Museum in an airport

The National Museum in Kolkata is not only the oldest but also the largest museum in India. It has six main sections comprising 35 galleries.

It is also called the Indian Museum and it also the earliest and the largest multipurpose Museum not only in the Indian subcontinent but also in the Asia-Pacific.

But in two weeks time, the National museum is all set to lose this distinction to a new upstart which is coming up in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital.

In just a little over ten days, largest museum where the entry will be on the basis of international airline tickets, will open its glass doors to the public.

The newly constructed museum in housed in the International Airport in Mumbai and it has 7,000 artefacts covering a range of  people, kingdoms and eras. What is more The museum will have a three kilometre long art wall which will feature works by over 1,500 artists.

This museum is built between the check-in and baggage claim and it is part of Mumbai's new integrated terminal T2. The art wall and the museum is so designed that it will showcase the best of Indian art, craft and designs to visitors, Indians and foreigners alike
The art wall and the art programmes will be one of the biggest of its kind in the world and no airport anywhere in the world will have this facility.

The installation at T2’s departure area occupies 80,000 sq ft and it will house ancient artifacts and finds some as old as the 10th century. A range of ancient articles including sculptures, statues, paintings, wood work, old temple chariots and articles of daily, religious and social use collected from villages, towns and cities will be on display.
The T2 is slated to open on January 15 and initially only passengers boarding or alighting from international carriers will be allowed to have a look-in. With a handing capacity of  40 million passengers annually, the museum could comfortably push Paris’ Louvre, currently the most visited art museum in the world with 9 million annual visitors, off its perch.
Similarly, the arrival corridor too has been given a massive brush up. It has works by several eminent contemporary artists such as Nek Chand, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Mithu Sen, Riyas Komu  Desmond Lazaro. All of them and of course several others have worked on the art wall that is 18 metres high and 1.2 km long. Like the departure wall, this wall too can be viewed from all levels.
Where there is Mumbai, can Bollywood be far behind. The best of Bollywood too is present here.

When the new integrated terminal will open on January 15, Air India’s Newark-Mumbai flight will be the first to arrive at the new terminal which is called T2.
T2 will have bigger areas for check-in, security check and baggage delivery. Spread over 439,000 square metres, the MIAL which will operate the airport is a joint venture of the GVK group, the Airport Authority of India, Airports Company of South Africa and Bids Services Division, Mauritius.

All of them are together executing the Rs 12,380-crore airport modernisation project. The work on the new terminal building began in February 2009.
While the old international terminal had 80 immigration counters, T2 will have 140.

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.

The bridge without nuts and bolts

Bridges are very common and they rarely make news unless they have something extraordinary to reveal. However, there are a few bridges that have become landmarks and they are even known by the name of the city in which they are built.

One such bridge has not only the name of the city in which it is situated but it has been the scene of shooting of films in almost all languages in India and even in English. It also has a film named after it.

Built by the British as a link between two areas separated by one of India’s greatest river, it has today attained the status of a monument that is visited by every person who comes to the City.

By the way, what sets out this bridge from others is that it has no nuts and bolts and it has been playing host to one of the densest traffic volume in the world.

When it was under construction, it collapsed triggering such a strong wave that it demolished a nearby temple and also led to a seismic station nearby recording it as an earthquake.

The bridge is in operation even today and it is counted as among the busiest in the world. It has defied all odds to stand tall even seventy years after its construction.

This is the Howrah Bridge and it is located across the Ganges in Kolkata. The Ganga or Ganges in Bengal is called as the Hoogly and  the bridge was opened to traffic in 1943. It is a cantilever bridge  and is the sixth longest of  such a type.

                             The bridge on a misty December morning

There are no nuts and bolts on the bridge and it is constructed entirely by riveting Cantilever truss.

Over period of time, Kolkata has embraced the bridge as its own and today it is as much known for the bridge as for the Victoria Memorial and its tram,

The construction of the bridge started in 1937 and it took almost ten years to complete. The bridge has remained one of the most outstanding landmarks of Kolkata and more than 150,000 vehicles and 4,000,000 pedestrians cross over the bridge every day.

The bridge is the lifeline of Kolkata and its is exposed to traffic throughout the day, except for Inter-State transport buses, goods vehicles, and all India tourist buses. At night, only three wheelers and goods vehicles are allowed to pass.

Steel truss cantilever (STC) was one of the newer technologies in the 1930s which was used for constructing the bridge.This is the first link to this city, as you approach it from Howrah railway station.

There are three more bridges connecting the city of  Howrah and Kolkata- Vidyasagar Setu, Vivekananda Setu and Nivedita Setu. This is the Rabindra Setu-named after Rabindranath Tagore.

When Howrah bridge was constructed, it consumed 26,500 tons of steel, out of which 23,000 were high-tensile alloy steel, known as Tiscrom. This was supplied by Tata Steel.

The main tower was founded with single monolith caissons of dimensions 55.31 x 24.8 m with 21 shafts, each 6.25 metre square. The fabrication was undertaken by Braithwaithe, Burn and others   at four different shops in Kolkata.

The central span is 1500 feet and the Anchor arms are 325ft. and the Cantilever arms 468 ft. long at both ends. While the middle suspended span is 564 ft., main towers are 280 ft. high above the monoliths and 76 ft. apart at the top Bridge deck width is 71 ft. with two footpaths of 15 feet on either side.
The bridge stands on two anchorage caissons which are each 16.4 m by 8.2 m, with two wells 4.9 m square. The caissons were so designed that the working chambers within the shafts could be temporarily enclosed by steel diaphragms to allow work under compressed air if required. The caisson at Kolkata side was founded at 31.41 m and that at Howrah side at 26.53 m below ground level.

One night, during the process of  removing the muck to enable the caisson to move, the ground below it yielded, and the entire mass plunged two feet, shaking the ground. The impact of this was so intense that the seismograph at Kidderpore registered it as an earthquake and a Hindu temple on the shore of the Hooghly was destroyed. This was rebuilt later.

When the muck was being cleared from the waters below the to be built bridge, all kinds of objects were brought up, including anchors, grappling irons, cannons, cannon balls, brass vessels, variety of coins dating back to the East India Company.

Then the sinking the caissons was carried out round-the-clock at a rate of a foot or more per day. The caissons were sunk through soft river deposits to a stiff yellow clay 26.5 m below ground level. The foundation for the bridge was completed on November 1938. By the end of 1940, the erection of the cantilevered arms was commenced and was completed in mid-summer of 1941. The two halves of the suspended span, each 282 feet (86 m) long and weighing 2,000 tons, were built in December 1941.

The entire project cost 25 million ( Pounds 2,463,887). The bridge did not have any pompous opening ceremony as the British were afraid of air attacks from the Japanese.

The first vehicle to use the bridge was a solitary tram.

This perhaps could be one of the few bridges to have a poem written about it.   

Howrah Bridge: Rabindra Setu by Catherine Daly

I drew in to Howrah Station along the river

to the city rising from the swamp.

Amid the muck and refugees, I saw a white bridge

cantilevered over the flat land and flat water,

improbable technology,

truss and girder like buttress and clerestory arch

spanning the Hooghly, thrust

into Calcutta. The bridge

is a new mathematical prayer

performed by clerks and reams of carbon paper,

clocked and numbered as if doves fly across daily at 2:00 p.m.

Horse carts and chickens wander over its asphalt.

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.

The Dino that was found in a cupboard

It was believed to have been lost for more than a century. Though several searches had been launched, none seemed to know how and when it went missing. Over the years, it not only engaged national but international attention.

It took a team of experts not only from India but also from the United States to track down the missing object. And do you where it was found. In the very office whose property it was.

This priceless piece was one of the most important fossil in India of all times. It was the fossil of India’s first  recorded dinosaur.

has been rediscovered in Kolkata, according to a top scientific journal.

God only knows the amount of money spent on the search for

India’s first Dino that went missing more than 135 years ago. The search for the elusive Dino went on for ten years.

It took a team of people from the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and the University of Michigan  to discover the Dino is boxes that had remained unopened for several decades in the GSI headquarters in Kolkata.

The Dino was the fossil of  Titanosaurus Indicus, or the Indian Tital reptile. The fossil was originally discovered by Lieutenant –Colonel W H Sleeman of the British Army from Bara Simla and Chotta Simla near Jabalpur now in Madhya Pradesh in 1828  (The areas from where the fossils were first discovered are also called as the Deccan Traps).

He had led an expedition of cartographers and geologists to map the area. However, this specimen was formally described as Taitanosaurus Indica by Richard Lydekker 50 years later - in 1877. It went missing after 1877 once its plaster cast was sent to the Museum of Natural History Museum in London.

Lydekker was believed to be the last scientist to have handled the specimen.

The fossil parts discovered in the cupboard were the caudal vertebra (part of the tail) of Titanosaurus indicus, bones from another species, Titanosaurus blanfordi and other Triassic vertebrates which were all presumed missing. All these fossil fragments are part of  the Lydekker Collection.

During the time of the discovery of these fossils, only 115 dinosaur species or less than 10 percent of the 1,401 species known by 2004 had been identified and the Indian Dino was important as it could provide a valuable link to the history of palentology.

Well. Let me come back to the history of the missing Dino. Sleeman sent two fossil bones to G. G. Spilsbury, a civil surgeon, who himself collected a third bone from the same area. In 1832,

Spilsbury sent all three specimens to Calcutta antiquarian, James Prinsep. Later in 1862, these fossils handed over to Thomas

Oldham, the first Director of the Geological Survey of India. It was the Surgeon- botanist Hugh Falconer, co-discoverer of the Siwalik vertebrates , who first gave a description of  the two bones, which he classified as caudal vertebrae.

When the fossils were examined by Lyddeker, he realized that it was a new genre and he gave it the current name. It went missing shortly thereafter though a cast of the specimen was exhibited at the Museum of Natural History in London.

Though the original Dino was believed to have been lost, in the early 1900s, many dinosaur fossils were discovered around the original site of Jabalpur by scientists such as Charles Metley and Durgasankar Bhattacharji.

By the way, this was not the only Dino fossil that went missing. There have been several others, including large and small specimens of sauropod and theropod Dinosaurs.

The three-member Indo-US team found the Dino bones in the curatorial division of the GSI office.  The discovery has had an important effect on paleontology as researchers do not need to depend on casts provided by US and UK museums to work on. The Dino that was rediscovered will help researchers plug an important gap in the paleontological period in India.

What is more important is that the bones recovered from the vast fossil vertebrate and invertebrate collection are intact.

The discovery of the Dino fossil in 2012 was published in a journal called Current Science brought out by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore.

A sweet named after a Viceroy's wife

He was the last Governor-General of India and also the first Viceroy. It was during his time that the first war of Indian Independence broke out.

Though the war was put down brutally, he was seen as a man who was on a mission to heal the wounds. Even if he handed over exemplary punishment to those involved in the war, he tried not be revengeful. He managed to restore law and order and introduced several administrative reforms. This earned him the sobriquet “Clemency”.

His wife, the first lady, was passionately in love with India. She not only painted but also wrote a series of detailed letters to Queen Victoria about the life and times in the age. The letters were so comprehensive that the Queen appreciated her. However, her husband, the Viceroy of India, rarely wrote to the Queen and even if he did they were short, brief and to the point.

They were the Cannings. The husband, Lord Charles James Canning, was the last Governor-Genera and the first Viceroy of India. His wife, was Charlotte Canning, who was once in the court of  Queen Victoria.          

Canning was the Governor General of India from 1856 - 1862 and the first Viceroy in India from November 1, 1858. Born on 14 December 1812, he was the third son of the famous statesman George Canning.

An year after he took over as Governor-General of India, he had to face the most daunting task of the period. The war of Indian Independence broke out in 1857. It was overcome and Lord Canning by  the Parliamentary Act of 1858 the rule of the East India Company ended and Britain formally took over India as one of its province. Canning was made the Viceroy.

Though Canning punished all those involved in the war, he was found to be liberal and not vengeful. This earned him the admiration of the people and he was called Clemency Canning.

The Cannings were stationed n Calcutta and they had a retreat  at Barrackpore, which is today one of the suburbs of  Kolkata.

 The Cannings mixed well with the Indians and locals. Lady Canning in particular was found of  Indian dishes, particular Bengali sweets. Her all-time favourite was the Pantua, which she regularly ate and also served to the many guests who visited the house of the Governor-General in Kolkata (now it is the Raj Bhavan. This building was commissioned by Lord Robert Clive).

Lady Canning was so fond of the Bengali sweet that a well-known local confectioner local confection in Calcutta, called Bhim Nag prepared special types of Pantua and called them as Ledikeni.

Ledikeni is a corruption of the English name Lady Canning,

Today, apart from Rosagollas and other sweets, Ledikeni is also a popular Bengali dish.

It is a conventional Bengali, Bangladeshi and eastern Indian dish prepared of deep-fried sweet balls  made from semolina, milk, ghee, khova and sugar syrup.

Of course there are many versions of Pantua and we do not exactly know what Lady Canning liked. All we know is that Bhim Nag prepared her favourite dish and even named it after her.

The story goes that Bhim Nag prepared the dish on the birthday of Lady Canning and dedicated the sweet to her. Whatever be the veracity of the story, one thing is for sure. Ledikeni is one of the most mouthwatering sweets of  Bengal and Bangladesh and if you want the ones prepared by Bhim Nag head for Kolkata.

Kolkata is well connected by both road and rail networks. It has an airport too but Dum Dum airport is far away from Kolkata. Now, the metro makes it easier for you to alight at Dum Dum, take a cab to the Dum Dum metro and get into the hustle and bustle of Kolkata.

By the way, Lady Canning contacted malaria and died in the arms of her husband in her house, rather mansion, in Kolkata in 1861. She was buried in Kolkata, the city that she felt was a lonely one for her. Her tomb can still be seen in Barrackpore, which she always preferred over Kolkata.

Her husband, Canning, was made an Earl and he returned to England an exhausted man. He died in 1862 and is buried at Westminster Abbey in London.   

Canning may have been forgotten. But Ladikeni is not. Though almost 150 have passed after Charlotte’s death, her names survives in a sweetened form.