This Durga brooks no slowdown

Well, India is in the throes of a recession and the falling rupee, slowing growth, policy paralysis have all contributed to a slowdown in the economy. However, there is one thing that does not see any slowdown and industry experts say that this is poised for a greater leap on the coming days.

Infact, this industry is expected to grow at a phenomenal rate of 35 per cent in just two years. Its current size is Rs. 25,000 crores and it is expected to reach Rs. 40,000 crores by 2015. And all this is happening in West Bengal.

Surprised. Yes, you should be. Known for its highly charged political situation and slowing industrialisation, West Bengal is poised to reach Rs. 40,000 crores. And who has made this estimate. It is Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), the venerable trade body of industrialists of India.

The ASSOCHAM has forecast that West Bengal's Durga puja industry is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 35 percent. This is expected to push the Puja industry to touch Rs.40,000 crores by 2015 from its current size of Rs.25,000 crores.

Much of this growth is due to the increasing cost of organising the puja which it says, has increased as much as over 30 percent compared to last year due to hike in the materials used. As per its estimates, the pandal (marquee) industry is expected to touch Rs.500 crore in 2013 from Rs.350 crore in 2012. Since 10,000 Durga puja marquees come up every year, the increase is significant.
The other expenses such as making the idols, transport, food and beverages, pandals, orchestra and entertainment shows have all increased correspondingly. The entertainment companies as well as organisations in the lighting and decoration are making hay
Every year, Kolkatta prepares over 20,000 to 30,000 idols and the cost of making them too has increased by almost 15-20 percent this year. The idols cost anywhere between Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 5 lakhs, while the food and beverage industry is worth over Rs. 50 crores.
More tan anything,  Durga worship is a major religious and social event not only in Kolkata but in West Bengal. It attracts massive crowds, people’s participation and even political backing.

The first recorded Durga celebrations in public is said to have been celebrated in the late 1500s by the zamindar of Dinajpur and Malda. Others say Raja Kangshanarayan of Taherpur or Bhabananda Mazumdar of Nadiya organised the first Sharadiya or Autumn Durga Puja in Bengal in 1606.

However, the origin of community puja can be credited to the twelve friends of Guptipara in Hoogly, West Bengal, who collaborated and collected contributions from local residents to conduct the first community puja called the “baro-yaari” puja or the “twelve-pal” puja in 1790.

The “baro-yaari” puja proved so popular that it was brought to Kolkata in 1832 by Raja Harinath of Cossimbazar, who performed the Durga Puja at his ancestral home in Murshidabad from 1824 to 1831. Since then, the puja has grown from strength to strength. Such community celebrations received a fillip when the Sanatan Dharmotsahini Sabha organised the first truly community puja in Baghbazar in Kolkata in 1910.

Another celebration that goes back to 1610 is by Sabarna Roychowdhurys at Behala. Similarly, the puja of the Deb family at Shovabazar Rajbati attracted among its visitor Lord Robert Clive. The British official came to the celebration after he won the Battle of Plassey. 

The Last Supper of India

Hundreds of Indians go to Italy to see Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.

The Last Supper, also called Il Cenacolo or L'Ultima Cena in Italian, is a late 15th century mural painting in the refectory of the Convent of Sante Maria della Grazie in Milan, Italy.

It represents the scene of  the last supper of Jesus Christ with his disciples. The painting measures 460 cm by 880 cm (180 in × 350 in) and covers an end wall of the dining hall at the monastery.

This is among the great paintings of the world and millions of people, including Indians, make a beeline to Milan to view it. But what many do not know is that we too have a painting of The Last Supper in India.  

The Indian Supper is a much smaller painting an unlike the original it is located in the premises of a church.  The Indian painting is much smaller-10x12 feet of canvas.

This is the painting that the German artist Johann Zoffany worked on for six weeks. A neoclassical painter, Zoffany gifted the painting of his version of the Last Supper to the St John Parish in Calcutta on June 24, 1787.

Though this is not a patch on the original, artists acknowledges that the Zoffany canvas is perhaps the best Biblical representation in India.

Zoffany had gifted the painting on the eve of the consecration of the first ever church built in Calcutta by the British. The painting, however, drew mixed response as some of the faces of the apostles closely resembled members of the Calcutta aristocracy.   

Zoffany (1733-1810) spent six years in India. Some of his other paintings can still be seen in Victoria Memorial. Born in Frankfurt, he is considered to be one of the founding artists of the British School of the 18th century.

The painting first served as an altar piece. Over the years, it slowly deteriorated and was severely damaged. It had to be restored in a big way.

This is not to say that the painting was damaged only recently. As long back as in 1888, the canvas was torn and there was a large hole near the nose of  Judas.

The painting is not an exact replica of  Leonardo’s Supper. The Calcutta canvas has an Indian touch. The top left hand corner of the painting shows a sword, which represents a common peon’s talwar. A Water ewer near a table on which the supper is placed is a copy of an Indian spittoon and next to it lies a water filled goat bag.

Perhaps the most unique feature of  the  Indian Supper is in the selection of model used by Zoffany to represent Jesus and his twelve disciples. Father Parthenio, a Greek priest, became Jesus. Auctioneer William Tulloh became Judas, while John is  represented by W.C.Blacquiere the police magistrate of Calcutta during 1780s.

Tulloh reportedly was so offended that he is said to have attempted to destroy the painting. This could be the earliest attempt to destroy or deface the painting. The several decades after the painting was gifted, saw the slow deterioration of the painting.   

It was only a few years ago, that Kolkatta woke up to the massive damage and undertook extensive restoration work. If Zoffany took six weeks to paint it, a team of six conservators took more than five months to repair 47 tears and holes the Supper had suffered in the 223 years. The cost of the restoration: Rs.15 lakhs.

What is not known is that two previous attempts to restore the painting had only gone to affect it. In one such attempt, putty was used to fill the gashes, up to 47 cm in length, and large sections of overpaint and tinted varnishes were applied.

The conservators were from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. They brought in some of the material and equipment from Europe, including reversible paints and consolidation media.

The team was headed by Renate Kant, a German painting conservator based in Singapore.

The original frame of the painting has been retained. The gilt was cleaned. The restored painting is today’s Kolkata’s pride. It still hangs in St. John’s Church.

John’s Church, originally a Cathedral, was among the first public buildings by the East India Company after Kolkata became the capital of British India. It is located at the North- west corner of Raj Bhavan.

The construction of the church began in 1784, with Rs 30,000 raised through a public lottery and it was completed in 1787. St. John’s Church is the third oldest church in Calcutta (Kolkata) only next to the Armenian and the Old Mission Church.

Kolkata is approachable by any means of transport-rail, road or air. There are plenty of options to stay and a lot of places to see.

How Delhi came to be India's capital

By the beginning of the twentieth century, almost the entire India was under British rule. Calcutta had emerged as their military and trading hub and it remained as the capital of undivided India.

However, the British had never been comfortable with Calcutta. The hot and sultry weather did not suit them. Nor did the rising  fervor of the nationalists in Calcutta and Bengal endear the city to the British.

The proverbial last straw to shift the capital from Calcutta came when Lord Curzon came up with an idea in 1905 to partition Bengal.

The partition hived away Assam and the Muslim-dominated East Bengal from the Bengal Province and merged them into a new state. The act lead to severe political unrest in Calcutta which kept on boiling year after year. The protests forced then to reverse the partition. An angry British were looking for revenge.

The British by then had decided that Calcutta had served their initial purpose of  mastering India. They decided to abandon the city and go for a new capital. The rising pollution in Calcutta was another worry for them.

The British first decided to shift the capital to a place central to India. This idea was soon abandoned as they realized that the new city would have to be built from they scratch and it had to have road and rail links, sufficient space to house 43 departments and also to build a new residential township. Several cities, including Nagpur, were considered but discarded.

Soon, the British decided to make Delhi the capital and showcase their Indian dream from the capital of the Mughals. They then held a Delhi Durbar attended by the English Royals and Indian Maharajas where King George V in 1911 announced the shifting of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi.

The foundation stone of the new capital was laid at Kingsway Camp and the British sate up a working camp in north Delhi, beyond Kashmere Gate. It was here that the British lived and worked on the new capital.

The new city was expected to come up beyond Kashmere Gate but an expert committee comprising architects like Edwin Lutyens, however, decided the site was not all that favorable. They found the site unsuitable, swampy and low lying, making it vulnerable to flooding from the Yamuna. Lutyens  described it to be too “flat and boring”.

The committee hen chose the area near Raisina hills for the city which they called New Delhi. The undulating terrain meant that buildings like the Government house, the earlier name of Rashtrapati Bhavan,  and the Secretariat would be situated at a height, making them look imposing.

The area was also ideal as it was largely uninhabited except for the village of Malcha. Thus began the journey of Delhi as India’s capital.

When the construction began, the Imperial Delhi Committee was constituted to monitor the progress. This committee had an absolute say over the construction and administration of the area.

When complaints began pouring in about the lavish manner in which money was being spent on building the new capital, the British stepped back from the grandiose plans of making Delhi one of the finest cities in the world.

The Viceroy himself stayed in a modest circuit house and this was to show to the world that the money was not being wasted unnecessarily.

In the two decades that it took the new Delhi to come up, the  Imperial Government of India functioned from buildings in areas known as Temporary Delhi.

The old Secretariat, constructed in 1912, is from where the government machinery functioned. The adjacent Council Chamber (now Delhi Vidhan Sabha) is where the Legislative Council was held, before construction of Council House (now Parliament House) in 1927.

Over the next few years, Imperial Delhi or the Delhi Enclave expanded to 1,290 sq miles, comprising the present day national capital territory.

The land east of Yamuna was acquired from United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) to be developed as a garden city and become the lungs of New Delhi. There were plans to house government employees on the site of what is now Shahdara.

The British also planned to dam Yamuna and create lakes on either side, lined by wide boulevards. Alas, this plan failed to take off. But the rest of the plan went off well and within years a new Delhi had sprung up.

Henry Vaughan Lanchester, an architect, wanted the Yamuna to be an integral part of New Delhi. His report said the river should be linked to New Delhi through a ceremonial avenue.

He also wanted Shahjehanabad to be integrated with the new capital. This too did not fruitfy.

The mud in the secret room

Libraries, they say, are treasure troves of knowledge. They store information right from fiction to works of art, literature to mysteries, science to philosophy and what not.

How many of us, when we were children or even in the first blush of youth, felt being a part of a secret cult, secret society or like Hardy boys and Nancy Drew felt detecting things.

Or what say, if like Harison Ford in Indian Jones we discovered a secret chamber on a well-known library. The only difference is that the library is in India and not in Italy as in the film. If Indian Jones could manage to break a flooring on the ground of the library which led to a secret chamber, what if  there was similar secret chamber but it had no entry or exit.

And what if the building in India was constructed several centuries ago and it housed some of the most distinguished figures to have set foot on India.

Well, say yes to all of these things. This is what happened in real life in India unlike the reel life of Ford in Indiana Jones And the place was good old Calcutta, the first capital of British India.The period-2010 of course.

This is what and how it happened

It was 2010 and the officials of the National Library in Kolkata had vacated the building. They had shifted India’s largest collection of books, periodicals and journals to another building temporarily.

The library had been shifted to Bhashya Bhavan from Belvedere House from where it had functioning from for several decades. The centre had decided to take up repair and renovation of the British built structure.

When the structure was fully vacated and being readied for renovation at a cost of Rs. 135 crores by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), they had stumbled upon a secret chamber or room.

The secret room soon set tongues wagging and rumours spread thick and fast. For some it held treasures, For others, it held secret papers and articles of the British. A few others hinted at the treasures in the house hidden away by Mir Jaffer.

For the ASI, the secret room soon turned into a headache. They could not break into the room as it was a heritage building and no  construction or demolition or even breaking up was allowed.

Meanwhile, pressure was building up to unlock the room and find out what secret it held.

The secret of the room soon became a topic of debate even among the intelligentsia of Calcutta or rather Kolkata. The history of  Belvedere House made matters all the more mysterious.        

The Belvedere House on Belvedere Road in Alipore was a protected monument and it had been used by the British more than two centuries ago.

It was built by Mir Jaffer, the Nawab of Bengal, in 1760s. He soon gifted it to Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India. In 1780, Hastings sold the building which later went on to become the official residence of the Lieutenant Governors of Bengal.

So, the secret chamber had people linking it to Mir Jaffer and all the people who stayed there. From 1854 till 1914, the building had been home to several high ranking officials.

What gave a romantic touch to the secret chamber was that it had remained hidden for more than 250 years of its existence.

A few people even hinted of a secret underground tunnel connecting Belvedere House to Fort William.

The building was thrown open to the public only in the closing stages of the 19^th century. It was then that the British decided to station their Imperial Library at Belvedere House. It was opened to the public in 1896. Almost a decade later, Lord Curzon merged it

with the Calcutta Public Library which was founded in 1836. The combined library was opened to the public on January 30, 1903.

After Independence, it was again renamed as the National Library and its management was handed over to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism at the Centre.

Very soon, it became one of the biggest libraries in the world. It has lakhs of books covering almost all the languages of India. At the latest count, it has a collection of over 2200,000 books.

Over the years, the building was only given minor repairs. When things took a turn for the worse, the Centre decided to take up a comprehensive project to repair and refurbish the building and also modernise the library.

The heritage wing of the library was then earmarked to get a coat of paint and other repairs. The ASI, which has undertaken the task of conservation, expects to complete it by 2014.

Coming back to the story of the secret chamber. It was opened months after it was discovered. Well, do you know what the eager archaeologists found. 

The secret chamber was full of mud. A series of experiments later revealed that the British had purposely built the chamber and filled it with mud to ensure correct balance of the building and strengthen its base.

This secret was unravelled almost an year ago-that is in November last. The 120 square feet room was full of mud. And the only treasure-mud that can rightly be claimed to be as old as 1760s. This was of course a tame end to an otherwise exciting discovery of a secret chamber in the 21st century.

The next time you visit Kolkata, hop on to a taxi and travel to Alipore. Visit the National Zoological gardens and the National Archives there. Check out the Belvedere House too. And also all the other British type buildings in the locality.  

   

When Calcutta became Alinagar

It was June 1756 and Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula, the Emperor of Bengal, was furious with the East India Company for constructing a fort in present day Kolkata without his permission.

Kolkata then was not the City of today. It was just a cluster of villages- Gobindapur, Kalikata, Sutanuti and Chitpur. However, it an was important trading centre for the British and slowly it also gained currency as a military post.

The British wanted to secure their trade and after obtaining permission from the Mughals went ahead with the construction of a fort.

Siraj-ud-Daula did not take kindly to this action and he asked the British to demolish the structure called Fort William. When the British demurred, he marched at the head of a vast army and defeated the British.

On June 15, the Bengal army crossed the Hoogly and the next day it stood outside the ramparts of Fort William. Captain Minchin was the British commandant of Calcutta.

On June 18, Siraj-ud- Daula launched an attack on the British outposts. The British losses were very heavy. The British then decided to send women and children to a safer place. The asked two of their supposedly bravest officers-Manningham and Frankland -to escort women and children on board the company's ship Dodaly.

Manningham and Frankland, who were also members of the council of the fort,, did escort the women and children to the ship but they refused to come back to land. They then held talks with the ship captain, Young, and moved away.

The next morning, the remaining British troops found that several other ships had followed the example of  Dodaly and vanished in the night. The panic-stricken Brotosh troops led by their Governor Drake, captain-commandant Minchin, captain Grant and a large number of soldiers deserted their post and fled in the remaining vessels. Thus, the defenders were left to the fate of the vast Bengal army.

It is here that Holwell comes in. Since he was senior, he was appointed acting governor and entrusted with the command. He redistributed the force . This was not of any consequence as the British were easily overcome.

Holwell and others decided to escape and sent for the ship St George. Unfortunately, the nervous ship captain drove the vessel into the shallow waters and the ship became struck.   By 5 p.m., everything bar the victory celebrations was over.

Siraj-ud-Daula entered the fort with his soldiers. The British, many of them badly wounded, were bound with ropes and brought before the Nawab. Holwell surrendered and this perhaps rankled him and led him to fabricate the large number of deaths at the Black Hole.

Meanwhile, Siraj-ud-Daula had ordered his soldiers to untie the British prisoners. Since many buildings in the fort were on fire due to the heavy bombardment,  the prisoners were shifted to safety of a small cell built by the British. This structure was near the Maidan (in Kolkata) but it has been demolished in later decades.

A few British soldiers and even Indians prisoners of war died of suffocation. A British soldier, J. Z. Holwell, who survived, spread a blatant lie that 146 people had suffocated. Anyway, since this article will not deal with this issue, I will stop here and get back to the story about the last independent ruler of Bengal-Siraj-ud-Daula.

By then, the British had renamed their settlement as Calcutta. When the British were thrown out of their settlement and many British buildings, including the Governor’s mansion (this was built on the place where the Raj Bhavan stands today), St Annes and other buildings were razed to the ground.

The first task of the new ruler of Calcutta was to rename it as Alinagar. Siraj-ud-Daula chose this name as Ali Vardi Khan was his grandfather. Ali Vardi Khan (1671 – 1756) was the Nawab of Bengal from 1740–1756. He toppled the Nasiri Dynasty of the Nawabs and then took over Bengal. A Shia Muslim, he made Mushirabad his capital. He died of  dropsy in 1756 and he was succeeded by his grandson, Siraj-ud-Daula.

Siraj-ud-Daula had great respect for his grandfather. Since Ali Vardi Khan was already buried in Khushbagh, he decided to rename Calcutta in his grandfather’s honor.

Thus, Caclutta got a new name and soon it came to be known as Alinagar. The maximum damage that Siraj-ud-Din inflicted on his new city was in the locality of Kalikata. The only Indian building or locality to suffer some damage was Burrabazar.

By then, the British evacuees and soldiers had set up camp 64 kms downstream of the Hoogly at a place called Falta. They remained there until British troops led by Robert Clive arrived in Bengal in January 1757.

What followed was a series of skirmishes between the troops of Siraj-ud-Daula and the British before it escalated into the Battle of Plassey. The battle saw the defeat of Siraj-ud-Daula and the rise of the British Empire.

On their part, the British built a stronger and much safer Fort William (the present structure) and renamed Alinagar as Calcutta after they overcame a small garrison of the Bengal Kingdom. This name stood for several centuries before the name was again changed to Kolkata.

Unfortunately, only a handful of people are aware that Calcutta was once Alinagar.