Last Bungalow , livre ebook

Edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

THE LAST BUNGALOW
Writings on Allahabad
Contents
Dedication
List of Illustrations
A Note on the Selection
A Note on the Text
Descendants: An Introduction Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Hsiuan Tsang
from Buddhist Records of the Western World
Ralph Fitch
from Richard Hakluyt s Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation
Reginald Heber
from Narrative of a Journey Through the Upper Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-25
Ghalib
A letter of grievance from my wanderings
Bahadur Singh Bhatnagar
from Yadgar-i-Bahaduri
Fanny Parkes
from Wanderings of a Pilgrim
Matilda Spry
Our pretty bungalow is now a heap of ruins
Bholanauth Chunder
from The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India
Rudyard Kipling
from Something of Myself
Edmonia Hill
The Young Kipling
Mark Twain
from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
David Lelyveld
Swaraj Bhavan and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
Jawaharlal Nehru
from An Autobiography
Harivansh Rai Bachchan
from In the Afternoon of Time
Narmadeshwar Upadhyaya
from Snippets from Memory
Amaranatha Jha
from Sarojini Naidu: A Personal Homage
Sudhir Kumar Rudra
from The Rudra Book
Rajeshwar Dayal
from A Life of Our Times
Suryakant Tripathi Nirala
Breaking Stones
Nayantara Sahgal
from Prison and Chocolate Cake
Kate Chisholm
Best Bakery in Town
Saeed Jaffrey
from An Actor s Journey
Esther Mary Lyons
Railway Colony
Ved Mehta
from Portrait of India
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Partial Recall
The Roys
Pankaj Mishra
from An End of Suffering
Kama Maclean
On the Modern Kumbh Mela
Gyanranjan
Vagabond Nights
I. Allan Sealy
Three Gandhis
Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Sex and the Small Town
Footnotes
Descendants: An Introduction
Fanny Parkes
Sudhir Kumar Rudra
Kama Maclean
I. Allan Sealy
Permissions Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
to the memory of Ravi Dayal (1937-2006) whose family appears inside
List of Illustrations
Fanny Parkes: The Ice Pits and Temple of Bhawani and Suttees Alopi Bagh from Wanderings of a Pilgrim (1850).
Matilda Spry: Rout of the Mutineers at Allahabad by Colonel Neill , The Judges Court-House and Gallows at Allahabad , and Mess-House of the Officers of the 6th Bengal N.I., at Allahabad from Narrative of the Indian Revolt (1858) by Sir Colin Campbell.
Rudyard Kipling: The Pioneer Press (2005); photo: Raghoo Sinha.
Edmonia Hill: Muir College Staff 1889 from A History of the Muir Central College, 1872-1932 (1938) edited by Amaranatha Jha, and Advertisement from the Pioneer of 8 September 1888.
Amaranatha Jha: Group Photograph 1923 from Sarojini Naidu: A Personal Homage (n.d.) by Amaranatha Jha.
Sudhir Kumar Rudra: Cartoons of Allahabad University s Economics Department teachers by Saeed Jaffrey from Allahabad University Magazine , Diamond Jubilee Number (1947).
Kate Chisholm: Advertisement from the Pioneer of 1 June 1888.
Kama Maclean: Contemporary Print of Tirtha Raj Prayag .
A Note on the Selection
First-hand accounts of pre-colonial Allahabad are few and far between. This selection, of necessity therefore, is focused mainly on the colonial city, from its rise, in roughly 1800, to its catastrophic end two hundred years later.
A Note on the Text
Most of the selections in this anthology are given without excisions. The few places where excisions became necessary are indicated by an ellipsis between paragraphs or between sentences in the text.
Descendants: An Introduction
He was courteous to a fault and spoke beautiful English, is how someone who was one of his students in the early 1970s described him.
What did he teach? I asked.
Shakespeare.
What was he like as a teacher?
I can t say.
Why?
Because he seldom came to class. Well, he came a few times and then gave us a long list of things to read, Caroline Spurgeon, G. Wilson Knight, M.C. Bradbrook, you know what I mean. The next we heard he had left for Holland, to teach in a school there. He had a droll sense of humour.
Arun Kumar Bhattacharya was a short, compact, neat-looking man. He had a bald head with a fringe of grey hair and a round, pleasant face. Occasionally, I would run into him in the English department of Allahabad University, where we both taught. He was twenty years older than me, but that was not why we did not have much to say to each other. There was something prickly about him, and I kept my distance. I always noticed, however, that Bhattacharya took great care over his appearance. His cotton shirts, even at the end of a hot day, looked freshly laundered, and his expensive leather sandals, it seemed, were dust-repellent. He lived in a yellow and white bungalow at the corner of Thornhill and Albert Road, and drove an Ambassador car, which, more so since he was often its only occupant, appeared to be too big for him, like an oversized jacket. He was a bachelor.
Although Bhattacharya had spent most of his life in Allahabad, he was not a native of the city. Unknown even perhaps to himself, he was part of a long migration that had brought increasing numbers of Bengalis, mainly, but other communities as well-Kashmiri Pandits, Gujarati Nagars, a few entrepreneurial Parsis-to Gangetic upcountry towns in the second half of the nineteenth century. What drew these people to places like Patna, Allahabad, and Cawnpore were the new opportunities in education and medicine, business and trade, the administration and the judiciary, opened up, ironically, by colonialism. The British Empire was the empire of Steam , Jan Morris has remarked, but though built as part of the infrastructure of colonialism and staffed chiefly by Anglo-Indians, the railways were crucial to this Indian migration.

The colonial city of Allahabad, the area today known as Civil Lines, stands on the site of eight villages, which the British, to teach the natives a lesson, razed to the ground after the Mutiny of 1857. Helpless women, with suckling infants at their breasts, felt the weight of our vengeance no less than the vilest malefactors, wrote a historian of the Mutiny of events in the city. And one British officer spoke of his day s work thus:
One trip I enjoyed amazingly; we got on board a steamer with a gun, while the Sikhs and the fusiliers marched up to the city. We steamed up throwing shots right and left till we got up to the bad places, when we went on the shore and peppered away with our guns, my own old double-barrel bringing down several niggers.
In 1858, the year in which the governance of India passed from the East India Company to the Crown, the capital of the North-Western Provinces shifted from Agra to Allahabad. The changes to Allahabad which this brought about would have seemed dramatic to its inhabitants at the time. A significant rise in building construction followed the increase in the town s population, particularly around 1870. In the space of little more than a decade, centuries of isolation gave way to cosmopolitanism; village settlements to city roads and parks, tower clocks and spires, bandstands and covered markets, gymkhana clubs and newspaper offices, law courts and colleges, hospitals and libraries. To the rural sounds of belled cattle returning home was added the rattle of the latest printing machines of the Pioneer Press and the ping of the shuttlecock from a game of badminton in progress in the gardens of Belvedere House, described by a late nineteenth-century resident as a famous old bungalow which [had] been standing since the Mutiny days of 1857 . Belvedere House is where, in 1888, Rudyard Kipling wrote his short story Baa Baa, Black Sheep and which, later, he recalled in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi .
New service quarters mohullas -Allengunj near the university, Lukergunj near the railway station-came up to accommodate the growing population, and even today if one goes there one gets the feeling that one has come to a different part of the country. The shop signs are in Bengali and banner ads for Ranga-Java Deluxe Sindur hang outside.
The Kashmiri Pandits had no mohulla of their own, but that is because many of them were vakils and made enough money on the High Court Bar to live more grandly. In the 1880s, Ajudhia Nath Kunzru was earning something like Rs 80,000 a year from his practice alone. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru s palatial house on Albert Road has been torn down, and so has Kailash Nath Katju s on Edmonstone Road, but Motilal Nehru s Anand Bhavan still stands, a two-storey white building with a colonnaded verandah running round it. Judging by the standards of the time, it is not very large, nor is it ostentatious in the same way that contemporary Bania- or Punjabi-Gothic is. Motilal appears to have been a man of taste.
In Civil Lines, where initially only the British could occupy the bungalows, some of the best business establishments were Parsi-owned. Guzders was a bar and restaurant, T. Shaporjee & Sons was a general merchant s, C.D. Motishaw and Co., a car and motorcycle showroom, and J.M. Patell described itself as Photographers and Artists . Opposite the High Court was Hotel Finaro. Owned by Rhoda Gandhi, it has been home to many generations of British and American researchers who have come to Allahabad to consult the regional archives after Independence or work in the record rooms of the High Court, the Commissioner s office or the Municipal Board.

From the road, which was once Hastings Road and is now Nyaya Marg, the small six-room Hotel Finaro looks like someone s house. One of Allahabad s few remaining colonial bungalows, one part of it is still a private residence. Rhoda Gandhi s son Rustam now lives there. He runs the hotel, in addition to managing his manufacturing business.
A heavily built man in his mid-sixties, with a broad forehead and a lumbering walk, Rustam was wearing a bright chequered shirt and navy-bl