Just as stories of empires, nations and cities reflect their rise and decline, lives and struggles of people, the narrative of a locality / an area mirrors the changes that transform the place and the people in it over time. What happens in it is also a reflection of the wider historical and demographic changes that sweep the city and the country of which it’s a part. I grew up in Bhawanipur, a locality in South Calcutta home to an old-world charm and Bengali aristocracy together with the changes the city has seen over the years.
The influx of Bihari, Gujrati and Marwari migrants, the gradual shifting of economic dominance from Bengalis to Gujratis and Marwaris, the slow movement of Bengali families which have stayed in Bhawanipur for centuries to flats located on the outskirts of the city, replacement of Bengali Bhodrolok culture by crude cosmopolitanism, Bhawanipur has seen them all.
Calcutta or as it’s known now Kolkata was created by the British by clubbing three villages, Sutanati, Gobindopur and Kalikata. By the time Calcutta came into being, East India Company had come a long way from being a group of traders trying to find their footing in the Subcontinent to becoming administrators, collecting taxes, dispensing justice, with imperial aspirations for a pan India domination. Taking over the administrative reigns of Bengal after defeating Siraj had helped them make the transition.
Places like Shobhabazar and Ahiritola developed in the early years. Developments of other areas of what came to be parts of north Calcutta, followed.
Bhawanipur was one of the 33 villages purchased by East India Company in 1758 from Mir Jafar, a puppet ruler installed by the East India Company after defeating Siraj Ud Daulah, the last independent sovereign of Bengal. Bhawanipur was set up by Britishers and Bengali landlords in 19th century. Now among the biggest localities in South Calcutta, Bhawanipur was just a small hamlet on the southern fringe of the city.
By the 1850s Bhawanipur grew into a place that migrants from East Bengal, who were mostly literate and well off, liked to live in. It helped them live close to North Calcutta and yet not in it. North Calcutta by then had started becoming a crowded place.
However, Bhawanipur flourished at the start of the 20th century when Harish Mukherjee Road and Lansdowne Road were constructed and Hazra Road was extended to Kalighat. In the later years rich Bengalis and Marwaris, who mostly owed their wealth to trades in tea, coal, jute and money lending, started shifting to the southern parts of Calcutta. Gradually many mansions came up in Bhawanipur.
Slowly Bhawanipur became a posh locality.
Much of the early history is largely forgotten now. Today the locality partly owes its eminence to the celebrated personalities who lived in it. The houses of Subhash Chandra Bose, Satyajit Ray, Ashutosh Mukherjee, Uttam Kumar still represent a different time and space.
Some of these houses have fallen prey to the ravages of time and others have been repurposed. Ashutosh Mukherjee’s house, for example, is Ashutosh College today. Subhash Chandra Bose’s is a museum.
With the passage of time, the famous residents moved away from public life, but the eminence of Bhawanipur continued. And slowly the locality started to add new aspects to its repertoire. In the 60s and 70s new cinema halls came up in Bhawanipur and it came to be known as cinema para.
Purna, Indira, Basushree, Kalika mostly ran houseful. Those were the golden years of Bengali films.
In the mid 80s and 90s, even if decline of Bengali films had started, the cinema halls still had considerable footfalls, although not so much as the earlier decades.
But in the last decade or so, these theatres have slowly gone into a state of decay. Some have long closed down; those that have survived are struggling to remain afloat. They run their shows with handful of viewers; sometimes they cancel shows because they don’t get the minimal number of viewers required to start a show.
Some may attribute this to the decline of single screen cinema halls. However, this decline is not isolated. It represents a larger trend generally reflected in the other physical landscapes of Bhawanipur.
The cinema halls may have an alibi, the houses of Bhawanipur, built in the later decades of the 20th century, don’t.
Some of these houses are mansions stretching from one end of a lane to another with vestibules connecting their different parts and old-fashioned balconies protruding out (Gari Baranda), somewhere forming a shade for cars and somewhere sticking out of the building overseeing the lane in front.
These houses easily equaled the grandeur and expanse of houses in North Calcutta, but today they are pale shadows of their former selves. Many of them have fallen into disrepair; some parts of them are still in use and others have been allowed to run into a terminal decay. A mansion near Elgin Road exemplifies their fate and current state aptly: abandoned with wild creepers running all over it.
However, on a closer look, it slowly becomes clear that it would have once throbbed with life and brimmed with wealth and Bengali aristocracy. Many of these houses, however, still stand solidly sans their aristocratic extravaganza of yesteryears, the gari barandas and the other frills.
And not just the mansions, even humbler dwellings constructed before independence mostly above 100 years old are in poor condition. They have housed multiple generations not just of owners but tenants who have been inhabiting these houses for several generations on laughably low rents.
Those who are luckier have been able to hand over their houses to property builders, but many have not been able to because of ownership disputes.
While walking in Bhawanipur a common sight is boards put up by Calcutta Municipal Corporation on these houses with cautionary messages informing that the structures are not safe to reside in, although families continue to live in them.
Another aspect of Bhawanipur is swanky high rises. And ironically, a common sight in Bhawanipur is a high-rise apartment standing next to an old decrepit house. You find them in the same lane, sometimes opposite each other, sometimes next to each other.
Flats in the high rises are mostly owned by Gujaratis. Every time an old house is demolished and replaced by a new age apartment, a middle-class Bengali family exits Bhawanipur to stay in apartments coming up in far flung, semi urbanized areas around the city and several Gujrati and Marwari families move in.
This has triggered a decline in number of Bengali families and a corresponding increase in the count of non-Bengali families in Bhawanipur and other prominent areas in Kolkata which were once strongholds of old fashioned Bengali upper middle class families.
Probably the decline was in the making for quite some time but it became painfully visible roughly two decades ago. Lack of jobs and unemployed or insufficiently employed youth, so much a part of 80s and 90s’ Calcutta, are some of the reasons. Lack of business ideas, an attribute of a place with low economic activity, can be another reason. In many cities old houses are repurposed or parts of them are renovated and let out to business establishments and then the revenue is reused for general maintenance.
Most of these houses are built such that they can’t be easily disintegrated and divided among the current owners. Lack of proper separation means coexistence and sharing, which snowballs into an issue with rising economic disparity among siblings, a preference for nuclear families, growing need to express individualism and an overall decline in old-world family values. Another reason is brain drain. Most of those who left Kolkata for jobs in other states of India in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s have settled down where they went.
Underneath the Bengali eminence lent by the residence of the celebrated Bengalis of the last century, Bhawanpur was always a multicultural place. Perhaps the wave of migrants from different parts of India in the later years of 20th century had diluted the Bengali culture of the locality. I remember there being lot of non-Bengali families in our para. There were small and medium food joints offering non-Bengali, mainly Gujrati, South Indian, fares. But this multiculturism notwithstanding, the dominant culture was unmistakably Bengali. Perhaps the same can’t be said with a similar sense of certainty today.
A transformation in the physical landscape of Bhawanipur has diluted that unmistakable Bengali character. Today, happily those food stores catering to non-Bengali palate remain but the Bengali ones offering fish and mutton cutlet and the Bengali variants of singara have either closed or are dimly surviving due to an ever-shrinking clientele or have tweaked their offerings to cater to a non-Bengali taste.
When I was studying in college in the 90s, it was a foregone conclusion among my friends and others of the same age group that we would have to leave Kolkata for a career. Eventually all of us left except a few. Over the last 20 years or so some have returned but most have settled down in other parts of India for good.
Now when I go to Kolkata on short visits and talk to youngsters either finishing their education or starting their careers, I don’t see the same keenness in them to leave Kolkata for jobs in other places. Today there are IT companies and BPOs in Kolkata, and many of these youngsters are employed in them. Maybe the tide is slowly turning.
Casual Notes 