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Title Pages

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

Title Pages
Sumanta Banerjee

(p.i) Memoirs of Roads (p.ii)

(p.iii) Memoirs of Roads

(p.iv)

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered
trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in India by
Oxford University Press

Page 1 of 2
Title Pages

YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India

© Indian Institute of Advanced Study 2016

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2016

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Epigraph

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

Epigraph
Sumanta Banerjee

(p.v)

‘Trodden by many feet, oh path, don’t muffle in your dust the sounds of the
footsteps from the past. I am lending my ear to those sounds. Please
whisper them to me.’

— Rabindranath Tagore, Lipika (p.vi)

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Page 1 of 1
Maps

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

(p.viii) Maps
Sumanta Banerjee

Map 1.1 Sutanuti, Kolikata, and Gobindapur, 1690, based on a map of the
late seventeenth century by George Herron 19
Map 1.2 The White Town and the Black Town, 1792–3, based on a map of
the late eighteenth century by A. Upjohn 33
Map 3.1 Bagbazar, 2016 82
Map 4.1 Shakespeare Sarani, 2016 115
Map 5.1 Rashbehari Avenue, 2016 136

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Page 1 of 1
Acknowledgements

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgements
Sumanta Banerjee

The present research has been made possible by a generous grant of fellowship
from the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, in the serene
surroundings of which I wrote this book during 2012 and 2013. I owe a special
debt of gratitude to Professor Peter Ronald deSouza, Director, IIAS, who first
suggested that I apply for the fellowship, and welcomed me to the Institute as a
fellow on a sunny winter morning in November 2012. His concern and care for
both the academic and the personal needs of the fellows and success in building
up a fraternity of scholars made my stay at IIAS not only intellectually
productive but emotionally rewarding too.

My warm appreciation goes to the many friends—fellows, associate fellows,

guest fellows, and other scholars—whom I had the fortune to meet during my
stay at the Institute, especially at the extremely valuable Thursday seminars
every week. Over numerous discussions and debates, they helped me clarify my
thoughts by introducing me to new theories that enabled me to build up a
conceptual framework for my research study. I should also express my thanks to
the ever-attentive staff of IIAS—in the library and other sections of the
administration—without whose assistance it would not have been possible to
complete this book within the stipulated time.

I acknowledge the support that I received during my fieldwork from the staff of
the following institutions: National Archives of India, New (p.x) Delhi; National
Library, Kolkata; and Town Hall, Kolkata. I would also like to thank the reviewers
whose comments helped me expand the scope of the book for its publication. My
acknowledgements, however, would not be complete without paying tribute to
those countless informants outside the pages of archival documents and walls of
official establishments who helped me to construct this narrative by sharing

Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgements

their reminiscences and current experiences—old residents of obscure lanes,

inhabitants of slums, pavement dwellers, street vendors, and owners of roadside
eateries, among others.

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Page 2 of 2
Introduction

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

Introduction
Sumanta Banerjee

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

Roads have acted as important conduits in all civilizations to serve purposes that
ranged from the commercial to the military. Along with the advancement in
technology, roads were built with more sophisticated surfaces to be able to bear
new forms of vehicular traffic. Bullock-cart pathways thus developed into
motorways. Apart from serving the need of interconnectivity between distant
places, roads became necessary for connectivity within a particular space—the
city. With growing urbanization, roads became an important tool for
administrators to reorganize old spaces (mainly rural), to primarily suit their
political and economic purposes. At the same time, the new space in the shape of
roads provided common citizens with the opportunity of connecting with each
other in their daily business transactions and professional work, as well as in
their social existence.

Keywords: Road, traffic, urbanization, citizens, connectivity, motorway

The three elements of nature—water, air, and earth—have given us the means of
transportation and communication. But there has always been a contest among
the three over the possession of space. Of them, water, through its seas and
rivers, has been the first to offer humans the opportunity to carve out routes for
trade and commerce. Waterways still remain a major mode of exporting and
importing commercial goods from one port to another. But water has also been a
rather unfaithful friend to human beings. Its inherent nature of fluidity makes
rivers drift and change their courses, which both created and destroyed
civilizations in the past. Further, in alliance with its other partner, air, it often
turns out to be treacherous. While there is no doubt that the airborne rain helps

Page 1 of 13
Introduction

rivers to swell and irrigate lands, aiding in agriculture, air behaves erratically—
moving from total abstinence to extreme indulgence. Sometimes, it withdraws
rain and starves the rivers of water, causing droughts, and at other times, it
makes rain suddenly pour down in a calamitous waterfall, making rivers
overflow into floods, destroying the very agricultural fields that it had once
nurtured. It can even result in cyclonic disasters like tsunamis, which destroy
human habitation.

Air was a late addition to the field of transportation and communication, and air
transport only became possible with the invention of modern technology like
airplanes and satellites. This technology has indeed facilitated global
intercommunication by collapsing distances with the help of speed. But that too
has been no smooth affair. The whims of air such as storms or cyclones not only
have disastrous effects on air transport (p.2) and its passengers, but also
disrupt satellite-dependent communication systems.

Compared to these two nature-based sources of traditional and modern modes of

transportation and communication (water and air), land has remained a more
reliable and safer friend of humanity. It has opened up its solid base to its
inhabitants as a firm ground for roads (barring occasional earthquakes); roads
and the structures built on it are less vulnerable to nature’s quirks like floods,
storms, cyclones, and so on, that disrupt riverine and aerial transport on a
massive scale. The land-based routes have, therefore, remained a robust spatial
backbone for the development of modern urban civilization. It is the submissive
viability of land that has allowed human beings to intervene and utilize it to an
extent that they can never hope to replicate in similar endeavours to exploit the
resources of water and air for the purpose of communication.

As a product of human intervention on the natural landscape, roads are a record

of the long history of the inventiveness and creativity of men in utilizing the
earth and its spaces to serve their interests. Roads were first carved out as
footpaths through jungles and fields by travellers. They were then turned into
lanes for bullock carts and horse-driven carriages to carry both passengers and
merchandize. With time and the development of technology, better roads began
to be built with new materials to ensure their permanence. Besides their
surface, engineers also started to exploit the underbelly of roads in order to dig
underground sewerage systems as a part of the urban health system. Still later,
roads were further dug under to create a parallel transport system—the
underground railway—that ran underneath the highways of surface traffic.

The Political Economy of Road-Building

Roads are thus an ancient human institution, which could be considered, as it
were, the circulatory system of human society and civilization. It has given birth
to cities and nourished them, provided channels for (p.3) trade and
communication of ideas, and has also been turned into sites of great battles that

Page 2 of 13
Introduction

overturned empires to replace them with others. The road, like no other
institution, brings together almost all facets of human life in one common space.
People live their existence through roads—dwelling in houses, shopping in
markets, walking or travelling in vehicles, and seeking entertainment in roadside
theatre houses or eating joints. The road, in this way, plays a decisive role in
transforming the surrounding reality and bringing about socio-economic,
political, and cultural changes in the lives of residents living on its either side.

At the same time, we should remember that the history of road-building has had
another side to it which is unsavoury. Driven by the growing urge for
urbanization, the state has often ruthlessly ousted people from their homelands
to make way for highways that cut through their traditional habitat.

Thousands of anonymous men and women had to make sacrifices in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the construction of the important roads
that today adorn the cities of the West, as well as those of its former empires.
Even in the present era, the same drive for urban expansion and the consequent
need for carving out roads are destroying both human settlements and natural
habitats in developing countries, displacing their inhabitants on a massive scale.
According to futuristic speculation, in the next two decades, more than 5,90,000
square miles of land globally—about the size of Mongolia—will be gobbled up by
cities.1 The speculation is based on the fact that from 1970 to 2000, India, China,
and Africa have experienced the highest rate of land acquisition for urban
expansion.2 Much of this land had been expropriated from villagers—either by
force or by paying them a paltry sum as compensation—leaving them destitute,
surviving as beggars or daily-wage labourers in an urban metropolis situated on
the same soil that once used to be their village homeland. Thus, the construction
and use of the road has always been fraught with tensions, with a disjunction
between the interests of those who made the road and those who used it. (p.4)

It is believed that the first paved road was built in Egypt in 2500 BC by Pharaoh
Cheops as a private path to reach the site of the Great Pyramid. It was 1,000
yards long and 60 feet wide. Obviously, it was a demonstration of the exclusive
privilege that the ruler enjoyed. But the political needs of the rulers—expansion
of their territory, rapid movement of their armies, making their presence felt in
the distant corners of their states—soon led to the construction of public
highways. One of the earliest such roads was what is described as the King’s
Highway in the Old Testament. As its name suggests, it was built by royalty. Laid
down in 2000 BC, it provided a major route for both conquering armies and
traders, stretching from Damascus to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south, through
Syria to Mesopotamia, and finally on to Egypt. This road was later renamed
Trojan’s Road by the Romans. The same road was to be used in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries by the Crusaders in their war to reclaim the Holy Land. Among
other ancient roads was the Royal Road, built by the Persians from the Persian
Gulf to the Aegean Sea—a distance of 1,775 miles. The Incas in South America

Page 3 of 13
Introduction

constructed a system of roads that enabled them to expand their empire and
govern large stretches of that part of the continent. Ironically, it was these same
roads built by the Incas that betrayed them and proved to be their downfall.
Another generation of empire-builders—the Spaniards—used these roads to
move in their militarily superior soldiers and weapons for invading Inca territory
and defeating them.3

Thus, once built, irrespective of their original purposes, roads may not remain
partisan or neutral for long. They cannot be claimed to be the exclusive property
of their planners alone. Like the published text of authors, roads become
accessible to the public who may interpret (use) them according to their tastes
and needs. The Grand Trunk Road in South Asia is an excellent example of how a
once royal highway has become a public thoroughfare. This road spans India,
Pakistan, and Afghanistan, linking the eastern part of the subcontinent with the
western part. Its origins can be traced back to some 2,000 years ago (p.5) to
the reign of the Mauryas. In the sixteenth century, King Sher Shah of India
reconstructed the road, giving it the name Sadak-e-Azam, to facilitate the
movement of his army and for administrative purposes. It also remained a vital
link for trade and communication. Today, the road is split into two halves. One is
known as National Highway 1, stretching from Delhi to Wagah on the Indo-Pak
border in the west. The other is National Highway 2, starting from Delhi and
stretching to Kolkata in the east. Neither the Mauryas nor Sher Shah could have
dreamt of the way their road is being used today. Buses choking with
passengers, heavy trucks in a mad rush overtaking other vehicles, oil tankers
precariously edging their way through meandering bullock carts and aimlessly
wandering cattle, and the never-ending stream of human pedestrian traffic—all
these sights and sounds are a far cry from the ancient description of soldiers
riding horses along this road to conquer new lands or caravans of traders
stopping at wayside inns on the way to their next destination.

Traders and their stakes in interstate commercial traffic were the other factors
(along with the political requirements of the state) that motivated road-building
in the past. Roads became necessary for transportation of commodities from
their centres of production to market outlets. They began to be developed by
traders. Interestingly enough, unlike the state-built roads, which were known to
the public by the names of the rulers who built them, these roads were named
after the commodities which passed through them. Thus, we hear of the Amber
Route, which stretched from Afghanistan through Persia and Arabia to Egypt.
Or, the famous Silk Route, covering some 8,000 miles, beginning in China,
traversing across Asia, and then through Spain to the Atlantic Ocean. We can
imagine traders in the earliest days using slow animals to carry heavy goods
over the rough, unpaved roads. With the development of vehicular traffic, some
of the stretches of these ancient paths were turned into metalled roads and
converted to modern highways. While looking back at history, we can, therefore,
comprehend the twin (p.6) motivations that lay behind the evolution of what is
Page 4 of 13
Introduction

known today as the modern road system—the economic interests of the traders
and the political interests of the rulers.

Impact of the Wheel on the Road

Over the years, the development of technology further emboldened the twin
forces discussed earlier to raise the science of road-building to new heights. The
invention of motorized vehicles, which needed smooth paths to accelerate the
delivery of commercial merchandize and take human passengers to their
destination, spurred both the state and its commercial allies to invest in road
reconstruction. Roads had to be made to keep pace with the new fast-moving
modes of traffic—motor vehicles carrying citizens, trucks carrying commercial
goods, and so on. Appropriate technology of road reconstruction evolved to meet
the new demands of vehicular traffic. As Hilaire Belloc observed:

It was the Vehicle that made the Road. It was the Wheel that made the
Vehicle. But the Wheel having made the Vehicle, and the Vehicle having
made the Road, the Road reacted back upon that which made it; and
though we cannot say that the Highway has, in changing, created a change
in Vehicles, yet we can say that, had it not changed, the new Vehicle could
not have come into being.4

Evolution of the Technology of Road-Building

The origins of paving roads with metal can be traced to 800 BC, when the rulers
of Carthage (on the northern coast of Africa) began to use stones to make the
mud paths solid. The Romans—who could be described as the pioneers in road-
building—paved the way for modern road construction. Their roads were
composed of a graded soil foundation, topped by four courses: first, a bedding of
sand or mortar; second, rows of large, flat stones; third, a thin layer of gravel
mixed with lime; (p.7) and fourth, a thin surface of flint, like lava. This design
remained the best model till the emergence of modern engineering techniques in
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In eighteenth-century England,
two British engineers came up with new techniques. Thomas Telford, who was a
stonemason, invented a process that involved the digging of a trench first,
followed by the installation of a foundation of heavy rock, and ending with its
surfacing by a six-inch layer of gravel. The other inventor was John Loudon
McAdam (from whose name the term ‘macadam’ came into use in the vocabulary
of road technology). His system was based on building the road directly on the
subsoil, first raising a layer of stone in the centre for drainage, and then
carpeting it by a layer of finer-grained stone that was cemented. The macadam
system became popular in nineteenth-century Europe because of the simplicity
of the procedure, and its suitability of use by gentle, slow transport like horse
driven carriages. But with the advent of fast-moving motorcars and heavy
vehicles like trucks carrying merchandize, the macadam roads proved
inadequate to cope with the higher speed of vehicles and to bear their load since
they lacked a firm foundation beneath the soil. Some of these roads, as well as

Page 5 of 13
Introduction

the new highways that came up in the twentieth century were, therefore,
reconstructed according to the Telford system, which provided a more solid
roadbed for such heavy traffic.5

Road-building seemed to reach a saturation point towards the end of the

nineteenth century. The building of canals and the railway system provided other
means of transportation. But soon, the arrival of motorized vehicles like
passenger-carrying cars and buses and freight-carrying trucks spurred renewed
activities in road-building at a more technologically sophisticated level.

Road Networks and the Politics of Urbanization

Along with their qualitative improvement, roads also gained in quantitative
importance. They expanded in wider directions, spreading to distant (p.8)
corners of countries and binding them in networks. Road networks evolved in a
synergic relationship with urbanization, each reinforcing the other. Their growth
was spurred by the drive for urban expansion, and they themselves accelerated
the speed of urban development. As one exponent of the network theory, Vito
Latora, points out, evolution of road networks is driven by two key elements:
exploration, whereby new roads trigger spatial evolution beyond the outskirts of
the town, and densification or the increase in local road density around existing
urban centres. ‘Exploration’, he says, ‘is more common during earlier historical
periods, whereas densification predominates in later years.’6

Roads thus get inextricably linked with cities. The original mud lane that used to
be the pathway for villagers was the first to be turned into a road during the
gradual transformation of that village into a city. Most modern roads in our
metropolitan cities can trace back their roots to the humble village lane.7 These
lanes evolved into wider roads along which were built structures that served the
needs of the urban population—houses, shops, markets, entertainment centres,
and parks, among other things. These new roads, besides continuing to be the
path of pedestrians, opened up a wide avenue for generations of vehicular
traffic, ranging from bullock carts and horse carriages to motor cars and trucks.

Roads became an important component of the physical infrastructure needed for

urbanization. Urbanization in modern times, however, is not a sporadic process
initiated by individual ruling dynasties (as we find in the history of ancient cities
like Rome or medieval cities like Lucknow). It is a well-organized programme of
industrial capitalism, which invests its profit in infrastructure that would further
expand its empire. Cities are built to house its commercial and administrative
centres and warehouses, to provide dwelling spaces for the white-collar
employees of these centres as well as for the workers employed in the
neighbouring industrial units, and shops and markets are set up for the use of
this vast conglomeration of citizens. A major part of the investment by industrial
capitalism is in roadways, rail roads, and ports, which (p.9) are the main means

Page 6 of 13
Introduction

of binding together these innumerable different segments of an ever-expanding

economic system.

Linking this modern form of urbanization with the rise of capitalism in the West,
European Marxist theoreticians stress that urbanization was both the product of
and the driving force for the absorption of ‘surplus product’ in the process of
capital accumulation. Surplus product was necessary for producing surplus
value (leading to profit). Surpluses (whether from agriculture, mineral
resources, or industrial manufacturing) were extracted and their use controlled
by a minority of capitalist investors and entrepreneurs. They needed a vast
majority of consumers who could purchase the surplus product, and thus yield
profit for the capitalist investors. This majority could be brought together in one
single space—the city. Modern cities, therefore, were developed to market the
surplus product. To quote the best exponent of this theory, David Harvey:
‘Capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization
requires … [and] needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it
perpetually produces…. The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual
need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption.’8
One of the most profitable terrains is the city, and it is on this terrain that the
consumers are made to concentrate through a variety of infrastructural
attractions: provision of employment, housing, civic facilities, schools and
hospitals, entertainment, and so forth. The most important element in this vast
complex and composite network of infrastructure is the road, which allows the
transport system to link together the other elements of the network. To go back
to David Harvey’s theory of capital accumulation and urbanization:

The cost, speed and capacity of the transport system relate directly to
accumulation because of the impacts these have on the turnover time of
capital. Investment and innovation in transport are therefore potentially
productive for capital in general. Under capitalism, consequently, we see a
tendency to ‘drive beyond all spatial barriers’ and to ‘annihilate space with
time’ [to use Marx’s own expression].9 (p.10)

Along with the shrinking of distance through the speed of movement by

accelerating the transport system, the capitalist town planner also reorganizes
space by changing the arrangement of buildings and streets. Such re-
arrangements reflect complex relations between social process and spatial form
—a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (as described by Edward W. Soja).10 They also
conceal deeper political and commercial motives of the ruling powers that
administer the cities. For instance, in the name of ‘beautification’ (which appeals
to the upper and middle class citizens), these urban administrators demolish
slums (where the poor citizens live) in order to set up housing complexes or
offices. Such projects trigger a boom in real estate speculation, which in its turn
swells the coffers of private contractors and builders with public funds. Besides
the commercial motive behind such reorganization of space, long-term political

Page 7 of 13
Introduction

calculations also play their part. The demolition of a slum breaks down a settled
concentration of the labouring poor, who are forced to disperse in different
directions. This destroys their potential to mobilize in protest against injustice.
Such a paradigm for reorganization of space in modern urbanization was set
years ago by Baron Georges Haussmann in Paris. Under the ‘second
empire’ (1851–70), Napoleon III appointed him as Prefect of the Seine, with the
task of restructuring the streets of Paris. Haussmann demolished slums and built
through them wide new roads and boulevards, and constructed imposing offices
and apartment blocks on both sides. It was not a coincidence that Haussmann’s
plan to change the road structure of Paris came in the wake of the 1848 popular
uprising in that city, when workers built barricades around street corners and
fought the state’s armed forces. Walter Benjamin succinctly analyses the motives
behind Haussmann’s plan:

The true goal of Haussmann’s works was to secure the city against civil
war.… The width of the avenues was to prohibit the erection [of street
barricades] and new streets were to provide the shortest routes between
the [military] barracks and the working class sections.11

(p.11) Status of the Road in the New Era of Globalized Urbanization

In the present era of globalization, when urban space is being reorganized again
in a new fashion, the road assumes a different character and role to play. New
modes of urban planning are coming up in this phase of transition—there is a
change from the Fordist model of accumulation and production (involving the
manufacturing of standardized commodities and provision of standardized
welfare services) to a post-Fordist one that stresses on specialization in the
production of specific commodities and the offering of predominantly privatized
services at expensive rates that cater to the needs and demands of a new upper
crust of citizens (for example, luxury goods; private nursing homes for medical
care; and educational institutes with exorbitant fees that welcome only children
of the rich to the exclusion of the less privileged).12

A large part of this new urban upper crust consists of employers and employees
in the information sector—the impact of which is no longer confined to urban
inter-communication, but extends to all sectors of the economy, ranging from
agriculture (where farmers use their mobile phones to know about latest market
prices of their products) to the urban stock market (where speculators are both
physically and mentally entwined with this technology). Members of this all-
dominating technology empire are refashioning the city according to their
requirements and tastes.

These electronically based communities of individuals and organizations do not

depend on traditional roads to interact, but use the Internet and kindred
electronic networks. They consist of executives employed in multinational firms,
business house magnates, and real estate agents and contractors engaged in the

Page 8 of 13
Introduction

construction of buildings that are impressive enough for the use of their nouveau
riche clients. They thus reconstitute the spaces in the city in their own image.
(p.12)

Ensconced within their private homes and offices, they may need the road only
for occasional forays into entertainment centres or for adventures that cannot be
provided through the virtual reality of television channels. But their existence
depends on an economy of high productivity and advanced technology—a rather
fragile base that fluctuates with ups and downs in the global economy.13 Will the
road come back again in their living experience?

Roads as Homes
Meanwhile, the present model of refashioning urban space by the corporate–
technocrat–bureaucrat oligarchy is impacting both the labouring poor and the
environment. The implementation of the model involves appropriation of the
lands and homesteads of vast sections of people dependent on agriculture are
deprived of their livelihoods and have to take to the roads. Working in the
various segments of the informal sector, these homeless people inhabit the
margins of the new metropolises, roads being their last refuge where they sleep
every night by putting up temporary shacks of plastic sheets and cardboard
covers supported by bamboo poles, to be dismantled every morning to make way
for pedestrians. According to a survey published in 2010, some 70,000 people
live in such conditions in Calcutta’s pavements.14

Many among these pavement dwellers who are under-employed or unemployed

are compelled to drift towards the criminal underworld for their survival and
resort to a variety of nefarious occupations (like smuggling, peddling drugs,
working as mercenaries for political bosses and land mafia, among many other
such avenues of a similar nature). Thus, as the well-known sociologist of urban
transition Richard Sennett suggests, the decline of job security among the
labouring classes in the present era of New Capitalism ‘corrodes the workers’
character’.15

The other areas where this model of refashioning urban spaces has had an
impact are environment and urban architecture. The eminent (p.13)
architectural historian Spiro Kostof has drawn our attention to two interesting
factors among others. First, Kostof recalls the history of suburbanization in the
West that was facilitated by land speculation and new modes of transportation
(similar determinants that spur the latest globalized model of urbanization of
greater Kolkata through encroachment on the suburbs—an issue that will be
dealt with at the end of this book). Second, he talks about the impact of
architectural innovations on the landscape of roads, like the rise of skyscrapers
in New York from the 1870s onwards, followed by other cities all over the world.
He discovers tensions between the practice of single buildings planned by
individual families and the design of housing apartment blocks planned by

Page 9 of 13
Introduction

commercial agencies to meet the collective housing needs of a particular class

or group.16 These tensions throw up interesting questions in the Indian context.
How do these new architectural structures (usually gated communities) that are
coming up in Kolkata and other cities affect the old spirit of shared concerns
that had prevailed among the residents in the neighbourhood (called para in
Bengali parlance) of the roads where these housing complexes are being
constructed?

Outside the gated existence of these privileged few, the vast masses still remain
intrinsically joined with the road. The road opens itself up to ever newer
generations of users, who form fresh identities, build new settlements, and
engender different notions of community along the road. At the same time, the
road is not a mere passive recipient of the footprints of successive generations
of travellers and settlers, historical events, and technological innovations. Every
road has a life of its own. It enjoys an autonomy of sorts, interacting with the
local needs of its inhabitants rather than submitting to the rules of urban
planning by a central authority.

Understanding a City through Roads

Roads are the entryway into a city. While one road may take the traveller to a
city, once she enters, some other road may take over and seduce (p.14) her to
move from one destination to another. All through history, both littérateurs and
academicians have happily chosen to be thus seduced like the nineteenth-
century French poet Baudelaire, roaming around the streets of Paris as a
flaneur, breathing in its smells, and immersing himself in its sights and sounds;
or the twenty-first-century historian Peter Ackroyd, writing the biography of
London, moving from its ancient roads, through the Victorian streets, to arrive
at the modern highways. Ackroyd looks at London within the schema of a ‘body’.
‘The byways of the city’, he writes, ‘resemble thin veins and its parks are like
lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles
of the older thoroughfares look as if they are bleeding.’17

The present author prefers to look at the evolution of roads in Calcutta under
the schema of a ‘family’. Following the practice of the homogeneous joint family
(ekannoborti poribar, the Bengali term to describe the tradition of sharing a
common kitchen in old households), the earliest roads can be said to have given
birth to all the streets and lanes, and like grandmothers took under their fold
their descendants—the by-lanes and alleys. These early roads thus became hoary
matriarchs. In Calcutta, one such ancient road is Chitpur Road (known as
Rabindra Sarani today), which has existed as an arterial road from the
precolonial era, when it served as a path for pilgrims travelling from the north to
the Kalighat Temple in the south. Over the years, it has given birth to a host of
lanes and their progeny that twist their ways behind the main thoroughfare. In a
similar fashion, the evolution of the two other longitudinal highways that cut
through Calcutta from the north to the south has been marked by the

Page 10 of 13
Introduction

proliferation of by-lanes and side streets. The first is the Circular Road (its
northern part now renamed Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, and its southern
end Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road), which was built in the early
nineteenth century by the British administration by covering up a ditch that was
dug in the 1740s by the East India Company to protect Calcutta from Marhatta
invaders. The construction of the (p.15) second road, Central Avenue, began in
the mid-nineteenth century, and today, through a process of gradual expansion,
it has become a full-fledged arterial road, now renamed Chittaranjan Avenue.
Historically, these three roads—Chitpur Road, Circular Road, and Central
Avenue—can be described as the grandmothers of all the streets and lanes that
criss-cross today’s Kolkata.

The present book is a story of three Calcutta roads, which—unlike the three
longitudinal highways—horizontally cut across the city’s topography from the
west to the east. They have been chosen because their intersection with the
three main highways at various points and historical stages has produced
diverse political and socio-economic currents, and led to the growth of
institutions that have shaped the minds of Calcutta’s citizens.

To put it in terms of an extended family, the first road, Bagbazar Street, could be
described as the grandmother, a matriarch spreading her progeny of lanes and
by-lanes. The second, Theatre Road, played the extraneous role of a midwife
bringing to birth a hybrid lifestyle and architecture that bore the signature of
the colonial era. The evolution of the next road, Rashbehari Avenue, can be
likened to the growing up of a middle-class Bengali housewife gingerly stepping
out into the limelight of modern society. By narrating their history, we attempt to
understand the socio-cultural and politico-economic changes in the city since its
birth, through a critical synthesis of micro and macro perspectives that combine
views from both above (official archives) and below (popular perceptions).

The narrative ends with a brief examination of the new stage today in the
urbanization of Calcutta—the city’s expansion into a globalized megalopolis
renamed Kolkata. The two names have been used as interchangeable terms
while narrating the history. Ironically enough, the new urban nomenclature
harks back to the name of the old village Dihi Kolikata, which, along with two
other villages, was bought by the East India Company to be constituted later as
the city of Calcutta. (p.16)

To continue with the concept of the family as a metaphor for the chronicle of its
roads, we can extend it today to an examination of the planning and designing of
the megalopolis and its transportation system (emerging on the north-eastern tip
of the city designated as New Town). It reflects the latest stage of the nuclear
household in the evolution of the family as an institution. Unlike the inclusive
spirit of the extended family system of roads built in the past (like those still
existing in parts of Calcutta that allow space for confrontations as well as

Page 11 of 13
Introduction

negotiations for conflict resolution through street processions and mass

gatherings, among other forms of public demonstrations), New Town and its
road design epitomize the extremist, exclusive mood of nuclear families of the
new generation that inhabit this zone. Theirs is a psychology of self-protection
within a gated community, and when stepping outside, of travelling in fast-
moving air-conditioned private vehicles along flyovers that are designed to spare
them the unpleasant sights and smells of slums and to debar pedestrians from
interrupting the race of upward mobility.

It is worth recalling in this connection the observation made some thirty years
ago by the American philosopher Marshall Berman on the history of changes in
the road system in the West:

For most of our century, urban spaces have been systematically designed
and organized to ensure that collisions and confrontations will not take
place here. The distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism was the
boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces
together; the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the
highway, a means for putting them asunder.18

Notes:
(1.) Michail Fragkias, Burak Güneralp, Karen Seto, and Julie Goodness,
‘Typologies of Urbanization Projections, Effects on Land Use, Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services’, available at http://chm-thai.onep.go.th/chm/city/document/
CBO-scientific/CBO-SAA_Chapter-7_13-Oct-2012.pdf, last accessed on 13 July
2016.

(2.) SETO LAB, Urbanization and Global Change, ‘Forecasting Urban Growth’,
available at Urban.yale.edu/research/theme-3, last accessed on 13 July 2016.

(3.) Shirley Sponholtz, A Brief History of Road Building, available at http://

www.triplenine.org/Vidya/OtherArticles/ABriefHistoryofRoadBuilding.aspx, last
accessed 13 July 2016.

(4.) Hilaire Belloc, The Highway and Its Vehicles (London: The Studio Ltd, 1926),
p. 27.

(5.) Sponholtz, A Brief History of Road Building.

(6.) Vito Latora quoted in ‘Road Networks Said Urbanization Driver’, 1 March
2012, available at www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/03/01/Road-networks-said-
urbanization-driver/54271330629507/, last accessed 13 July 2016.

(7.) Bagbazar Street, for instance, was a bullock-cart path in the village of
Sutanuti some three hundred years ago, meant for the use of cloth merchants.
Page 12 of 13
Introduction

(8.) David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban
Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2012), p. 5.

(9.) David Harvey, ‘The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for
Analysis’, in The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie
Watson (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2002), pp. 119–20.

(10.) Edward. W. Soja, ‘Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis’, in Bridge and

Watson, Blackwell City Reader.

(11.) Quoted in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project by Susan Buck-Morss (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p. 222.

(12.) Soja, ‘Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis’.

(13.) Saskia Sassen, ‘Globalization and Its Discontents,’ in Bridge and Watson,
Blackwell City Reader.

(14.) Action Aid Report, quoted in the Statesman, 15 October 2010.

(15.) Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences

of Work in the New Capitalism (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company,
1999).

(16.) Spiro Kostof, A Historical Survey of Architecture and Urbanism (1991),

available at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/kostof.html, last accessed 13 July
2016.

(17.) Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p.
1.

(18.) Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 165.

Access brought to you by:

Page 13 of 13
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

Calcutta and Its Roads

Sumanta Banerjee

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

British colonial power, represented by the East India Company in the early
eighteenth century, recognized the importance of road-building as a major
means of establishing and reinforcing its authority over territories (in this case
comprising the three villages of Sutanuti, Kolikata and Gobindapur) that it
acquired through a deal with the then Moghul regime. It reconstructed the old
mud-laden arterial paths that ran from the north to the south and from the west
to the east, into gravel roads that were suitable for the movement of its military
vehicles, as well as its traders. After Independence, the landmarks of these old
roads underwent changes, particularly with the expansion of the city in the
south. Today, the new road system of flyovers is leading to further expansion
towards the north-eastern part, and changing its topography.

Keywords: Colonialism, East India Company, Independence, Sutanuti, Kolikata, Gobindapur, arterial
path, gravel roads

Calcutta is an illuminating example of the urbanization of a pre-industrial society

under colonial planning and its legacy in the post-Independence era. Unlike
urban development in modern capitalist societies of the West, where indigenous
industrial and commercial interests shaped to a large extent the contours of the
city, in the colonies the process through which cities developed can be described
as ‘dependent urbanization’ (a term used by Manuel Castells).1 In other words,
in colonies like India, new cities were created (for example, Calcutta), and old
cities were restructured (for example, Delhi) to meet the changing requirements

Page 1 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

of the colonial rulers—ranging from business and military to administrative

interests—during the various stages of their regime.

The Origins of Calcutta

The city originated from the East India Company’s initial attraction for the site
as a commercial centre, and later, because of the possibilities of future colonial
expansion. The area consisted of three villages—Sutanuti in the north, Kolikata
in the centre, and Gobindapur in the south (see Map 1.1). (p.19)

(p.20) They were owned by

the Sabarna Roy Chowdhury
family. In 1698, the Company
paid a Mughal prince,
Farrukshiyar (who wielded
considerable influence in the
court in Delhi at that time), a
sum of 16,000 rupees to obtain
a grant of permission to buy
these three villages. The
Company then purchased them
from the local Sabarna Roy
Chowdhury landlords—
Ramchand Ray, Manohar Ray,
and others—by paying them
1,300 rupees.2 The total cost
that the East India Company
incurred, therefore, in investing
in creating an urban metropolis
amounted to a little over 17,000
rupees. Compare this with the
profits that they accumulated
on this investment over the next
Map 1.1 Sutanuti, Kolikata, and
decades, and their successors—
Gobindapur, 1690, based on a map of the
the British rulers—did over the
late seventeenth century by George
next two centuries.3
Herron
Soon after buying the three Source: Courtesy of the author.
villages, the East India
Company officials set about
transforming them into a full-fledged town. In the earlier years, they
concentrated on the two villages Sutanuti and Kolikata, in the north and centre
respectively, for their plan of urbanization. They first built accommodation for
their soldiers in Fort William (constructed in 1698 and named after the then
reigning British monarch, William III) in Kolikata village (the site being occupied
today by the General Post Office). They then set up offices for their commercial

Page 2 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

and administrative operations, and encouraged European traders to settle in

these areas of Sutanuti and Kolikata. The Company’s Court of Directors from
London issued the following instruction:

Calcutta should be advanced to the dignity of a presidency … the President

should draw a salary of Rs 200/- per month with an additional gratuity of
Rs 100/-; that he should be assisted by a Council of 4 members; of whom
the first should be the Accountant, and the second the Warehouse Keeper,
the third the Marine Purser; and the fourth the Receiver of the Revenues.4

British settlers and administrators started the process of urbanization of these

villages by clearing jungles to construct roads—the most important
infrastructure for building a city. Maps and accounts available from the turn of
the eighteenth century show that at the time of the arrival of (p.21) the British,
there were only two arterial roads that covered these villages and nearby areas.
One ran from the north in Chitpur to the south in Kalighat through the jungles of
the neighbouring village of Chourungi. It was described as the ‘Pilgrim Road’ by
contemporary British settlers, because of the Hindu devotees who used it to
reach the Kali Temple in the south.5 The other was a parallel road on the east
(later known as the Circular Road), which moved down towards the south-west.

Over the next fifty years—from 1706 to 1756—both the town and its streets grew
at a rapid pace. The size of the town increased from 1,692 acres to 3,229 acres,
and the number of streets from two to twenty-seven, along with the creation of
some fifty-two lanes and seventy-four by-lanes. With the influx of entrepreneurs
(like agents engaged in commercial transactions, traders, shopkeepers, and so
on) and manual labourers looking for earning opportunities in the expanding
town, the population grew and so did the houses on either side of these roads
and lanes. From only eight brick-built (described as ‘pucca’ in contemporary
records) houses in 1706, the number rose to 498 in 1756. They were mainly
inhabited by English traders and administrators, who were later joined by
Bengali and other Indian entrepreneurs. As for the labouring classes, they lived
in mud houses with thatched roofs. Their number went up from 8,000 to 14,450
during the fifty-year period under survey.6

The final conquest of Bengal by the British following the Battle of Plassey in
1757 was a turning point in the further expansion of Calcutta and its roads. The
British rulers were now firmly saddled in the fledgling town, and began to
redesign it according to their administrative and political priorities. One of the
first plans was to shift their fort (Fort William, which housed their soldiers) from
the Kolikata part of the town (where it was set up in 1698) to further south, in
the Gobindapur village. This decision was prompted by their bitter experience in
1756, when in June that year Siraj-ud-dowlah, the Nawab of Bengal, attacked
Calcutta and first threatened their fortifications in Sutanuti in the north, and still
later overran Fort William in Kolikata. The northern and central parts of (p.22)

Page 3 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

the town (covering the sites of the old villages of Sutanuti and Kolikata) were,
therefore, no longer considered safe. The East India Company then decided to
develop the southern village of Gobindapur as a township of sorts by installing
their military base (the second Fort William) in the western part, on the banks of
the Hooghly River, and providing residential quarters for the European
inhabitants in the eastern part.

Construction of the new Fort William in the western zone of Gobindapur, on the
banks of the Hooghly, began in 1758 and was completed in 1773. This long
period involved large-scale displacement of the villagers of Gobindapur. The East
India Company gave cash compensation to the Bengali well-to-do families who
owned pucca or brick-built houses in the village, and encouraged them to move
northwards and buy lands and settle in the Sutanuti area. This led to the
development of settlements on either side of the old Chitpur Road and the
creation of new streets and lanes, winding out from behind the main road, where
these newly displaced Bengali families built their houses.7 It was this area in the
north that came to be known as the Black Town in the parlance of the British
colonial authorities as well as European travellers.

As for the poor villagers of Gobindapur who lived in mud huts, they were
removed to the villages of Chourungi and Kalinga on the eastern part for their
resettlement. Here, a group of English traders and entrepreneurs had already
settled down by clearing the jungles, carving out roads and plots for their own
use, and building houses. They had also laid down the base for a major arterial
road, which is known today as Chowringhee Road (deriving its name from the
village of Chourungi). These people needed manual labour to run their
establishments. The East India Company, therefore, resettled the poor villagers
from Gobindapur in this area, where the English residents rented out their spare
plots to the Company for the setting up of slums to accommodate these
labourers. These slums were named after the English owners—like Duncan’s
Bustee, Colvin’s Bustee (‘bustee’, being the indigenous (p.23) term for slum).
The slum-dwellers either worked as domestics in these European households, or
as artisans to cater to their regular needs.

These English and European residents cut up slices of Chourungi and Kalinga
villages into roads and streets. They christened them with their own names, and
according to their living style (for example, Camac Street, Kyd Street, Park
Street, Theatre Road, Elysium Row, and so forth).8 They constituted what came
to be designated as the White Town in the historical narrative of colonial
Calcutta.

From a Town to a City—through Roads

After having fortified themselves and resettled the villagers, the Company drew
up plans to turn the town into a city. It first concentrated on the White Town to
cater to the needs of its residents. To quote one instance, from old records we

Page 4 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

find that in 1776 a sum of 125 rupees was paid to Mr Fortnam, described as a
‘civil architect’, for the purpose of making ‘one water-course in the Chowringhee
Road’ (that is, an open drain).9

But we also come across enterprising English residents who were willing to
volunteer to develop the whole of Calcutta. For instance, a certain Colonel
Campbell inserted a notice in the newspaper Hickey’s Gazette in 1781, where he
made a proposal of ‘cleaning and draining the town, on an estimate of two lacs
of rupees per annum’. Still later, one Mr Henckell cleared considerable portions
of the Sunderban jungles near the town, ‘which greatly contributed to diminish
the local sources of fever’. But it was Marquess Wellesley who in 1799 enlarged
and extended the road system in Calcutta, especially the Circular Road in the
east. This particular arterial road, which linked the north-eastern with the south-
western parts of the town, was considered by the English citizens to be a ‘great
improvement’, although to construct the road, the famous Baithakkhana tree (a
huge tree, which had been the ‘place of assemblage for native merchants from
the earliest period’ and served as an open air baithakkhana or sitting room from
the early eighteenth (p.24) century onwards) was cut down—an act which was
‘looked upon with superstitious regret’ by the Bengali residents.10

Nevertheless, during this early stage of Calcutta’s urbanization, sections of

Bengali residents also participated in the colonial plans of road-building. In fact,
the trading communities among them had been the pioneers in shaping roads
that served their commercial interests. The Sheths and Basacks were the
traditional Bengali traders who had been exporting textile goods to the
European trading houses for decades. Even before the establishment of the East
India Company’s rule, they were the first to clear the jungles in the northern
village of Sutanuti (which was to be a part of the future city of Calcutta) and
construct a lane from the west to the east (to be known in future as Bagbazar
Street) to facilitate the transport of their goods to the harbour on the River
Hooghly. They built houses for themselves and set up markets where European
traders came to buy the merchandize. After the East India Company took over
this site in 1698, it chose the Sheths in particular as their protégés for their plan
of future urbanization. In 1707, the Company reduced ground rents for the
estates of the Sheths in Sutanuti. In exchange for the concession, the Company
required the Sheths to take care of a major road. A notification issued by the
Company said:

In consideration that Janundun Seat [Jadunandan or Janardhan Sheth?],

Gopaul Seat, Jadoo Seat, Banarsi Seat [all Sheths?] and Jay Kissen will
keep in repair the highway between the Fort’s landmark to the norward on
the backside of the town, we have thought fit to abate them 8 annas a
bigha of their garden rent, which is about rupees 55 in the whole less than
it is ordered.11

Page 5 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

In other words, these Bengali merchants were entrusted with the maintenance
of the arterial road known as Chitpur that ran from the north to the south near
the site of the then Fort William (today’s General Post Office in Dalhousie
Square), or as described in the notification as ‘the highway between the Fort’s
landmark to the norward on the backside [sic] of the town’. (p.25)

The colonial rulers thus recognized the importance of the road as an essential
infrastructure (highways in this case) in the project of urbanization as early as
the beginning of the eighteenth century. In its pursuit of integrating all the
major regions under its control by connecting arteries of communication, the
East India Company was even ready to outsource a public undertaking like road-
building to private individuals like members of the Bengali mercantile
community. Calcutta, therefore, was not ‘chance directed, chance erected’, as
Rudyard Kipling would have us believe in his famous poem on the city.12 On the
contrary, the first generation of British traders-turned-rulers who arrived and
settled in this area soon formulated a deliberate plan to turn it into a full-fledged
city from where they could conduct both their commercial and administrative
operations—for which they needed roads.

In fact, in order to build roads in Calcutta, the British rulers resorted to a

curious device. To fund their construction, they encouraged and institutionalized
a form of gambling among their own employees and other citizens. They began
to raise money for road-building by means of lotteries. In 1817, they set up a
regular Lottery Committee, sanctioned and patronized by the then governor-
general-in-council. It issued tickets of a certain value for sale, promising prizes
for lucky winners of numbered tickets. According to the Frenchman Victor
Jacquemont, who visited Calcutta in 1829 (a little over a decade after the
institution of the Lottery Committee), every six months, six thousand such
tickets were issued, each costing 128 rupees. He noted: ‘The number of civil and
military officers … amounts to about six thousand, the same as the tickets.’13 No
doubt the scheme appealed to the gambling instincts of these officers as well as
other citizens. It attracted a lot of investors and the funds obtained from them
were used to reconstruct old roads in north Calcutta and build new ones in the
south.

The laying down of new roads under the Lottery Committee again resulted in the
dislocation of a large number of people—this time slum-dwellers. In the
Chourungi area for instance, the construction of new roads led to the second
displacement of inhabitants living there. These (p.26) were the people who had
earlier been ousted from their past habitat in the villages of Gobindapur to make
way for the building of Fort William, and had resettled in slums owned by
Englishmen in the late eighteenth century. When the British authorities began to
build new roads in the period between 1820 and 1830, they took possession of
the old slums like Colvin’s Bustee and Duncan’s Bustee, and demolished them to
make way for a wide arterial road stretching from the west on what is the

Page 6 of 14
Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

modern Chowringhee Road to the Circular Road in the east. This model of slum
clearance was to be followed in other parts of the town also over the next
decades of urbanization.

We can, therefore, follow the history of road-building in colonial Calcutta broadly

through three successive stages: first, the clearance of jungles in the villages of
Sutanuti, Kolikata, and Gobindapur during the late seventeenth to early
eighteenth centuries; second, the clearance of the entire village of Gobindapur
at the end of the eighteenth century, accompanied by encroachment on the
neighbouring villages of Birji and Chourungi; and third, the clearance of slums
in all these areas through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make roads.

At this stage of our narrative, we can digress into another avenue in order to
examine the history of roads in Calcutta from a theoretical perspective. The
existing theories of urbanization and road-building—mostly conceptualized by
Western theoreticians and town planners—may often be inadequate to explain
the complexities of urbanization that lay behind the official plan of building of
roads and its subversion by the local underclasses, who carved out lanes and
alleys from these roads in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Calcutta.

The Theoretical Prism

Anthony D. King has been a leading theoretician on colonial planning of cities.
Taking a cue from his thesis of dividing the colonial planning of cities in three
stages, let us examine Calcutta’s development and see (p.27) how it fits into
that theoretical framework. According to King, colonial urban planning passed
through three historical phases: (a) In the period up to the early twentieth
century when settlements, camps, towns, and cities were consciously laid out
according to various military, technical, political, and cultural codes and
principles, ‘the most important … being military and political dominance’. (b) In
the second period, beginning in the early twentieth century, when in the
metropolitan centre of the colonial regime, Britain, there was developing the
theory of ‘town planning’ with its attendant ideology of cultural behaviour in
public space, and architectural patterns and structure of roads. The
administrators in the colonies sought to replicate this planning in the dependent
territories on a selective and uneven basis. (c) A third period of post- or
neocolonial developments took place after 1947 in Asia, when ‘cultural, political
and economic links … within a larger network of global communications and a
situation of economic dependence, provided the means to continue the
transplantation of ideologies, values, and planning models, generally in the “neo-
colonial modernization” of once-colonial cities’.14

When we extrapolate King’s thesis in the Indian situation, we find that the
process of colonial urbanization in India, in certain respects, both departs from
and conforms to King’s theoretical premise. In Calcutta, the British rulers had
completed the first phase of ‘military and political dominance’ by the mid-

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

eighteenth century, thus predating the period marked by King as the first stage
in the history of colonial planning of cities. This first stage of urbanization of
Calcutta was marked not only by ‘military and political dominance’, as
emphasized by Anthony King in his thesis, but also by collaboration with the
indigenous traders, as described earlier.

Role of Bengali Residents in Building Roads and Lanes

Moving forward to the second period of colonial urbanization (which according
to King began in the early twentieth century), in Calcutta it (p.28) took on new
characteristics from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It could not be totally
monopolized by the colonial rulers as was suggested in King’s thesis. Their
hegemonic plan to create strictly bordered arterial thoroughfares was sabotaged
at every stage by the local inhabitants who fragmented them into lanes and by-
lanes criss-crossing these thoroughfares—called golis in Bengali. They named
these lanes after their own local heroes and heroines. This, even today, we find
in north Calcutta a lane called Panchi Dhobani Goli (named after a dhobani or a
washerwoman who lived in that locality and served its residents in the
nineteenth century), and another lane called Gulu Ostagar Lane (celebrating a
tailor who was her contemporary). Thus, roads laid down officially by the
municipal authorities were fractured by the local people, who carved out from
them their own lanes and alleys.

Ironically enough, the proliferation of lanes or golis was indirectly accelerated

by the colonial city planners’ schemes of sanitation of the city. From 1859
onwards, they began to construct the underground sewer system for urban
waste disposal, which involved restructuring of the old road surface. The sewer
system reached the Black Town in the mid-1870s. Before its introduction, open
narrow drains behind residential quarters in north Calcutta’s streets used to
carry human refuse and other wastes from these houses abutting on them, to be
dumped into the big drains on the main roads. Under the newly introduced
sewer system, these open drains were covered up to allow the disposal of such
waste through pipes placed underground. Their covering up created a new land
surface in the shape of narrow stretches along the streets and behind the houses
—known as ‘sewered ditches’. They soon began to be used by pedestrians as
paths. Describing how these newly created land stretches turned into lanes or
golis in north Calcutta, a Calcutta Corporation report narrates:

There is a sewered ditch which runs along some houses in Gooptu’s Lane,
which is a lane branching off from Chitpore Road.… There are several
houses abutting on this ditch, which have their drainage connection into
the sewer laid in the ditch.... Mehters [scavengers], servants, (p.29)
mistries [artisans] and other people connected with the houses, use this
sewered ditch, and it is used as a thoroughfare by people who want to

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

make a short cut from Gooptu’s Lane where the sewered ditch begins to
Boloram Dey’s Street where it ends.15

Parallel to this popular incursion from the lower orders in road planning in the
northern parts of the town, there was an equally important involvement of a new
generation of Bengali upper and middle classes in the planning of roads in the
southern parts of the town where they settled down in the late 1890s. They
consisted of civil servants and barristers trained in England, as well as teachers,
lawyers, medical practitioners, and engineers who had graduated from the
educational institutions in Calcutta. They stepped out from the confines of their
professional careers to participate in the wider sphere of the national movement
from the 1880s onwards. They demanded the introduction of the very
mechanisms of the bourgeois democratic system that their colonial rulers
followed in their homeland—representation through elections, a voice in the
administration of local affairs through municipalities, and a free press, among
other rights.

The assertion of their demands coincided with the election of the Liberal Party
statesman W.E. Gladstone as prime minister in England, the metropolitan centre
of the colonial regime. His party was willing to grant a few concessions to these
English-educated native subjects of his government, in tune with the principles
of a bourgeois democratic liberal system to which he was wedded. As a result,
the colonial authorities in Calcutta enacted a legislation (Act II [B.C.] of 1888),
which allowed a large number of members of the Bengali upper middle class to
gain entry into the higher echelons of the Calcutta Corporation. Advocates and
educationists like Surendranath Banerjee, Bhupendranath Bose, and Ashutosh
Mukherjee became commissioners of the Corporation. It was through their
efforts that the civic facilities of the Black Town began to improve to some extent
from the end of the nineteenth century. They began to assert themselves in
decision-making in city planning through (p.30) their representation in the city
municipality. They exerted their control, to a limited extent, on the ‘cultural
behavior in public space, and architectural patterns and structures of roads’ (as
defined by King), in the southern-most part of the town, which was being
developed from the later years of the nineteenth century.16

Some, from among these upper middle–class Bengalis bought plots in the
Ballygunge area (which was earlier a suburb of sorts to the south of the main
city), where they set up their homes and built institutions. These settlers
consisted of both the descendants of the old zamindar families of the Black Town
and other parts of Bengal (known as bonedi in Bengali parlance), and the
entrants into the new urban professions (who came to form the ‘bhadralok’
community, in alliance with the bonedi). This resulted in the development of the
hitherto neglected southern suburb as an adjunct to the process of
modernization of the metropolis. It also contributed to the construction of a new

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

network of roads and streets in an area that, within a few decades, became a
sort of enclave for this section of Bengali bhadraloks.

Present Phase of Town Planning

When we reach the third period of urbanization (as defined by King) in
postcolonial societies, in Calcutta we find that in its present phase it conforms to
a large extent to King’s thesis of ‘neo-colonial modernization of once colonial
cities’. In the years immediately following Independence, town planners had
continued with the paradigm set by colonial rulers. The model of keeping
separate the two cultural identities by dividing the city into Black and White
Towns was replicated—this time in the south of Calcutta—by reinforcing the
cultural differences among the indigenous residents. Development of south
Calcutta became a priority at the expense of the north. The roads and houses in
the old Black Town of north Calcutta continued to deteriorate, while in the
southern part, roads were widened, houses came up with (p.31) spacious
compounds, and marts were constructed with well-built shops and kiosks to
meet the needs of a flourishing class of professionals and bureaucrats who
resided there.17

Following this initial phase of continuing with the colonial model of town
planning, the Indian ruling class in the twenty-first century has today entered
what King describes as ‘a larger network of global communications and a
situation of economic dependence’.18 Huge megacities, modelled on the world’s
largest megalopolises, are being built on the outskirts of the old metropolitan
cities. Describing this trend as postmetropolis, Edward W. Soja emphasizes its
characteristics: globalization of urban capital, labour, and culture, and the
formation of a new hierarchy of global cities; emergence of new polarizations
and inequalities; and rise of fortress cities and surveillance technologies, among
others.19 We find in north India a typical representation of this phenomenon of
the postmetropolis in Gurgaon on the borders of New Delhi. In east India, in a
similar fashion, the town planners are extending the borders of Calcutta by
creating a megacity in Rajarhat to the north-east of the city (a subject which will
be dealt with in detail towards the end of the book). The global economy
manufactures benefits for the elite residents of these megacities. But the rest of
the citizens face increasing economic stress and cultural alienation. The
postmetropolis, as is being designed by these megacities in today’s India, is a
replication of the colonial model of ‘dependent urbanization’ in a new form,
shaped by the policies and requirements of the neo-liberal global economy,
described as ‘neo-colonial’ by Anthony King. As in the past, it is creating spatial
barriers between one part of the city and another, and socio-economic and
cultural divisions between one section of the citizens and others.

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

Urbanization of Calcutta and the Evolution of Its Roads

Calcutta is thus an interesting historical site, which provides social historians an
opportunity of tracing the successive phases of urbanization (p.32) under both
colonial auspices and the post-Independence regime. The route to urbanization
of this area lay through roads. The roads which the colonial authorities laid
down served the need of transportation of merchandize by European traders, as
well as movement of their soldiers and administrators. They later became
arteries in their system of governance.

But roads also acted as cultural barriers. Some of the roads were marked out for
the use of only European residents. Thus, a path was constructed along the
ramparts of the new Fort William that also ran along the banks of the Hooghly
River on which the Fort stood. This path, known as Respondentia Road, offered
the city’s white residents a promenade from where to breathe fresh air. But the
‘black’ residents of the city were debarred from using it. The segregation was
enforced by official orders like the one issued on 7 July 1821 by the British Town
Major of Calcutta, a certain C.T. Higgins: ‘Considerable inconvenience is
experienced by the European community who resort to the respondentia from
the crowds of Native workmen and Coolies who make a thoroughfare of the
Walk.’ Higgins then orders, ‘Natives shall not in future be allowed to pass the
Sluice Bridge … between the hours of 5 and 8 in the morning and 5 and 8 in the
evening.’20

The process of urbanization of Calcutta was thus fractured from its very
beginning. The colonial town planners took care to distribute the racial groups
in two separate zones—in the north and the south, the former known as the
Black Town, where lived the indigenous Bengali and other Indian people, and the
latter as the White Town, where the British and Europeans settled. The two
zones were separated by a thin strip, stretching from Bowbazar in the centre to
Entally in the east, which was mainly inhabited by a mixed group of Chinese,
Jews, Iranians, and Eurasians (later known as Anglo-Indians), among others (see
Map 1.2).

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

It was through this

reconstitution of a rural site and
redistribution of its space on
racial lines from the late
seventeenth to the early
nineteenth (p.33) (p.34)
century that Calcutta evolved
into a city. It is necessary to
add, however, that this spatial
segregation of the population
according to racial, social, and
cultural differences did not
prevent the elite of all these
communities from interacting
with each other through
business meetings or
entertainments. We thus hear of
senior English administrators
and their wives attending
‘nautches’ (performances by
Indian dancing girls) and dinner
parties at the palatial mansions
of the Bengali aristocrats in the
Map 1.2 The White Town and the Black
Black Town. Similarly in the
Town, 1792–3, based on a map of the late
White Town, when the British-
eighteenth century by A. Upjohn
built Chowringhee Theatre fell
into bankruptcy, it was a Source: Courtesy of the author.
Bengali aristocrat from the
Black Town, Dwarkanath Tagore
(Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather), who came to its rescue by buying it in
August 1835 for a sum of 30,000 rupees.21

Notes:
(1.) Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (London: Edwin Arnold, 1977).

(2.) Wilson’s Early Annals, quoted in Ajit Kumar Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath:
Samajey O Sanskrititey (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Private Ltd, 2008), p. 14.

(3.) In the present phase of Calcutta’s urbanization, marked by the extension of

its borders through encroachment on neighbouring villages, we observe a
repetition of the old colonial method of buying lands from farmers for paltry
sums and developing those lands for industrial projects, and higher-income-

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

group residential complexes or entertainment parks that yield enormous profits

to this postcolonial generation of indigenous entrepreneurs.

(4.) Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath.

(5.) Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath.

(6.) Harisadhan Mukhopadhyay, Kolikata Sekaler O Ekaler (Calcutta: P.M.

Bagchi, 1985 [1915]), p. 458.

(7.) Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath. Describing the ouster of these villagers from
Gobindapur, a later-day census report said: ‘Many thousand huts [were] thrown
into the holes from whence they had been taken, to form roads and an
esplanade.’ (Census of the Town of Calcutta Taken on the 6th April, 1876 by H.
Beverley, C.S. [Calcutta: printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press, 1876].) The
process of clearing villages and jungles went apace all through the eighteenth
century. By the end of that century, the rural acreage of the villages had shrunk
by almost half—from 2,525 acres in 1756 to 1,283 in 1794. (Re: Rama Deb Roy,
Glimpses on the History of Calcutta, 1600–1800 [Calcutta: Socio Economic
Research Institute, 1985].)

(8.) Appendix to Report on the Census of the Town of Calcutta.

(9.) B.V. Roy, Old Calcutta Cameos (Calcutta: Asoka Library, 1946).

(10.) James Ranald Martin, Notes on the Medical Topography of Calcutta

(Calcutta Military Orphan Press, 1837), pp. 11–13. Circular Road—now divided
into two parts, with the northern section renamed Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray
Road and the southern portion Jagadish Chandra Bose Road—remains an
important arterial link between the northern and the southern parts of the city.

(11.) The East India Company Consultation, quoted in Soumitra Srimani,

Anatomy of a Colonial Town: Calcutta—1756–1794 (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private
Ltd, 1994).

(12.) Kipling’s poem described Calcutta as ‘the midday halt of

Charnock’ (recalling the British merchant Job Charnock who set up his camp in
the northern banks of the Hooghly River here in August 1690), which grew into
a city ‘as the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed’.

(13.) Quoted in P.T. Nair, ed., Calcutta in the 19th Century (Calcutta: Firma KLM
Private Ltd, 1989), p. 513.

(14.) Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy (London:
Routledge, 1990).

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Colonial and Postcolonial Planning of a City

(15.) Corporation of Calcutta, Legal Opinions and Rulings, 1900–1907 (Calcutta:

Corporation Press, 1907).

(16.) King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy.

(17.) The present author remembers how in the early 1950s, a modern shopping
complex called Hindusthan Mart came up on Rashbehari Avenue near its
crossing with Gariahat. Unlike the Gariahat Market a few yards away, which was
a traditional bazaar selling vegetables, fish, and other sundry commodities, this
new mart offered a variety of luxury items and consumer goods that were earlier
available only in the erstwhile White Town—the famous New Market in
Dharmatalla, and the fashionable shops along Chowringhee Road and Park
Street. Today, that site of Hinduthan Mart is occupied by a huge multistoreyed
residential and shopping complex.

(18.) King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy.

(19.) Edward W. Soja, ‘Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis’, in Imagining Cities:

Scripts, Signs, Memories, edited by S. Westwood and J. Williams (London:
Routledge, 1997).

(20.) Quoted in Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and
Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull, 1989), p. 23.

(21.) Nair, Calcutta in the 19th Century; and Salil Sarkar, Theaterer Kolkata
(Calcutta: Mitra O Ghosh Publishers, 1999). According to the historian Partha
Chatterjee: ‘There never were clear rules of segregation of White and Black
areas in Calcutta.… In the 19th century, there were no laws that prevented
anyone from acquiring property anywhere in the city or from living anywhere.’
He adds, however, that ‘an effective system of segregation did operate’, by
explaining that ‘segregation was more the result of regulations of various
economic and public activities’. (Quoted by Howard Spodek in ‘City Planning in
India under British Rule’, Economic and Political Weekly 48, no. 4 [26 January
2013].)

Access brought to you by:

Page 14 of 14
A Tale of Three Towns

Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial

Urbanization to Global Modernization
Sumanta Banerjee

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468102
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.001.0001

A Tale of Three Towns

Black, White, and South

Sumanta Banerjee

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468102.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords

In the early years of British rule, the fledgling city of Calcutta was divided into
two zones—‘Black Town’ and ‘White Town’ (the frequently used terms found in
contemporary official reports and records)—according to the racial composition
of its inhabitants. Black Town comprised the northern part of the city (the site of
the old village Sutanuti), which was inhabited by Indians (mainly Bengalis);
while White Town was concentrated in the central part of the city (originally the
village of Kolikata), where lived the British administrators and merchants, along
with a variety of European entrepreneurs. Still later, in the early twentieth
century, the southern part (hitherto a cluster of villages) was urbanized and
incorporated into the city, which attracted a lot of Bengali middle-class
professionals who settled there and created a distinct culture of their own that
came to be known as ‘south Calcuttan’ and hence this part of the city got the
name ‘South Town’.

Keywords: north Calcutta, central Calcutta, south Calcutta, Black Town, White Town, administrators,
merchants, middle class

The Black Town: Its Population and Roads

The ‘native’ population in the Black Town in north Calcutta during the early
phase of colonial urbanization (eighteenth to nineteenth centuries) generally
consisted of three classes.

1. A minority of rich Bengalis who had made money as agents of the East
India Company (known as mutsuddis) for its commercial activities in the
Page 1 of 33
A Tale of Three Towns

early years of the eighteenth century and as the Company’s revenue

collectors (given the title of dewans) from the tenants of the land that
they owned in their villages in the later years.
2. A new generation of the Bengali middle class (like lawyers, teachers,
and government employees, among others) who had gained entry into
these avenues through their access to Western education in the
nineteenth century.
3. The masses of labourers, both Bengalis and Indians from other parts of
the country, who earned their living by providing manual labour to the
two classes occupying the social hierarchy above them.

The earlier generation of commercial agents and revenue collectors built palatial
mansions on the main roads of the Black Town, and garden (p.38) houses on
the banks of the Hooghly River. One early nineteenth-century English observer,
W. Hamilton, described them as ‘great native families who contributed to
Calcutta’s splendor … (but) were of very recent origin … (from among whom)
scarcely ten could be named who possessed wealth before the rise of English
power, it having been accumulated under our sovereignty, chiefly in our
service’.1 By the early nineteenth century, however, their fortunes were on the
decline. Hamilton pointed out at the state of their houses: ‘ruinous and decayed
premises, either vacant, or occupied by the remnants of wealthy families’.
Explaining the decline of these old rich Bengali families of the Black Town,
contemporary English observers conjectured: ‘The mercantile adventurers of
Calcutta had retired to spend their wealth in other quarters and ... the old and
indigent habitants of the place had not been able to preserve their former
station.’2

Even after some three decades, the state of these descendants of the former
Bengali grandees described above had not changed. An English missionary
visiting Calcutta in the late 1860s described the houses of the rich in the Black
Town in these words: ‘Scattered over the city … are the family mansions of the
native gentry, with their broad central courts, their pillared verandahs, and
numerous rooms. Some are palaces in appearance, though surrounded by filthy
drains; others are badly out of repair, their walls eaten with salt petre, their
courts full of cast-away furniture and heaps of rubbish, or overgrown with huge
weeds; and threatening to tumble into ruins.’3

It is no wonder that this English visitor found the houses of the ‘native gentry’ in
such a dilapidated condition. By the mid-nineteenth century, these Bengali
families of the ‘native gentry’, which had amassed fortunes in the eighteenth
century through deals with the East India Company, had already lost their
wealth and power. First, these members of an informal sector were no longer of
any use to the colonial administrative system that had succeeded the East India
Company and had laid down formal rules for both commercial and (p.39)
administrative functions. The new rulers had trained functionaries from among a

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A Tale of Three Towns

new generation of Bengalis (through their schools and colleges) to man their
commercial institutions as clerks, and administer the rural economy as junior
officials (entrusted with the task of collecting revenue and looking after law and
order). Second, the descendants of the eighteenth-century Bengali grandees
themselves were in no position to retain their status in the face of new
challenges. They were ill-qualified to fit into the new capitalist system. Most of
them dissipated the wealth accumulated by their forefathers through an
inherited extravagant feudal lifestyle (for example, spending their money on
lavish parties, maintaining mistresses, or gambling on horse races). By the mid-
nineteenth century, therefore, they were reduced to penury, their mansions
looking like moth-eaten structures.

But a new generation of the Bengali middle class (referred to above as

functionaries trained by the colonial authorities) was growing up in the Black
Town during this period. They came from amongst the descendants of these old
families, as well as new immigrants from outlying areas. Some of the former
continued to live in the dingy rooms of the mansions of their ancestors, some in
the newly built houses in the lanes and alleys behind these mansions. They
belonged to two groups. One consisted of the traditional commercial or artisan
caste families, like subarnabaniks (goldsmiths), gandhabaniks (dealers in spices),
and tantubaus (engaged in weaving and selling textile), who were quite
prosperous in eighteenth-century Bengal. In mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta,
the second or third generations of these subarnabaniks and gandhabaniks were
still able to retain their position through banking and commerce. The other
group was comprised of the descendants of upper-caste Brahmin and Kayastha
zamindars. Bereft of their old estates, the second and third generations of these
families drifted into the new professions that were opened up by the colonial
administrative system. As mentioned earlier, they went through an educational
(p.40) system that trained them as functionaries to serve the administration
and its different adjuncts—commercial, judicial, medical, and engineering,
among others. They entered professions like law, medicine, engineering,
education, accountancy, and so on.4 They were also recruited by the
administration as clerks and petty bureaucrats to man the administration at the
lower levels. These middle-class professionals and government employees
formed the class that was described by the English rulers as ‘babu’—a rather
ambiguous term in colonial discourse, which was mostly used in a pejorative
sense by the British to describe the sloppy and grovelling habits of the Bengali
clerks, and yet quite often as a respectable prefix for Bengali intellectuals (for
example, Babu Bankim Chandra Chatterjee).

How did these ‘babus’ live in the lanes and by-lanes behind the main roads in the
Black Town of the nineteenth century? We come across a meticulously written
description of the houses that they built by a perceptive contemporary European
observer, who found them

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A Tale of Three Towns

uniformly built in the form of a hollow square, with an area of 50 to 100

feet each way, which on the occasion of Hindoo festivals, is covered over,
and when well lighted up, looks very handsome. The house itself is seldom
of more than two stories, the lower portion, on three sides of it, being used
only for store-rooms, or for domestics; on the remaining side, and that
always the northern one, is to be found the Thakur Ghar, or abode of the
Hindoo Gods; this is always finished with care, and when the owner is
wealthy, the lustres contained in this sacred apartment are of considerable
value. Above stairs are the public apartments, with verandahs, always
inwards; these are generally long narrow slips, containing a profusion of
lustres and wall lights, altogether affording but a mean view to an
European. Jutting out from this main building are situated the
accommodations allotted to the females, and family; they consist of smaller
hollow squares, with petty verandahs opening inwards, and some houses
have two or three sets of these zunnanahs, with one or more tanks
attached, but which are generally kept in a very neglected state.5

(p.41) The Underbelly of the Black Town

But the majority of the inhabitants of Calcutta’s Black Town were migrants from
villages who had come to the city looking for livelihood. They carved out little
pathways from the main roads, on the sides of which they set up their huts. They
lived a ghetto-type existence, instilling their traditional rural living style and
customs within the newly mushroomed crowded bazaars and hutments in the
narrow lanes of Calcutta. In these alleys, which twisted away from the original
arterial roads (Chitpur running from north to south and Bagbazar from west to
east in the north), they built slums of mud huts with thatched roofs, living cheek
by jowl with the middle-class homes of the ‘babus’, whom they served as
domestic helps, local artisans, or in any other similar manual occupational role.

Neither the main roads in the Black Town (where stood the mansions of the rich
Bengalis), nor the streets and lanes behind them (where the poor lived), were in
any usable shape. Writing in 1836, Lieutenant Abercrombie, who held office as
Superintendent of Conservancy, described the abominable road conditions in the
northern part of the city: ‘There are at present no effectual means in use for
putting the streets into a proper state of cleanliness and preserving them in
such. Dust, rubbish and all kinds of dirt are thrown into the streets ad libitum
from every house, to be picked up as may be when the carts … (only about 300
carts to serve the whole town) may happen to come round.’ The roads were
rendered even worse by the drainage system. The only drains were deep open
ditches running alongside the roads, which were always full of filth and stinking
matter. Describing the drains in the Black Town, Lieutenant Abercrombie said:
‘They were unpaved.… In some places the bottom of the drain was nearly 2 ft.
below its supposed out-let, so that the deposit of filth, consisting chiefly of the

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A Tale of Three Towns

contents of privies and other matters in various stages of decomposition, gave

out the most offensive stench when disturbed for removal.’6 (p.42)

A vivid description of the sanitary conditions in the Black Town is available from
another contemporary account, which draws our attention to the role of
‘mehtars’ or scavengers in cleaning the roads:

The larger houses possessed private privies, while the poorer classes, who
lived in huts, sometimes shared one privy between four or five huts, and
sometimes resorted to the ‘mehtar-tatties,’ or public necessaries, which
instead of being municipal property, were built and managed by private
enterprises, fees being charged for their use.… The night soil, collected
from private privies by mehtars, who were paid fees by the occupiers of
the premises was conveyed to depots called ‘tollah mehtars’ depots,’ which
were situated at convenient centres. It was then removed to the night-soil
ghat on the river bank near the Mint, carried downstream in boats hired by
the Municipality on the contract system, and thrown into the river.7

Some thirty years after Abercrombie’s report, the first census of Calcutta was
carried out in 1866 by a committee headed by V.H. Schalch. It estimated that
there were 438 roads and lanes in Calcutta, out of which 253 were in the Black
Town with a length of 3,50,083 feet. They were so narrow, Schalch pointed out,
that traffic could not move smoothly. Besides, he warned, that the concentration
of combustible industries like jute mills, shops selling paints, oil mills, and soap
manufacturing units along these roads and lanes posed a danger to the citizens,
as no fire engine could enter these alleys, and no tanks or ponds were situated
nearby to make water available.8 A British traveller passing through Calcutta
during that period gives a vivid description of the living style and conditions of
the Bengali citizens of the Black Town, which occupied nearly 6 square miles of
the entire city (then comprising 8 square miles):

The streets, roads, and lanes are narrow, and are overshadowed by the
lofty walls and verandahs of straggling family dwellings.… All the great
roads and streets, destitute of pavements, are lined with shops, which are
innocent of glass fronts and windows; and which exhibit, without (p.43)
protection from dust, piles of brass vessels, bundles of slippers and shoes,
gorgeous tin lanterns, bales of cloth, mats, stool and cane chairs; vast piles
of red pottery, pitchers, cups and cooking pots; leaf umbrellas; and hillocks
of bamboos; posts for houses, small tiles, and straw.9

As for the domestic existence of these inhabitants of the underbelly of the Black
Town, the British traveller provides us with an insight into their living style and
habits. Describing the pressure on urban space, he observed: ‘So precious has
space become in recent years, that almost all vacant land outside the gardens of
the better houses has been covered with common huts. Of these the city now

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contains over sixty thousand. Formerly they were made of light materials, were
walled with mats, and thatched with leaves or straw.’ But the great fires which
burned three thousand of them every year led to the implementation of a public
law that required them to be roofed with tiles. How did these inhabitants of the
newly refurbished huts live? To quote the British traveller: ‘Though more
substantial in make, they are huts still. Most of them consist of but a single
room, and contains a bed-stead, a huge chest, a lamp or two, bamboo or glass oil
bottles, and a miscellaneous collection of pots and pans.’10

The state of the Black Town roads and lanes deteriorated further over the next
two decades. A report prepared by the Health Officer of the Calcutta
Corporation in 1887 described in grim colours the ‘close, narrow and ill-
ventilated streets … in the northern and native portion of the town’. The official
pointed out that localities which were crowded fifty years ago had become still
more densely crowded because of new buildings which had been erected during
this period. As a result, the air was polluted, for the purification of which ‘the
sweeping force of a storm is required to penetrate into the numerous narrow
lanes, passages, nooks, crevices and gullies which intersect the more crowded
districts’.11

The report also described the impact of such a congested atmosphere on the
health of those inhabiting these ‘nooks, crevices and gullies’. (p.44) They
suffered more in terms of mortality rates compared to the citizens of the White
Town. While the mean death rate in the European quarter was 14.6, in the Black
Town it was 28–35. Explaining the high mortality rates, a Bengali physician who
treated patients in the Black Town slums attributed them to ‘bad hygienic
conditions under which the poor sufferers live in ill-ventilated over-crowded
rooms, coupled with the insanitary conditions … where the privies open on the
road side admitting the free admixture of the sewer gas with the atmosphere
already surcharged with the effluvia emanating from the … deposit of house
refuse; the contamination of well water with suspended sewage’.12 Epidemics
were quick to break out and spread to the rest of the city from these slums.

Calcutta’s Slum-Dwellers—as Agencies and Victims of Urbanization

The nineteenth-century report of the living conditions of the slum-dwellers
described earlier helps us to enter their habitat and examine the hitherto
neglected role of these inhabitants of the city’s underbelly in the urbanization of
Calcutta. Slums had been a part of the city’s roads from the beginning. James
Ranald Martin described them as huts where the mass of labouring classes lived,
‘the walls of which are of mud, or of matted reed or bamboo, roofed with straw
or tiles, according to the means of the occupant … they are uniformly placed on
the bare ground or on damp mud, but little raised, which continually emits
injurious exhalations’. In 1822 (the period about which Martin was writing), out
of the 67,519 premises in Calcutta, 37,497 (more than half) were straw huts.13

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Those who inhabited them sustained Calcutta’s civic infrastructure by providing

its upper-class residents with roadside facilities like transport (by horse-driven
carriages, manually carried palanquins, and later, hand-pulled rickshaws) and
eateries, and in the role of domestic helps, (p.45) cooks, washermen, tailors,
and porters, among others. Some of these bustee dwellers were also engaged as
manual labourers in certain types of small-scale industries that grew to meet the
growing needs of the urban population. The municipal authorities, however,
frowned upon these mushrooming industries and termed them ‘dangerous and
offensive trades’, since they posed hazards to the habitations amidst which they
cropped up. Among such trades, they listed straw depots, potteries, tanneries,
brick kilns, wood depots, dyeing houses, coal depots, soap manufacturers, oil
boiling, houses for melting tallow, places for drying fish, and saltpetre
manufactories. ‘Many of these places of business’, they warned, ‘are mere large
sheds, with mud walls and tiled roofs … in the midst of densely populated
clusters of huts, where one spark at the hot season of the year may set the whole
in a flame, and cause immense destruction.’14

The danger of such conflagration was not confined to the Black Town. There
were slums in the White Town also, which were inhabited by the Indian servants
of the European residents. We come across a Bengali newspaper report of a fire
that broke out in ‘Bamun Bustee’ in the neighbourhood of Theatre Road on 27
March 1821, which started from a hut occupied by a servant of a certain Mr
George Watt, and spread fast.15

Slums or bustees, therefore, always posed a threat—both as sources of

epidemics and conflagration. Yet, they were accepted as a necessary evil by both
citizens and the authorities, since they acted as an agency for urbanization by
housing the masses of labourers who manned the city’s network of civic
facilities. We cannot, however, deny the fact that slums sprang up because of the
absence of any humanitarian concern on the part of the civic authorities for the
residential requirements of these manual workers. They were forced to build
little mud huts for themselves, a conglomeration of which constituted a bustee.
According to the 1876 Census of Calcutta, out of the 150-odd bustees, some 130
were situated in the Black Town in the north alone, while the remaining spread
over the central part and the White Town in the south. (p.46)

But those who built their homes in the bustees were not owners of these plots
where they built up their shacks. These plots belonged to landlords (like the rich
Bengali residents of the Black Town, and the European settlers in the White
Town, or middle-class traders and businessmen) who rented out their land in
small plots to different tenants for building purposes. Neither the Bengali nor
the white landlords were concerned about the well-being of the residents of their
slums as long as their rents were duly collected. The rich and middle-class
households did not care either, as long as these slum-dwellers continued to serve
them as their domestic helps. In the absence of any humanitarian concern on the

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part of the civic authorities for the residential requirements of these manual
workers, they were forced to build little mud huts for themselves. Besides
suffering from such existential problems, the bustee dwellers were also denied
political rights. Till the early twentieth century, neither the hut owner nor its
occupant was entitled to vote in municipality elections.

Meanwhile, the colonial authorities needed to give the fragmented city an

appearance of coherence and bring it under a centralized system of town
planning. In their bid to expand the road network and beautify the city, it was
essential, therefore, to clear the roads of the bustees. The slums thus became a
site of tensions between the citizens’ need for the slum-dwellers on the one
hand, and the municipal authorities’ need to get rid of them on the other.

From the 1860s onwards, municipal administrators began to systematically

demolish slums to make way for new structures. In 1868, for instance, a
sprawling bustee on Chitpur Road was pulled down, and a garden was built on
the spot costing 3,00,000 rupees, which was named Beadon Square (which still
exists) in the name of the then British governor general of India, Lord Beadon. A
variety of flowers were planted in the garden, which used to be illuminated in
the evening.16 One might wonder why the white rulers chose this particular site
in the Black Town to build a garden; there could have been several reasons. (p.
47)

First, the British rulers were seriously concerned about their own physical
health, and the dangers of contamination from the Black Town, which was
perceived as a den of all diseases, from where the northern wind blew and
infected the White Town in the south. They suffered from what a modern-day
historian describes as ‘sanitation syndrome’—a term used with reference to
colonial planning in South Africa.17 As Anthony D. King points out in his analysis
of urban planning under colonial regime: ‘The overriding, even obsessive
concern with “health” … was … taken as the driving force behind planning in all
colonial territories. The creation of physically “healthy” environments, defined
according to the cultural criteria of the metropolitan power, became a major
objective.’18 Thus, a ‘physicalist’ strategy based on sheer rearrangement of
space and dispersal of its inhabitants to sanitize the environment was
formulated by the Calcutta municipal authorities to bypass problems that were
essentially economic, social, and political. The demolition of a crowded slum and
the creation of an open-air garden in its place fitted well into this strategy of
purifying the Black Town. In fact, as early as 1836, Lieutenant Abercrombie, the
then Superintendent of Conservancy for Calcutta, recommended the formation
of streets that could lead to the opening up of crowded localities and secure
‘free ventilation’ so that the wind which blew from the Black Town in the north
could be detoxicated. Besides, the policy to reduce the congestion in the
northern part of the town was also motivated by the British rulers’ need to keep

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their native subjects in a healthier form. If they were reduced to physical

wrecks, who would man the services of the colonial rulers?

Second, environmental reforms like setting up of gardens and naming them after
white rulers in the heart of the Black Town served the twin objectives of
stamping the space with symbols of colonial authority, and also pleasing the
upwardly mobile Bengali professionals and middle-class inhabitants by offering
them a space for leisure. Such ‘strategic beautification’ of portions of the Black
Town allowed its native (p.48) residents to relax in open air within the
precincts of their own territory, and debarred them from invading the
promenades in the White Town like the Eden Gardens and the strand along the
Hooghly River.19

Among other areas in the Black Town where the slum population was affected by
road-building in the 1880s, were Jorasanko, where bustees were razed to make
way for the creation of several streets; Kolutola, where municipal authorities
took possession of a large bustee to evict their dwellers in order to construct a
hospital on that site; and Muchipara, where the site of a bustee was taken over
to construct a building to house a social institution. In the White Town, Duncan’s
bustee, which was situated in Wood Street, was pulled down to build the office of
the Surveyor General. This meant the second displacement for its inhabitants
who, after having been ousted from Gobindapur (due to the construction of Fort
William there, as mentioned earlier), had been rehabilitated in this bustee.20

By the turn of the twentieth century, more bustees had been demolished, partly
with the consent of their upper-class Bengali owners, who were compensated
with money for the loss of their regular income from the rents paid by their
tenants who inhabited the bustees. An official report describes how these
owners removed all huts in ‘Natherbagan bustee … Soortibagan bustee ...
Tantibagan bustee’, where ‘the owners … have removed all the huts and
constructed masonry buildings’.21 A few years later, the Calcutta Corporation
was empowered with the right to remove bustees for the purpose of building or
widening roads, without payment of any compensation whatsoever to the
owners.22

The bustee-dwellers were thus a fluid stream of the city’s population—compelled

to move constantly from one habitat to another, ousted from a newly developed
road to some lane that still awaited reconstruction. They were victims of the
ever-changing plans of municipal authorities. Yet, they remained a permanent
adjunct to the city—invariably cropping up behind the main roads and the
houses of upper- and middle-class families that had to depend on their labour.

(p.49) Middle Classes of the Black Town

We have earlier described the composition of the Black Town’s Bengali upper-
and middle-class inhabitants in the nineteenth century consisting of descendants
of the old families of commercial and administrative agents of the East India
Page 9 of 33
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Company and the new class of professionals like advocates, teachers, medical
practitioners, and bureaucrats and clerks in the administrative hierarchy. Even
at the turn of the twentieth century, they were all bundled up in the stereotype
of ‘babus’ by the contemporary European observers. They were denigrated in
the Kiplinesque style, in the contemporary accounts by Englishmen in
newspapers and other writings. A typical illustration is a snippet from a
travelogue by an Englishman in the early twentieth century. He begins by
admitting that he has ‘followed in Kipling’s footsteps, and … smelt the Big Stink
of which he wrote so geographically’. He then proceeds to describe the lifestyle
of the ‘babu’ who works ‘all day in his two-foot section of desk behind the brass
rails of a busy bank or office … [and] is wide awake at night enjoying himself in
the haunts of his class’. The haunt is the red-light area in Upper Chitpore
(‘perhaps the most Indian of Calcutta’s streets’), where ‘babus of all shapes and
sizes … from the long and lanky to the squat figure that looks like a Crème de
Menthe bottle’ congregated.

The English visitor then sums up: ‘Ninety percent or more of the clerks in
Calcutta thus disport themselves in the charms of femininity, working by day,
revelling by night, and rearing families in their spare time.’23

This typical colonial view of the Bengali middle class of the Black Town fails, as
usual, to look deeper under the surface. At the time when this Englishman was
sneering at ‘babus’, a mood of discontent and protest against colonial rule was
also simmering among the same ‘babu’ class. While some among them did
indulge in the hedonistic lifestyle described above, others were organizing
public meetings to demand political rights within the existing system; some
among them even (p.50) going a step further by resorting to armed resistance
to put an end to the colonial system altogether.

In fact, the educated Bengali middle class of the Black Town, which was a
product of the colonial system, also bred within its womb the forces that
challenged the system. One of the ironies of a hegemonist English educational
system (that was introduced in the Black Town in the nineteenth century by the
colonial rulers to serve their interests) was that while creating a subservient
class of Bengali clerks, petty bureaucrats, and professionals, it unwittingly led to
the growth of a subversionist grouping within the same class that rebelled
against the colonial powers. Thus, in the Black Town, institutions like the Hindu
College (a joint endeavour by English colonial educationalists and Bengali upper-
class social reformers) produced a generation of intellectual dissidents in the
early nineteenth century (for example, the Young Bengal group), who can be
described as the precursors of the next generation of Bengali nationalist
politicians, who in the twentieth century emerged as a force to challenge the
colonial rulers. Educated in the values of Western Enlightenment that were
spread through this system, they questioned the credibility of colonial power in
the terms of a discourse that was set by that power itself. These Bengali middle-

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class residents of the Black Town constituted the nationalist elements—both

those who sought to gain independence through constitutional means and others
who resorted to armed struggle.

It was in the streets and halls of the Black Town that public rallies and meetings
were held against draconian laws that imposed censorship and violated political
rights, Bengali plays were staged that lampooned the city’s colonial
administrators, and secret revolutionary groups hatched plots to overthrow the
British regime by armed onslaught.

Rise of the White Town

As mentioned earlier, from the mid-eighteenth century, the European residents
began to shift from the northern wing of the town, Sutanuti, (p.51) following
Siraj-ud-dowlah’s attack. They sought accommodation in Gobindapur in the
south-west, where they also felt more secure due to the construction of the new
Fort William. But Gobindapur alone was not spacious enough for them. As one
latter-day historian of Calcutta was to describe their problems,

The English with their shops, shipping servants and dependents, their
banians, brokers and traders, who were most rapidly increasing in number,
lay scattered, in spite of concentration of the factors and soldiers in and
around Fort William, over the whole of this area in straggling houses and
boat … it was becoming more and more difficult to deal with them in the
best interests of the Company.24

Besides, the existing town was attracting a new group of Europeans. Another
modern historian of Calcutta points out that the success of the English in the
Battle of Plassey encouraged ‘a growing number of unlicensed Englishmen … to
find their way to Bengal.… Spurred by the examples of the Nabobs [the first
generation of East India Company merchants and administrators who made
fortunes in India and returned to England where they flaunted their wealth in
the early 18th century] more and more began to reach Bengal’.25 These
‘unlicensed Englishmen’ consisted of sailors who jumped ships, soldiers who
deserted the army, wanted criminals who escaped from London, and a variety of
adventurers who flocked to this town seeking ways to make fortunes. The
English settlement was bursting at its seams.

The East India Company, therefore, had to extend its territory beyond the
prevailing borders. As luck would have it, their old patron, the Moghul prince
Farrukshiyar (who granted them the permission to buy the three villages of
Sutanuti, Kolikata, and Gobindapur in 1698), captured the Moghul throne in
Delhi in 1713. The East India Company approached him for permission to
expand their territory by buying villages neighbouring their old settlement in
Calcutta. In 1717, Farrukshiyar granted them the right to buy thirty-eight
villages in and around Calcutta. But the local zamindars of these villages refused
to sell them.26 Over the next (p.52) decades, however, the Company got
Page 11 of 33
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possession of the villages through devious means. It employed its agents and
brokers to twist the hands of these zamindars and make them concede.
According to a latter-day British official—Mr Bolts, the Collector of Calcutta—
these servants and brokers of the Company ‘realized whatever rents and profits
they could get, and omitted to pay the Government revenue, which however, was
exacted from the old, but dispossessed zamindars.’27

Among these villages were Chourungi, Birji, and Kalimba (or Kalinga) in the
south-eastern part of the area. The English and European settlers (mainly
administrators and traders) encroached upon them and carved out a space for
their own exclusive use. In this new phase of the urbanization of these villages in
the early eighteenth century, these European settlers built houses and roads that
suited their movements and convenience. Thus, a new urban spatial structure
was constructed through the rearrangement of public and private spaces, and
connectivity and accessibility were made possible by the creation of roads and
lanes. Very soon, these European settlements, which stretched from the
neighbourhood of Fort William in the west to the Chowrungi-Birji area of the
east, became institutionalized as a separate enclave known as the White Town.

The European population carved out the White Town as their own exclusive
zone, where they implanted town planning theory, ideology, and professional
knowledge, which they borrowed from the metropolitan centre of London in
Britain. In these enclaves, they constructed wide roads and avenues, built
British-type cottages, and laid out gardens experimenting with tropical flora.

The development of the urban infrastructure—roads and houses—of the White

Town can be traced from contemporary accounts. One of the earliest such
accounts is that of a European painter called William Hodges, who visited
Calcutta in the 1780s and described the White Town in the following words:

The streets are broad: the line of buildings surrounding two sides of the
esplanade of the fort, is magnificent; and it adds greatly to the superb (p.
53) appearance, that the houses are detached from each other, and
insulated in a great space. The buildings are all on a large scale, from the
necessity of having a free circulation of air.… The general approach to the
houses is by a flight of steps, with great projecting porticoes, or
surrounded by colonnades or arcades, which gave them the appearance of
Grecian Temples.28

The Grecian architectural façade of houses and gardens in the domestic sphere,
and wide roads and promenades in the public sphere, remained a model of living
style also for later generations of European residents of the White Town. In the
1830s, an English observer described their houses as marked by a ‘style of
building (which) is Grecian, ornamented with spacious verandahs, the pillars of
which are generally too lofty to afford much protection from the sun’s rays’. He

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added: ‘Each house has a piece of garden around, which gives to this quarter
[European] … a great advantage in point of airiness.’29 Some thirty years later,
we find from another contemporary report the following description of the White
Town:

The English quarter occupies the south end of the city. Here a beautiful
plain, a mile and a half long goes down to the water’s edge, having Fort
William in the centre, on the river bank.… On its inner sides the plain is
bordered with the stately houses of the English, with their white walls,
broad, open verandahs, and green Venetian shutters.… On the east side
are the numerous English homes of ‘Chowringhee,’ always increasing both
in number and in their rents.30

The ‘beautiful plain’ is what came to be known as the Maidan—the lungs of the
city. Once a deep jungle, it was later cleared (in 1830–40) and turned into a
pasture and grazing ground. Still later, the British administrators began to
develop the stretch as an open space for the recreation of white citizens by
planting trees and creating spots of quiet retreat—on the lines of Hyde Park and
similar English sites of open-air exercise and leisure. By the 1860s, it had been
given recognition in official records as the Maidan, and suggestions were being
made for (p.54) the ‘improvement of the Maidan … [since] the increase of
European population demands corresponding means to provide for the
recreation of the community.’31

Differing Patterns in the Use of Space

The contrast between the Black Town and the White Town boils down to the
basic difference in the organization of public and private space in the two towns.
It is a contrast between a concept of habitats and living style in an indigenous
pre-industrial society on the one hand, and a newly introduced colonial concept
of urban planning imposed on that society on the other. In the encounter
between the two, those inhabiting the indigenous conceptual framework were
torn by tensions between their traditional rural roots and the newly emerging
urban compulsions of existential survival in Calcutta, where they had emigrated.

The growth and development of the Black Town reflected these tensions. The
Bengali landlords and other residents who settled here in the late eighteenth to
early nineteenth centuries allowed it to develop along the old pattern of villages
from where they had emigrated. As in their villages, where people huddled
together in huts rubbing shoulders with each other, sharing common concerns,
in north Calcutta too in the early days of its growth, houses cropped up side by
side, often without any boundary wall. Again, following the old joint-family
system, a single building accommodated numerous wings of the owner’s
extended family. This cluttered-up native housing pattern, which persisted all
through the nineteenth century in the Black Town, posed a challenge to British
colonial town planning, which lay stress on the separation of individual

Page 13 of 33
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residential units—as followed in the White Town with its European bungalows
detached from each other by patches of empty space. The problem was posed in
vivid terms by a British official, H. Beverley, who while carrying out an on-the-
spot survey of the Black Town in 1876, observed: (p.55)

House accommodation is too limited and expensive to allow of many

families among the poor classes thus enjoying a whole baree (house) to
themselves; far more frequently we find each separate room in the
homestead occupied by a distinct family. The rooms may be detached or
not; they may have access to the street by separate entrances or by a
common door. In some cases there are perhaps shops outside facing the
street, bearing distinct assessment numbers, though all under the same
roof. Was such a baree to be counted as one or more houses?32

Following the rural pattern of allotting separate space to occupational groups

and castes, the Bengali landlords in the Black Town settled artisans, potters,
fishermen, and similar communities in respective slots in the urban topography.
We thus find areas in north Calcutta carrying names like Dorjipara (named after
tailors), Kumortuli (inhabited by potters), and Jeleypara (occupied by fishermen
who steered across the neighbouring Hooghly river to catch fish). As in their old
villages, these various areas came to be connected by lanes and alleys winding
through the clusters of mud huts of the poorer classes and the brick-built houses
of the upper classes. As in the villages again, bazaars were situated in certain
corners of the town—like Lala Baboo’s Bazaar on Chitpore Road or Simla Bazaar
on Maniktala Street. The traders operated from makeshift stalls, selling fruits,
vegetables, spices, and fish among other things, which they often produced in
their own farms in the neighbouring villages, or manufactured in their own
homes (like the spice merchants), or gathered from their own occupational
sources (like the fishermen). The traditional direct relationship between the
producer and the consumer that characterized rural market economy persisted
in the Black Town in the old times.

Bengali owners of some of these traditional bazaars of the Black Town faced a
crisis when English administrators and entrepreneurs encroached upon their
commercial space on the borders of the Black and White Towns in central
Calcutta towards the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the descendants of the
famous businessman Motilal Sheel, who owned an old bazaar in the
Chowringhee–Dharmatala area, (p.56) protested when in 1873 the British
administrators decided to build a modern market next to it, named after their
patron, Sir Stuart Hogg, who was the city’s commissioner of police as well as its
municipal commissioner. The Sheel family, however, agreed to give up their
claims to the commercial space by accepting 60,000 rupees as compensation
from the British administrators.33

Page 14 of 33
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Hogg Market (known today as New Market) and similar other markets that came
up in the White Town stood in sharp contrast with the bazaars of the
contemporary Black Town. In these new markets, a different class of indigenous
retailers rented well-structured shops, bought goods from the wholesale market
in north Calcutta, and sold them to their main clients, the European residents.
Quite a number of European and Jewish traders also set up their shops in Hogg
Market, some of which still survive.

Calcutta Roads as Registers of Changing Modes of Transport

Next to housing and markets, transport is a major requirement of the residents
of a city. Roads cannot live without transport. The various stages of road
development in Calcutta are bound up with the different phases of transport that
operated on the roads—ranging from animal-driven carts to vehicular traffic.

In rural Bengal, bullock carts were the traditional mode of transport, both for
the movement of freight and travellers. The rich used palanquins carried by
human bearers. For faster travelling, the paiks and barkandazes (armed
mercenaries) of the zamindars rode horses. In the urban mileu of Calcutta in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, palanquins and horse-driven carriages
were used by the upper-class Bengalis in the Black Town and the Europeans in
the White Town. The European painter F. Balthazar Solvyns, visiting Calcutta in
the late eighteenth century, described the palanquin as well constructed, with
(p.57) lanterns, and borne by four bearers whose movements were so easy that
‘they are scarcely felt by the person in the palanquin, though they are at the
same time very rapid and get over a great deal of ground in a short time’.34 The
bearers kept shifting the palanquin—one group succeeded by another on a long
stretch. A contemporary Englishwoman, Sophia Goldbourne, narrating her
journey to the promenade of Esplanade in Calcutta, wrote: ‘Swiftly did we pass
along; for it seems these palanquin-bearers (with proper relays ...) are so expert
that in defiance of the heat, etc. they go at the rate of from nine to twelve miles
per hour.’35 But the common citizens could not afford palanquins. As one latter-
day historian of Calcutta observed:

Travelling by dawk palki (palanquin) continued well up to the 19th century,

but for people of limited means the cost was prohibitive and they had to
avail of the ubiquitous bullock-cart, with a thatch or covering of split
bamboos and cloth and a layer of straw inside to serve as a ‘shock
absorber’ against the jerks and jolts incidental to badly kept roads.36

The next important mode of transport was the hackney carriage. A mid-
nineteenth-century official report describes three types of such carriages in
Calcutta: (a) four-wheeled carriage on springs, drawn by two horses; (b) a
similar carriage drawn by one horse or a pair of ponies; and (c) a two-wheeled
carriage without springs.37 Although palanquins gradually disappeared from the

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roads of Calcutta, horse-driven carriages continued to operate till the twentieth

century.

The transition from palanquins and horse-driven carriages to trams, railways,

and motor cars led to the redrawing and resurfacing of roads into suitable
avenues for carrying these mechanized modes of transport. The surfaces of
Calcutta’s roads were sliced into strips through the laying down of railway and
tramway tracks that cut across the city, connecting its different corners. In 1867,
the administration built a railway line that ran from Theatre Road in the White
Town to Bagbazar in the Black Town in the north, to collect and carry the refuse
of the residential areas all along the route, and then move (p.58) further
towards the eastern outskirts of Calcutta in Dhapa, in order to dump the refuse
into the swamps there. The train that trudged along this railway line through the
middle of the city was known in those days as the ‘Dhapa Mail’. Still later, in
1873, the Calcutta Corporation began experimenting with the tramways by
laying down a line that was 12,700 feet in length, which was to be mainly used
for the removal of seeds and jute from the Sealdah Railway Station to the
warehouses in the Black Town, where they would be stored by wholesale
merchants. This was, however, a rather brief experiment, since under pressures
from a section of the administration (which felt that it was working at a dead
loss), it was discontinued.38 But the tramways were revived soon with the
introduction of horse-driven trams for passengers along the old tramway line,
and were turned later into an electricity-driven popular means of transport all
over Calcutta. Meanwhile, the appearance of the automobile on Calcutta’s roads
posed a new challenge to the existing road system. Motor cars were imported
from abroad for private use by the richer classes and heavy trucks were used for
transporting freight.39

All these various stages of mechanization of transport were accompanied by

administrative efforts to strengthen the road surface to suit the new kinds of
traffic. But during this period (from the end of the nineteenth century till the
beginning of the twentieth) road-building in Calcutta became a contested terrain
between various competing parties—British officials of the Calcutta municipality,
British road engineers, and British contractors. It became a site of debate and
conflict among these members of the colonial ruling elite, on issues like
administrative priorities, commercial profits, technological innovations, and
health concerns, among others. First, to cut down costs, the British engineers
suggested different technologies ranging from the use of asphalt macadam to
cement concrete.

But the most curious technology was mooted by a British contractor firm called
Messrs Gladston Wyllie. It had investments in logging (p.59) operations, and in
order to profit from the wood thus extracted from forests, it submitted a
proposal to the municipal authorities in 1902–3 to pave the city roads with
wooden planks that had a cement covering. But two other Englishmen, the chief

Page 16 of 33
A Tale of Three Towns

engineer and the health officer of the Calcutta Corporation, raised objections.
They pointed out that a similar experiment had been earlier carried out on some
London roads, and it had been found that in summer the wooden planks rotted
and gave out an offensive smell, as a result of which those roads had to be
washed with deodorant! In Calcutta, what with the summer heat, such wooden
roads would give out an even worse stink!40

‘Tyrannies of the Road’

Finally, the British administration abandoned all other experiments, and settled
for tar macadam and cement concrete. But it decided to be selective in both the
construction and maintenance of roads. The roads in the White Town—in the
central and southern parts—which housed the British administrative and
commercial headquarters and residences of white citizens—were well laid,
cleaned and watered every day, and repaired every year. The roads in the Black
Town in the north suffered stepmotherly treatment. Local residents complained
about the discrimination, as evident from a contemporary Bengali newspaper
editorial in the late 1850s, describing the plight of pedestrians there at the onset
of the monsoon: ‘Every road is choked with slush ... yet there is no sign of
repairing the roads.... Just because we are Bengalis, the roads in our
neighbourhoods have to remain in disrepair.’41 Even after almost two decades,
the extent of road-building in the two areas remained skewed in favour of the
White Town. A municipality report of 1873 indicates that while in the southern
division (that is, the White Town) stone layers for paving the roads covered
about 1,00,000 cubic feet, in the northern division (the Black Town) they covered
about 80,000 cubic feet only, although the residential area in the north was
larger than that it was in the south.42 In the (p.60) same year, a letter that
appeared in a Bengali newspaper described the plight of a pedestrian returning
home through a road in the Black Town:

It is evening and it is drizzling.… But the road has already become a mud
puddle, as if a sweetmeat seller had poured all his rotten curd on a plate.…
The pavements are also bumpy and slippery.… Further down, a sewerage
pipe has burst … so you have to take a diversion.… But there again, you
find that there is some problem with the pavement gas light posts.… So,
the gas company labourers are digging up the road.

The letter ends with an appeal to the Calcutta Municipality: ‘Please, please …
find some means to reduce the tyrannies of the road.’43

Apart from the poor maintenance of the surface of the roads, the underground
drainage and sewerage system also created problems (more dangerous than the
frequent bursting of the pipes, as described in the above letter). Lack of proper
supervision of the numerous details of the drainage machinery, beginning from
its construction, laying, trapping ventilation, flushing, and so forth, often left it
vulnerable to the leakage of sewer gas. A late nineteenth-century English health

Page 17 of 33
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of L'héritage
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: L'héritage
roman

Author: Henri Bachelin

Release date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72984]

Language: French

Original publication: Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1914

Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from
images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK L'HÉRITAGE ***

 HENRI BACHELIN

L’HÉRITAGE
ROMAN

PARIS
BERNARD GRASSET, ÉDITEUR
61, RUE DES SAINTS-PÈRES, 61

1914
Tous droits de reproduction, de traduction et d’adaptation réservés pour tous pays.
Copyright by Bernard Grasset 1914.
 DU MÊME AUTEUR

Horizons et Coins du Morvan.

Pas-comme-les-autres.
Les Manigants.
Jules Renard et son Œuvre.
Robes Noires.
La Bancale.
Les Sports aux champs.
Juliette la Jolie.
Sous d’humbles toits.
 IL A ÉTÉ TIRÉ DE CET OUVRAGE :
12 exemplaires sur Hollande Van Gelder
numérotés de 1 à 12
 A JÉROME ET JEAN THARAUD

Mes chers amis,

Avec nos sympathies instinctives et nos répugnances irraisonnées

ne jouons-nous pas un peu comme au boomerang ? Je crains
qu’elles ne nous reviennent avant d’avoir touché ceux qu’elles
pensent atteindre, et je ne me flatterai point de forcer votre amitié.
Mais depuis le jour où j’ai lu La Maîtresse Servante, l’estime
consciente et — si le mot ne vous offusque pas, — admirative que
j’ai pour vous n’a point varié, et il n’y a que cela qui importe. Je
devine dès maintenant que nous ne suivrons point la même route.
Je n’ai réalisé jusqu’à présent, au point de vue de l’expression de
mes sentiments personnels, que la partie négative de mon œuvre, si
ce mot ne vous semble pas trop ambitieux. Tenterais-je de le faire
directement que j’écrirais en polémiste des romans de revendication
sociale de valeur esthétique nulle, ou peu s’en faudrait. J’attends de
me sentir mûr pour les écrire en artiste. Et je vous sais trop
intelligents et trop artistes, vous, pour conclure à l’identité des
sentiments de mes personnages et particulièrement de Vaneau
résigné, et des miens. Mais je souhaiterais que tout le monde vous
ressemblât.
 L’HÉRITAGE
Il faut que tu renonces à cette vie
extraordinaire qui n’est pleine que de soucis : il
n’y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes.

René.

PREMIÈRE PARTIE

« Il apprend tout ce qu’il veut ! » disait-on, sans se rendre compte

que pour lui c’était peut-être un malheur. C’est bien d’être toujours le
premier à l’école, d’avoir beaucoup de prix à la fin de l’année et de
descendre de l’estrade avec une couronne verte ; mais plus tard
sera-t-il le premier dans la vie ? Aura-t-il le front ceint de lauriers ?
Les vieux certificats d’études, couverts de signatures, jaunissent
sous verre. Personne ne peut les emporter avec soi, collés sur sa
poitrine, comme font les aveugles, les victimes d’accidents. Personne
ne peut dire : « Et puis j’ai eu mon certificat d’études à onze ans,
l’année d’avant ma première communion ».
Il doit exister des gens que cela ferait éclater de rire.
Dans la cour il jouait avec les autres, sans se souvenir qu’il était
le seul à n’avoir pas fait une faute dans la dictée de tout à l’heure.
Mais il n’était pas le plus habile aux barres ; il lui arrivait de se laisser
prendre, vexé lorsque ceux de son camp ne se pressaient pas de le
délivrer, comme s’il leur eût été inutile. Il n’était pas le plus fort aux
billes, où il perdait plus souvent qu’à son tour, ni au jeu de saute-
mouton où plus d’une fois il lui fallait tendre l’échine. Il aurait préféré
se tenir à l’écart, mais il était obligé de jouer.
Même avec sa cour où les marrons à la rentrée rebondissent sur
le sol dur, même avec son hangar ouvert à tous les vents et sous
lequel les jours de pluie ils s’entassaient en se heurtant, en poussant
des cris, l’école lui plaisait. Elle lui plaisait davantage encore avec ses
salles décorées de cartes où l’eau bleue épouse si exactement les
terres multicolores, pourtant déchiquetées, qu’il ne reste pas un
vide. Les tables se suivaient, violettes de coulées d’encre. Ils y
étaient bien, l’hiver, toutes les fenêtres fermées. Il fallait allumer les
lampes à trois heures de l’après-midi. Dehors, à cause de la neige,
aucun bruit ; ici la respiration du poêle ronflant tout rouge. Ils y
étaient bien, l’été. Par les fenêtres grandes ouvertes le jour entrait,
vert à cause des feuilles des hauts platanes ; ils entendaient sur le
colombier roucouler les pigeons, et dans une maison proche trotter
une machine à coudre et rire des couturières. Parfois, lorsque de
jeunes hommes passaient en sifflotant, les rires ressemblaient aux
roucoulements. Parfois aussi, cédant à la torpeur de l’après-midi, le
cher frère s’inclinant sur son bureau ronflait, congestionné, rouge
comme le poêle en hiver. Des coqs s’interrogeaient, se répondaient.
Il les reconnaissait. Le coq des Bide avait une voix enrouée ; le coq
des Dumas chantait net. Celui de Mme Leprun était un peu ridicule
avec son filet de voix : il fallait qu’il fît un grand effort et qu’il se
dressât sur ses ergots. Il entendait encore d’autres coqs, inconnus,
dispersés dans les villages d’alentour, dont il devinait plutôt le chant,
comme en un rêve d’été, quand on s’imagine voir un homme velu,
aux pieds de bouc, qui joue d’une flûte bizarre, assis à l’ombre près
d’une source, en regardant la plaine blanche de soleil.

L’école était un monde à part. Aussitôt qu’il avait poussé la porte

de la cour il respirait un autre air. Par les livres il y était en contact
avec toute la terre.
En Afrique les lions dorment sous des palmiers, et les chameaux
ont l’air de collines qui marchent. L’Australie est habitée par les
ornithorynques, les émeus. Au pôle Nord les ours blancs voyagent
sur des glaçons qu’ils rayent de leurs griffes. Les tigres miaulent
dans les jungles de l’Inde. Un condor plane au-dessus de l’Amérique.
Tout cela n’est rien à côté de la France. Des cinq parties du
monde une vue d’ensemble suffit. La France mérite qu’on la
connaisse dans ses détails. Les ruisseaux font les fleuves qui tout de
suite partent pour la mer, bleus comme l’eau quand il n’y a point de
nuages : en géographie le ciel est toujours pur. Les lignes de
chemins de fer sont noires de la fumée des locomotives, des
poussières du charbon. La Bresse est peuplée de poulets. On
rencontre beaucoup de poulardes par les rues du Mans. Des chevaux
galopent dans le Perche ; des bœufs ruminent dans les pâturages du
Nivernais. La Beauce est jaune de blé, le Midi bleu de raisins, les
Alpes blanches de neige, les Ardennes vertes de forêts.
L’histoire de la terre est si compliquée qu’il n’essaie pas de s’y
retrouver. Depuis que l’épée de l’Ange les a tenus hors du Paradis
terrestre, les hommes sont partis dans tous les sens, chacun à la
recherche de son paradis. Des rois les ont menés, poussés. Ils se
sont battus, blessés, tués, à coups d’épieux, de massues, de
catapultes, de francisques, de couleuvrines, d’arquebuses. Des
trônes se sont effondrés dans les flammes. D’autres, vermoulus, se
sont affaissés d’eux-mêmes, mais comme de vieux saules dont
l’écorce ne meurt jamais sans transmettre sa force à quelque vivace
bourgeon. Le bonheur cependant, effrayé, fuyait à tire-d’aile sous les
nuages, comme une colombe qui cherche un coin paisible où se
poser, et que l’on ne verra peut-être jamais revenir avec le brin
d’olivier.
Il y était en contact par les autres avec ce que la vie a de familier
dans un rayon de six kilomètres. Les gamins des villages arrivaient
avec des carniers de toile bise à l’intérieur des quels se trouvaient un
morceau de pain dur, un chaudron plein de soupe froide, des noix
sèches. Il y en avait de si malheureux que même les jours de soupe
étaient pour eux des dates dans une semaine. Ils apportaient de
l’odeur sauvage des bois qu’ils traversaient et que fréquentaient les
renards, les chevreuils et les sangliers. Ils disaient que lors des
grandes neiges ils rencontraient des loups dont ils n’avaient pas
peur. Car ils s’en retournaient à la tombée de la nuit, petites formes
grises qui se mouvaient sur les grandes routes pendant que la bise
gémissait entre les arbres dépouillés. Ils parlaient des champs et des
prés, des semailles et des moissons. A dix ans ils étaient rudes et
portaient déjà de gros sabots ferrés.
Parce qu’il ne travaillait pas la terre et qu’il vivait dans ce bourg
de trois mille âmes, il avait l’air à côté d’eux distingué, délicat
comme une demoiselle. Il avait l’air d’un petit riche. Pourtant
plusieurs d’entre eux plus tard posséderaient les fermes, les champs
et les prés de leurs pères. Lui il n’hériterait jamais de rien, parce que
son père ne possédait que ses deux bras.

Sa maison était proche de l’école. Tandis que ceux des villages

restaient sous le hangar, les pieds dans la poussière, à manger sur
leurs genoux, en deux minutes il arrivait. Le repas attendait sur la
table. Presque en même temps que lui son père s’asseyait. Le repas
de midi était le point culminant de la journée. Ce n’était pas en vain
que toute une matinée ils avaient l’un et l’autre travaillé, puisqu’ils
trouvaient sur la table lui la récompense, son père le fruit de sa
peine. Le repas n’était guère varié : ils mangeaient du bœuf une
grande partie de la semaine ; c’est la viande qui coûte le moins cher
et l’on commence par vivre sur le pot-au-feu deux jours entiers, le
dimanche et le lundi. Ce n’en était pas moins délicieux. Ils ne
faisaient pas que manger, ni que boire un peu de vin : ils savouraient
le calme, faisaient provision de courage pour l’après-midi qu’ils
envisageaient avec plus de sérénité. Puisque la matinée avait eu sa
raison d’être, il en serait de même de l’après-midi.
Pourtant le repas du soir ne ressemblait pas à celui de midi.
D’ailleurs ce n’était point un repas : c’était « la soupe ». Qu’elle fût à
l’oignon, aux pommes de terre, à l’oseille, elle ne coûtait pas cher. Il
y avait plus d’eau que de beurre, que de lait. Elle durait un quart
d’heure à peine. En été il fallait profiter de ce qu’il restait de lumière
dans le ciel pour s’occuper du jardin où il y avait plus de légumes
que de fleurs, du carré de champ où il n’y avait pas un centimètre de
terre qui ne fût ensemencé. En hiver ils se couchaient de bonne
heure, parce que le pétrole coûte cher et qu’il ne faut pas brûler trop
de bois. La soupe n’était point comme le repas de midi une halte en
pleine marche. Elle était le commencement d’un repos qu’ils avaient
sous la main, du repos de toute une nuit. La chaise n’était rien, à
côté du lit.
Pour lui, que ce fût sur le pas de la porte quand les pierres
étaient encore chaudes du soleil de toute une journée, à la table à
peine desservie quand le poêle qu’on laissait s’éteindre commençait
à se refroidir, il apprenait ses leçons ou lisait de merveilleuses
histoires.
Il y avait des animaux assez intelligents pour écrire de délicieux
mémoires, d’autres, terribles, à qui les chasseurs dans les Indes
dressaient des pièges. Des enfants quittaient leur chaumière
bretonne pour tenter la fortune à Paris, et ne manquaient pas de
rencontrer, chemin faisant, toutes sortes de bons génies ; d’autres
dormaient au bord d’une route sous un chêne. « Il faisait froid, il
faisait sombre ; la pluie tombait fine et serrée. » Ils auraient pu
mourir ; mais passait, retour de Sébastopol, un brave sergent
accompagné de son chien Capitaine. Hommes, femmes et bêtes, ah !
qu’ils étaient donc tous de braves gens, généraux russes et soldats
français, honnêtes chemineaux, douces et distinguées comtesses,
paysannes délicates ! Et il fallait avoir huit ans pour trembler quand
Bournier enferme Dourakhine pour le tuer ! Ce n’étaient plus les
menus incidents dont se tissait la trame de sa vie. Toute
préoccupation mesquine était écartée. Les papas et les mamans
savaient réprimander selon la juste mesure, et les enfants même,
lorsqu’ils désobéissaient, ne le faisaient que d’accord avec une
volonté supérieure.
Puis il lia connaissance avec un monde différent. Son imagination
se posa sur les cimes de l’espace et du temps. Elle allait des
Flandres où luttait Jacques Artevelde aux montagnes de l’Est où « Le
Taureau des Vosges » tentait d’arrêter à lui seul l’invasion allemande.
Il s’enthousiasmait tour à tour pour les chevaliers bretons qui la
lance au poing galopaient sur les landes, et pour les hardis
ingénieurs qui pouvaient faire vingt mille lieues sous les mers. Il
descendait jusqu’au centre de la terre où il rencontrait, avec quel
fantastique effroi, un géant pasteur de mammouths. Ce n’étaient
plus les indications sèches de la géographie, ni les dates mortes de
l’histoire. Tout était vivifié par le vent du large et des siècles
ressuscités. Il ne rapetissait point les héros à sa taille : il rêvait de
les égaler en force, en sagesse et en loyauté.

Le jeudi par des chemins détournés il s’en allait, quelquefois avec

un ou deux camarades, presque toujours seul, jusqu’à l’entrée des
bois qui encerclent la petite ville. Au printemps, les talus étaient
fleuris de violettes et les prés de marguerites. L’été des libellules
grésillaient au-dessus des étangs, et le chèvrefeuille parfumait les
haies où les prunelles bleuissaient aux approches de l’automne.
L’hiver le sol des routes sonnait creux comme la dalle d’un
tombeau : dessous la terre était morte de froid. Tantôt, assis au pied
d’un hêtre centenaire, dont les racines apparentes ressemblaient à
de grosses veines de vieillard, il écoutait gémir le vent d’Octobre et
regardait se disperser la fumée qui monte des tas enflammés de
mauvaises herbes, d’épines et de bois de pommes de terre ; un petit
oiseau sautillait en poussant de faibles cris, et le chant du grillon
était triste comme un gémissement. Tantôt il allumait lui-même un
feu de branches sèches, rêvant d’être perdu dans une île déserte où
il lui aurait fallu subvenir à tous ses besoins et s’occuper de sa
propre cuisine : ce ravin au fond duquel coulait la cascade n’était-il
pas à une infinie distance de toute habitation ? On n’y sentait que
l’odeur du buis, du houx et du sureau. Il y avait des fourrés
inextricables de ronces, de lierre et de longues plantes enchevêtrées,
qui faisaient penser aux lianes des forêts de l’Amérique. Un énorme
serpent n’était-il pas enroulé là-bas autour du fût lisse de ce
bouleau ? Tantôt il entendait meugler des bœufs qui paissaient dans
les prés voisins ; tantôt au crépuscule des voix mystérieuses se
répondaient dans la vaste plaine qu’il savait peuplée de fermes et de
villages et dont il reprenait conscience. La nuit entrait dans le bois
plus vite qu’ailleurs. Il grimpait le long des sentiers abrupts,
retrouvant un peu plus de lumière à mesure qu’il atteignait les
rochers les plus hauts.
Chaque saison revenait avec ses joies et ses ennuis invariables.
Les rudes hivers lui valaient des heures exquises au coin du feu. S’il
étouffait les après-midi d’été, que les matins étaient beaux et claires
les nuits !
 II

Sa maison ne ressemblait pas aux chaumières des villages avec

leurs toits de paille qui descendent jusque devant les fenêtres
comme s’ils voulaient voir ce qui se passe au-dessous du grenier.
Elle pouvait paraître riche à cause de ses tuiles, de sa porte, de ses
volets peints en blanc, de son armoire luisante, de sa table ronde
recouverte d’un tapis et de sa cheminée garnie de bibelots sur
lesquels à huit heures du matin il ne restait plus un grain de
poussière. Mais elle ne leur appartenait pas. Il y en avait sur les
seuils desquelles il eût été dangereux de s’essuyer les pieds parce
qu’on se les serait salis, d’autres dont les carreaux n’avaient jamais
été cirés ni même lavés, avec des tables encombrées de bols à
moitié pleins de lait, avec des lits sans rideaux et des fenêtres à
rideaux qu’on ne changeait pas tous les ans. Mais des hommes et
des femmes y vivaient qui, possédant des biens au soleil, n’avaient
qu’à travailler pour leur compte ; ils n’étaient pas à la merci des
riches puisqu’ils récoltaient plus de blé, de légumes qu’il n’en avaient
besoin, et qu’ils ne pouvaient boire avec la meilleure volonté du
monde tout le vin de leurs vignes. Ils connaissaient les solides repas
qui commencent en hiver à six heures du soir pour se terminer le
lendemain matin. C’étaient de bons vivants à qui l’avenir ne faisait
pas baisser les yeux. Ils n’avaient pas besoin de chercher à
économiser, puisque leurs terres ne s’en iraient pas pendant la nuit.
Il avait l’air encore d’un petit riche parce que sa mère le tenait
propre. La propreté ne coûte rien ; elle est même une économie.
Puis il y avait chez elle une pointe d’orgueil à ce que son petit eût le
moins possible de taches, de poussière, pour qu’on lui dît :
— Ah ! madame ! comment faites-vous donc pour qu’il soit
toujours si propre ? Moi avec le mien je ne peux pas y arriver. Et puis
c’est un brise-tout.
Ses sabots étaient toujours luisants, ses souliers du dimanche
aussi parce que le cirage conserve le cuir et le bois.
Mais elle l’empêchait de courir avec les autres l’été, parce qu’on a
vite fait de ramasser un chaud et froid et que les visites du médecin
se payent ; de glisser avec eux l’hiver sur ces interminables glissoires
qui usent en une après-midi de jeudi des paires de sabots. Autour du
vieux puits dont le treuil grinçait et dont se descellait la grille,
gamins et gamines dansaient la ronde en chantant :

Il court, il court, le furet,

Le furet du bois mesdames.

Et il se demandait en quel pays peut être situé ce bois qui s’appelle

« mesdames ».
Mais il n’avait pas beaucoup de fois dans une année deux sous à
lui. Il ne manque pas de choses plus indispensables qu’un bâton de
sucre d’orge, qu’un tour de chevaux de bois, les jours où c’était fête,
le premier dimanche de Mai, le lundi de la Pentecôte. Il enviait les
autres qui sortaient avec des pièces de vingt sous. Il s’arrêtait
devant toutes les baraques. Aux approches du crépuscule il errait
encore, la gorge serrée, ses deux sous dans son poing fermé. Il y
avait trop à choisir : il ne pouvait se décider. Il lui semblait qu’avec
vingt sous il aurait pu se payer toute la fête. Les autres profitaient
de tout, criant, essayant même de fumer des cigarettes. La vie était
simple et naturelle pour eux. Leurs parents savaient que les jours de
fêtes sont rares et qu’ils sont faits pour tout le monde. Leurs pères
allaient dans les auberges et dans les cafés où sont installés des
billards.

Du moins les fêtes religieuses étaient à la portée de tout le

monde. L’entrée de l’église était gratuite ; les chantres avaient des
voix assez puissantes pour que tout le monde les entendît. Surtout
chacun de ces jours de fête était entouré d’une auréole lumineuse.
Si la Toussaint s’appuyait mélancoliquement sur un bâton pour
visiter les bois jonchés de feuilles jaunes et tout gris de brouillard, si
Noël se chauffait dans une chaumière entourée de neige, Pâques
s’annonçait majestueux par les voix de ses cloches assez puissantes
pour que la terre toute entière les entendît. Il venait des profondeurs
du ciel d’où il tirait le soleil qui étincelait dans l’azur comme la face
même du Christ ressuscité. C’était une grande fête pour tout le
monde, pour les enfants surtout, parce que c’est le dimanche de
Pâques qu’ils mettent un beau costume neuf qui servira tout l’été,
avec des souliers vernis qu’ils ne craindront plus de salir dans la
neige. Ils étaient heureux aussi à cause des œufs de Pâques, si
beaux que l’on dirait qu’ils n’ont pas été pondus par des poules
ordinaires. Ils sont de toutes les couleurs. Il y en a de rouges
comme des pantalons de soldats, de plus bleus que le ciel
d’aujourd’hui, de violets comme des violettes qui sentent bon, de
verts comme les feuilles nouvelles des tilleuls. Il n’avait ni costume
neuf ni souliers vernis. On sait ce que coûtent les couleurs chez
l’épicier. Alors on lui teignait ses œufs dans du marc de café.
C’étaient de pauvres œufs qui roulaient timides, grisâtres, au milieu
des autres qui lui semblaient prodigieux. Il n’osait pas les lancer trop
fort, parce qu’on lui avait dit de les rapporter, parce qu’on en avait
besoin pour le repas du soir.

Il savait trop, pour l’entendre répéter, que les travailleurs n’ont

que le pouvoir d’économiser, puisqu’il est juste qu’ils ne gagnent que
ce qu’on veut leur donner. Il paraît que dans des villes d’usines
toutes noires de fumée, que même à Paris ou pourtant les maisons
doivent être bâties en pierres rares, les ouvriers mécontents
réclament des augmentations de salaires. Ici ceux qui lisent cela
dans les journaux se contentent de hausser les épaules.
Au-dessus des maisons, des jardinets, des tilleuls et des sapins,
le ciel est tendu comme une grande toile bleue solidement clouée
aux bords de l’horizon et retenue très haut en son centre. L’automne
et l’hiver, ses attaches faiblissant de partout elle se salit soudain, se
transforme en une multitude de petits torchons grisâtres qui
viennent frôler à certaines heures ce paysage d’arbres et de
maisons. De ce ciel clair ou sombre toujours le même calme tombe.
Torpeur des après-midi, apaisement des nuits de Juillet quand on
fume sa pipe sur un banc de pierre jusqu’à onze heures du soir en
regardant les étoiles. Ensevelissement des jours d’automne quand il
pleut, des jours d’hiver quand il neige. Mais c’est en été que les
jours contiennent le plus d’heures de travail. Le tabac ? De l’argent
qui se dissipe en fumée. Les cafés ? Des abîmes où s’engloutissent
en une heure les économies de toute une semaine. Rien n’est plus
sain comme nourriture que les légumes que l’on récolte dans son
propre jardin. Il faut aller le moins souvent possible dans les
boucheries. Nous sommes tous appelés à vivre très longtemps :
mettons pour notre vieillesse de l’argent de côté. Des mines d’argent
à certains endroits se cachent sous le sol. Ici le moindre coin de
terre recèle de gros sous qu’il faut arracher un à un à la fatigue de
ses bras. Quand on les tient on les garde.
Dans cette atmosphère de contrainte son enfance montait
comme rabougrie. On avait beau le tenir propre : il avait l’air quand
même d’un petit malheureux. Il avait beau les jours de distribution
de prix s’en aller chargé de livres : il n’en était pas moins le gamin
des Vaneau, celui dont le père était à la disposition des bourgeois,
dont la mère n’entrait jamais dans les salons des « dames », les
belles dames encore jeunes qui sortent avec des chapeaux, des
ombrelles, des jupons bruissants. Leurs fils, du même âge que lui,
n’allaient pas tarder à partir pour le collège. Ils avaient moins de prix
que lui. Ils ne connaissaient pas bien l’orthographe, rataient des
problèmes, mais ils n’avaient peur de personne. Ils faisaient du
tapage dans les rues, occupaient leurs vacances à des voyages qui
les menaient hors du canton, hors du département, quelquefois
jusqu’à Paris. Personne ne doutait que, parce qu’ils étaient riches, ils
ne fussent destinés à accomplir de grandes choses. Il aurait dû
rester ici comme les fils d’ouvriers. Mais à l’école il apprenait tout ce
qu’il voulait : il partit comme les fils des riches.
 III

C’est son premier voyage, qui n’en finira peut-être jamais. Après
le train, une voiture, non plus la bonne diligence où l’on est assis
entre des gens du pays, mais un char-à-bancs où l’on se serre, qui
ressemble à une voiture de boucher. Il suit des rues, puis une longue
route plantée d’arbres.
C’est une après-midi d’Octobre où les rayons du soleil n’ont point
la force de venir jusque sur la terre : ils s’arrêtent très haut dans
l’air, au-dessus du vent qui a le champ libre. Il n’aura plus pour se
moquer du vent le coin du feu. La cheminée ne lui offrira plus, pour
l’abriter, son manteau.
Sur le même banc, sur le banc d’en face, d’autres enfants sont
assis qui portent déjà l’uniforme : casquette à visière vernie, veste à
boutons dorés. Ils sont heureux de se retrouver.
Pour lui, ce n’est pas « la rentrée » qu’il faut dire, mais
« l’entrée ». Il avance dans l’inconnu dont il a peur. Comme un croisé
sur la route de Jérusalem, il tressaille dès qu’il aperçoit entre les
arbres une grande maison couverte d’ardoises. S’il n’était pas si
hésitant il demanderait : « Est-ce que nous arrivons ? » avec la
crainte que ce fût déjà la pension.
Il faut pourtant que les chevaux s’arrêtent.
Jetés pêle-mêle à l’entrée de la cour, jusque sous le trapèze, des
malles, des caisses, des colis de toutes formes. Ici un édredon que
l’on devine, là une paire de sabots ficelés sur le couvercle d’une
malle. Cela vient de tous les coins du département. Il se promène
entre ces caisses et ces malles, cherchant les siennes du coin de
l’œil. Si elles étaient perdues ? Il les découvre au pied d’un arbre. Il
s’assoit. La tête lui tourne. Il se rappelle ; c’est comme s’il voyait tout
ce que sa malle contient de menus objets que sa mère a voulu qu’il
emporte.
Voici deux caisses qui renferment l’une des provisions, l’autre une
partie de l’humble trousseau ; voici dans un sac de calicot le petit
édredon fait exprès pour lui. Il voudrait pouvoir fermer les yeux,
s’endormir là pour longtemps au milieu de tout ce qu’il lui reste de
son pays, de sa maison. Mais il faut qu’il voie auprès de lui dans la
cour, qu’il entende traversant avec bruit les couloirs et montant des
escaliers, d’autres enfants, des élèves qui seront peut-être
méchants. Il faut qu’il voie beaucoup de fenêtres dont aucune n’a de
rideaux : dans les villages c’est seulement chez les misérables que
les fenêtres sont sans rideaux. Par delà la cour que limite une
terrasse les cimes des arbres d’un bosquet qui dévale vers une
plaine immense, vers un horizon où fument de noires usines.
C’est un soir d’Octobre, un soir de fin de vacances où, lorsqu’il
était encore « là-bas », il rentrait à la maison. Un feu clair pétillait
entre les chenets. L’angélus tintait dans la brume. Il se
recroquevillait heureux, parcouru d’un frisson à penser à ceux qui
s’en allaient sur les routes parmi le brouillard et le vent, à ces petits
qui fatigués s’assoient sur des talus en pleurant. Plusieurs ne
rentraient pas chez eux, parce qu’ils n’avaient pas de maison, ou
bien ils en étaient partis depuis tant de jours qu’il leur faudrait
marcher beaucoup avant de la retrouver. Aujourd’hui c’est lui qui,
comme un enfant égaré, songe douloureusement.

Ensuite que s’est-il passé ? Quelqu’un a dû venir lui frapper sur

l’épaule et lui demander :
— Qu’est-ce que vous faites là, mon ami ?
Il a dû se lever, s’en aller au hasard, suivant l’un, suivant l’autre,
de l’étude où vaille que vaille il a rangé ses quelques livres, à la
lingerie où il a donné son trousseau. Il a dû monter au dortoir faire
son lit, redescendre au réfectoire où bien qu’il n’ait pas faim il a été
forcé de manger au milieu du bruit que font cent cinquante voix.
Après la prière à la chapelle, il s’est couché, juste sous une veilleuse
qui lui fait mal aux yeux. Il se sent malade et ne se plaint pas. Est-ce
qu’on a le droit d’être malade en pension ? Les autres se
moqueraient de lui. Il se cache du mieux qu’il peut la tête dans le
traversin ; isolé, dans ce lit que sa mère n’a pas arrangé il pleure
sans bruit, sans oser chercher son mouchoir, parce que le surveillant
qui fait sa ronde le punirait certainement : on ne doit pas avoir en
pension le droit de pleurer.
C’était une maison où les dortoirs sont perchés tout en haut des
murs, comme des nids au faîte des arbres que le vent secoue. Huit
jours durant, aux heures des récréations, il erra de corridor en
corridor parce qu’il ne voulait pas jouer dans la cour avec les autres.
Ils verraient tout de suite qu’il était timide, qu’il portait une culotte
rapiécée. Ils se moqueraient de lui, le feraient souffrir.
Les soirs, dans la salle d’étude, à l’heure où les lampes à pétrole
charbonnent, il se tenait immobile devant son pupitre, la tête
brûlante.
Le jeudi c’étaient des promenades dans les bois jonchés de
vieilles feuilles, des bois sans ronces qui ne ressemblaient pas à ceux
de son pays. Son cœur se serrait lorsque vers quatre heures quand
le soleil se couche et que durcissent les ornières, il passait devant
quelque maison isolée où, debout derrière une fenêtre, des enfants
de son âge mordaient dans des tartines. Il rentrait, le sang aux
poings d’avoir beaucoup marché. Il mangeait un morceau de pain
sec après avoir bu un plein gobelet d’une eau froide que le moins
fatigué allait chercher à la pompe. Il se couchait les pieds gelés, et
trouvait en se réveillant, dans sa cuvette un bloc de glace. Lorsque
la cour était couverte de neige il fallait qu’il courût bon gré mal gré,
se faisant petit, tâchant de se mêler à des groupes, — qui n’avaient
guère souci de lui, qui même le rejetaient, — pour ne pas devenir le
but vers qui toutes les boules de neige eussent convergé. Car il
n’aurait pas été de force à la lutte ; ses mains boursouflées
d’engelures lui faisaient trop mal pour qu’il les pût plonger dans la
neige.
Les « grands » l’effrayaient. Il en connaissait de beaucoup plus
âgés que lui qui avaient jusqu’à dix-huit ans. Parmi eux l’on trouvait
les rhétoriciens. Il faut tout connaître pour être rhétoricien ; il lui
semblait que jamais lui ne pourrait le devenir. Il ne traversait leur
cour, leur étude, que pénétré de respect en baissant les yeux. Ils
lançaient avec une telle force des balles en peau rembourrées de
chiffons que d’un seul coup ils l’eussent anéanti. Ils avaient tant de
livres, de gros dictionnaires, que, l’intérieur de leurs pupitres ne
suffisant pas, ils en entassaient entre les pieds des tables.
Heureusement il faisait partie des petits et des moyens ; il n’y
avait que deux divisions. Mais là encore il avait peur de tout le
monde. Il en voyait d’habiles à tous les jeux, pour qui la barre fixe,
le trapèze n’avaient pas de secrets, de riches, qui ne mangeaient pas
comme les autres. Au lieu de l’innommable soupe du matin, — eau
claire où nageaient de gros haricots rouges, — ils déjeunaient
d’œufs sur le plat et buvaient un verre de vin pur. D’autres avaient la
supériorité d’être nés à Nevers ; c’est une grande ville avec sa
cathédrale, sa caserne, sa rue du Commerce, toutes ses autres rues
dont chacune a un nom, et ses maisons dont chacune a un numéro.
Il avait du respect même pour de plus jeunes que lui, parce qu’ils
étaient entrés ici deux ou trois ans plus tôt ; il prenait garde de les
froisser. Surtout il en voyait dans sa classe qui, eux aussi sans doute,
avaient été les premiers à l’école dans d’autres pays. Là-bas
personne ne pouvait lutter avec lui. Il trouvait ici avec qui se
mesurer ; il lui arrivait de ne pas être le plus fort. C’était un pauvre
petit qui ne demandait pas mieux que de travailler, mais il n’était pas
le seul à avoir son amour-propre, sa bonne volonté. La vie déjà
commençait-elle ?
Les professeurs étaient inaccessibles, impeccables. Ils dominaient
le peuple des élèves comme des chênes qui regardent de haut les
jeunes pousses. Ils n’avaient pas pour lui d’attentions spéciales
parce que personne ne le leur avait recommandé. Au réfectoire ils
s’asseyaient à une table surélevée vers laquelle il n’osait pas diriger
ses regards.
Il vécut ainsi tremblant et travaillant à l’écart, se tenant dans les
coins de la cour sous le hangar à poteaux de fonte près du petit
pavillon où chacun dans une case rangeait ses chaussures, son
cirage et ses brosses, se blottissant vite dans son lit et fermant les
yeux pour s’en aller en rêve vers son pays, vers sa maison où jamais
la nuit on n’allume de veilleuse.
Pourtant il eut des heures d’enthousiasme certains soirs où
l’étude était tiède. Le menton appuyé sur la paume de ses mains, il
partait en d’autres rêves pour d’autres pays.
Toute l’antiquité se levant de son sommeil, se dressait devant ses
yeux éblouis d’enfant qui ne s’étaient reposés jusqu’alors que sur
des paysages réels. D’entre les îles aux doux noms que caresse une
mer harmonieuse et bleue, elle se levait pareille à Vénus qu’il voyait
moins pâle que la Vierge Marie, elle montait comme une vapeur
embaumée, tout entourée de nymphes en robes blanches. Dans une
plaine grise de roseaux secs, des hommes d’un prodigieux héroïsme
s’entre-tuaient à l’aide de glaives courts ; d’autres drapés dans leurs
toges debout sur leurs seuils, d’un doigt levé désignant la voûte du
ciel, prononçaient d’admirables sentences. Des temples carrés
jaillissaient du sol dur. Dans d’humbles maisons à toits plats les
laboureurs s’inclinaient devant les statuettes de bois des dieux Lares,
à l’heure où les bergers sous un hêtre jouaient sur leurs pipeaux, en
regardant glisser le soleil, des airs déjà bien vieux.
Sa maison ? Il la revit lors des vacances de Pâques qui durent
presque deux semaines, avec de la neige encore dans les chemins
creux et un beau soleil déjà sur les violettes. Il la revit lors des
grandes vacances ; aussi loin que l’on regarde elles apparaissent
telles qu’une plaine à l’horizon de laquelle ne s’aperçoit même pas le
dernier jour, comme une colline d’où descend entre deux rangées de
platanes le chemin du départ. Les grandes vacances commençaient
bien avant le jour de la distribution des prix. Il semblait que dès le
premier Juillet elles fussent une réalité. Mais, lorsqu’ils faisaient leurs
malles dans la poussière de la cour, nu-tête, en plein soleil, c’était
d’une impatience, d’une fièvre si délicieuses, si aiguës que la joie du
jour définitif s’en trouvait à l’avance comme diminuée. Écouter le
discours et les chœurs, aller et revenir de sa place à l’estrade avec
des couronnes et des livres, en se disant que tout à l’heure ils
prendraient le train, ce n’était presque rien à côté du marteau qu’ils
se disputaient pour clouer une caisse, des cordes qu’ils s’arrachaient
pour ficeler la vieille malle longue et plate.

Mais il n’était plus le même. Il lui arrivait de rencontrer de ses

anciens camarades de l’école primaire ; ils travaillaient, apprenant
chacun le métier de son père. Les uns portaient des blouses
blanches de plâtre et de chaux, d’autres avaient les mains noires du
charbon des forges où l’on ferre chevaux et bœufs. Il les retrouvait
grandis, avec de grosses voix, forts comme des hommes, ne
connaissant ni les tressaillements des jours de départ, ni l’angoisse
de s’endormir chaque soir à trente lieues de son pays. D’eux aussi il
avait peur à cause de leurs rires quand ils rencontraient les filles.
Même pendant les vacances il y avait entre eux et lui beaucoup plus
de trente lieues.
Il retrouvait à la maison plus d’économie que jamais. Il fallait que
l’on vécût de privations pour qu’il restât au collège. On lui disait :
— Ainsi tu t’imagines que tu ne nous coûtes rien ? Regarde
seulement le total de ce qu’on a dépensé pour toi cette année.
Ne pouvant passer ses après-midi à des promenades, des
journées entières à des excursions avec les fils des riches qui comme
lui revenaient en vacances, il vivait solitaire, replié sur lui-même.
Quand il entra dans sa quinzième année il retourna souvent se
promener dans les bois qu’enfant il avait fréquentés, où il n’avançait
encore qu’avec crainte, comme dans une forêt vierge. C’était par de
chaudes après-midi d’été : on n’entend que les sauterelles et les
grillons. Devant lui çà et là, dans la plaine, des maisons dont le
chaume avait dû brûler étaient coiffées d’ardoises étincelantes. Des
sensations en lui s’associaient à des réminiscences de phrases lues
et relues là-bas certains soirs de rêves. Ce n’était pas la torpeur des
après-midi qui s’abattait sur lui ; mais leur âpre beauté faite de
silence et de lumière le maintenait, jusqu’aux approches du
crépuscule, debout contre un chêne à regarder ces paysages où pas
une feuille ne palpitait.
 Il connut les premiers troubles de l’adolescence. Sa voix mua. Il
prit soin de sa personne à cause des jeunes filles qu’il pouvait
rencontrer. Les beaux livres de la Bibliothèque Rose et ceux qui
racontaient les exploits de héros comme le Lion de Flandre et le
Taureau des Vosges dormaient leur éternel sommeil, enfouis dans le
placard sous des journaux jaunis. Il peuplait d’autres figures idéales
l’amère solitude de son adolescence. Il ne regardait qu’à la dérobée
les jeunes filles de son pays, trop timide pour s’avancer à leur
rencontre avec, comme hérauts, les feux de son regard : leurs rires
le déconcertaient. Elles étaient pour ceux qui vivaient toujours ici ;
pour ceux même qui, revenant aussi en vacances, les éblouissaient
par leur assurance, leurs belles paroles et leur richesse. Mais il s’en
allait le long des sentiers qui se cachent dans les bois. Il allait
beaucoup plus loin, errant avec Atala dans les forets du Nouveau
Monde, avec Amélie par ces landes où toujours un vent de
Novembre gémit sur la bruyère, buvant avec Virginie aux fontaines
de l’Ile-de-France. Parfois il rêvait de mourir près de Graziella, bercé
sur les flots bleus d’une mer admirable.

Il vivait dans l’espace, loin des villages dont l’unique rue est un
chemin bordé de chaumières qui n’ont ni le temps de se nettoyer, ni
l’argent nécessaire pour se soigner ; aussi sont-elles bien malades.
On hésite entre deux portes presque semblables et, croyant entrer
dans la chaumière, c’est dans l’écurie que l’on pénètre. A l’écurie il
n’y a personne. L’âne travaille dur et la vache est aux champs ; loin
de la petite ville où un peu avant midi le quartier de l’église
d’habitude silencieux s’anime. Des laveuses rentrent le tablier
trempé. Elles laissent leur porte grande ouverte, rapprochent les
tisons dans la cheminée, ou bien allument leurs fourneaux. Elles
viennent au puits et s’en retournent, leur seau plein, avec un
balancement de leur bras inoccupé.
Il vivait dans le temps, hors des histoires que les femmes se
racontent sur le pas des portes : des Letourneur qui ont des dettes
partout, à qui si cela continue le boucher refusera de la viande et le
boulanger du pain ; du père Papon qui ne peut plus marcher qu’avec
deux béquilles et qui n’ira pas loin maintenant ; du gamin des
Clergot qui fait les quatre cent dix-neuf coups à Paris.
Il vivait dans ses rêves, dans sa solitude. Qu’eût-il fait d’argent
pendant ses vacances ? Il ne fumait pas, n’allait pas au café.
C’étaient les deux seuls plaisirs coûteux et possibles dans cette
petite ville où il n’y avait pas de place pour un théâtre. A peine si
une fois l’an deux chanteuses inévitablement comiques donnaient
une soirée au Café de Paris. Elles partaient le lendemain matin ;
peut-être même ne se couchaient-elles pas.
A dix-huit ans la vie lui paraissait aussi simple qu’une route à
suivre depuis longtemps tracée. Ce n’est pas en vain qu’il s’était
développé dans le triple isolement d’une famille qui ne voit pas plus
loin que sa maison ; d’un collège enfoui entre des arbres dans le
calme d’une province où des maîtres indolents ne se soucient point
de diriger les enthousiasmes précoces ; d’une petite ville qui ne voit
pas plus loin que son horizon de montagnes et ne s’occupe pas de la
bataille des idées à Paris où croit-elle toutes les portes s’ouvrent
d’elles-mêmes devant les jeunes bacheliers.
Il n’avait pas de but. Lorsque rêvant d’amour il s’essayait à écrire
des vers, il se voyait à Paris, logeant sous les tuiles dans une
mansarde étroite mais claire. Devant la fenêtre flottaient aux soirs
de Juin des plantes grimpantes ; l’hiver assis près de son poêle
rouge, il regardait le ciel gris. Il fréquentait des poètes, des artistes ;
tous portaient les cheveux longs.
Bachelier il aurait pu continuer ses études ; mais cela eût coûté
trop cher. Son père l’avait mené jusqu’au haut de la côte en
soufflant : il était à bout de forces.
Il avait maintenant, disait-on, tout ce qu’il fallait pour réussir. Il
ne lui restait plus qu’à se lancer dans la vie. Mais il devait d’abord
passer par la caserne.
 C’était une ville de trente mille âmes où la caserne est reléguée à
l’extrémité d’un faubourg. Il se dirigea vers elle, sa légère valise à la
main. Il était trois heures d’une après-midi d’Octobre. Un vent froid
soulevait des restes de poussière de l’été et faisait tomber les
dernières petites feuilles des acacias plantés le long de la voie
ferrée. Le soleil pâle rougeoyait sur les vitres de quelques maisons.
Vaneau marchait sans enthousiasme, comme un bœuf piqué pour la
première fois par le dur aiguillon de la vie. D’un seul coup d’œil il
embrassa les trois grands corps de bâtiments à cinq étages, percés
de centaines de fenêtres. D’autres locaux moins importants
s’apercevaient de-ci de-là. La cour lui parut immense. Il n’y poussait
pas un brin d’herbe.
Vaneau portait bottines, veston et chapeau de paille. Un feutre
eût convenu davantage au commencement d’Octobre, mais c’était
un vieux chapeau dont la paille avait jauni comme les feuilles mortes
et qu’il jetterait. Devant le poste de police des gradés, les mains
dans les poches de leurs pantalons rouges, fumaient et ricanaient en
dévisageant ce « civil » imberbe dont le veston jaunâtre ne valait pas
une bonne blouse. Il entra dans une chambrée vers quatre heures
du soir à l’époque où les doux rêveurs marchent mélancoliques
parmi les feuilles mortes. Six ans auparavant presque jour pour jour
il était assis sous le trapèze, la poitrine gonflée de sanglots. Il vit les
lits rectangulaires à couvertures brunes, les hauts paquetages
protégés par des mouchoirs bordés de rouge, les équipements
accrochés à la tête des lits, et le râtelier d’armes où tous les fusils
avaient exactement les mêmes dimensions.
A l’arrivée des bleus il vit la caserne transformée en caravansérail
où se rencontraient des hommes qui parlaient des patois fort
différents. Ils venaient avec des valises de tous prix et des baluchons
de toutes formes, avec des souliers à lacets, des bottines à boutons
et des sabots sans lacets ni boutons, avec des chapeaux melons, des
chapeaux mous, des casquettes « cycliste » et des casquettes de
vrais paysans, avec des blouses, des vestons, des pardessus, effarés
ou crâneurs, silencieux ou bruyants, grands et petits, maigres et
gras, bruns, blonds, roux, s’éparpillant, ondulant pour se rassembler
à des commandements dont ils devinaient le sens, happés par des
hommes de garde, par des fourriers, par des « pays » qui
cherchaient à les reconnaître.
Il vécut là des jours de corvées, d’exercices, de nourriture rance,
de lavages de loques dans des eaux sursaturées de savon bon
marché. Les autres, joyeux, se bousculaient sur les lits, astiquaient
avec ferveur, entouraient de plus de soins leur fusil que leur propre
corps, paysans venus de Saintonge et d’Auvergne avec des têtes
carrées et des fronts étroits. En bourgerons sales dont leur torse et
leurs bras avaient pris l’habitude, ils jouaient aux cartes le soir,
accroupis ou, lorsqu’ils avaient reçu de l’argent, traversaient la nuit
de la grande cour pour aller boire un litre à la cantine en fumant des
pipes. Nul doute que les gamins des villages avec qui jadis il avait
fréquenté l’école, ne dussent, sonnés leur vingt et un ans, vivre des
jours pareils dans des casernes identiques. Mais il avait mené une
vie trop différente de la leur pour pouvoir fraterniser avec eux, trop
jeune encore pour les accepter tels qu’il les voyait, obscènes et
brutaux.
Les gradés maniaient le règlement comme une arme redoutable.
Ils passaient enivrés de leur puissance sans limites, de leur gloire.
Deux galons rouges cousus sur les manches d’un bouvier le
rendaient infaillible et inviolable. Vaneau ne demandait pas mieux
qu’il en fût ainsi. Mais il les vit mauvais, rancuniers comme de
simples mortels, ignorants, quelques-uns stupides. Alors il se révolta,
timidement d’abord, puis avec certitude. De leurs galons que le
premier venu pouvait porter, il ne voulut pas. Et Vaneau apprit à
connaître la salle de police, les repas que l’on y fait assis sur le dur
rebord du lit de camp, sa gamelle entre les genoux, et les après-midi
de dimanches que l’on passe à récolter des brins de paille dans la
cour.
Il sortait souvent le soir après la soupe. C’étaient presque quatre
heures de liberté dans une ville qui avait l’air de mettre à sa portée
tous les plaisirs du monde dans des rues brillamment illuminées ; de
petites ouvrières sentimentales y passent qui tout le jour ont chanté
des romances. Mais pour les éblouir il n’avait point de galons qui
étincellent comme des miroirs à alouettes. Il n’avait pas assez
d’argent pour s’asseoir dans les cafés luxueux où parmi la musique
et la fumée des cigares on peut oublier que l’on est soldat. Et il ne
pouvait pas non plus s’attarder avec les autres dans les gargotes
louches. Trois et quatre heures durant il se promenait seul, préférant
les rues désertes, les ruelles obscures. Il allait inconnu, anonyme,
mais vêtu d’effets matriculés, armé d’une baïonnette qu’il n’aurait
jamais eu l’audace d’enfoncer dans la poitrine d’un homme. Il
marchait vite comme pressé d’arriver quelque part, mais sans but.
Le dimanche il errait dans les prairies qui entourent la ville, suivant
les bords du fleuve et du canal sous les coteaux plantés d’arbres et
de vignes, mais traînant avec lui l’idée de sa servitude comme un
âne attaché par une corde à un bateau. De l’entrée du vieux pont de
pierre il s’attardait à regarder la ville avec ses maisons qui grimpent
vers la cathédrale dont la tour les domine, et vers le palais des Ducs
qu’elles masquent. La Loire coulait sur du sable fin entre des îles
dont les dimensions varient au gré des saisons et des crues. Il se
souvint longtemps d’un splendide dimanche de Pâques où les
cloches de la cathédrale et des églises chantaient la résurrection du
Christ et le retour du printemps. Des jeunes gens avec des jeunes
filles en robes claires passaient ironiques devant la caserne, s’en
allant rire dans les guinguettes. Lui, de faction, immobile, l’arme au
pied, les regardait.
Il fit des marches et des exercices de nuit, brûlant des
cartouches contre un ennemi que représentaient soit une haie bien
taillée, soit de vieux saules difformes, des feux de guerre dans une
plaine sinistre brûlée par le soleil, plus vaste à elle seule que cent
cours de casernes, de grandes manœuvres avec le sac chargé
réglementairement ; la sueur tombait de son front dans la poussière
stérile. Comme autrefois lors des promenades d’hiver, quand il voyait
avec envie des enfants de son âge derrière les vitres de leurs
maisons mordre dans des tartines, il eût voulu être un des paysans
qui debout sur leurs seuils ombragés regardaient passer les soldats.
Mais il pensait surtout aux jeunes gens riches qui ont assez de
relations pour se faire exempter du service militaire. Il les devinait à