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Re-forming public space![]()
Chapter 10: Politics, Planning, and Subjection
Anticolonial Nationalism and Public Space in Colonial Calcutta
Swati Chattopadhyay
In 1998 the Calcutta Town Hall was restored and turned into a museum (Figure 10.1). A tableau of Calcuttaās history and a visual narrative of anticolonial nationalism came to occupy much of the lower-floor hall, while a library was located to the left of the entrance foyer (Figure 10.2). The upper-floor hall and surrounding rooms were designated for conferences and state celebrations. In a poignant way the museumification of Town Hall returned the space to its original function. The Town Hall was first proposed in 1792 with the objective of providing a public space for the cityās residents. The idea was taken up in earnest in 1804 when a building was found necessary to display the marble statues of two preceding Governor Generals of the East India Company, Lord Cornwallis and Lord Wellesley, that had just then arrived from England.1 Other statues of notable residents were added in due course. Although not intended, the display cases of the contemporary exhibition housing the historical mannequins provide an interesting counterpoint to the marble statues from the nineteenth century that continue to adorn the foyers.
Figure 10.1 Calcutta Town Hall. Photograph by the author.
Figure 10.2 Exhibits in the Lower Floor of Town Hall, Calcutta. Photograph by the author.
The Calcutta Town Hallās purpose, location, and ultimately the contestation over its use during the first hundred years after its inauguration, were deeply political, but for much of its existence it was not meant as a space of representative politics ā it was about the denial and bitter contestation of that privilege of self-representation and citizenship. If city halls are always about representation ā whom do they represent and in what capacity? ā what indeed is the relationship between the city hallās function as public space, its architectural vocabulary, and the planning ethos in which it is embedded? Who constitutes the legitimate public? And how does the city hall inflect the answer to that question? Calcuttaās Town Hall helps us understand the limits of self-representation in a colonial milieu and the impact of those limitations on the larger scale of the city as political space. The spatial lessons here, I would argue, need not be limited to the colonial context. In a more important sense, the history of Calcutta Town Hall as public space, suggests something critical about the changing spatial imaginary of representative politics.
THE CONTEXT OF REPRESENTATION
The need for a respectable establishment, more polite than the taverns and coffee houses of the city, was part of an emerging early nineteenth-century British vision of Calcutta, capital of British India until 1911, that sought to impress the power of the ruling elite on the landscape. In the late eighteenth century, in the absence of a town hall and because of the smallness of the erstwhile residence of the Governor General, most state celebrations and important entertainments organized by the British community in Calcutta were held in the Old Court House. The latterās demolition in 1792 left the city without any āgrand halls for public suppers or dances.ā2 That and the Governor General Lord Wellesleyās penchant for ceremonial pomp meant that several new buildings, including the Town Hall and a new Government House, would be erected in the city center on Esplanade Row. The location of Calcuttaās Town Hall was exceptionally privileged. It faced the vast open expanse of the Esplanade or the Maidan, and Fort William, and stood in line with the Supreme Court and the new grand pile of Government House, the residence and office of the Governor General (Figure 10.3). Together they constituted the front row of the administrative center, and this view was faithfully recorded in contemporary depictions of the city. Visitors arriving by ship in the nineteenth century were routinely impressed with the solemnly organized row of public buildings facing the Esplanade.
The city center itself was a heady combination of government offices, warehouses, churches, large agency houses, taverns, markets, petty shops, and residences. The police headquarters on Lall Bazaar Street was just a block away, so was the Writersā Building, the administrative headquarters of the East India Company. Wellesley pursued a plan to buy the properties behind Government House, so that the grandeur of the imperial center could be extended over a larger space. But the proprietors of these buildings did not comply with his vision. So ceremonial activities turned towards the Esplanade in the nineteenth century.
The buildings on Esplanade Row worked as an aesthetic and social ensemble with the green space of the Esplanade, which included the Course (for drives) and Respondentia Walk. Special celebrations in the Governorās mansion concluded with fireworks in the Esplanade, which the guests could observe from the porticoes and balconies of the buildings on Esplanade Row. While Indian gentlemen crowded the Course in search of fresh air, in 1831 both the Course and Respondentia Walk were made exclusive European preserves from five to eight in the mornings and evenings.3 Such exclusionary measures were considered necessary to prevent natives from disfiguring a valued social event. The Town Hall was considered part of this privileged landscape. The landscaping in front of Town Hall explicitly linked it to the ceremonial space of the Esplanade and Government House. In Fredrick Feibigās mid-nineteenth century depiction we see the copper statue of Governor General Lord William Bentinck by Richard Westmacott placed across the street from Town Hallās front entrance around 1830 (Figure 10.4).4
Figure 10.3 Map of Calcutta showing the location of Town Hall.
Figure 10.4 The Town Hall in Calcutta by Fredrick Fiebig. Tinted lithograph, Calcutta c. 1845. Copyright British Library Board.
The building itself, designed by Colonel John Garstin of the Engineers, was grandiose, in excess of even the typical palatial scale of public and private buildings in the city. The lower floor was 23 feet tall and the upper floor another 30 feet high.5 A wide flight of stairs leading directly from the street to a double-story portico framed by non-fluted Doric-style columns made for an impressive entrance. The fund for the construction of the building was raised by a public lottery,6 and the government provided the cost for its initial interior furnishing.7 Its grandiosity, and the fact that the building showed signs of structural failure soon after it was completed generated sarcastic commentaries from contemporaries:
ā¦ that far-famed hall.
In which there of Graeciaās school the traces,
But by its cracking predisposed to fall.
Till patched up, and well tried by many a festive ball.8
In 1818 Garstin undertook the necessary structural remediation at his own cost. Subsequently, the steward, William Hastie, undertook to furnish it at his own expense in exchange for the privilege of supplying provisions for dinners and other social events. While the steward was responsible for daily supervision, the Town Hall was placed under a committee that set the conditions of use and enforced the rules. Accordingly, the public could visit the lower floor hall housing the statues from 8 am to 4 pm Monday to Saturday, and merchants and other individuals who wanted space for business purposes were allocated one of the southern rooms by the steward. The use of the upper floor hall was restricted for meetings and entertainments for public occasions for which one needed to apply to the Town Hall Committee. The responsibility and maintenance of Town Hall underwent periodic changes after 1824 when the initial committee was dissolved. The government did not wish to support the costs, and transferred the responsibilities to the Justices of the Peace in 1865, instituting a new rule of charging Rs 100 for general use such as dinners, entertainments, and professional meetings.9 Town Hall could be used for free only for charitable or public purposes. In 1867 the property was transferred to the Calcutta Municipality.
The centerpiece of the building plan was the transverse hall on each floor, the entry to the building being located perpendicular to their long sides (Figure 10.5). Such an arrangement was uncommon as a planning device in colonial Calcutta, where the norm was to build the central hall on axis with the entry. The balcony that overlooked the rear portico acted as a gallery and provided an impressive view of the administrative center of the city and the river. The main hall on the upper floor with its teak floor was conceived of as a ballroom with a music gallery on the west end and a raised platform on the east end. The rooms on the north were used as card and supper rooms, and the ground floor rooms next to the foyer were rented out for business meetings. Both its interior and exterior were designed with a certain elite performativity in mind. Although not architecturally distinguished, the largeness of the central hall allowed the space to be suitably dressed for events. Jeremy Losty gives us the description of such an interior decoration scheme from William Prinsepās unpublished journal. The occasion was a fancy-dress ball to welcome back Lady Hastings from England:
Figure 10.5 Plan of Upper Floor of Town Hall, Calcutta. Drawing by author based on drawings courtesy of Calcutta Town Hall and plan by Sivashish Bose.
[W]e [William and his brother James, newly arrived in Calcutta] were both on the decorating committee. It was to be done regardless of expense. Between each pillar a shield was suspended by wreaths of evergreens with the name of some Indian victory on it. The ceiling was made to represent the interior of a tent by the tinted muslin festooned from the centre to the capitals of the pillars. At one end was a splendid tent of open drapery looped on to a group of tilting lances and a shield with the armorial bearings of the Loudoun and Moira arms. On the other end under the orchestra we made with the cheap white muslin of the country a temple to Hymen with fluted columns looking like a Doric peristyle with flowers at the capitals, the only colour about it. It had the most elegant light appearance.10
The production of imperial elegance by transforming the neoclassical interior with symbols of conquest was typical of such celebrations, and invited the participation of the guests, both British and Indian, in the performance of imperial glory. But this participatory terrain remained uneven.
When James Prinsep died in 1840, a āgreat meetingā was held in the Town Hall on August 6, chaired by Sir Edward Ryan, to determine the best manner in which his contribution to India and Calcutta ought to be commemorated. We do not know what transpired at that meeting, but William noted that āthe natives in the meanwhile held a meeting among themselves and formed a subscription of their own to build a ghaut [stepped landing] to his memory.ā William, partner with William Carr and Dwarakanth Tagore in the firm Carr, Tagore and Company, did not mention who these natives were, despite his closeness to the elite Indian community. He continued:
A site was given them by the Gov General at the Coolie Ghaut just below the Fort and the erection of a very neat Palladian Porch at the head of a flight of steps was entrusted to our friend Fitzgerald an officer of the Engineers. It is an ornament to the river, and mostly used for the landing of troops arriving by sea which before mostly had to jump out of the boats on to a very muddy shore. It bears the name of James Prinsep on the architrave in four different languages ā English, Bengallee, Hindi, and Persian. My last act in India was to add 2 stone recumbent lions to slope off the stairs which I got well done in Bu...
