Home
The light in our kitchen could be switched on only if the switch were held at a certain position for a certain amount of time. These were the Bakelite ‘dolly’ toggle switches, as our house had not yet managed to complete the transfer to the newer rocker switches. The art of ‘toggling’ correctly was passed from one resident to another like some piece of sacred family lore; the ones who could do it well were held in some esteem. Often as my mother struggled with an especially recalcitrant one or someone had to attend to the third busted latch of the day, I would hear them muttering under their breaths about having to live in this strange old house, this ‘Manajder adbhut bari’. This was long before I had discovered Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s thin hardbound volume, a hilarious novel about the adventures of the eponymous protagonist surrounding mainly the photograph of a mysterious stranger and the many misadventures of his bewildering family with its curious cast of characters. It was wedged among a number of other inviting titles in my library: Pagla Saheber Kabar [‘The Mad Sahib’s Grave’], Bhuture Ghari [‘The Ghostly WallClock’] Patashgader Jangale. When I read Manajder Adbhut Bari [‘Manaj’s Strange Household’], the similarities to the house I lived in were certainly there: I had, as a child, seen a variety of acquaintances live in the house for various amounts of time. The curious thing was that while everyone seemed to know these acquaintances well enough, nobody could quite explain how they had come to know them in the first place. Crammed with strange people and stranger treasures as this house was, I would not have been too surprised to find a photograph like the one Manoj does at the beginning of the novel; one that would hopefully set me off on a similar series of adventures in the company of incompetent detectives in search of the lost son of the local king; involving – as the constable at one point exclaims – everything from ‘murders, to monkeys to marauding’, and all culminating in the joyous return of the long-lost member of the community. In fact, I can distinctly remember spending several summer afternoons sneaking around, going through moth-eaten books and papers trying to find something I could keep after a particularly vicious termite infestation had forced everyone to empty their shelves and air out the books. Many of these books, I saw, bore names that none of us could recognize. As I began to grow up in that house, and on multiple occasions reread Mukherjee’s novel, the similarities began to make me more and more uncomfortable because at the centre of Manajder Adbhut Bari, I now realized, there are not one but two old houses. While on the one hand, there is Manaj’s household, bustling with family, neighbours and strangers, there is, on the other hand, the old Rajbari, a derelict manor populated only by the very old king and queen of Haringadh and the even older mother of the king. The story consists of two narrative strands, the first is interested in solving the mystery of the smiling boy in the photograph that Manaj cherishes, while the second is interested in tracing the return of the princely prodigal son, Kandarpanarayan, to his ancestral home in Haringadh. The story ends with the dacoit chief, hitherto referred to in the text simply as Mejosardar, learning that he is in fact Kandarpanarayan, the missing son of the house he had come to rob. He consequently returns to the ‘Bhadra home’, from which he had been lost as a child long before the events of the novel.
Mejosardar becomes ‘Kandarpanarayan;’ rejoining the long series of ‘narayans’, stretching from Herambanarayan to Gobindanarayan. Eviator Zerubavel, writing on the ‘tremendous significance of names as tokens of sameness’, explains that ‘[t]he common intergenerational repetition of first names’ or ‘traditional practices of naming newborns after ancestors’ invokes for us a ‘chain’, that is the ‘image of a single continuous structure’. As such it ‘enables us to mentally and experientially transform series of essentially discrete, generationally adjacent pairs (parent- child, teacher-student) into a single continuous “line of succession.” Among other things, this serves to identify the future inheritors of the family’s wealth and in informing onlookers with designs on the property, of its safe passage into the ‘right’ hands.…reflects,
In the text, the path to the treasure, that the gang of robbers led by Mejosardar – who is as yet unaware of his true identity – comes to loot, is lined with portraits of Kandarpanarayan’s ancestors; each one leading to a subsequent portrait and with that to the next clue to the treasure. It indicates the reasons for which the story’s denouement must involve Kandarpanarayan’s return to the ‘right’ home, the re-establishment of his links with the ‘right’ line, even though the dacoits had cared for the lost childlike their own son. By taking up his rightful place in his ancestral ‘home’ at the end of the series, Kandarpanarayan ensures the treasure’s remaining within the family as it has remained for several generations by being passed from one male heir to the next. Thus, at the same time that I realized that the story centers not really around the shenanigans of the many colourful residents of Haringadh but the miraculous arrival of the ‘right’ descendant to a dying line; the one with the legitimate claim to the property, I also realized that becoming the ‘right’ descendent, becoming the next link in the generational ‘chain’ so to speak, becoming a ‘narayan’ as Kandarpanarayan does, for instance, in this story, is very often a position open only for a man. As a more grown-up reader the novel, this meant that I had to become uncomfortably aware of myself as a single girl child occupying exactly the same kind of space, as the derelict ‘rajbadi’ of the novel. Now the sighs of elders in the family about the dilapidated state of the house – the repairs that were seemingly always required here, or there – began to lead to a niggling suspicion at the back of my mind – confronted with a daughter, and especially with one deeply unwilling to get married, my elders could not hope for the miraculous arrival of a ‘right’ descendent as granted in Mukgerjee’s novel. Was that in fact the fear which remained unexpressed behind the frequent sighs?
Fragmented Houses, Piecemeal Histories
Descendants – ‘right’ or otherwise, – are, anyway, rather difficult to come by in a city like Kolkata. A 2015 report in The Times of India stated that among the metro cities of the country, Kolkata is home to the largest population of senior citizens, most of them living alone. It also has the smallest population of 20- to 30-year-olds. As professional opportunities in the city have dried up over the past few decades, many young people have emigrated from Kolkata. No wonder, then, that the miraculous return of the ‘right’ descendant figures in these texts. They are possibly an attempt to address the anxieties of an ageing city.
The house I live in sits sandwiched between two others; both with members who are contributors to the statistics mentioned before. It is the familiar story of children emigrating to the west and to other cities within India for better educational and professional opportunities. One of the houses has had to be sold piecemeal after some units of the family changed cities and others were unable or unwilling to maintain the entire property; preferring instead to sell or rent parts of it to supplement their incomes. Part of it has gone to a landlord who houses tenants, part of it to a coaching centre and parts of it to shops. This fragmented house reminds me of another childhood favourite, Lila Majumdar’s short story, ‘Uluberer Bhuter Bari’ or ‘The Haunted House of Ulubere.’ I always felt as though she had this exact house in mind while writing this short story. The eponymous haunted ancestral home to which the young narrator Somu comes to spend his Puja vacations is fragmented, falling apart both literally and figuratively. It is ‘dilapidated, patched together somehow’ and is in need of serious repairs.
‘Uluberer Bhuter Bari’ traces the story of relative socioeconomic decline familiar to many ‘Bhadralok’ households; ones which went from drawing incomes from multiple sources like agricultural land ownership and service sector jobs, saturating both the social and economic spheres in the nineteenth century to often struggling to maintain their properties by the end of the twentieth. The fragmented house testifies to this. As Somu’s grandmother had informed him before coming, ‘the adjacent lands have had to be sold off.’ Additionally, a part of the house has been leased to the government for a salt go-down, and another one for storing coir, and the rest is in imminent danger of being auctioned, for failure to pay the necessary taxes. Thirteen branches of the family occupy thirteen different portions of the house and are thus faced with eviction; to be uprooted from the single household and dispersed.
The owners of the house live in fear that the house will be ‘smuggled’ away before they know it if they fail to pay the taxes this time around. However, Majumdar spares the house this indignity. Right at the end, the ‘uncivilized boys and girls’– who Somu had thought were the children of the workers at the go-down – come to Somu. Standing on top of each other, they make a chariot ‘almost as tall as two storeys’; with the one on top carrying a sack. They drop the sack at Somu’s feet and disappear into thin air’. The contents of the sack will obviously cover the cost of preserving and improving the fragmented home. Later in the story, when Somu’s father discovers a ‘one-fifty-year-old’ book of accounts, we learn that in it he has found directive to the effect that one paise was to be given to Palot’s wife every day. Palot’s wife used to be an employee of the family a hundred and fifty years ago, as were, it seems, her descendants. It is they who come bearing tribute just as their former bosses are about to lose everything.
It may have been her own experiences that led Majumdar to save the house from changing hands in the story. In fact, Lila Majumdar’s own ancestral home was similarly fragmented: the famed home of the Ray Chowdhurys at 100 Garpar Road. After Sukumar Ray’s death, the task of managing the press and the printing business had fallen on the young shoulders of his brother, the thirty-two-year-old Subinay. The Rays had borrowed from the Mullick Estate, and with Subinay unable to manage affairs on his own, the family defaulted on the payments. In her memoir Pakdandi, Majumdar writes of the two years that the family had to spend at the heart wrenching task of making a list of all its belongings (which included among other things the printing press and Upendrakishore’s manuscripts) so that the house could be auctioned. While a part of the house went to the Athenaeum Institution, the business was bought by two brothers who were erstwhile employees of the Rays. The loss of the ancestral home plagued another equally illustrious Kolkata family. The Baithakkhana Badi, at 5 Dwarkanath Tagore Lane, which Dwarkanath Tagore had built solely to entertain his guests and which later housed the four sons of Girindranath Tagore – Gunendranath, Gaganendranath, Samarendranath and Abanindranath – had to be sold, as Mohanlal Gangopadhyay writes in Dakshiner Baranda, as zamindari incomes dried up at the same time and property prices in the city soared so that many in the family considered at the time that letting go of the house would be the most profitable option.
Majumdar ends ‘Uluberer Bhooter Bari’ with the domestic workers remaining loyal to their old employers, which eventually saves the property from being ‘smuggled away.’ This could be an attempt to manage a sense of disquiet which lurks at the corners of many of these stories, a disquiet driven by the very real possibility of losing a home. The thought of losing a home, I know, triggers some deeply painful memories within a section of the Bengali Bhadralok milieu. I have witnessed it firsthand. The house I have lived in all my life was built in the years following the Partition. After my grandfather’s family left almost everything, they had in Rajshahi, they started here – as my grandfather likes to say – ‘from zero’. They lived in Bhawanipore with some family they had in the city until a floor of this house could be built. My dadu and didu– both of whom came to Kolkata from Dhaka –had almost exactly the same stories to tell. They additionally had the experience living in rented houses and the threats of eviction they faced made them continually relive the original trauma. The middle-class refugees from East Pakistan who had to leave behind significant amounts of land and wealth and rebuild their lives in the city would harbor a deep anxiety about losing everything again. Thus, the references to old possessions being ‘smuggled away’, being occupied by squatters of no means, which we find for instance in Shirshendu Mukherjee’s ‘Kalicharaner Bhite’, a story about a man restoring his home that had been taken over by squatters with the aid of ghosts, that is, to property being gradually wrested from ‘worthy’ hands that are not unusual in Bangla children’s stories of the period. may be read in the light of this history. However, the motif of the threatened old house – often haunted by vengeful or benign ghosts depending on who was entering the house – was, I would argue, also being used to respond to a more longstanding and a more general anxiety among the Bengali Bhadralok about the changing patterns of ownership. The anxieties that these texts articulated were in fact also being discussed by many in numerous such actual houses, including mine. The window of my parents’ room overlooked the terrace of the house I mentioned earlier, and our two families had built up something of a camaraderie based mostly on unattended neighborhood grievances and sharing tips on tending to meager terrace gardens. As the terrace was fitted out with two rooms which would now house new tenants, I witnessed in the drawn curtains of their room their discomfort at having to be in such close proximity with these newcomers. I kept asking myself, was the city and its associated spaces changing hands?
Towards a History of Changing Ownership Patterns
N. Mukherjee, in what was one of the earliest historical accounts of the Bengali Bhadralok, noted a particular aspect that was central to the early self-definition of the group known as Bhadralok. In ‘Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta, 1815 – 38’, Mukherjee traces the history of the Bengali Hindu man’s consequential involvement in the colonial economic sphere to the exclusion of nearly all other communities: as financiers they supplied capital to private British merchants which could not otherwise be raised in the absence of a modern joint stock banking system; invested large sums in Calcutta where there was a boom in building and in land, after the Permanent Settlement. The analogy that Mukherjee uses is telling: ‘the opulent merchants and bankers…built large houses, established family deities, patronized Brahmins and ghataks’, entertained European officers and friends as a Mughal courtier would do.’ Additionally, they were the ones who consistently filled the ranks of white-collar workers because ‘…the vast majority of Muslims had neither the inclination nor the skill required for the type of administrative posts open to Indians, nor the areas of economic activity which received a new impetus under the British; or occupied clerical posts; the ‘commercial houses in the city providing a great deal of [such] employment.’
Thus, as long as the colonial firms retained oligopolistic control over the market, the Bengali Hindu men managed to maintain themselves as the sole indigenous elite; and only ones with sufficient socioeconomic clout, or access to the network, to build, maintain and affiliate themselves with sites like the municipal office, the courthouse, the colleges supported (at least partially) by the colonial government, and the Town Hall; i.e. ‘the arenas designated as belonging to the state and/or the colonizer by the stamp of colonial authority. Their almost exclusive hold over colonial centres of power was expressed spatially by their extensive ownership of land and property not only in the city, but also in the villages where their ancestral homes would often be.
However, this state of affairs would begin to change soon enough. In his article, ‘Sahibs, Babus and Banias: Changes in Industrial Control in Eastern India,1918–1950’, Omkar Goswami, delving into a relatively understudied area of business history has attempted to explain what brought this about. Goswami cites a cartoon printed in 1930s in the Capital, a European daily published in Calcutta:
UNCLE SAM: [Holding a piece of burlap and roaring] Who did this?
SCOT: [Trembling] Please, sir, it was not I. It was my boss. [Points at a pot- bellied, short, obese, dhoti-clad, betel-nut-chew- ing Marwari standing at the side]
UNCLE SAM: [Incredulously) Is that your boss?
SCOT: [Still trembling] Yes, sir. I can’t do any business without asking his blessings.
The cartoon captures, succinctly, the new dynamics taking shape in the city. Around 1920s, Marwaris emerged as the major financiers to European managed companies that in these inflationary years found themselves ‘undercapitalized, strapped for funds, and needing cash to expand capacity in their jute mills’; ‘started moving from trade to industries…through steady purchases of shares in companies controlled by European managing agencies’, often acquiring such shares as collaterals for the loans, ‘to a point where Marwaris could first force their way into the boardrooms and then take over the firms’. Also, to rival the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, in 1926, the Indian Chamber of Commerce was set up ‘to speak for Indian business and political interests’ which ‘soon started orchestrating Marwari opposition to the [former]. A process which had started towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the exit of the Bengali financier and the steady immigration of the Marwaris to Calcutta and their emergence as the new traders and financiers, had begun to reach its full threatening potential. Although what Goswami calls ‘Swadeshi’ firms – like Banga Luxmi Cotton Mills or Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals, ‘exclusively under Bengali management, ownership and control’ – came up rapidly in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, these collapsed as fast. Bent on maintaining their ‘Bengali characteristics’, ‘closely held…out of a fear that outsiders would control the company and out of a desire to exclude Marwaris at all costs’, these companies refused to issue fresh equity to the general public, and were often forced to sell these off to ‘non-Bengalis’. The Bengali Hindu man was no longer the sole constituent of the indigenous elite; and was facing serious competition from the ‘non- Bengali’ groups, which would only intensify as the Twentieth Century progressed.’
Real Estate, Ancestral Properties and the Non-Bengali ‘Other’
The ‘non-bengali’ continues to figure as the nouveau riche ‘intruder’ waiting, often in the guise of real estate developers, to take over spaces previously owned by members of the Bengali gentleman class. In Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s story, Gad Hekimpurer Rajbari [‘The Palace of Gad Hekimpur’], for instance, which appears in one of the most recent special Puja issues of the children’s magazine, Anandamela, , the local nobility is down on their luck. Their palace is being eyed by one Gardanbhai Atowal, who is looking to turn it into a ‘modern resort’. With the advice of a ghostly doll and the help of their loyal employees the ‘historical Rajbari’ and the family it houses are sought to be restored to something resembling their former stations by the Bengali populace of the town. That this was in fact a notion held by many was evidenced by the massive popular success of a film like Bhooter Bhabishyat. In the film a group of ghosts come together to save a derelict house due to the rapid rise in the activity of promoters – a group represented in this film by Ganesh Bhutoria, characterized as the paan-chewing stereotype of the ‘non-bengali’ businessman – the homes they had dwelt in, both while alive and dead, have all been demolished.
In his study of the business of real estate development in Kolkata, Tone K. Sissener writes that the private real estate business in Kolkata is in fact ‘dominated by Marwaris’, as ‘they are behind most large-scale and high-profile development projects in Kolkata, commonly organized as joint enterprises of the government of West Bengal with names such as the Shrachi, Emami, Sureka, MKJ, JB, Merlin and Nahata groups. Some of the recent landmark projects in the city The South City Towers and Urbana have also been associated with these names.
What has made the maintenance of ancestral properties difficult has paradoxically also been one of the factors that have led to the growth of the business of real estate development. While the dispersal of the units of a joint family and the associated fact of the division of incomes, the emigration of young people, etc. has made the maintenance of unwieldy old houses difficult, it has also often led to incomes in foreign currencies and an awareness of global living practices. As Pablo S. Bose writes ‘Living the Way the World Does: Global Indians in the Remaking of Kolkata’, the desire to emulate such living practices in their homelands has often driven demand and made these projects immensely profitable. Although real estate development tailored to the tastes of and driven by demand of foreign returnees is yet to come to our ‘pada’ or neighbourhood, the skyrocketing prices of property in an area adjoining the Sukanta Setu, has left it no stranger to promoting. Of the two houses I mentioned earlier, one of the houses has been converted to an apartment. One flat is reserved for the ageing parents. Three others are kept locked for when the three siblings might visit. The rest have been sold. The house next to it, or Sen badi as we used to call it, has also gone the same way.
Coda
To put it mildly, we too have been ‘encouraged’ to do the same; our extended family would prefer to have discrete living units not least because it would be difficult to determine the quantum of one’s rights in a space difficult to divide, but also because it is easier to use such units as collaterals for various financial needs than it is to use an ancestral home. The local real estate developers are not too far behind; we pay more ‘chanda’ [‘donation’] during Durga Puja and Kali Puja, we try to take it lying down when garbage is dumped in front of our gates, and hope that we are not drawing too much attention to ourselves.
The Bengali Bhadralok, a social milieu within which I would situate myself, however, remains by all standards a privileged group. Needless to say, historical events such as the Partition or the activities of real estate developers have affected other social groups in much worse ways. But as economic capital shifted and changed hands, the social class of the Bengali Bhadralok has experienced a relative sidelining within the public sphere. As the retaining of their former hegemonic position goes further and further out of reach, they have, it seems, run out of corporeal entities with which to fantasize about their vengeance. There is a turning to the supernatural, avenging with fictional ghosts the place they are losing in reality. My family, over the years, predictably, has constructed a version of this at home: Whenever anyone ‘suggests’ that we sell the house we live in, and if the invitation to share the house as it is does not apply or is rejected, I have heard my parents and grandparents tell them a story. Apparently, whenever anyone got too keen on demolishing the house, they had been visited by an apparition, patrolling our backyard, clad in the traditional white cloth as ghosts should be if they are to serve their purpose. This has worked remarkably well up till now.
Illustration : Suman Mukherjee