Back to West Bengal where a crumbling treasure trove of little visited but once important towns and former trading posts decorate the banks of the Hooghly River north of Calcutta - an obvious tourist draw one would imagine. As it is the roads are so bad and any sort of tourist infrastructure scant to non-existent that few people beyond Bengal, and few enough of them, ever visit Serampore, Chandernagore, Chinsura or Hooghly; respectively the former Danish settlement;the former French Settlement, still looking today like French colonial towns look from Hanoi to Pondicherry; the former Duth/British settlement and the headquarters of the British East India Company before the founding of Calcutta. There are others too, each with their own stash of temples, mosques, a Portuguese church here, a cemetery there and Kalna with its spectacular temple complex that we sadly only had time to see at a distance from the road.
Travel time or lack of it is the greatest problem when attempting to visit those forgotten places of the world that have fallen off the beaten track or indeed where the main road really is not much better than a rutted track. We were heading for Murshidabad, former capital of Bengal after the Nawab, Murshid Quli Khan transferred it from Dhaka at the beginning of the 18th century, the roads are appalling and we were too short of time and the daylight which at least slightly reduces the risk of accidents on dreadful surfaces where everyone is out for himself only. Due to India's east/west distance, the sun rises and sets much earlier in the East than the west and in Bengal darkness comes all too quickly not long after 4.30pm. Before that time we saw what we could of Bengali pastoral life, cattle, goats, rice crops and cotton - the brightly coloured dyed and spun thread drying on huge bamboo spools, piles of heavy read cotton quilts stuffed with real cotton wool, the most obvious locally manufactured product in small roadside shops - the countryside was very pretty too in some areas and particularly so around Murshidabad itself.
It always seems a privilege to be alone in any great historical site. At the same time, it is a shame that tourists to India tramp the same circuit round Rajasthan, Kerala, Goa, with dashes of Mumbai, Delhi and, more occasionally, areas of Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and perhaps a summer trip to Himachal Pradesh or Ladakh for those who crave mountains. West Bengal, starting with Calcutta of course, is packed with unique pleasures, as indeed is neighbouring Bihar, albeit of very different and more ancient forms in the main. Darjeeling gets a sprinkling of visitors but Eastern India has staggering cultural wealth that is largely ignored by foreign tourists when there are few obvious hotels, roads and communications are pretty chaotic, and, as a result, journeys take longer than most brief holidays allow.
It is a serious waste as ignored palaces that have great heritage value crumble quietly away. In Murshidabad
there is a certain amount of renovation ongoing on some of the major buildings – naturally that meant depressing NO ENTRY signs but the beautifully maintained ruins and grounds of the gigantic Katra mosque are cause for some optimism for the rest, likewise the restoration work on the vast imambara by the Hazar Duari Palace, the biggest of all the Murshidabad buildings, designed by Colonel McLeod Duncan of the Bengal Corps of Engineers and begun in 1829 to be a British official residence and now a Museum under the auspices of the Archaeological Survey of India holding an assorted collection of possessions of the former Bengal royal family
Sadly the neo-classical houses that remain in private ownership are suffering the worst as families have presumably disappeared down the rough road to the great cities, seldom to rattle back to deal with horrendous maintenance issues and bills in old family homes. One that has been restored, outside at least, to a positively disneyfied extent is the house at the centre of the Katgola Gardens which belongs now to a family trust judging by the signs. There is no entry to the interior of the house so there is no telling whether that has been restored to a level to match its alarmingly bright but nonetheless rather splendid exterior - at least it doesn't look as if it will fall down any time soon. For those with a love of cartoon lions, the palaces of Murshidabad take several prizes with their exterior guardian beasts - they are quite extraordinary
For a British visitor, Murshidabad is a series of slightly surreal discoveries with a house/palace round every corner looking like smaller or not so small at all versions of Blenheim or Buckingham Palace. Well really perhaps like Raj Bhavan in Calcutta or Belvedere, former residence of Lord Kitchener when he was Commander in Chief at the beginning of the 20th Century, but they amount to the same thing too and we were the only foreign tourists in the whole town, actually almost the only tourists apart from a handful of small groups of very local visitors. In Serampore and Chandernagore en route we saw Danish and French versions of the same neo-classical style. In Serampore, the old Danish trading settlement, the Danish Church, St Olavs is attended only by goats and falling down; the large mansion that is now Serampore College was built by British Baptist missionaries in the days when missionaries still thought broad education was at least as important as stuffing any form of Christianity down other people’s throats. It must be said that the theology professor who caught us loitering in the grounds appeared to take rather a disappointingly different view but she was kind enough to make sure we took in every detail of the College.
There is no reason for Indians to celebrate the Battle of Plassey and the 19th century monument on the battle field sits in a rubbish filled enclosure with a small tea shop nearby to fuel the local card players sitting by its iron gated entrance. It seems, however, that the prospect of future tourists has not escaped the thoughts of the local authorities as the adjacent inspection bungalow is being renovated, theoretically at least, to be a small museum. The present 3D plan of the battle field is perfectly understandable and looks like a school project in a glass case with a badly shattered top - the caretaker showed great enthusiasm for the plans afoot to improve the show. 
There may be little atmosphere indeed on the field of that extraordinarily important battle but the peaceful graveyard at Cossimbazar on the outskirts of Murshidabad has it in spades. Here, Warren Hastings first wife and baby daughter are buried beside a handful of soldiers and merchants both independent and attached to the East India Company, short lives memorialised, like in the famous South Street cemetery in Calcutta with huge obelisks and pyramids and hefty blocks of stone. The nawabi Jaffarganj cemetery just down the road to the North holds the graves of hundreds of members of the royal family from 1760 up to the present day and is somehow a less melancholy spot - these after all are the bodies of those who belonged here whether or not they too had lives cut short by disease or war or childbirth. Several of the graves are decorated with blue and white Dutch tiles interestingly applied, often upside down with no regard to their neighbours but presumably to offer something to all possible viewpoints.
My Mother joined me on this trip, indefatigable in her 80th year and rather better on her feet often than I am with an irritatingly bust up ankle. She was slightly surprised by the delights of the 'Hindu Kitchen' dhaba on the Murshidabad road where she definitely, to her extreme disappointment, couldn't get a Kingfisher beer and was lucky to find bottled Sprite. She was rightly horrified by the dining room decor of the 'Sunshine Hotel', virtually the only one in Murshidabad that we discovered, that went in for a line in purple curtains, patterned banquettes and everything clashing in dismal shades that would be hard to exceed for bad taste.I would have classed it as a soggy carpet hotel and expected odours of damp but they had had the sense to settle for tiled floors and the place was spotlessly clean - staff were chilly and entirely uncomprehending. The wedding party we encountered looked stunned in their best clothes and the wedding flowers wilted sadly. Possibly I would have thought a cockroach or two a decent exchange for the dining room curtains but still....The beer was cold, the red wine was positively frozen so we did without it, the food at good basic level was good and basic leaving aside a mistaken line in breakfast. My blackberry was stolen from my room - more fool me I suspect.
