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Notes
1. Chitpore or Chitpur is a locality in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the Indian state of West Bengal. This neighbourhood is closely associated with the history of the rise of the city during British colonialism.
2. One of the three villages (the others being Kalikata and Gobindapur) along the eastern bank of the Ganges that the British purchased from a local landowner and around which the city of Calcutta was built.
3. Job Charnock (1630–93), an employee of the British East India Company, is considered the founder of Calcutta. He landed at Sutanuti with the intention of establishing the headquarters of the East India Company in Bengal. He is said to have constructed for himself a garden house some distance north of Sutanuti, at Barrackpore. Interestingly, Barrackpore is the place where the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was triggered. Sambhunath Chattopadhyay was a resident of Barrackpore.
4. In sharp contrast to their domination of the western coast of India, the Portuguese had a weak official presence in the eastern coast. Consequently, from the 15th to mid-19th centuries, Portuguese adventurers and privateers routinely plundered ships and settlements along River Hoogly. The Portuguese boats and their crew that were involved in piratical outrages were referred to by the locals as harmads.
5. In Bengali, the word harmad—a distortion of the Spanish and Portuguese word “armada”—means pirate. The brutality of the harmads was legendary and has entered the folk memory of the Bengalis.
6. River Hoogly is also known by the name of Bhagirathi. It is the arm of the Ganges that flows through the Indian side of Bengal.
7. The poet lived in a dilapidated house in Manirampur, Barrackpore in the suburbs of Calcutta. The house was built by an ancestor who was a tehsildar or tax collector during the regime of the British East India Company. Because of their loyalty to the Company Raj, the family was able to make an enormous fortune. It is said that trunkfuls of gold mohurs or coins were hidden away in the house. The family came to own several palatial houses in the nearby areas. Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) was filmed in one of the houses that belonged to the poet’s family. Certain members of the family squandered the wealth and the family eventually lost its prestige and influence.
8. An anglicized version of the Bengali surname Chattopadhyay.
9. In the Bengali language, godhuli literally means the “hour of cow-dust”. It refers to twilight, dusk or evening. It is so named because of the cloud of dust raised by the cows returning home at the end of a day’s grazing in the pastures.
10. A town in North India located in the vicinity of Agra and south of Delhi which was founded by Emperor Akbar in 1571 as the capital of the Mughal Empire.
11. The Palace of Winds.
12. Victory Gate.
13. Nakhoda Mosque is the biggest mosque in Calcutta. Built in 1926, it was modelled on the tomb of Mughal Emperor Akbar in Sikandra, Agra.
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Amitendu Bhattacharya
Amitendu Bhattacharya teaches English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) – K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India. His research interests include South Asian literature, environmental humanities, and comparative studies and translation. He translates from Bengali and Urdu into English.