CHRONICLING CALCUTTA'S COLONIAL ZEITGEIST

In Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and other Forgotten Lives, Devasis Chattopadhyay, beautifully blending history and storytelling, resurrects nine forgotten Caucasian lives whose eccentricities, ambitions, and legacies shaped the colonial city's vibrant socio-cultural fabric. Excerpts:

- SANJEEV CHOPRA

Circa 1800: This was the time when the port city of Kolkata was an El Dorado – the first city of the very prosperous British East India which attracted Caucasian settlers of all manners and types – missionaries, traders, mercenaries, adventurers, fraudsters, treasure hunters, administrators and impresarios. Some made a fortune and a reputation, others lost all of theirs, but they all had their own repository of tales to recount. While those of Governor Generals and members of his Council have been archived, what of the vast majority of those who were the sinews of the Empire – the wives and the barmaids, the hotelier, the farrier, the haberdasher, the crime detective, the writer, the publisher, the cartoonist and the civil servant who died before he could reach a position of any significance.

It is precisely this world that Devasis Chattopadhyay brings to the fore in this wonderfully eclectic collection of nine lives of Caucasians – the piano tuner Major Harry Hobbs, John and Talbott Shakespear(e), the Frenchman Chevalier Antoine De L'Etang reputed to be lover of Marie Antoinette, Richard Reid, Calcutta's first detective and crime writer, Shirley Tremearne, the city's first media mogul, the Prinsep who lent his support to the slave trade, Isaac Henry Townley Roberdeau, the model civil servant who died very young, Colonel Percy Wyndham and the Comic Star of India Dave Carson. These were all people who came from another world, but made a major difference to the social, cultural, political, intellectual and entrepreneurial life of the city. As Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, the erudite editor of Niyogi Books, tells us in the Foreword, in this narrative, fact and fiction walked hand-in-hand, thereby reinforcing the etymological connect between story and history.