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Abstract
The proliferation of print in mid nineteenth century Bengal witnessed several self-reflexive exercises in writing that tried to capture the incongruence between the colonial administration and indigenous everyday lives. Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (or The Observant Owl) written by Kaliprasanna Sinha (1862) is possibly the closest representation in print of such incongruities. This article focuses on the text of Hutom in relation to visual representations and reports by the colonial administration in contemporary English newspapers like The Hindoo Patriot, The Bengal Harkaru and others. In doing so, it will highlight the sensory world of colonial Calcutta that is so vividly captured in Hutom.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two South Asia reviewers for their detailed and critical feedback on this essay which helped me revise the content and put forth my arguments more clearly. I am also thankful to the editors, Dr. Christin Hoene and Dr. Vebhuti Duggal, for offering me the opportunity to present this research, first at the ‘Empire and the Senses’ workshop at the University of Kent in June 2019, and then as a contribution to this special section. The comments and questions posed by my fellow presenters at the workshop have helped me immensely while writing this essay. Finally, I take this opportunity to thank my friends, Dr. Swati Moitra and Farha Noor, who took time out of their busy academic schedules to patiently read the initial drafts of this article and send me their suggestions and encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Bholanath Mukhopadhyay, Aapnaar Mukh Aapni Dekho (Calcutta: Hindu Press, 1863). The Blumhardt catalogue of Bengali books adds the phrase ‘amongst the English-speaking natives of Calcutta’ to the entry: see J.F. Blumhardt, Catalogue of Bengali Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum (London: Longmans & Co., 1886), p. 10. I have used the spelling ‘Hutom’ throughout the text of my article except in the two quotes because it most closely resembles the English pronunciation of the Bengali word, ‘Hootum’.
2. Literary critic and historian Hans Harder writes of the popularity of the genre: ‘The function of a social mirror that these texts professed apparently continued to hold attractions for a growing urban middle-class public in Calcutta until the late days of the British Raj and even beyond’: see Hans Harder, ‘Urbanity in the Vernacular: Narrating the City in Modern South Asian Literatures’, in Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques, Vol. 70, no. 2 (2016), pp. 435–66 [445].
3. Nabin Kumar, the protagonist in the Bengali novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay’s historical novel, Shei Shomoy (Those Days), was based on the life and character of Kaliprasanna Sinha: see Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shei Shomoy (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1981).
4. Note the indirect reference to a darpan or mirror in the title of Bholanath Mukhopadhyay’s text cited above.
5. Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (The Observant Owl: Hutom’s Vignettes of Nineteenth Century Calcutta), Swarup Roy (trans.) (Ranikhet: Black Kite, 2008), p. xix.
6. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903).
7. See Ranajit Guha, ‘A Colonial City and Its Times’, in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 45, no. 3 (2008), pp. 329–51.
8. For critical responses to Hutom on these aspects, see Swapan Chakraborty, ‘Purity and Print: A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose’, in Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakraborty (eds), Print Areas: Book History in India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 211, 216; Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature’, in Modern Asia Studies, Vol. 34, no. 2 (May 2000), pp. 379–406 [384]; and Sanjukta Sunderason, ‘Arts of Contradiction: Gaganendranath Tagore and the Caricatural Aesthetic of Colonial India’, in South Asian Studies, Vol. 32, no. 2 (Oct. 2016), pp. 129–43 [132].
9. See Partha Chatterjee, ‘Foreword’, in Kaliprasanna Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha (The Observant Owl: Hutom’s Vignettes of Nineteenth Century Calcutta), Swarup Roy (trans.) (Ranikhet: Black Kite, 2008), p. x.
10. Ibid., p. xi.
11. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 19.
12. See Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 12.
13. Hutom Pyanchar Naksha is more popularly identified by the word ‘Hutom’ which was also used by Kaliprasanna Sinha as a pseudonym. I will be using ‘Hutom’ as the title of the text and the denotation for the narrator in the rest of this paper.
14. For a discussion on ‘genres introduced’ through print (theatre chap-books, detective novels) and ‘genres reproduced’ (from manuscripts, oral traditions), see Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009).
15. Robert Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’, in Past & Present, no. 15 (May 1971), pp. 81–115.
16. Ibid., p. 100.
17. Consider, for example, the case of Nicole-Joseph-Laurent-Gilbert in the Parisian literary world who, because he was denied access to the grands philosophes, took a different route to publish against the high literary world: see Darrin M. McMahon, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’, in Past & Present, Vol. 159, no. 1 (May 1998), pp. 77–112 [80–3].
18. For an overview of this subject, see Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
19. See Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 7.
20. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. xix.
21. Ibid., p. 40.
22. Ibid., pp. 17–8.
23. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 24.
24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 94.
25. Ibid.
26. Matthew Reason, ‘Archive or Memory: The Detritus of Live Performance’, in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 19, no. 1 (Feb. 2003), pp. 82–9 [83].
27. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 34.
28. See Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 12.
29. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 34.
30. Ibid., p. 73.
31. Ibid., p. 8.
32. See Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press, 2006), p. 34.
33. Reason, Archive or Memory, p. 88.
34. Ibid., p. 89.
35. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 24.
36. See Nabaparna Ghosh, A Hygienic City-Nation: Space, Community and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 27.
37. Ibid., p. 23.
38. Ibid., p. 1.
39. Sambudha Sen, ‘Re-Visioning the Colonial City: Local Autonomy versus the Aesthetics of Intermixtures in the Age of Circulating Print Cultures’, in Literature Compass, Vol. 11, no. 1 (2014), pp. 26–35 [26]. Also see Sambudha Sen, ‘Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, Colonial Modernity, and the Making of the Postmodern Novel in India’, in Sambudha Sen and Baidik Bhattacharya (eds), Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2019), pp. 211–57 [213], in which Sen argues that ‘Kaliprasanna Sinha conceptualised time as fragmented’ and ‘worked with disparate segments of time to register discontinuities and produce unthinkable juxtapositions’.
40. The overlaps and negotiations between official and festive time continued to be captured in later publications as well, especially for the autumn festival of Durga Puja: see Bidyashunya Bhattacharyya, Durgotshab (Calcutta: Albert Press, 1876), pp. 2–3.
41. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 3.
42. Also note the titles of the visuals and illustrations, as, for example, James Moffat, ‘View on the Banks of the Ganges with Representations of the Churrck Poojah—A Hindoo Holiday’ (Calcutta: 1806); Frederick Shoberl, ‘A Species of Penance Practised at the Festival of Goddess Bhavani’ (London: Ackerman, 1820); J.J. Crew, ‘The Churuk (Charuk) Puja, or Swinging Festival’, in The Illustrated News (London, 1858); and ‘The Churruk Poojah or Swinging Festival in a Bengal Village’, in The Graphic (London, 1893); and Fanny Parkes, ‘Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque during Four & Twenty Years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenana’ (London: 1850), 10055.f.29, plate 6, British Library, London [all available at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1800_1899/hinduism/hookswinging/hookswinging.html, accessed 30 October 2021].
43. ‘Letter by a Traveller’, in Calcutta Gazette (22 April 1819). For Charak and hook-swinging, see Geoffrey A. Oddie, Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: Hook Swinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800–1894 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); and Sumanta Banerjee, ‘The Mysterious Alien: Indian Street Jugglers in Victorian England’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 46, no. 14 (April 2011), pp. 59–65.
44. Sen, ‘Re-Visioning the Colonial City’, p. 30.
45. ‘Churuk Poojah’, in The Reformer (7 April 1833), in Benoy Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume I: 1815–1833) (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1978), pp. 165–7 [165].
46. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 12.
47. Ibid., p. 13.
48. Sen, ‘Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, Colonial Modernity, and the Making of the Postmodern Novel in India’, p. 219.
49. Letter from Madhab Chunder Mullic to the India Gazette (21 Oct. 1831), in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume I: 1815–1833), p. 63.
50. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 158.
51. Ibid., p. 155.
52. ‘The Late Durga Poojah Nautches’, in India Gazette (22 Oct. 1831), in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume I: 1815–1833), pp. 67–8 [67].
53. Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 127–79.
54. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 60.
55. Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s farce, Buro Shaaliker Ghaarey Ro (New Feathers on an Old Bird), published in 1860 depicts a lustful and predating old Vaishnav zamindar exploiting his Muslim peasant subjects and their young women.
56. ‘Mohurrum Festival’, in Hindu Intelligencer (1 Oct. 1855), in Benoy Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume III: 1849–1856) (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1980), pp. 135–6 [135].. Also see the editorials on the Mohammedan community and the Mohammedan Association in the same newspaper between May and Sept. 1855, in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume III: 1849–1856), pp. 132, 133–5.
57. Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
58. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, p. 73.
59. Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire, p. 156.
60. ‘Proposition for Lighting the Town of Calcutta with Gas’, in Hindu Intelligencer (6 Feb. 1854), in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume III: 1849–1856), pp. 95–103..
61. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, pp. 30–1.
62. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 19.
63. Accounts of audience reactions to nineteenth century courtyard performances are scant, yet some of the accounts that emerge point to regular fights among the competing camps of aficionados.
64. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 59.
65. Ibid., p. 66.
66. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
67. Sumanta Banerjee, ‘“City of Dreadful Night”: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 38, no. 21 (May 2003), pp. 2045–55.
68. ‘Midnight Howlings of Chowkeedars’, in India Gazetteer (27 Oct. 1832), in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume I: 1815–1833), p. 100.
69. See Walter D. Mignola, ‘Coloniality at Large: Time and the Colonial Difference’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation & Globalization (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), pp. 67–95.
70. Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta, p. 4.
71. For a detailed account of the history of railways in India, see Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency: A Social History of Railways in Colonial India, 1850–1920 (London: Routledge, 2018).
72. ‘The East Indian Railway’, in Hindu Intelligencer (31 Jan. 1855), in Ghose, Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century Bengal (Volume III: 1849–1856), p. 111.
73. Akshay Kumar Dutta, Bashpiyo Ratharohidiger Proti Upodesh (Directions for a Railway Traveller) (Calcutta: Tattvabodhini Press, 1854); also see Abhijit Gupta, ‘Raising Steam’, 279.36.D.29, British Library, London [https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/raising-steam, accessed 13 Aug. 2020].
74. Munshi Azim Al-Din, Ki Majar Kaler Gaari (Calcutta: Anglo Indian Union Press, 1863), 1413.a.13.(18.), British Library.
75. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, pp. 74–5.
76. Sen, ‘Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, Colonial Modernity, and the Making of the Postmodern Novel in India’, p. 232.
77. Ibid., p. 233.
78. Sinha, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha, p. 189.
79. Mukhopadhyay, Imperial Technology and ‘Native’ Agency, pp. 155–6.
80. See Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1999).
81. Radha Prasad Gupta, Kolkatar Feriwalar Daak aar Rastar Awoaaj (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1984).
82. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies in East Pakistan’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 4 (2018), pp. 892–910 [909].
83. For the transformation of the Bengal delta from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, its effect on the land and ecology, and the making of Calcutta, see Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
84. Rolf Lindner, ‘The Culture of the Metropolis’, in Sebastian Klotz et al. (eds), Sounding Cities: Auditory Transformations in Berlin, Chicago, and Kolkata (Zurich: LIT, 2018), pp. 35–46 [36].
85. Ibid., p. 37.
86. I am borrowing the concept of hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes from Richard Murray Schafer’s discussion of the rural soundscape: see Richard Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), p. 43.
87. Ibid, p. 60.
88. Mark M. Smith, ‘The Garden in the Machine: Listening to Early American Industrialization’, in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 39–57 [43].
89. I am hugely indebted to the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project at the British Library that has now digitised and made available online more than 1,800 rare printed pieces of literature in Bengali, Assamese and Sylheti from between 1714 and 1914.
90. Harder, ‘Urbanity in the Vernacular’, p. 444.