student was ever sexual. There are thus conflicting accounts of the romance, although both Eliade and Maitreyi Devi – who never met again – seem to have both regarded it as the great love of their life up to the day they died. It was a tragic romance of Shakespearean proportions.

Worse, though, it destroyed Dasgupta. His wife had pleaded with him on behalf of Maitreya Devi but, in the role of traditional Hindoo father, he was intractable. This left permanent tensions in his marriage and his family. The work of indexing his book was taken up by another student, a Hindoo lady, Sumara Mitra, to whom the professor drew ever closer. It seems that the scorned and vengeful daughter, Maitreyi Devi, took exception to this working relationship and accused her father of the hypocrisy of having an extra-marital affair. She returned home from the countryside to spy on her father. At one time, it is related, as Sumara approached the family home one day, Maitreyi climbed onto the rooftop and called out to the neighborhood, “Come and see what scandal is happening in our house!” She led a conspiracy against her father, and eventually convinced her brothers of her father’s misdeeds. The sons beat their father up.

Maitreyi Devi also distributed leaflets around Dasgupta’s university denouncing him as an adulterer. She set out to destroy his reputation. She was largely successful. In the process, she also destroyed his health. After a row with his wife, Dasgupta suffered a heart attack and fled the family home to be nursed by friends in a guesthouse at Sanskrit College. When he finally found the opportunity to travel to Europe – this was now after the Second World War – he was estranged from his family and in such poor health he remained bedridden in England for almost five years. Sumara Mitra fled Calcutta with him and they married – although this seems to have been for administrative reasons (and technically made Dasgupta a bigamist).

In any case, Dasgupta’s life was left in ruins. It all followed from the dreadful day he uncovered the love of Mircea Eliade and Maitryi Devi. Events left Eliade and Maitryi Devi as star-crossed lovers, but an even more savage fate befell the hostile father. Readers should be aware that, prior to these events, Professor Dasgupta was a man of extraordinary renown, and not only as a scholar. At a young age he was hailed as a “khokā bhagavān”, a “boy god” and the saint Vijay Krishna Goswami had once declared him to be in that special class of being who remember their previous lives. He was regarded as a person of great spiritual qualities. At one time, when he was young, his father had to take him away from Calcutta to protect him from the crush of people who longed to be in his presence. He was guru to many. Eliade himself, as he makes clear in his autobiography, regarded the professor as his guru, his life-teacher, and speaks of a bond that transcended earthly life. Dasgupta’s knowledge of the Hindoo philosophical tradition was unsurpassed in his generation. He was awarded several PhDs and an array of medals for high academic achievement. He was made a Commander of the Indian Empire, the highest honour of the land.

After the Eliade affair – that tragic and catalytic misunderstanding - and then the scandal involving Sumara Mitra that followed it, orchestrated, it seems, by the mortally disappointed daughter, Sarundranath Dasgupta’s reputation, like his health, was in tatters and it never recovered. He was largely forsaken by the academic world and was then forgotten. He moved to Europe on the eve of independence in circumstances of disgrace and, for whatever reason, modern India has never seen fit to restore his name to its former glory. His work, especially his multi-volume History of Indian Philosophy, endures, but it has never received the recognition it deserves. He was a man eclipsed by events. Poor Dasgupta. These days he is an obscure name from a former era.

This is the harrowing tale of human weakness that the present author had in mind when he stood outside the dilapidated shell of 82 Ripon Street in Calcutta yesterday. These are the events that defined Eliade’s twenty month visit to Calcutta. The events were a full generation ago now. They were immortalized in book and counter-book (and even in a pretty ordinary 1990s film starring Hugh Grant) but they tell a timeless story of love, loss, pride, bitterness, revenge. The pity is that it has faded so completely from the local memory. It belongs to a Calcutta that no longer exists. There seems no readiness in contemporary Calcutta to revive it. It is only because Mircea Eliade went on to become one of the great pioneering scholars of the 20th C. that these events, which are otherwise all too human, like the predations of time itself, mean anything at all.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

John George Lang - The Usual Compliments

A sketch by John Lang.

It is some years since I first landed in Calcutta. I was in no way connected with the Government, and was consequently an "interloper" or "adventurer." These were the terms applied by certain officials to European merchants, indigo-planters, shopkeepers, artisans, barristers, attorneys, and others. It was not long before I made up my mind to become a wanderer in the East...

Too few Australians have heard of John George Lang (1816-1864). He deserves renown as Australia’s first novelist – he was an associate of Charles Dickens - but also as a traveler, an adventurer, a pioneering journalist, an orientalist and a prominent Hindoopile. He must count as one of the most colourful Australian characters of the first half of the 19th C. and yet he remains almost unknown in his native land. His Jewish father had been sent to Botany Bay as a convict with the First Fleet for the heinous crime of stealing spoons but was later emancipated and became a free citizen of early New South Wales. The colonial-born John took William Wentworth as his model and pursued a career in law as a path to better standing. With a gift for languages, he studied Greek and Latin, which won him passage to Cambridge. After that he travelled to British Hindoostan and it was there that he made his mark. His grave is there, in the hill station of Mussorie, and has recently been relocated and restored from neglect by the noted writer Ruskin Bond who has also advanced the cause of bringing Lang’s life and work to wider attention.

It was in the Modern Book Depot in Calcutta – an esteemed establishment run by the articulate Mr Prem Prekash – that the present writer encountered the new edition of Lang’s primary volume of travel writings ‘Wanderings in India and Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan’ – first published in 1859, with sections appearing earlier in Mr. Dicken’s magazine Household Words - and has been reading it during the sticky Calcutta afternoons. It is indeed a series of sketches, largely but not completely autobiographical, relating life in India with sympathetic insights into the land and people in the period prior to the Mutiny of 1857. 

Having himself first arrived in Calcutta, Mr. Lang, not being an employee of the East India Company, found himself regarded as an interloper, and taking to the role, he immersed himself into the India of his day by quickly acquiring the Hindoostanti and Persian languages. Thereupon, he entered into adventures in both law and journalism, bringing to both fields a characteristic Australian swagger, always on the wrong side of the Company. Most famously, he represented and won a landmark case for the Mahometan princess, the Ranee of Jhansi, in her struggle against the Company’s despotic policy of land seizures under the so-called Doctrine of Lapse. Where there was no male heir the Company would seize land from Indian nobles. Mr. Lang fought this injustice on her behalf with antipodean vigor and imagination and scored a major victory against the Company’s despotism.

Similarly, his journalistic career was marked by fights with the Company and with other vested interests. He led a newspaper in Calcutta called The Optimist and then, more famously, one called The Mofussilite, founded in 1845. He used these as vehicles for his quite prolific writing – stories, poems, essays, translations - and as forums for exposes of the maddening incompetence of British authorities in their dealings with Indians. This won him enemies in high places, sure enough, and he was at one time jailed for libel. Afterwards, he travelled throughout the land, enjoying the patronage of wealthy clients. In 1851 he again defeated the East India Company in a landmark legal case, on this occasion defending the rights of Mr. Jottee Prasad who had provided for British troops during the Sikh Wars but had then been cheated of what he was owed. Mr. Prasad, like the Ranee of Jhansi in the earlier instance, showered Lang with expensive gifts which enabled him to live as he pleased, game hunting, trekking and living a life of flamboyant indulgence among Indian nobility. He was, as his volume of Wanderings attests, a great lover of the Indians, often a champion of their rights, and an attentive student of their ways and customs.

For all of that, thankfully, he fails to qualify as a multicultural relativist sop in the contemporary mode. Wanderings is not a book that will please the post-colonial intellectual of our time. Lang is a British man through and through, although an Australian one, with a typical Australian disdain for overwrought authority. His advocacy for the rights of the Indians was not politically ideological. He was no traitor to the Empire. He merely believed – in an entirely English manner – in the rule of law, with an Australian egalitarian application of the same. He disliked rogues and corruption. In his untarnished view the good peoples of Hindoostan were subjects of Her Majesty, Empress of India, and as such had rights. 

Nor, might we say, was he a great writer, although he is certainly an entertaining one, direct, light, cogent, with keen observation and a good sense of humor, usually at the expense of the natives whose company he loved to keep. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the fifth chapter of Wanderings where he describes the exchange of “compliments” with a Maharajah:

THE USUAL COMPLIMENTS

Here sat the Maharajah on a Turkey carpet, and reclining slightly on a huge bolster. In front of him were his hookah, a sword, and several nosegays. His highness rose, came forward, took my hand, led me to the carpet, and begged of me to be seated on a cane-bottomed arm-chair, which had evidently been placed ready for my especial ease and occupation. After the usual compliments had passed, the Maharajah inquired if I had eaten well. But, perhaps, the general reader would like to know what are "the usual compliments."

Native Rajah: "The whole world is ringing with the praise of your illustrious name."

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj. You are very good."

Native Rajah: "From Calcutta to Cabul—throughout the whole of Hindoostan—every tongue declares that you have no equal. Is it true?"

Humble Sahib (who, if he knows anything of Asiatic manners and customs, knows that he must not contradict his host, but eat his compliments with a good appetite). "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "The acuteness of your perceptions, and the soundness of your understanding, have, by universal report, became as manifest as even the light of the sun itself." Then, turning to his attendants of every degree, who, by this time, had formed a circle round me and the Rajah, he put the question, "Is it true, or not?"

The attendants, one and all, declare that it was true; and inquire whether it could be possible for a great man like the Maharajah to say that which was false.

Native Rajah: "The Sahib's father is living?"

Humble Sahib: "No; he is dead, Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "He was a great man?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj. You have honoured the memory of my father, and exalted it in my esteem, by expressing such an opinion."

Native Rajah: "And your mother? She lives?"

Humble Sahib: "By the goodness of God, such is the case."

Native Rajah: "She is a very handsome woman?"

Humble Sahib: "On that point, Maharaj, I cannot offer an opinion."

Native Rajah: "You need not do so. To look in your face is quite sufficient. I would give a crore of rupees (one million sterling) to see her only for one moment, and say how much I admired the intelligent countenance of her son. I am going to England next year. Will the Sahib favour me with her address?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Here the Native Rajah calls to the moonshee to bring pen, ink, and paper. The moonshee comes, sits before me, pen in hand, looks inquiringly into my eyes, and I dictate as follows, laughing inwardly all the while: "Lady Bombazine, Munnymunt, ka uper, Peccadilleemee, Bilgrave Isqueere, Sunjons wood-Cumberwill;" which signifies this: "Lady Bombazine, on the top of the Monument, in Piccadilly, Belgrave Square, St. Johns Wood, Camberwell." This mystification must be excused by the plea that the Rajah's assertions of his going to Europe are as truthful as Lady Bombazine's address.

The Maharajah then gives instructions that that document shall be preserved amongst his most important papers, and resumes the conversation.

Native Rajah: "The Sahib has eaten well?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "And drunk?"

Humble Sahib: "Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "The Sahib will smoke hookah?"

Humble Sahib: "The Maharajah is very good."

A hookah is called for by the Rajah; and then at least a dozen voices repeat the order: "Hookah lao, Sahib ke waste." (Bring a hookah for the Sahib.) Presently the hookah is brought in. It is rather a grand affair, but old, and has evidently belonged to some European of extravagant habits. Of course, no native would smoke out of it (on the ground of caste), and it is evidently kept for the use of the Sahib logue.

While I am pulling away at the hookah, the musahibs, or favourites of the Rajah, flatter me, in very audible whispers. "How well he smokes!" "What a fine forehead he has!" "And his eyes! how they sparkle!" "No wonder he is so clever!" "He will be Governor-General some day." "Khuda-kuren!" (God will have it so.)

Native Rajah: "Sahib, when you become Governor-General, you will be a friend to the poor?"

Humble Sahib (speaking from the bottom of his heart). "Most assuredly, Maharaj."

Native Rajah: "And you will listen to the petition of every man, rich and poor alike."

Humble Sahib: "It will be my duty so to do."

Native Rajah (in a loud voice): "Moonshee!"

Moonshee (who is close at hand). "Maharaj, Protector of the Poor."

Native Rajah: "Bring the petition that I have laid before the Governor-General."

The moonshee produces the petition, and at the instance of the Rajah, reads, or rather sings it aloud. The Rajah listens with pleasure to its recital of his own wrongs, and I affect to be astounded that so much injustice can possibly exist. During my rambles in India I have been the guest of some scores of rajahs, great and small, and I never knew one who had not a grievance. He had either been wronged by the government, or by some judge, whose decision had been against him. In the matter of the government, it was a sheer love of oppression that led to the evil of which he complained; in the matter of the judge, that functionary had been bribed by the other party.

It was with great difficulty that I kept my eyes open while the petition—a very long one—was read aloud...

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Durga in the Ganges

In a previous post concerning the Hindoo goddess Durga, or Durga Maa, which is to say Mother Durga, the present author offered an explanation of her cultus in terms of its soli-lunar symbolism. In popular understandings among Hindoostanis a more political symbolism prevails, whereby Durga represents the very soil of India herself, and so her festival in Calcutta, the Durga Puja, takes on more nationalistic signficances. Such lesser understands developed among the Calcutta intelligentsia during the 20th C. in their struggle against the British. It is one of the many ways in which the festival, and the cultus of the goddess, has been distorted over time. Sociology displaces cosmology. This is always a sure sign of religious decay. Principally, though – as noted in a previous post – there has been, in this case, a calendrical distortion. Once the Durga Puja was attached to the spring equinox. Since the 17th C. – a time coinciding with the arrival of the British – it was dislodged and has become attached to the autumn equinox. Instead of being a celebration of the restoration of order after the dark of winter, it now celebrates the end of the monsoon. 

The present author was fortunate enough to witness the climax of the festival yesterday. It was a wild, noisy affair marked with drums and other festivities. The Durga idols are removed from their homes in “pandals” and hoisted into the back of trucks and lorries and, with much fanfare and hoopla, taken down to one of the ghats along the Ganges (i.e. the Hoogly River). They are then thrown into the river where they float downstream and out to sea, although, there being so many of them, the custom now is to clear the river of them with dredges before this happens so that only a few actually make the journey to the Bay of Bengal.

Witnessing this event revealed an important detail of cosmological symbolism of which this author was not previously aware and which is not mentioned in any of the written accounts he had previously read. Namely, that before the Durga idol is tossed into the waters of the river it is the custom for it to be spun around seven times. The Durga idols, readers will appreciate, are heavy, being constructed of straw and clay and wood. Teams of Hindoo men lift them from trucks, carry or drag them to the ghat, and then – with great effort, spin them around, once, twice… seven times. Then, when there is space and opportunity – guided by police and other officials who control the whole chaos, there being dozens of teams of Hindoos arriving with their idols all the afternoon, the statue is pushed into the water to shouts of joys and the splashing of water. The pious dive in with her or else run the sacred waters of the river through their hair. 

The turning of the Durga seven times before she is dissolved in the river, surely, is a motif of cosmological significance. The river, readers must understand, is itself a terrestrial correlate of the celestial river (the Milky Way), and so the ocean is the terrestrial correlate of the great and infinite darkness of the sky. Durga herself represents the same. She is, as the conquering type of Kali Maa, as noted in a further previous post, that deity that the Greeks called Night. (Here, the conjunction of symbolisms between the darkness beyond the stars and the black soil of the earth is crucial, for Durga is both.) The seven turns prior to returning her to the river signify the seven planets and their courses. The symbolism is quite plain. There is certainly no political or sociological meaning to this custom. It points to a cosmological truth.

The impressive thing about this climax to the festival, too, is the theological fact that, finally, the idols are transient. It is a celebration of impermanence. The Durga statues are made by the potters of the city with great love and care. They are housed in beautiful, elaborate pandals (temporary temples) – typically placed at crossroads (a further cosmological motif, the crossroad being the terrestrial correlate of the points where the ecliptic and equator cross at the equinoxes.) It is a vastly elaborate business. The statues are clothed and painted and decorated with jewelry. But they only stand for a short while. Then they are taken to the river and destroyed. Next year they will be made all over again. The theological lesson of this is that the idols are impermanent and merely symbols or emblems. The Mohamedan will often chide the Hindoo for worshipping idols. Prophet Mohamed himself takes the title ‘Smasher of Idols’. But yesterday this present author witnessed the Hindoos smashing their own idols – to the point that the river was choked with them. And as they smashed them the Hindoos shouted with joy. The festival underlines the fact that these images of Mother Durga are merely clay and straw and the Hindoo does not worship the clay and straw but rather the divine reality represented by that image. Idolatry, of course, is a confusion of this point. There is no confusion in the Durga Puja. No one mistakes the image for the reality it represents. The image is dissolved in the consuming waters of the Ganges. Durga Maa is other than her image.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Mausoleum of Job Charnock

Mr. Job Charnock Esq. was the man who founded the city of Calcutta, but not according to the High Court of West Bengal. In an odious piece of spiteful revisionism in 2003 the Court, led by a submission from a team of nationalist historians, ruled, to its great discredit, that Calcutta was a major trading port prior to Charnock and that all references to Mr. Charnock as founder of the city were to be erased in perpetuity from the official documents, records and school history books. This was part of the post-colonial tantrum that led to the trivial name change from the Angloform “Calcutta” to the more indigenous sounding but hardly more informative “Kolkata”.

The case of Job Charnock is a singular instance of the type of petty and juvenile revisionism with which post-colonial intellectuals and activists concern themselves. In this instance they do so against the evidence of the known facts. The simple truth is that prior to Job Charnock this salubrious location on the Hoogley River consisted of three villages and a jungle and not much else. The location, marked especially by the Kali temple at Kalighat, was mentioned in earlier documents, to be sure, but it nevertheless consisted of three villages and jungle and not much else. It was indeed Mr. Charnock, an officer of the British East India Company, who proposed it as the location for a trading base that subsequently became Fort William. And it was through the vision of Mr. Charnock that the location was developed by the East India Company, and later the Raj, as the ‘London of the East’, a great prosperous city of Hindoostan, a safe port just up river from the Bay of Bengal. Dress it up how they may, the resentful and small-minded Anglophobes who engineered the rewriting of the city’s history cannot defy the plain truth of the matter. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008 edition, sets the record straight:

It is mostly due to Charnock's imagination, his vision, and his commitment to what he considered was right that the English transformed three small villages on an inhospitable tract of riverbank into what was to become the premier city in India ... Of all the great cities of modern India, Calcutta it is that owes its existence to the vision and commitment of one man.

* * *

The mausoleum of Job Charnock is now in the grounds of the historic St. John’s Church near Delhousie Square in what was once the centre of Calcutta city. It is built of a local mineral named after him, Charnockite and houses the earliest European graves in Calcutta, considerably older than those graves found in the old cemetery at the south end of Park Road. (See previous post.)

The tomb of Mr. Charnock himself is marked in a beautiful Latin inscription, as follows:

D.O.M. Jobus Charnock, Armiger Anglus et nup. in hoc regno. Bengalensi dignissimum Anglorum Agens Mortalitatis suae exuvias sub hoc marmore deposuit, ut in spe beatae resurrectionis ad Christi judicis adventum obdormirent. Qui postquam in solo non-suo peregrinatus esset diu reversus est domum suae aeternitatis decimo die 10th Januarii 1692. Pariter Jacet Maria, Iobi Primogenita, Carole Eyre Anglorum hicci Praefecti. Conjux charissima. Quae Obiit 19 die Februarii A.D. 1696–97.

Translation:

In the hands of God Almighty, Job Charnock, English knight and recently the most worthy agent of the English in this Kingdom of Bengal, left his mortal remains under this marble so that he might sleep in the hope of a blessed resurrection at the coming of Christ the Judge. After he had journeyed onto foreign soil he returned after a little while to his eternal home on the 10th day of January 1692. By his side lies Mary, first-born daughter of Job, and dearest wife of Charles Eyre, the English prefect in these parts. She died on 19 February AD 1696–7.

* * *

The mausoleum also includes the notable grave of William Hamilton, the British surgeon who, famously, cured the Mughal Emperor Farrukseer of swelling in the groin. The emperor had been due to marry a princess from Jodhpur; it was Hamilton’s cure that permitted the marriage to proceed. Farrukseer was delighted. Hamilton was handsomely rewarded. The East India Company was given the right to trade duty-free out of Calcutta and Hamilton received an elephant, a horse, five thousand rupees in money, two diamond rings, a jewelled aigrette, a set of gold buttons, and models of all his instruments in gold. His plaque includes an inscription in Persian:

* * * 

More intriguing than these notable graves are those marked in the paving around the mausoleum. In many cases they are so worn that the names, dates and inscriptions cannot be made out. These too are early graves of the men and women of the East India Company who first created a fort and trading post on the Hoogley River near the Bay of Bengal. What makes these graves intriguing is that most of them display the skull and cross bones. As with the graves in the Park Road cemetery there are no indications of Christian piety, and least of all crucifixes. Instead, in these cases, the conspicuous iconography is of the skull and crossed bones. Here are some samples:

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Tenshin's Book of Tea & the Chai Wallah

Okakura Kakuzo, Tenshin

There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation... It has not the arrogance of wine, the self- consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.

Among the many excellent photographs on display in the Japanese section of the Tagore museum at Jorsanko in north Calcutta are some intriguing pictures showing the Indian sage in the company of Okakura Kakuzo, also known as Tenshin. They caught the present author's attention because he has previously read Tenshin's famous and eccentric little treatise on tea, The Book of Tea, and because he had no idea that Tagore was an associate of that Japanese writer. The photographs raised many questions about contacts and context. They also sent this writer back to his edition of The Book of Tea, a wonderful little book that is a paean to tea drinking, especially in relation to Japanese aesthetics and Taoist and Buddhist philosophy. It is subtitled 'A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture & the Simple Life':

In this work, Tenshin - now regarded as somewhat old-fashioned in his aesthetic theories - expounds the doctrine, nay the religion, of "Teaism", (as he calls it) a whole world-view, and specifically a view of the world of the Orient, centred upon tea. And why not? As Tenshin writes, "Mankind has done worse!" He asks:

Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself....

And thus begins his extended meditation upon the celestial beverage as the cultural bond of the Orient. In an earlier book, Ideals of the East, Tenshin composed a famous statement of his philosophy that is partially reiterated in The Book of Tea. Like Tagore, he was a Pan-Asianist with a strong internationalist identity. In this sense neither of the two men were narrow nationalists. They have sometimes been criticised and even despised by their countrymen for this. It was a universal perspective, inclusive of the great virtues of Asian civilization, they shared. Tenshin writes:


"Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life."

In The Book of Tea he places tea-drinking at the centre of this Pan-Asian vision. There are certain ironies attached to this, however. Tenshin, like Tagore, promoted the virtues of the 'East' against what he called the 'White Disaster' of European colonialism. Yet he wrote all his works in English and it was in fact the British who joined both sides of the Himalayas with tea. We might think of tea as natural to India - the finest teas, Darjeeling and Assam, come from India after all - yet it was the British who introduced tea growing south of the Himalayas as an economic foil against the Chinese, and it was the British who deliberately promoted tea drinking to the Indian population. Far from being integral to the traditions of Hindoostan, it was only as recently as the 1920s that tea drinking became commonplace throughout the Indian sub-continent. India and China may constitute the two sides of a single Asia, as Tenshin proposes, but it was the White Devil and episodes of European imperialism that made tea the common beverage of both civilizations. Pan-Asian "Teaism" is as much a creation of the British as it is a natural feature of traditional Asian unity.

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Reading Tenshin's Book of Tea while residing in the back streets of old Calcutta one is confronted by the stark contrast of raw India against refined Japan. There is certainly nothing of the Japanese tea ceremony to be found in the Indian approach to the beverage. The Japanese make tea drinking a fine art: perfectly subtle, beautiful, aesthetic. They discern countless subtleties of flavour in a wide variety of teas according to soil and climate and mode of preparation. The Indian approach, on the other hand, lacks all subtlety. It is a raw and abundant joy, an earthy festivity, but not by any means a refined art.

India’s distinctive tea culture resides in the institution of the chai wallah. They are on every street corner. The tea is strong, milky, sweet and heavily spiced. It is taken in small, potent doses that resemble the way coffee is consumed elsewhere. It is brewed, not steeped. Often it has been simmering for hours. There is nothing delicate about it. If not for the sugar and the spices – ginger and cardamom especially, but sometimes bay laurel and black pepper or cinnamon – it would be bitter. Usually, it is served in small red rough-hewn earthenware cups called bhar which are only used once and then broken, returned to the earth or recycled. More recently though the plastic cup has become popular, a terrible turn of events because of the vast amount of pollution they cause. Much of the charm of chai is in the earthen cups. They are very practical. They have a protruding lip that enables one to hold it with two fingers – a third finger on the base underneath – and avoid burning one’s self since chai is served and consumed piping hot.

In Calcutta, where the author presently resides, the chai cups are the main trade of the city’s potters. They scoop the clay from the Hoogley River and it is to the river that the cups ultimately return.

The present author, let it be known, is himself an enthusiast of tea, a devotee of Teaism. Once more out of phase he has developed an aversion to the ubiquitous coffee culture that has taken hold in Australia and the wider Western world. Coffee is a drug for the shallow journalistic mind. Coffee is the drug of the chattering classes. Tea is the drink of the contemplative. It is with a some disdain that the author watches restless disgruntled Western tourists scouring the streets and markets of Calcutta in search of a coffee fix. The chai wallah is everywhere. Chai culture is a delight. It is a sad symptom of self-consciousness, as Tenshin says, that the "maritime" West has succumbed to the coarse stimulation of the coffee bean. Teaism forever! 

If you are looking for a good resource on the culture of tea drinking in India you cannot go past the following excellent blog, Chai Wallahs of India: http://chaiwallahsofindia.com

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Idiot Ink in India

There is, at last, an opportunity for this writer to vent his unfashionable distaste for the decadent contemporary craze of tattooing. Not only does he not have any tattoos, he has never seen any that he likes, and in general he finds them either off-putting, distracting or blatantly offensive. This is an aesthetic preference, but a strong one, and more than that, an ideological aversion to post-industrial degeneracy. The human body is not a canvas for bad folk art or graffiti. One of the most dismal eventualities in the author’s lifetime, to be frank, has been to live through the revival of this particular form of narcissistic self-mutilating ugliness. He regards the tattoo as primitivist pollution, and makes no apology for the same. It is an opinion that is likely to offend about one in five readers these days. No doubt a tattoo is no longer a sign of bad character as once it might have been, but today the opposite is true: it is an invariable point of good character for a man - and even more for a woman - to resolutely decide not to be tattooed.

It is with a certain satisfaction, therefore, that he reads the story of an Australian man in Bangalore who was attacked, or at least harassed, by a cadre of dedicated Hindoos who took exception to his blasphemous depiction of the goddess Yellama on his lower leg. The Australian – proudly displaying his beloved "ink" - was in a restaurant, it seems, when he was confronted by a dozen people who demanded that the image be removed. According to the newspaper account, at one point in the confrontation the Hindoos threatened to flay his skin – although the report admittedly comes via that disreputable purveyor of sensationalist pulp, Australia Associated Press.

Shaken, the Australian sought refuge in the police, but they were less than sympathetic. "I was relieved to see a policeman, but much to my shock he started to blame me,” the Australian, Mr. Matthew Gordon, was reported as telling the Hindu Daily. The police told him 'This is India and you are insulting Hindoos'." After a three hour ordeal he was forced to write a letter of apology and to give a signed commitment not to display the offending tattoo at any time during the remainder of his visit to India.

For his part, the Australian insists that he meant no offence and that, indeed, he has a respectful understanding of the goddess, just as he has of the great deity Ganesh who is inked all over his back, a work of so-called ‘Body Art’ that took some 35 hours of needling to complete.

Predictably, the AA Press report describes the incident as an attack by “right wing extremists”. Critics – those unnamed, all-purpose puppets of the left-wing media – say that “right-wing Hindu extremists have been emboldened by the BJP's victory in a general election last year,” according to the equally anonymous AAP journalist. The incident is then linked – on no basis whatsoever – to the murder of a “leading scholar” who had “spoken out against idol worship… in Karnakata state” last August.

In other words, AAP used the incident as a cheap item of anti-BJP leftist propaganda. It was as if Prime Minister Modi had attacked the Australian himself. Additionally, it was another episode in the 'Irrational-things-religious-people-do' genre of leftist journalism - as if there is nothing irrational about covering your body in tattoos of Hindoo deities in the self-indulgent quest for self-defined identity. 

In any case, this writer has as much sympathy for the Australian gentleman as did the Bangalore police. This is India, and you are offending Hindoos. If the Australian had any proper respect for the Hindoos - as he purports - he would be aware of their sensitivities and appreciate that his "Body Art" might very easily be taken as an offence. As it is, throughout most of India it is testing the tolerance of the local population for tourists to wander around in shorts and thongs like they're on their way to a barbecue at Bondi beach. The body has a different sanctity in Indian culture. It is not just Western women who need to be sensitive about this fact and to observe a different code of attire. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Park Road South Cemetery

A great treasure lies at the end of up-market Park Street, just before the Park Street Circus, in old Calcutta, namely the Park Street South Cemetery, the burial ground used by the British East India Company up until the mid 1800s. Once completely overgrown and subject to scandalous neglect in post-colonial India, it has now been cleaned up, guided by the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, and is open to the public. It is an oasis of calm and cool green beauty, with its monolithic tombs covered in emerald moss, an escape from the mad bustle of the modern streets. Here are some of the present author's photographs from two visits there:

Although ostensibly a Christian graveyard, it is noticeable that there are very few overtly Christian graves. There is not, for example, a single crucifix to be seen. (These, presumably, were regarded as excessively "papish" at the time.) But even the grave inscriptions rarely make reference to Christian piety. The inscription speak of the virtues of the deceased, their service, their commitment to duty, their dedication to their families, but only rarely is there a mention of their Christian beliefs or quotations from the Christian scriptures. All that is sacred is the memory of the departed. Here are a few sample inscriptions to illustrate the point:

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Two tombs in this remarkable graveyard stand out for special comment; that of Charles Stuart and that of Elizabeth Barwell, two of the more notable and extraordinary characters from British Calcutta in that era. 

CHARLES STUART

Charles Stuart, who travelled to India as a teenager, is better known as Hindoo Stuart and is commemorated under that appellation on his plaque. He lived in Calcutta for over fifty years. During that time he increasingly took on local customs and eventually identified himself as a Hindoo. He bathed in the Ganges every day, adopted Hindoo dress and practiced the devotions of the Hindoo religion. This in no way prevented his advancement in the army; he rose to the office of Major-General. Nor did he entirely reject the Christian faith; rather he seems to have understood Christ as an incarnation of deity alongside Krishna. He often exhorted his fellow Britishers to embrace Hindoo customs and, famously, wrote a pamphlet urging British ladies to shun European vestments and to take up comfortable Hindoo apparel. Its full title was: The Ladies Monitor, Being A Series of Letters First published in Bengal on the Subject of Female Apparel Tending to Favour a regulated adoption of Indian Costume And a rejection of Superfluous Vesture By the Ladies of this country With Incidental remarks on Hindoo Beauty, Whale-Bone Stays, Iron Busks, Indian Corsets, Man-Milliners, Idle Bachelors, Hair-Powder, Waiting Maids, And Footmen.

Stuart was buried, not cremated with his ashes cast into the Ganges according to Hindoo practice, but his grave is marked by the small Hindoo-style temple (mandir) that is one of the outstanding eccentricities of the Park Street burial ground. As a point of interest, British atheists in Calcutta, such as David Hare, were denied a tomb in "Christian ground", but this sensitivity did not extend to the "heathenism" of Hindoo Stuart.

(The present author, let it be noted, currently resides in Stuart Lane, just off Sudder Street, in central Calcutta.)

              

The Mandir-Style tomb of Hindoo Stuart

ELIZABETH BARWELL (Nee Sanderson)

It is reported that when young Elizabeth Sanderson arrived in Calcutta every bachelor in the city fell in love with her. She is famous for her great beauty, the Helen of British India. Young British officers and officials of the East India Company lined up for her hand. In one famous incident, she informed her suitors of her intention to attend a certain ball and let it be known what dress she would be wearing so that the young men could attire themselves in concert with her. On the occasion, no less than a dozen young men turned up at the ball all dressed in the same pea-green clothing. Eventually, she married the womaniser and gambler Richard Barwell, but tragically died of "fever" (malaria?) shortly afterwards. The tomb of Elizabeth Barwell - a huge stone pyramid - is the largest in the cemetery. 

              

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black