The Empress of India Read Free Page A

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    The capital of British India, and the terminus of the East Indian Railway, Calcutta had been an important outpost of British power since Job Charnock came to the Indian state of Bengal in 1690, and combined the adjoining villages of Sutanuti, Govindapur, and Kilikata to establish a trading post of the British East India Company. Some said that the name of the new city came from Kali, the Hindu goddess of murder and unspeakable crimes. Some, who should know, said that was not true, but they looked away nervously when they said it.
    Over the next century Calcutta grew in importance, both as a major port and as a symbol of the East India Company’s dominance. There were a few setbacks along the way: In 1756 the Nawab of Bengal died, and a power struggle arose between his widow, Ghasiti Begum, and his grandson, twenty-seven-year-old Siraj Ud Daulah. The Company sided with the widow, which proved to be a mistake. When Siraj became the new Nawab, his troops took Fort William, the British strongpoint in Calcutta, and occupied the city. They thrust over a hundred British prisoners into a small cell in the fort, and then promptly forgot about them. By the next day, when they remembered, many of the prisoners had died of heatstroke and dehydration—the temperature, even at night, was over a hundred degrees. This became known as the infamous “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident.
    In 1757 Robert Clive and his army won the Battle of Plassey, retook the city, and ousted the Nawab. Calcutta was never again to suffer the embarrassment of being out of British hands. A grateful king ennobled Clive, and he became Baron Clive of Plassey. In 1855 political and militarypower was taken away from the East India Company, which had grown too big for anybody’s britches, and Great Britain became the direct ruler of much of the Indian subcontinent, and the power behind the throne of most of the rest of it. In 1877 Victoria Regina, Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, was crowned the Empress of India.
    By 1890 Calcutta was thoroughly British, except those parts of it that were thoroughly Indian. A short distance from Fort William, past Eden Gardens, were Government House and the High Court; around the corner was the Imperial Museum and, a block farther, the United Service Club. Under the Gothic clock tower of the red brick Sir Stuart Hogg Market building sat all the shops one could possibly need. The Calcutta Turf Club, more popularly known as the Race Course, was just south of Fort William. The streets had names like The Strand, Grey Street, Wellesley Street, and Cornwallis Street, and broughams and chaises took the English sahibs and memsahibs on their rounds of shopping and visiting.
    On the other hand, the Calcutta waterfront was on the Hooghly River, not the Thames. A ten-minute stroll from Government House would find the wanderer in a warren of twisting, narrow dirt lanes, where cows, goats, chickens, beggars, and rats fought off the flies and mosquitoes. If one continued along Lower Chitpur Road, skirting past wagons and carts of all shapes and sizes, drawn by bullocks, donkeys, and unbelievably skinny men clad in dirty white dhotis, dodging the emaciated cows that ambled anywhere they chose, secure in their sacred status from human molestation, one would pass within blocks of the Leper Asylum and Alms House, and the Hindu Female School, before reaching Bagh Bazar Street. Troops of jackals roamed the city in the night, breaking the silence with their barks, coughs, and howls.
    The first assaults to the senses of the European visitor to Calcutta were the heat, the glare, and the smell. The sights came shortly after—the palatial structures housing the British colonial administration andthe very rich, mostly within sight and easy running distance of Fort William in case the natives should get restless once again; and all around them the narrow streets fronted by ancient brick buildings, and even more