The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Maidan, Calcutta
dian or British, was always a stranger in a foreign town. The simple dualities
of native and colonizer inadequately describe the population of a city
that contained Portuguese, Armenians, Jews, Parsis, and Chinese as well as
Bengalis and British. Feelings of separation, danger, and strangeness were
not particular to one race alone; but it was the British who most convincingly
made concrete their denial of vulnerability and their confirmation of
permanence.
The Maidan would have been a spacious and beautiful sight for the
traveler arriving by ship at Chandphal Ghat, or by land across the pontoon
bridge in the approach from Delhi; it would already be present in the
traveler’s imagination because of the picture books circulated at home in
England. Images of Calcutta were available during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in England through representations made by Thomas and
William Daniell for Oriental Scenery between 1786 and 1793 and by William
Baillie, who painted twelve views in 1794. All of the images were picturesque
views of the city, either looking over the Maidan from the river
toward the City of Palaces, as it was known, or focusing on its principal
buildings. A series of paintings made of the Black Town by Baltazard
Solvyns between 1757 and 1790 were not so widely disseminated. It was the
vision across the double artifice of the Maidan that presented the bravest and
most picturesque face of the city. A contemporary observer praised the
fringes “absolutely studded with elegant . . . garden houses,” creating an
illusion that provoked Kipling to advise: “if you can get out into the middle
of the Maidan you will understand why Calcutta is called the City of
Palaces.” 9
Since the city had no single cultural origin, the opportunity for invention
produced a landscape picturesque in character. It was inhabited by
neoclassical buildings, derived from an architecture rooted in the ancient
cities of Greece and Rome. This architecture was deliberately different,
clearly marking Britain’s presence in India; but the adoption of standard
European forms was also due partly to convenience. Many early colonial
churches were based on the church of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, London,
for example. Its plans were published in 1728 by James Gibbs, pattern
books made them readily available to engineers, whose principal interest
was not design. The most dominant presence at the edge of the Maidan was
the Calcutta Government House, built for Lord Wellesley in 1803. It was
not a reproduction but rather an enhanced version of the eighteenth-century
baronial seat of Keddleston Hall in Derbyshire. An extra story gave it a
greater bearing, and its interiors—more magnificently and splendidly decorated
than those of its original—became the focus of Calcutta’s high society.
Keddleston Hall itself was designed by Robert Adam in the 1760s, and