How does one read the continually diminishing space for cosmopolitanism in the metropolitan cities of India? As people tend to move more than ever from one place to another looking for better opportunities in life, tensions too begin to mount between ‘original’ inhabitants of a place and those who come from outside—and that in turn takes a toll on the idea of a cosmopolitan culture that cities like Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras used to stand for at one time. The changeover from Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata bear witness to these changes. It is thus important to document the cosmopolitan character that the Indian experience used to be. Sankar’s Thackeray Mansion serves in a way that very purpose, capturing beautifully the still-very-cosmopolitan life of Calcutta in the 1960s.
Thackeray Mansion is the translation of Gharer Madhye Ghar (literally, room within a room i.e. space within a space) by the renowned Bengali novelist Sankar (Mani Shankar Mukherjee). The third part of a Calcutta trilogy brought out by Penguin, it deals with the simple and innocent protagonist-narrator Shankar’s stint as the manager of the residential apartment called ‘Thackeray Mansion’, after his dismissal from the Shah Jahan Hotel (subject matter of the second part of the trilogy, Chowringhee). Using a trope similar to that in Chowringhee, Sankar tells the tales of the many lives that used to lend character to the posh and cosmopolitan heart of Calcutta in the 1960s, the Park Street area.
Located on Sudder Street, just off the posh neighbourhood of Park Street, the crumbling Thackeray Mansion is described as one of the earliest experiments of what was to become the iconic feature of the colonial Calcutta landscape of that particular area—a residential apartment block distinctly different from the condominiums that dominate the cityscape of India today. The mansion functioned as pivot in the lives of people from diverse linguistic and regional backgrounds from all over India (and even a few of Eurasian descent) as a veritable microcosm of the country as much as of the city of Calcutta in the first half of the 20th century—be it the British builder and original owner of the building, David ‘Calcutta’ Martin; Cohen Jewish the real estate agent, the Sindhi Jethmalani and the Eurasian devotee of Tagore, Dorothy Watt, or even the lawyer Ganapati (who fetched the protagonist Shankar his job in the first place).
Even though the book is woven around the Shankar’s stint as manager in the Mansion, it does not have any central narrative to speak of, and hence neither any central protagonist except the narrator who is more of a witness than an agent in the happenings at the Mansion. The book deals with the lives of the people who live in the Mansion, their joys and their pain, as seen through the eyes of Shankar who just ‘happened’ to be there. As the Bengali name of the novel suggests, it is the story of the smaller spaces (households) that exist within a larger one (the Mansion), and also of the manner in which each of these distinct spaces become linked to each other through their shared experiences in late-colonial and post-colonial Calcutta.
Unlike period pieces in literature, which are generally laden with thick descriptions to provide the reader with a sense of the space concerned at a particular time, Thackeray Mansion does not come with vivid descriptions of Calcutta in the 1960s, where the story is set. This is because the story was actually a contemporary account when it was written, hence the assumption that the reader would be largely familiar with the landscape where the story is set. References to landmarks are cryptic, and while they may be clear to readers even today who are familiar with the area, people who have not been to the area would be able to visualise the landscape with some difficulty.
And yet, the book provides a sensitive picture of the quintessentially cosmopolitan flavour of Calcutta—beginning from the naming of the Mansion after the 19th century British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in a house nearby where the Armenian College was to come up later. The novel glides through the lives of those who found their home in the colonial city—ranging from the lawyer Barwell, the builder David Martin, the dilettante Dorothy Watts, the seductive Sulekha Sen, Ramasinhasan Chaurasia the darwan, the disreputable Madna and above all the superstitious Baradaprasanna —virtually documenting the beginning of the process by which the cosmopolitan city came to be transformed into a social space dominated by the Bengali bhadralok. The tapestry of such human experiences makes Thackeray Mansion a delightful read.
Finally, a word on the translation. Senior journalist Sandipan Deb has done a commendable job. Despite the occasional cases of too literal translations (‘showering of honey into the ears’ as against ‘music to the ears’), his facility with Bengali and English has allowed the flavour of the cultural specificities of 1960s Calcutta to be transmitted to the 21st century reader with great ease.