The elegant white buildings that were the backdrop to Zoffany's 18th century portraits of East India Company officials, merchants and adventurers, their wives and servants, have been heavily overlaid by succeeding Calcutta life. Gracious facades nevertheless still stand here and there overlooking the Maidan, cool and calm among grimy brick, dusty steel and glass or shiny new office buildings and the hurly burly bustle of this highly populated city. Old arcades are filled with shops and street traders and it is hazardous to look upwards as much as one would wish in Kolkata to admire buildings both beautiful and extraordinary; it will inevitably mean tripping over a broken pavement or someone whose whole attention is to the task in hand. Under one of the oddest directives so far from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, that may mean a man carefully painting municipal street furniture blue to fulfil her stated ambition to make Kolkata a blue city - why, nobody appears to know.
Bengalis are intensely proud of their past as leaders of Indian Nationalism. Images and effigies of Ghosh or Bose adorn every junction that is not already dedicated to Vivekananda or Tagore. It is sad, nonetheless that so much of the past continues to crumble away as it did under the long communist rule of West Bengal The nationalists are rightly celebrated but, like it or not, the art and architecture of the colonialists is part of the city's history and is worth preserving for that and for its own sake. It is hard to include the astounding Victoria Memorial in that bracket but since it exists as an extraordinary space, it could be better used than currently. God knows what a man of such aesthetic albeit imperialist sensibilities as Lord Curzon would have thought if he had ever seen his dream in all its weight. If he dreamt of another Taj Mahal he got instead a brute of a building that sank instead of soared - quite literally, given the unsuitability of its marshy site for so vast an edifice.
The collection of Zoffanys, Tilly Kettles and Daniells inside the building is splendid nevertheless and the viewer is all too splendidly isolated by determined barricading from getting close enough actually to see them without binoculars. A shocking waste that could easily be rectified. The historical exhibition from Job Charnock to the Nationalists and Independence is exhaustive and informative but begins to look tired and could do with a revamp. One hears that the whole edifice is riddled with such corruption, and I don't mean rust and mould, that it is impossible for anything sensible to be achieved - it is probably a miracle that the paintings are so well known and well documented that they have avoided quiet sales. Like or loathe its looks, The Victoria Memorial is a tourist draw for locals and foreigners alike and could could become remarkable among the great exhibition venues of the world.
On this occasion my main interest was in the rather grim bronze statue of Queen Victoria herself, outside on the approach to the Memorial entrance. I have been editing the Vicereine Mary Minto's Indian Journals and the stunning bronze panels by Sir Goscombe John on the statue's plinth were originally made to surround that of the equestrian statue of Lord Minto, Viceroy from 1905-10. When his daugher Ruby saw the finished piece in 1911 she remarked on the foreshortening effect of the panels on the whole and Lady Minto later donated them to the Victoria Memorial. The Minto statue has now been banished with other Viceregal bronzes to a happy if secluded resting place in the beautiful gardens of Flagstaff House at Barrackpore, the Viceroys' country retreat. Removing the panels, it must be said, did not have the desired effect, the proportions are all wrong and Minto, Grand National jockey 'though he had been, looks a sadly diminished figure on a cinderella rat of a pony.
Nearby Flagstaff House, once the Private Secretary's residence, the Barrackpore Government House crumbles, its near ruin an almost defunct police hospital. Its now unkempt gardens stretching down to the river must have been an oasis for the Viceroys and a place for something like normal life after the barracks-like Government House in Calcutta where armies of underemployed staff did nothing to reduce the inconvenience. The Barrackpore gardens, like those at Viceregal Lodge in Simla, gave successive Vicereines the opportunity to pursue their gardening ambitions and decry those of their most immediate predecessors. A great shading tree that was the site for viceregal breakfasts still thrives, and, away from the hurtling buses on the main road outside the gates, it is easy to relax into the peace of this beautiful spot. Governor Generals and Viceroys seldom escaped their work altogether, however, judging by the regularly spaced telegraph towers still stand among the shacks and shops on the edges of the road between Government House and Barrackpore. The final one is immediately adjacent to the house and, since its removal from more public view,to yet another statue of Lord Curzon. He might not have minded in this setting that its plinth is the favoured spot for pi dogs basking in the sun.
These days, although it is easy to imagine the complications of life in Government House and to empathise with its critics like Bishop Heber, who wrote of 'columns in a paltry style' and 'three stories, all too low', it is impressive for the sheer scale of its ballrooms and banqueting halls and then for the occasional treasures of the past, especially amongst the holdings of the Governor's private library. Of all the great rooms, the most evocative of the past are the still-used council chamber, easily recognisable from hundred year old photographs and the ADCs ante-room, still containing a billiard table and echoes of mild inebriation, high jinks and cigar smoke. In the lower level entrance hall it is easy too to imagine the foggy winter gloom in these 'dreary catacombs' where, according to the Asiatic Journal, the ghastly effect was magnified by the bodies of blanketed palanquin bearers sleeping on the floor like the dead in their winding sheets.
And so back to the beginning, at least of the colonial city, where the visitor may soak herself in the essay like church wall and cemetery epitaphs to the shortlived heroes and suffering heroines of the past, from Job Charnock onwards. Just as size mattered so much in government buildings that stamped the footprint of an invading culture on India soil, the memorials in the cemeteries of Calcutta are on a monumental scale, often in inverse proportion to the length of a life. In the South Park Street cemetery, a child's mausoleum comes as pillared and porticoed as Greek temple. Charnock's mausoleum rests among the earlier and less magnificent graves of his contemporaries and other later notables in the church yard of St John's, the original East India Company Anglican Cathedral of Calcutta. The churchyard also contains Curzon's Black Hole of Calcutta monument, a surprising survivor of Independence given the opposing views of British mythmakers and some Indian historians on the whole episode. Inside the church a recently restored Last Supper by Zoffany glows above a side altar; the improbable models for the disciples, various worthies of his day, and Jesus, the Greek priest. The later, gothic St Paul's Church has since become the Cathedral of the Calcutta diocese of the Church of India, its wonderful stained glass windows by Burne-Jones commemorating another Vicereine, Lady Mayo.
The Bengal Club is another monument to an earlier and very different society. Like old British Clubs the world over it somehow retains an ambience of the past with bearers waiting to launder a shirt or bring tea and biscuits to huge lobbied bedrooms, these days well plumbed and airconditioned, whose balconies overlook the hawkers and shops of Russell street. Members and their guests nod to each other in passages and tea rooms; pre-lunch bloody marys are served in the bars and beautifully dressed women eat in the dining rooms under the forbidding painted eye of whiskered former members. In their day Indians and women were banned from membership - Indians could not even be guests.
At the Calcutta Cricket Club, a perfect green lawn is now surrounded by the high buildings of the modern city. Cricket and tennis go on outside and for cricket in India there is never a shortage of enthusiastic players and spectators. Inside, whisky drinkers sit in the chill of airconditioning at the old horseshoe bar drinking Islay and Jura malts, another reminder, with more solid memorials, of so many colonial Scots tramping throughout Indian/British history.
It is said that when Sir Colin Campbell was marching to relieve the siege of Lucknow in 1857, the rebel bugler, a former sepoy, all unknowing, sounded the only march he knew: 'The Campbells are coming'. A gossipy atmosphere of past and present stories of the Kolkata social merry go round plays out in the bar. One elderly man's wife was slapped by his mistress, a famous singer, in a restaurant many years ago and never went out again. Another aging roué has brought his wife with him to everyone's surprise - she looks miserable and one wonders who is proving what to whom at this stage of their lives. It is hardly obvious to the outsider but the glitterati and the literati mix less in Kolkata than they do in other great Indian cities like Delhi. As for Mumbai, both Kolkatans and Delhiites will tell you that they have no literati there, only business and Bollywood.
Who mixes with whom may be an issue but there is a sense of community in West Bengal that is unusually tangible and exemplified in its charitable institutions, whether a Muslim community group in the slums,a children's NGO like Future Hope, started in in the last 20 years by an English banker, or an older organisation like the volunteer run All Bengal Women's Union, founded by women leaders in the community to help women and children who had been raped, trafficked or were sex workers and had been abandoned by their families. The organisation now offers schooling to slum children and care for elderly women, with variably successful vocational training schemes for their younger sisters. It also has the best cafe serving genuinely and deliciously home-cooked Bengali food in the city for rock-bottom prices.
It is hardly comparable but the Indian Museum, another great white but fittingly proportioned building facing the Maidan, seems also to fulfil community needs. It is a popular place to go, not only filled with enforced school parties but by dallying young couples, determined groups of matrons, the casual wanderer and the curious tourist of any nationality. Its high rooms and verandahs are cool enough and it contains, after all, something for everyone, albeit one might regret the lack of judicious weeding out of the collections and wish for additional spit and polish in their presentation. It seems time-warped and therefore irresistible. In rooms redolent of 19th century collectors and little changed from those early days, this is Kim's Wonder House. Everything is here, from moth eaten Scottish stags heads to ancient religious relics and sculpted stone of whimsical design and poetic beauty,thousands of years old. Anything may be thrown in, apparently randomly,with the confused collections of enthusiastic and often amateur botanists, metallurgists and archaeologists of changing decades and diverse ethnic extraction. The Museum may be another colonial building but it is undoubtedly an Indian Museum containing a taste of every era of India's history, civilisations, tribes, invaders and settlers and seeming somehow to mirror the broad flood of life outside its doors.
