Abstract
This chapter explores the specific subgenre of the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’, reading their representation of mid-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century Calcutta, the capital of British India till 1911, as an attempt to produce the historical significance of colonial rule and rationalise it through tropes of sacrifice, progress, and civilisation. In reading the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ with reference to their prefaces and the heritage policies of the British government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the chapter argues that these texts were part of the literary and cultural investment in pro-imperial heritage construction that emerged as a distinct political tool to counter the nationalist claims of popular anti-colonial insurrections, which viewed the colonial rulers as outsiders. It further traces the workings of territorial anxiety through the constructions of heritage and explores its relationship with nostalgia. The ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ in this reading emerge as a safety valve to quell the territorial anxiety of the city’s white residents and travellers. By contextualising this genre within the time frame (1880–1930) of the turbulent political shifts alongside which it evolved, this chapter aims to reveal how the handbooks depended on omissions of political context and imposed silences to build a curated and controlled version of the imperial capital that was in line with the dominant political ideologies of its time. To this end, the ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ deploy formal and aesthetic experiments that are often at odds with each other and reveal the conflict at the heart of an increasingly threatened empire.
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Notes
- 1.
I will be using ‘Calcutta’, the colonial name of the city, instead of Kolkata, as it was renamed in 2001 to match the vernacular Bangla pronunciation.
- 2.
Calcutta, the capital of British India and now the capital of the state of West Bengal in India, was the primary port of commerce for the entire Gangetic valley; it dealt in jute, coal and tea and was also the port of transit for the indentured labourers shipped out of India to other British dominions.
- 3.
David Kopf introduces Bengal Renaissance as the ‘social, cultural, psychological, and intellectual changes that were brought about in the Indian region of Bengal as a result of the contact between British officials and missionaries on the one hand and the Hindu intelligentsia on the other’ (1969, 10). It is this period between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the import of English education into the Indian upper-middle-class educational institutions led to the stylistic rejuvenation of the regional language, Bangla, and contributed to a non-traditionalist stance on social reforms aligned with ‘western’ understandings of liberty, equality and utilitarianism.
- 4.
- 5.
Given the limited scope of the chapter, I have limited my close textual analysis to E.B. Eastwick (1882) and excerpts from other texts. I have dealt with the individual texts at length and in succession in my thesis, titled ‘Representing Calcutta through Handbooks, 1840-1940: Narrativizing City Space’ (2019), which is in the process of being converted into a monograph.
- 6.
For a comprehensive list of Murray’s publications including those on India, see W.B.C. Lister and John R. Gretton (1993).
- 7.
See further references to Curzon’s speeches and participation in handbook publications later in this chapter.
- 8.
The Anglo-Hindustani Hand-Book: Or, Stranger’s Self-Interpreter and Guide to Colloquial and General Intercourse with the Natives of India (1850) included conversations with servants titled ‘Of a Journey’ and ‘Of Hiring Servants’.
- 9.
- 10.
H.E.A. Cotton’s book takes its name from this historic divide: Calcutta Old and New: A Historical and Descriptive Handbook to the City (1907). Debraj Bhattacharya comments on this as Cotton’s attempt to create a ‘modern’ city as distinct from its ‘old’ premodern and therefore precolonial history (2008, 242–270).
- 11.
- 12.
In this chapter, I have used the term ‘western’ to mean the various overlapping ideologies of modernity that were in circulation in Europe drawing on the modernisation of the imperial states and their colonial empires which informed British ideals of modernity, progress and ‘civilisation’.
- 13.
A particular example of this would be the establishment of the Dharma Sabah, ‘which was formed in 1830 in the wake of great agitation against the abolition of sati. Lord Bentinck inadvertently gave the Bengalis a chance to learn the techniques of agitation which were to be used later for more worthy causes’, as discussed in S.N. Mukherjee’s Calcutta Myths and History (1977, 4).
- 14.
Kalikata Kamalaya literally translates to ‘Kolkata, The Abode of Lakshmi’, Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity in the Hindu pantheon. This book had been translated and published in English in 1990 with the title Kalikata Kamalalaya: Calcutta in the Early 19th Century by Firma KLM situating the satiric narrative criticising the changing moral codes of city life in the early nineteenth century. Naba Babu Bilas and Naba Bibi Bilas are satires targeting the ‘Young Bengal’ group and their affinity for European clothes, cuisine, consumption of alcohol, and socialising that were a challenge to traditional religious, and social ways of life. For more on Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay, see Anindita Ghosh’s, ‘Revisiting the “Bengal Renaissance”: Literary Bengali and Low-Life Print in Colonial Calcutta’ (2002) and Tapati Roy’s chapter ‘Disciplining the Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance’ in Texts of Power (1995, 30–62).
- 15.
All translations from Bengali to English are mine unless otherwise indicated.
- 16.
‘Local’ here refers to the British and English-speaking communities of Calcutta and greater Bengal.
- 17.
Lord Curzon cited Busteed’s book as the main source of his interest in the Black Hole incident in the speech he delivered on the day he ceremoniously unveiled the replica of the previously removed Holwell Monument on 19 December 1902. See Marquis George Nathaniel Curzon’sLord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from his Speeches as Viceroy & Governor-General of India 1898-1905 (1906, 442). Busteed is also mentionedas a source in Firminger (1906), Cotton (1907), Newell (1922) and G.W. Tyson (1932).
- 18.
‘Harakaru’: spelling as quoted in text.
- 19.
John Murray III and the Murray publication house was the first publication to use the term ‘Handbook’ to designate a particular subgenre of guidebooks that was designed to improve on available formats and introduce a particular rigour in the genres of guidebook and travel manuals. The term ‘Handbook’ and Murray’s publications under this title achieved a cult status and developed a brand name for themselves. For further information on Murray Publication house, refer to John Murray IV (1919).
- 20.
For context, Baedeker, a rival publishing house based in Leipzig and specialising in travel handbooks, published on India in German only: Indien. Handbuch für Reisende. Ceylon, Vorderindien, Birma, die malayische Halbinsel, Siam, Java, 1st edn. (Karl Baedeker, 1914). In 2013, Michael Wild, the Baedeker historian, published his English translation of the 1914 edition titled Baedeker’s India, 1914 from Natland-based Red Scar Press.
- 21.
- 22.
On belatedness and colonialism, see Ali Behdad (1994).
- 23.
Elements of modernisation were introduced in various parts of South Asia through all foreign contacts like the French and the Portuguese (first to arrive) but colonial modernity as an ideology was deployed as part of the rationale of rule by the British in the late colonial period. See Chatterjee (1997) and Chakrabarty (1997).
- 24.
Eastwick’s text opens with the description of Sagar Island, ‘covered with dense jungle, swarming with tigers and wild beasts’ (83).
- 25.
The inverted commas are part of the inscription Eastwick quotes from the tablet.
- 26.
The visual bias encountered in travel narratives has been the continuous subject of criticism as it creates a ‘hegemony of vision’ that privileges the eye as the sole medium of experiencing and comprehending one’s surroundings. The visual ideology involves portraying a place/site as tourists might wish to view it. Swenson and Daugstad (2012) state that the ‘guides, with their simple, illustrative use of drawings or photographs, promised tourists the certainty of an authentic relationship between themselves and the site deemed important’ (5).
- 27.
Such instances include scattered events of violence and sedition in the latter half of the century, like the assassination of Lord Mayo, the Governor General of India (Viceroy of India from 1869 to 1872) on 18 February 1872 in Port Blair, Andaman Islands. The early handbooks treated the incident as an isolated instance of crime, whereas later historians have interpreted this as a political murder and a part of the rise of revolutionary nationalism in India during the turn of the twentieth century.
- 28.
Siraj-ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Bengal, had granted lease and trade licences to the British but was against the British building fortifications in Bengal. The attack of 1756 was targeted to dismantle the first Fort William and stall all attempts to build armed fortifications in Calcutta. The Black Hole tragedy happened in the aftermath of the attack and was recorded by J.Z. Holwell (1758), a self-proclaimed survivor. The accuracy of Holwell’s narrative has been repeatedly questioned, and its strategic importance in rallying English forces from Madras to take over Calcutta and demolish the Nawab’s rule has often been pointed out.
- 29.
For Murray’s strict adherence to refraining from commenting on the political aspect of places and people his handbooks represent, see Lister and Gretton (1993, xxiii).
- 30.
In the case of the handbooks, this amounts to a practice of narration that creates silences where the text speaks most powerfully.
- 31.
See Ranajit Guha’s ‘Not at Home in Empire’ (1997) where he discusses ‘the unhomely opposite of the world of known limits’ of the colonised territory in terms of ‘colonial anxiety’ and the ‘uncanny’ (p. 484).
- 32.
I have mentioned earlier in this chapter the critical disagreements on using the term ‘Mutiny’ or the ‘First War of Indian Independence’ for the uprising of 1857. Cotton and Firminger, however, categorize the uprising as anti-authoritarian and as an illegal expression of native agency.
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Bhattacharya, A. (2023). Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks. In: Bhattacharya, A., Hibbitt, R., Scuriatti, L. (eds) Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13060-1_2
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