19 March 2014, 06:27 PM IST
A friend, Adity, after decades spent as a peripatetic Indian diplomat's wife, has now taken up an admirable post-retirement project: chronicling the fast disappearing old mansions of India, starting with her hometown Allahabad and her 'sasural', Lucknow.
Recently she also went to Calcutta -and was amazed at the wealth of elegant residences now going to seed, either due to fragmented inheritances or plain disinterest. It takes an outsider to realise the potential of things lying right under the noses of habitués.
So quintessential pravasi (non-resident) Bengalis such as Adity and I cannot help but be overwhelmed by architecture when we visit Calcutta. There are not only the grand palaces of the mercantile rajahs who prospered due to British trade, but also the elegant homes of professional 'bhadralok' -- the class to which we both belong.
Like Bombay, most of the buildings of Calcutta's prosperous professional class -- doctors, lawyers and senior civil servants -- were built in the early decades of the 20th century and the Art Deco style persisted till at least a decade after India's independence. Luckily, Mumbai has not forsaken the rich legacy that Bombay has bequeathed, at least in terms of its public buildings, particularly cinema halls.
They have been renovated sensitively and enshrined in commemorative books. The ethos of a contemporaneous, gracious Calcutta, unfortunately, has not survived the transformation into Kolkata. It is one thing to lavish attention and restoration funds on British magnificence such as Writers' Buildings, the High Court, the Indian Museum and the Indo-Saracenic piles built by Standard Chartered and Lloyds Bank.
Ditto for the palaces of the Indian courtiers who prospered under British munificence. But it is quite another to include in this historical rubric the relatively larger body of public and private buildings and residences that encapsulate the motivations and ambitions of the bhadralok. This class is a sociological oddity of Bengal that desperately needs sympathetic chronicling and support.
They came up by dint of British education and opportunity but were left floundering by the Reds and then Didi's Bengal.
Calcutta's soul is invariably epitomised by the overly romanticised: the tropes of amazing grace amid grinding poverty, lower middle class struggle and Marxist angst, grime and civic shambles. That other bhadralok Calcutta's ghostly presence can be sensed only in their Art Deco buildings, for the living remnants -- the descendants of those professionals -- have mostly receded into their clubs, or started afresh abroad.
Now their Art Deco era buildings, the epitaphs of this disappearing class, are also vanishing. The odd well-maintained 1930s villa can be seen -- such as the one that belongs to the descendants of a Bengali ICS officer -- but it's right next to a 30-storied behemoth being built by ITC, the imperial tobacco relic that has so successfully reinvented itself for a swadeshi India. It may not be long before the villa succumbs too.
Unfortunately, there are builders aplenty willing to raze those Art Deco houses and erect characterless four or six storied apartment blocks for the new class aspiring for bhadralok status almost exactly a century later. Since neither law nor aesthetic conscience (among the owners as well as the civic authorities) prevents them from doing so, builders can hardly be blamed for bulldozing a legacy to rubble.
In the absence of any incentive to maintain these solidly built examples of Art Deco -- with some uniquely Indian defining features as well -- there is little hope that the genre will survive the 21st century. It may be wishful thinking, but surely Indian cities that still have such precious examples of turn of the century architecture can take a leaf from the book of British cities and take steps for preservation.
There can be tax breaks for restoration as opposed to new construction, there can be diktats against altering of frontages even for buildings that are not, say centuries old, in order to preserve a period or the character of a neighbourhood.
Recently a filmmaker lamented that there is hardly a street left in Calcutta where he can shoot a film set in the 1930s as there are new buildings everywhere! The west, of course, goes to extremes in its bid to chronicle and preserve -- quite the opposite of the break-and-build instinct of our "antique" civilisation.
That is why so little of our past remains intact. But there is no reason to repeat the mistake of our ancestors, especially when the benefits of preservation are so manifest. But if we persist in this course, Calcutta's Art Deco era and the bhadralok who created it will only survive in pravasi efforts such as this column and Adity's blog!
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