Glimpses of 'An Anthology of Selected Writings on East Bengal' from the 'India Collection' at the India International Centre Library, Delhi
Introduction
The 'India Collection' at the India International Centre Library in New Delhi earlier constituted the 'Collection of British Books on India' of the British Council, New Delhi. Numbering over 3000 rare and old books, documents, personal accounts, prints, memoirs, maps and manuscripts; the 'India Collection' consist largely the works of British authors on India, particularly covering the British period. The Collection spans the period from the 17th century (the earliest title is dated 1672) to 1947.
The extracts presented below draw on expansive archival material pertaining to selective original works in the form of memoirs, records and travel accounts primarily on nineteenth-century East Bengal. Rich in topographical and architectural documentation and social customs the topics include administration, animals, architecture, climate, customs, geography, lifestyle, mores and manners and Indian rulers; by generations of British civilian and military officers, scholars and traders in India. These 'voices that speak' from a bygone era are an introduction to a larger literary canvas of the British presence in East Bengal that will be explored in a forthcoming book.
'Sylhet' Thackeray' by F.B. Bradley-Birt
Published by Smith, Elder, & Co., London, 1911.
(RH Note): 'Bradley-Birt is also the author of 'Chota Nagpore', 'The Story of an Indian Upland', 'The Romance of an Eastern Capital', 'Through Persia' and others…'Sylhet' Thackeray is the grandfather of the nineteenth century English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. Both grandfather and grandson carry the same name. The grandson born in Calcutta is the author of 'Vanity Fair', the novel on the Napoleonic period in England. His father lies buried in the South Park Street cemetery, Calcutta. The grandfather as a cadet in the East India Company's service arrived in Calcutta in 1766 and was appointed as Fourth in Council in Dacca in 1771. William Makepeace Thackeray Senior went on to become the First Collector of Sylhet in 1772 and was henceforward known as 'Sylhet' Thackeray in order to differentiate him from some four generations of other Thackerays who served in India.
Extract
"It was in the up-country stations at Patna, Cossimbazar, Rajmahal and Dacca that almost all the great fortunes of those days were made, and when, in the ordinary course, it came to a question as to which of those stations Thackeray should be transferred, it was but natural that the choice should fall upon Dacca…No Eastern capital was more fortunate in its approach than Dacca, in the middle of the eighteenth century. The only highway that gave access to it was the river, but the broad and glittering waters of the Buriganga furnished a magnificent approach…Beyond the masts of the shipping, for over four miles along the river bank, stretched the city itself. Though already shorn of much of its beauty by time and neglect, since the great Viceroy Shaista Khan had kept court there and hundred years before, it still presented a splendid front to the new-comer on the Buriganga...Founded by Englishmen and chosen as their capital, Calcutta was as English as an Eastern city could well be. Dacca, in striking contrast, was as yet almost untouched by the West, an oriental city upon which the great Mogul Empire had indelibly set its impress. A city of mosques and palaces, of Durbar halls and mausoleums, of arched gateways and imposing landing ghats, of narrow winding streets, high walls and dim mysterious passages, there was nothing of the west in it save the little group of buildings that formed the English Factory…"
"…Sylhet, though adjoining the Dacca district and actually under the Company as part of the province of Bengal, was still without a local British agent to direct its affairs in the beginning of 1772. Yet the district was an important one for purposes of trade. Its vast forests produced some of the finest timber in Bengal, while the rivers that intersected them furnished means of transport, the lack of which so often severely handicapped the timber trade elsewhere. Huge logs, bound together and started off on some distant rivulet in Sylhet, found their way down stream with a minimum of cost and trouble, landing safely at Dacca or Calcutta, hundreds of miles away. Chunam (lime) was an even more important export and formed the staple product of Sylhet, a hundred to a hundred and twenty thousand maunds being sent down annually…"
"…Nothing in Thackeray's career in India has caught the popular imagination so much as his deal in elephants, and, after more than a hundred and thirty years, it remains the one incident throughout his ten years' service that is generally remembered. It has invested him with all the romance of a great shikari, the reputation of an elephant-hunter being as closely associated with him as the name of the province of which he was the first Collector…"
'The Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves' by Sir William Wilson Hunter, K.C.S.I., M.A., L.L.D.
Published by Henry Frowde, London, 1897.
Sir William was a civil servant and scholar.
Extract
"Of the twelve children born to Sylhet Thackeray and his wife, eleven grew up, and nine found their way to the East. They at once became a great Indian family…Of the six sons of Sylhet Thackeray who went to India, five died there, and the sixth on a voyage to the Cape for the recovery of his health."
"…The serious business of the Resident of Sylhet, or 'Collector' as he began to be called in 1772, was to hold the District against the frontier tribes and rebellious chief. Each autumn the hillmen burst out upon the valley: if in any year they did not come, it was because the floods had already swept away the crops…" "During Thackeray's two years in Sylhet, he continued the native system of administration, but gradually imposed on it the methods of British rule. Under the Mughals an agent of the Delhi treasury, always distrusted and constantly changed, had remitted the revenue to Dacca, and made as much as he could by extortion during his precarious tenure of office. Village tax-farmers brought to the Emperor's intendant the quota payable by the separate rural communes, as shown in the books of the village accountant and the Imperial registrar. Each of these subordinates took in his turn an allowance, and increased it as much as he dared by bribes…"
'Handbook for the Bengal Presidency' by John Eastwick
Published by John Murray, London, 1882.
(RH Note): The publisher John Murray also published 'Handbook for the Madras Presidency' (1881) and Handbook for the Bombay Presidency (1881).
Extract
Dhakah, erroneously called Dacca by the English, has its name from Dhak, the Butea frondosa. In 1575, when Akbar's generals reduced Bengal, Sunhargaon was the chief commercial city; the emperor Jahangir made Dhakah the residency of the governor, and called the city Jahangirnagar. It is built on that part of the Baraganja called the Dalliseri. In 1801 there were 233 mosques, and 43,949 houses, of which 2,832 were of brick, according to the account given by Tavernier in January, 1666. Not withstanding the riches and celebrity of Dhakah, there are few edifices left of any importance…The most pleasant drive at Dhakah is round the race-course, which is about 1 m. to the W. of the church. To the S. of it is a fine country villa belonging to the Nawab Ahsanu'llah…Dhakah is a good place for hog-hunting and tiger-shooting. There are extensive ruins at Sunhargaon, but they can be visited only on an elephant. The Nawab mentioned, above, possessed some elephants thoroughly broken in for tiger-hunting, and they were often lent to English gentlemen for that purpose. The English Government borrowed them some years ago, and they died while in use for Government purposes, and have not been replaced."
(Author Note): A vocabulary handbook follows every one of the three Presidency books. In 'Bengal Presidency' we find English-language gems with Hindi and Bengali translations.
"On Dressing and Washing", we find in Bengali: "Posak para o hat much dhoya":
In English: "Before you close the mosquito curtains, beat out all the mosquitos with a towel."
In Bengali: "Masari gonjar purber ek khani towel diye masa taraiya ber kare deo."
In English: "Let the feet of the bed stand in water, to keep the ants off."
In Bengali: "Khater paya jaler upar rakho, tahale pipre utte parbena."
In English: "The bearers must pull the pankhah all night."
In Bengali: "Beharadigake samasta ratri pakha tanite habe."
'Sport in Bengal and How, When and Where to Seek It'' by Edward B. Baker
Published by Ledger, Smith, & Co., London, 1887.
Edward B. Baker was the Deputy Inspector-General of Police in Bengal.
"…The average native of Bengal, prone to exaggeration, and discriminating with difficulty the variety and distinguishing features of wild animals, is apt to mislead the sportsman, and to take him on a wild-goose chase; to him "bagh" is indifferently a tiger, a panther, a hyena, or even a wild cat, and the size of the animal he reports is a mere matter of petty detail, to be settled according to the power of his imagination, the amount of the expected "bukshish," and the gullibility of the recipient of his news…"
"…Having hunted and shot for nearly forty years between Ganjam and Dibroghur, and Benares and Arracan, I, too, can say that I have never encountered a single full individual (black panther); but I once saw in a litter of three cubs two which were quite black, the third and the mother being of the common tree variety. This curious incident in sporting life occurred in Noakholly, on the borders of Chittagong and Hill Tipperah, and it proves, I think, that the black and tree panthers will interbreed, since it is highly improbable that the black cubs were stolen, or had been put out to nurse by their black mother."
"…The cyclone of the night between the last day of October and the first of November, 1876, inflicted losses still more dreadful and more widespread, and was even more calamitous in the Noakholly and adjoining districts of Backergunge and Chittagong, than was that of the 5th October, 1864, in Midnapoor and the twenty-four Pergunnahs, Calcutta included."
"…A curious fact in connection with the hurricane of 1876 is that by far the greatest amount of damage was done during the reflux or retirement of the waters which had been driven up from the sea into the funnel-like mouths of the Megna and Burra Fenny rivers. When that cyclone burst upon the land on the night of the 31st October, the moon being at the full and the highest spring tides of the year due, an alarming rise of the water was naturally to be apprehended…Should these lines be ever read by the brother officer, whose ill luck made him my fellow-sufferer, he will, I feel assured, bear me out in the assertion I make, that the time we spent together then is to be regarded as the most trying and painful to look upon in our lives. The exposure, the coarse food, and frightful heat of May and June, 1858, when we rarely pitched tents, were bad enough, and Crimean veterans declared them to be harder to endure than the cold and mud of the first winter before Sebastopol; but while then we had compensation in the excitements of marching and fighting, in our November campaign among dead and rotten nature there was none..."
(Author Note): I presume that "May and June, 1858" refers to the period Edward Baker spent on duty somewhere in the plains of northern India -- following the 1857 Uprising and the hapless "November campaign" to the aftermath of the devastating hurricane of 1876.