The lost heritage
I walked into a 200-year-old mansion the other day. I had been to the one next door to it many times with friends visiting Kolkata. That was Marble Palace, a grand mansion dating back to 1835 sitting like a melting white wedding cake in the Kolkata sunshine. It was home to the Mullicks, a quirky house with Bengali thakurdalans and Corinthian pillars and a verandah that looked like a Chinese pavilion. It was also home to an even quirkier collection – chandeliers, paintings, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent, giant mirrors, even an aviary.
But I’d never looked much at the house next door, an imposing building with huge pillars, cast-iron railings and French windows but falling into ruin. It belonged to some off shoot of the same Mullick family but had slowly decayed. This March its ruins were home to a photographic exhibition by Kounteya Sinha and the Calcutta Heritage Collective, pictures of the heritage of cities from around the world, from Mexico to Budapest.
The building itself, now owned by Emami, was as much an exhibit as the photographs. A giant suspended print of a bridge from Budapest slowly swayed in one of its long corridors. The image of a French window in black and white, stood on an easel in a dark corner. An old Chinese style bungalow holding on against two looming skyscrapers hung on a bare brick wall. The old building was not just a gallery. It was in conversation with the photographs that were breathing life into a shuttered and neglected space.
Heritage – a new definition
Kolkata is full of such buildings. We do not think of it as heritage. We have grown up thinking of heritage as places where history happened, a treaty was signed, Rabindranath Tagore lived, a memorial to a queen. Yet these houses with their courtyards gave the north of the city as distinct a character as the two storey houses with faded green shuttered windows and intricate cast iron railings overgrown with bougainvillea. We rarely think of that as our heritage. We just imagine office buildings and apartment complexes on the land on which they stand.
That is what is happening in too many parts of Kolkata. The Old Kenilworth Hotel, one of the oldest hotels in business, part of the city’s Armenian history, just had its heritage status downgraded by the city’s own Kolkata Municipal Corporation and the building was demolished by the consortium building the city’s tallest tower, 62 storeys high. It was not just a building lost, it was an opportunity lost to imagine how a grand yet faded building from yesterday could be reused to become a vibrant part of a city’s culture today. Instead it was turned into rubble, valued only for the land it stood on, an impediment to a 62-storey tower. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation downgraded the building it was supposed to protect and signed its death warrant, like foxes guarding the henhouse.
It’s true these buildings are old, hard to maintain, expensive. We revel in their nostalgia but who wants to pay for their upkeep? Yet as the photography exhibition showed, we can breathe new life into them, if we think of heritage imaginatively. Last month Chitpur Local, a project of the Hamdasti art collective took old camera stores, the courtyard of a mansion, a restored building with Turkish floors that now served as a police station in bustling congested Chitpur in north Kolkata and turned them into spaces of public art. Standing on the balcony, looking down into the courtyard of the Dawn house where carrom games were in progress someone wondered if the games were performance or just regular neighbourhood life. That confusion, in a way, was the point. Art does not just hang on the walls. The walls can be part of the art.
When I go to Marble Palace, I think of myself as a visitor to someone else’s home, peeking into someone else’s art collection. The guide turns on the lights, pulls the curtains and shows us a painting, then he turns it off as we leave. In the corridor I remember seeing an old man sitting in the sun getting a shave. That is one way to understand heritage and preserve it. But in the house next door, there was no guide telling me not to take photographs. I could wander down the corridors, peer into empty rooms. It was another way to interact with heritage, to run your fingers over exposed bricks that were over a century old.
A different view
A friend led me up the dark staircase. It opened up into a room cluttered with debris. And then beyond that we were suddenly at the edge of the balcony. The sun was going down and the city stretched before us, a mishmash of old and new. I had a view of the Marble Palace I had never seen before, from above, the way the pigeons in the eaves of the building see it, looking down at its gardens, its grand fountain, at the delicate lattice work of its imposing balcony. That was heritage and one way to look at it. And this building, its shabbier sister, with its photographs on its bare walls and shadowy corridors, was also part of our heritage and another way to interact with it. One is about preservation of what was and the other is about imagination of what it can become. That conversation is essential even though sometimes one feels it’s too little too late.
But that it’s happening is a sign of hope at least. Hopefully we are waking up to the fact that heritage requires imagination not dustcovers, and that something can be heritage even if Tagore never slept there.
Arteastic thanks Sandip Roy for writing this piece for their blog. Sandip Roy is a journalist, commentator , author and radio host. He lives in Kolkata. His first novel is Dont’ Let Him Know.