Pratik Kanjilal
March 26, 2010

First Published: 22:51 IST(26/3/2010)
Last Updated: 22:57 IST(26/3/2010)

Yet another colonial hangover

Life on Kolkata’s Park Street will not be the same after the
devastating fire in Stephen Court. The hub of social life and
entertainment almost since the city was founded, the street has
recently been trying to recover from its decline during Marxist
rule. Now, its regeneration could falter. Kolkata is an old-style city
with a sense of public decency. The tragedy will be mourned for years
to come and going out for a bit of fun on the street where so many
people died needlessly could feel unnatural.

People are also mourning the destruction of a landmark of the colonial
skyline. Interestingly, though Stephen Court was a Raj period
building, it was not built by a colonial. In fact, much of the
remarkable heritage architecture of the Presidency towns is of Asian
provenance. The English mainly built government institutions to rule
from, educational institutions to generate manpower and barracks for
the military which kept them in power. They built an astonishing
number of barracks. In fact, one of Kolkata’s satellite towns is
called Barrackpore. Ironically, that’s where the 1857 rising started,
precipitated by the court martial of the turbulent sepoy Mangal
Pandey.

Stephen Court was built by the Isfahani Armenian Arathoon Stephen
(1861-1927), who arrived in Kolkata dirt-poor and became a real estate
baron. His impoverished refugee origin may be an exaggeration, since
his family was perhaps already in India when Pandey was turning up the
heat. But he was certainly a merchant prince committed to
institution-building. His most remarkable property was a Chowringhee
boarding house he took over from a Mrs Monk and turned into the iconic
Grand Hotel. When business declined in 1938 following Kolkata’s great
cholera epidemic, it was bought on the cheap by a certain Mohinder
Singh Oberoi. The Oberoi Grand was a lucky buy, minting money during
the war years when thousands of Allied soldiers were billeted there
and partied with single-minded determination as they waited to be
shipped out to fight the Japanese. It became the seed of the
transnational Oberoi chain of hotels.

The British did not exclusively build the colonial skyline, as we
imagine.

Mercantile Asians, notably the Armenians, also invested in building
modern India. Armenians were trading with the Malabar coast from the
8th century and the seed of the British Empire, the Mughal firman
allowing the East India Company to set up shop in Bengal, was brokered
by an Armenian named Khoja Sarhad. By the time of Stephen, about
30,000 Armenians were settled in India. And when Armenia was under
Soviet rule, this nation persecuted throughout history valued India as
a safe haven for its church.

In 2003, the Calcutta High Court ruled that the Company functionary
Job Charnock could not be identified as the founder of Kolkata. The
evidence against him included mention of the town in Abul Fazl’s
Ain-i-Akbari and the popular medieval text Manasa Mangal. But the
court neglected the most damning evidence: the oldest Christian
gravestone in India, in Kolkata’s Armenian Church. It is that of an
Armenian woman named `Rezabibi, wife of the late charitable Sookias,
who departed from this world to life eternal’ in 1630. At the time,
Charnock was a suckling babe in London. So much for the British
creating modern India!

Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine.
n pratik@littlemag.com
The views expressed by the author are personal.