The Hindu Business Line : Conserving Kolkata's heritage

On one of the numerous bandh days which this city (Kolkata) has had in the recent past, this correspondent took a short walk in the Dalhousie Square (now BBD Bagh) area and its neighbourhood in the winter sun, camera in hand to take shots of anything that caught his eye, architecturally that is. At the end of about 90 minutes he found he had taken around 80 photographs of landmarks in the area, which is probably not even a quarter of what the area has to offer but which nevertheless convey a feeling that Calcutta — somehow one always refers to the city thus when one is delving into its past, rather than Kolkata — is not only a pre-eminent city architecturally, but that there are very few people today who see it that way and, consequently, do not bestow the attention that this aspect of city life so desperately deserves.

Stepping out of his office, he set foot on Old Court House Street — a road still redolent of memories of the British commercial presence despite the architectural changes that have been wrought over the years by the pulling down of gracious, stolid mercantile edifices and the building of faceless, soulless blocks, particularly on the western side of the road. He turned right and walked north towards St Andrews Church, completed in 1818 and built on the site of the first Court House (after which the street is named) of the English settlement.

Grand changes

After just about fifty paces, across the road, the giant façade of the Great Eastern Hotel, currently in the process of being renovated by its new owners, stared down at him. Of immense interest to this correspondent was the brickwork pattern that had been exposed after the plaster had been peeled off on the western face of the building, suggesting that the façade had undergone important changes over the years, stretching back perhaps into the early 1860s. One thought one detected signs of large windows facing the road, possibly hailing from the time when the hotel did not have its present verandah extending across the full length of the building's frontage. The columns also had been rendered bare with the plaster being taken off, but it was abundantly clear that their alignment and shape had remained unchanged for nearly 150 years. Old photographs of the hotel tend to confirm this.

With the happy thought of the reassurance being given by the new owners that the façade would not be altered in any way — thus making the hotel recognisable to people of the 19th century were they to return now to their old haunts in the area — one moved on to be confronted by the imposing edifice at the corner of Old Court House Street and Dalhousie Square South, known previously as the Dead Letter Office, the campanile of which has been a defining landmark of the area since 1876 when the building was completed.

A sense of despair

But the sense of grandeur and imperial writ gave way to one of sadness and despair when one saw, on the eastern side of the road, at its crossing with Mission Row, the disfigured hulk of the Currency Building, completed in 1868. It is a matter of shame and embarrassment for a citizen of this city to see the state the building is in today because what it indicates is that even officialdom has its eyes closed when it comes to tearing down a gracious architectural sentinel from the past in return for some measly, quantifiable income from real estate, in the process sacrificing heritage the value of which one cannot quantify.

One took a few pictures of the still surviving architectural details of the buildings (for example, the windows) and of course the once-imposing iron gate abutting Old Court House Street before turning left towards the nondescript and, architecturally, totally out-of-place Telephone Bhavan, which today stands on the site of the statue of the Marquess of Hastings, which, in the 19th century (the statue was erected in 1824), could be seen from the northern flight of steps of Government House (Raj Bhavan).

At the corner of Red Cross Place (formerly Wellesley Place) stands the Standard Life Assurance edifice (1895), an impressive, four-storey red-brick building with a tower surmounted by a weather-vane which, possibly, has stopped twirling years ago owing to a lack of maintenance. The building, which extends for quite a bit along Dalhousie Square South, is one of those critical edifices in the area which, if restored, could change the look of the entire square.

Breath-taking architecture

The architectural treasures on Hare Street, leafy Church Lane, Hasting Street (now Kiran Shankar Roy Road) and Council House Street are simply breath-taking, the best-preserved being on the last-named street and the worst on the first. In the southern part of this quadrangle stands St John's Church, the first cathedral of Calcutta being built in 1787, the churchyard of which contains the burial monument of Job Charnock. Incidentally, there seems to have been some denudation of the monuments in the churchyard, which this correspondent remembers having visited, and written on, in the 1970s.

In fact, it being a bandh-day called by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, the roads were totally empty, and walking down Council House Street gave one the distinct feeling that one was in the City area of London on a holiday. It is no great stretch of the imagination to suggest that this is precisely what this particular area of Kolkata can be transformed into, visually at least, if only those responsible for the upkeep of the buildings did their job conscientiously and with passion.

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