Singing in a New World: Street Songs and Urban Experience in Colonial Calcutta

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Calcutta in the late nineteenth century was a melting-pot of migrant workers, artisans, servants, boatmen, labourers, petty traders and shopkeepers and an army of clerks, besides of course the better-known and more frequently studied residents, the educated Bengali classes. As the administrative and commercial capital of British India, the city was the quintessential harbinger of modernity in the sub-continent. And yet we know rather little of the responses of its more humble inhabitants to these tumultuous developments. What was the reaction of these people to the changing world around them? Contemporary songs about Calcutta, some of which were later captured in print, provide possible entry-points into the mental world of the city’s lower social orders. This article is an investigation of urban experiences in the colonial metropolis as articulated in its street song culture. It looks at how singing and songs in Calcutta in the late nineteenth century animated the urban domain with widely shared discourses on the city – on women, material changes, natural disasters, and sexuality – validating the quotidian experience of a recently urbanized world. The incidents and experiences narrated in the songs offered common reference points around which public debate could crystallize and urban sensibilities were shaped. This study therefore also traces the emergence of an urban public that was visible and vocal, and quite organically located in the city’s open public spaces – streets, markets, open grounds – just beneath the more educated layers of society.

In extant historical literature colonial Calcutta is overwhelmingly defined by the experiences of the educated male Bengali middle classes or bhadralok , and viewed as a product of liberal western governmentality, modern civic institutions and a cultural regeneration. ¹ With the notable exception of the highly influential work of Sumanta Banerjee who paints a vibrant picture of street cultures in the nineteenth century – although he is more interested in tracing their demise than their survival – the wider groups of Calcutta residents remain confined within narratives of labour or nationalist mass protest, riots, and epidemics. ² This is also perhaps because serious scholars of social and cultural history, while routinely using Calcutta as a backdrop for tracing historical processes, have rarely made it the focus of their attention. ³ The present study is deliberately strung lower to take into account not just the experiences of these educated groups, but also various other layers of city life – equally representative and sentient, but not so strongly visible in historical literature. Popular culture aired scandals and sensational topical themes alongside serious social and political concerns. This brought together such lower and middling social groups in shared constituencies for reflection, critique and questioning of the contemporary urban experience. ⁴

In all the songs discussed here, the city is the fundamental organizing category of the subject matter, and in their presentation the producers assumed shared interests between the listener, performer and writer. Both the specificity and the temporality of the songs made them unique, not as fleeting moments of city life, but as critical experiential frames through which city dwellers could capture the tremendous social and material changes occurring around them. In a recent essay Ranajit Guha talks of the significance of the ‘everyday’ in Calcutta’s colonial urban life. ⁵ Recurrent emphases on the everyday, the ordinary and routine, in the midst of the major events being described, offer mundane but extraordinarily piquant images of life in the city. Songs were sometimes sung extempore or from handwritten song-sheets, sometimes printed for performance and sale. Both genres were highly stylized and faithful to traditional formats of composition, but also very distinct as newer ‘urban’ variants, as evident in the imagery deployed and themes chosen. This article studies songs from this period, exploring the interstices between a largely pre-modern, pastoral and deeply indigenous sensibility and the onset of a rushed urban modernity in nineteenth-century Calcutta, the consequences of living and working in a harsh colonial environment, and their wider significance for the emergent public sphere in the city.

This is not to argue that the songs constitute a self-contained discursive system. They have of course to be judged in terms of their performative style, audience participation and the wider ramifications of the lyrics. The study thus appreciates the role played by listeners in filtering the performances in the light of their own experiences and knowledge, and offers some accounts of varying audience reactions. But it is somewhere between the two – between the language of the songs and gestures, between representations and acoustic presence – that their importance is to be traced.

Social historians of modern South Asia have tended to shy away from songs, treating them as undependable and unverifiable registers of identities, values and mentalities, and yet they have been studied profitably in other historical contexts. ⁶ The importance of songs and their role in the creation of ‘interpretive communities’ sharing common codes and expectations, themes and motifs has been noted by scholars. ⁷ In the cultural experience of South Asia, especially in colonial Calcutta, ‘songs were everywhere’. This entrenched presence needs to be made more visible in historical writing. The present study represents a small step in that direction.

THE CHANGING URBAN ORDER

Calcutta’s importance for British India in the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. The city was the hub of commerce and trade. The principal organs of government – the army, judiciary and bureaucracy – all had their headquarters in Calcutta. With its spacious European classical-style villas lining the eastern and southern reaches, and official buildings along the Esplanade marking the nerve-centre of British trade and administration, the city evoked a sense of grandeur and elegance, giving rise in the eighteenth century to the expression, ‘City of Palaces’.

The images of the city as recovered from private European and official archives are static and one-dimensional in so far as they offer a stable and fixed reading of colonial dominance – fixing Indians and Britons in specific locations and roles. In such narratives the indigenous quarters of Calcutta, known as the Black Town, constituted ‘a sprawling appendage that only survived because of the white town and remained the great defect in this capital of empire’. ⁸

From the nineteenth century onwards educated Indians offered their own perspectives on Calcutta’s urban experience but even these remained largely skewed by imbibed Orientalist assumptions The city was not worthy of habitation because pollution, dirt and disease were rampant within its limits. The countryside was fresher, purer and idyllic in contrast. ⁹

What is missing from these representations, however, is the experience of the lower social tiers. Some views – such as those on women and migrants – were no doubt shared vertically across the layers. Other more specific socially ordered perspectives were an inherent part of the city’s longstanding popular traditions. Examining them through the lens of the city’s popular printed and street culture we perceive competing ideas and self-images.

Traditional street entertainment in the form of pnachalis (rhythmic rhymed couplets) based on both religious and more sensual themes had been around since late medieval times, but there emerged new urban variants in Calcutta in the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the form of kobi -songs ( kobi meaning poet). These were adapted from older and more sober pastoral versions to include amusing and sharply observant accounts of everyday experiences of city life. Staged in front of vast adulatory crowds, the songs often turned loudly and unambiguously critical, heady with hatred of the city’s more well-off denizens, of immigrants and, not surprisingly for the late nineteenth century in Bengal perhaps, of erring women. ¹⁰

A further category of songs about the city, independent of this performative tradition, developed from the late nineteenth century onwards and was shared by significant reading, singing and listening groups. Printed as short pamphlets and composed in colloquial Bengali (sometimes stylized and sometimes rudimentary), these offered perspectives and comments on dramatic happenings or major developments that could be presumed to affect all city dwellers.

As bridges spanned mighty rivers and electricity dispelled evening darkness, people were awestruck by these developments and wrote and sang prolifically about them. Unlike the laments of the educated middle class over the passing of the old days, ¹¹ the popular response was a joyous celebration of city life. Poems and songs composed in traditional rhymed couplets marked the construction of the pontoon bridge over the Hooghly in 1874 ¹² and its illumination in 1879, the laying of the tramway in the city in 1880, and even the municipal drains in 1874. But natural disasters, disease and death exposed the vulnerabilities of modern civilization. The cyclones of 1864 and 1867, the scare about worms in edible fish in 1875 and the spread of dengue fever in 1872–4 fanned fears of an impending apocalypse, when the city’s residents would have to pay for their sins. Such disasters and the accompanying trepidation also gave rise to songs.

Not just the physical and material, but the social and cultural topography of the city was fast altering. The increasingly visible presence of women in public spaces was disturbing to some, and in popular art and literature triggered images of a world turned upside down. It seemed indicative of the moral decay of the new urban world. Migrants in the city, in the shape of up-country labour from northern India and numerous menial service-workers (both men and women), constituted another source of anxiety. Most importantly, the opening up of urban space as a sphere of arguably freer circulation and exchange, ¹³ not bound by caste and ritual restrictions though subject to a common municipal regime, made room for new aspirants who challenged the comfortable boundaries of the educated and propertied classes. The colonial state in this literature appears as a benign law dispenser and provider of urban essentials. By contrast the Bengali élite – as its corrupt petty executive and facilitator – comes in for much criticism.

Educated Bengalis wrote about Calcutta too, but their concerns were very different. Their acknowledgement of the technological marvels of the British empire was apathetic, at best tardy. When they did mention them, it was to complain about the inconvenience of the city being dug up all over the place, or the lack of a clean water supply. ¹⁴ There is a constant dialectic of identification and alienation for the educated within the colonial space of the city of Calcutta: to be expected, perhaps, given that the metropolis symbolized among other things the material and political triumph of the Raj and the concurrent subservience of the educated Bengali – whose sole reason for being in the city, ironically, was service to the colonial state. Registering mixed feelings about Calcutta with its abundant wealth and opportunity, and an alien lifestyle now rivalling one that was habitual and sanctified by custom, their writings closely interrogated their own social and cultural investment in the city. There was one anxiety shared with the lower orders however, and that concerned the perceived moral corruption of the urban fabric with the increasing presence of women in public places.

A voluminous body of literature has examined the social make-up of Calcutta during the period. ¹⁵ But a potted history of the city is nevertheless useful at this point, to locate the various consumers and producers of our songs within the larger contemporary social and cultural imaginary. Calcutta in the nineteenth century had a resident Bengali population dominated by the educated middle classes or bhadralok , who had gradually emerged in importance as the traditional landed and commercial aristocracy declined. Occupying the middling levels of the colonial administrative and commercial structures as providers of vital services – doctors, lawyers, educationists and bureaucrats – with limited interest in land, they asserted their distinctive though tenuous position as social elite through cultivated cultural snobbishness ( bhadra literally meaning genteel), that marked them off from their aspirant but less educated brethren who served in the same structures as clerks, petty tradesmen and entrepreneurs. At the very bottom of the social ladder were the menial workers (often internal migrants): servants, labourers, artisans, sweepers and so on, who might well be illiterate but took a keen interest in the energetic and sometimes volatile street cultures of the city.

An important investigative angle here is therefore that of social ordering in the city. How did the city’s lower-order inhabitants fit into their new roles? The fluid boundaries of urban existence, I argue, caused many to challenge the city’s shifting structures of population, gender and caste hierarchies, governance and patronage networks. The increasing visibility and enterprise of such actors produced a social geography much more complex than a simple acceptance of modern civic bourgeois ethos would suggest. In fact their vigorous presence rendered the streets of Calcutta a contested site for class, caste, community and gender encounters. I endeavour here to bring to light the perceptions of varied petty bourgeois and non-élite social groups in urban Calcutta in the nineteenth century and the ways in which they were responding to the changes occurring around them, through street songs that reflected on the city.

Understanding the songs fully is undoubtedly problematic. Their language was not solely verbal but involved complex musical, gestural and emotive codes. We know next to nothing of their rhythmic variations or tonal inflections, nor of either the physicality or most significantly the vocal timbre of the singer – what Roland Barthes has described as ‘the grain of the voice’. ¹⁶ Although unrecoverable, this materiality of sound – and indeed its visuality, as commented on later – remains as significant and critical for me as the words, and I have therefore paid close attention to any circumstantial evidence, however fragmentary, of such contexts.

And yet words are what we have and it is on the basis of the lyrics that we must read kobi songs – and indeed the later printed street songs – today. Words in that sense represent for us (as they did for the listeners) what Simon Frith calls ‘the sign of the voice’, and likewise the relationships they construct between singers and audience, the imaginary positioning on both sides, and the shared identities suggested by such posturing. ¹⁷ The song texts are thus read as critical indices to contemporary experiences and aspirations, offering as legitimate representations of city life as any other written texts.

KOBI SONGS: ADAPTING OLDER STYLES TO NEWER EXPERIENCES

Sumanta Banerjee’s seminal work has exposed a world of pungent lower-order hatred of the urban successful. ¹⁸ The street culture of Calcutta in the early part of the nineteenth century was a vociferous one, including staged abusive interludes in folk songs, the lampooning sawng pantomimes and sensual khemta dances. Basic to all of these was mocking laughter, sometimes light-hearted but often pointed, along with images which for us are startlingly evocative of a Rabelaisian carnival world. ¹⁹ The initial patrons for this culture were the first generation of the rich in Calcutta – old landed aristocracy, East India Company compradors and commercial barons of the city – who still strongly identified themselves with country life. But it quickly found wide support among far less prosperous residents of the city.

Contemporaries noted in particular the power of street musicians and singers to hurl abuse in the rudest colloquial at perceived wrong-doers, ranging from parsimonious patrons ²⁰ to wealthy cheats, and at times reflecting the personal rivalries between different aristocratic factions or dals . ²¹ Thus when the well-known Raja Nabakrishna Deb, merchant and top servant to the East India Company, lost a court case against another landed notable, Chudamani Dutta, drummers paraded triumphantly in front of the Deb residence with the corpse of the latter, beating the rhythm of a doggerel verse that congratulated Chudamani even in his death. ²² But the critical net could well be cast further afield, to highlight the evils widespread in the larger society and government – as when an appropriately contemptuous verse circulated in the city after the passing of the notorious Insolvency Act by the East India Company in 1830. ²³

Rival pantomime or sawng performances, emerging from the city’s occupationally organized residential quarters (for instance the dorjipara or tailor colony) during the enormously popular gajan festival, dedicated to Shiva, were far from benign in their representations of contemporary city life, and instead, as a memoir recalls, ‘specialised in throwing the spotlight on social, administrative, municipal corruption and wrongdoings in religion and education, the sharp wit of the songs lashing mercilessly at their targets’. ²⁴ In one such procession, emerging from the Bowbazar jelepara (boatmen’s colony) area, a participant performing as an untouchable female sweeper or mehtrani sang a song aimed at the Calcutta Municipality which attacked the high-caste educated Bengalis who occupied its middling and lower rungs. ²⁵

Even for the reticent bhadralok the lure of the street proved quite tempting, and despite their public condemnations of such exuberant street presence they did occasionally join in to celebrate the city’s tremendous urban surge. ²⁶ As Ranajit Guha has commented recently, ‘Far from holding back’, from the mid nineteenth century onwards, Calcutta in its writings appears to ‘spill over into the streets, join the crowds, and defy the over-Sanskritised sensibilities of the literati by adopting the mode of the everyday speech as its vehicle.’ ²⁷ Guha’s allusion here is to a very specific work published in 1861, Sketches by Hutom (Night Owl) – arranged in the style of Dickens’s Sketches by Boz – by Kaliprasanna Sinha, intellectual and aristocrat, which combined witty social observations with closely detailed depictions of city life and everyday mores, and was written in a playful, racy colloquial style. ²⁸

Kobi songs or kobigaan were integral to the vibrant street scene described above. ²⁹ With their antecedents rooted in communal festivities at the end of the harvest season in rural Bengal, ³⁰kobi songs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be sponsored by nouveaux riches patrons in Calcutta and around, who saw in this an opportunity for extending and consolidating their newly acquired network of patronage and influence. The songs were usually performed on the occasion of prominent festivals and feasts organized and hosted by the more prosperous Calcutta households, although over time the venues became more neutral and public. Itinerant folk songsters or kobis , who had travelled to the city in search of better fortunes, performed before large – often similarly uprooted – urban audiences, and were immensely popular for their ready wit, lyrical prowess and rhythmic song and dance routines. Their rural folk-singing skills proved admirably flexible in the bustling modern city, and they were quick to adapt their traditional subject matter to contemporary urban life in Calcutta.

The insertion of more earthly, mundane and topical content into the songs began in this period and was to prove an enduring feature of kobi songs, thriving well into the twentieth century. ³¹ While still faithful to the conventional formats and to themes drawn from Hindu religious texts, kobis used tongue-in-cheek allusions and telling imagery to offer commentaries on the city’s social scene. An addition to the songs that the street audience particularly enjoyed was the kheud , ³² usually sung extempore, which involved abusive verbal duels between rival poets. The contest lasted several hours and could only end when there was a clear winner, with the clamorous audience taking decided and often combative sides.

The kobis themselves were veritable stars of their day, and there was tremendous emotional investment on the part of audiences in singers, both on and off stage. ³³ They came from modest backgrounds of either lower-caste or lower-order professions, such as cobbler or sweetmeat-maker, and often carried on their normal occupations alongside singing songs. A promising star would apprentice himself to a pre-existing group, and then break away to forge his own. The songs could be composed by the lead singer himself, but usually professional composers wrote songs on demand for various groups. ³⁴ The traditional thrust-and-retort format of the songs did allow for verbal duels between rival poets, but on more formal occasions, where poets sang from prepared song sheets, with pre-formulated rejoinders. ³⁵ Later on these became more impromptu, involving offensive exchanges, and were best enjoyed as such. Eventually, the kheud element took over to become the most definitive element of these improvised compositions. ³⁶ Contemporaries commented on the astounding ability of kobis , often semi-literate or illiterate, to compose sharp rebuttals extempore, keeping their audiences enthralled for hours on end. ³⁷

While the songs consistently revolved around familiar mythological and devotional themes, they offered opportunities for intervention, innovation and comment and varied widely in their mood, imagery and delivery. Thus the illicit love affair between the Hindu god Krishna and his earthly partner, Radha, a married woman, was repeatedly invoked to offer veiled illustrations of real-life clandestine relationships between babus (a derogatory term for the bhadralok in popular and satirical literature) and married housewives. ³⁸ Singing as Radha, a singer could vividly suggest the possibilities of infidelity in the marital ranks:

I have been so enslaved by your flute that I dare to venture into the forest

The enchanting melody of your tune has slain me.

I care not for kul [kin status], nor for honour;

… Your flute has destroyed my cherished chastity. ³⁹

Leaving the young woman alone you left for abroad

My soul craves with longing for you

Who will guard my youthful body without you?

Who do I turn to in the absence of my beloved?

Fie on him for not turning up in the springtime

And chasing false dreams in distant lands without sparing a thought for his woman

How could he, a husband, leave me at the mercy of Madana , the god of love? ⁴¹

Such anxieties were picked up in the songs, which at the same time attacked the practice among young Bengali men of cohabiting with prostitutes, or other lovers, and neglecting their faithful wives. ⁴³ Away from the sobering influences of domesticity, it was not unusual for petty service-workers to fall prey to the attractions of the red-light area of the city. ⁴⁴ But the kobis quite clearly blame the men for the plight of their married womenfolk. ⁴⁵ The general import of the songs was very conservative. The values constantly asserted were those of marital fidelity and honesty, filial love and domesticity. They seemed to provide succour to the listeners in a rocky social environment.

Singers routinely mobilized the collective interests of the listening public by playing to different sub-sets at different points during the performance – women, lovers, office-workers and the socially less privileged. The appeal of the great stars lay in their ability to convey messages to the audience in an immediate and authentic manner. The direct form of address which was built into the kobi performances helped with this. ‘Knowingness’ or the awareness of shared reference points, as Peter Bailey has argued in the context of music-hall songs in nineteenth-century England, provided linkages ‘by pulling the crowd inside a closed yet allusive frame of reference, and implicating them in a select conspiracy of meaning that animate(d) them as a specific audience’. ⁴⁶ Increasingly too, in the course of the nineteenth century, the venues shifted from the more private domain of influential families to that of market places, riversides, temple courtyards, and even cremation grounds, and this gave the genre a more decidedly ‘street’, and thereby inclusive, character. ⁴⁷

Everyday subject matter and shared concerns, therefore, created an intimate world of exchange of ideas and sentiments. The participatory nature of the performances allowed the crowds to assert their own collective authorship from time to time, which makes their content doubly significant for us. Responding to popular concerns, songs thus complained of endless taxes, and described the troubles caused by natural disasters such as cyclones and floods. ⁴⁸ The change in the urban landscape brought about by technological innovations was reported with awe: machine-powered steamers and railways, and the telegraph that could send instant messages, were hailed as stupefying wonders. In comparing the human body to a train and the mind to an engine, and the human quest for salvation as a railway journey, the technological metaphor was raised to new heights, and machines embraced as the new emblem of spiritual enquiry. ⁴⁹

The songs were rendered to a background of rhythmic music, using a combination of traditional folk percussion and metal instruments as well as the violin. ⁵⁰ Dance routines performed to fast-beating music often accompanied the chorus. ⁵¹ Contemporaries noted how the intoxicating beat of the music drew audiences to the performance sites. ⁵² The stage presence of the singers was significant not so much in terms of costume as in the degree of role-playing involved. Narrating highly charged emotive or dramatic sequences involving violent fights or tearful betrayals tested the performative skills of the singer as much as the vocal. Not surprisingly, late nineteenth-century audiences recalled ‘seeing’ rather than ‘hearing’ kobigaan . ⁵³Bhadralok observers, however, deplored the lack of classical restraint in kobi songs, describing them as ‘indistinct, indecent and discordant’, sung loudly in shrill, nasal tones and irritating in the extreme because of ‘the neck-curling, furrowing of eyebrows, and grinding of teeth’ involved. ⁵⁴

The kheud element of the kobi songs, where abuse hurled at rival poets flew freely and generously, egged on by the audience, contained rich commentaries on the patrons as well as the songsters. Thus Bhola Moira, a famous songster, took little care to disguise his contempt for ‘Lalababu’ (real name Krishna Chandra Singha), wealthy descendant of a prominent aristocratic family, for his alleged miserly habits:

What a babu that Lalababu of Calcutta is!

He prefers to have his roasted aubergines without salt [salt was expensive].

That rascal is nothing but a lowly hadi [low-caste]

Who does not hesitate to squeeze the last drop out of a jaggery-laden ant, or feast like a bee on free honey. ⁵⁵

The attacks on colleagues could be savage, and toe-curlingly personal. Any evident physical irregularity or social vulnerability of poets provided ready ammunition for their competitors. Most kobis acquired unflattering nicknames based on such characteristics and coined by rivals. Singers tagged with such individualized insults included Mahesh Kana ⁵⁶ and Loke Kana ( kana meaning blind), Gopal Ude ( Ude was an uncomplimentary name for a resident of Orissa) and Kukur Mukho Gora (dog-faced Gora). The digs at immigrants extended even to those who came from the eastern districts of Bengal, disparagingly referred to as Bangals . ⁵⁷

The repeated assaults by more than one contemporary Bengali kobi on the only non-Indian songster among them all, Anthony Firingi, or ‘Anthony the European’ demonstrate the dislike in the city for immigrants and foreigners. Portuguese by birth, Anthony Heinsman settled in the vicinity of Calcutta with a local Brahmin woman, and then trained himself in kobi singing, eventually becoming quite a star in the process. But this pushing his way into their world was resented by rival songsters, who vented their displeasure by denouncing him as foreign. In various contemporary songs he was portrayed as a stealer of coffins, accused of aping Bengalis, and warned to refrain from the invoking of Hindu divinities. ⁵⁸ Women singers, admittedly rare in the profession, were not spared either. Bhola Moira is known to have insulted a particularly prominent female poet, Joggeswari, by referring to her as a shameless, bellowing cow looking for favour from the patron babus . ⁵⁹

The kobi songs represent a microcosm of rivalries and aspirations, as well as the miseries and joys of urban living. With Calcutta’s high proportion of migrants, communal bonds were uncertain and variable, but the sociability of listeners at these musical performances was comforting. A broader meta-language underlying the kobi songs, I argue, was Bailey’s ‘knowingness’, which represented a new alertness that was part of the cosmopolitan urban sensibility, the need to ‘know’ its world in order to survive. ⁶⁰ The kobi songs eventually lost out to theatre in the city and performers migrated to east Bengal, although some formats continued to be used on stage. ⁶¹

PRINTED STREET SONGS: NEWS, THE URBAN AND THE SENSATIONAL

Underscoring the fundamental importance of the ephemeral in literature such as gossip or sensation, and referring specifically to the Sketches by Night-Owl (the 1861 commentary we encountered earlier), Ranajit Guha stresses the role of ‘immediacy’ – the now – inherent in the bringing together of an ‘urban public’ in nineteenth-century Calcutta:

As a phenomenon it lives only for the day … in a state of utter transience. Consequently, it is the ‘now’, the vehicle of its circulation, rather than the messages circulated, that enables this discourse to weld the mass of its interlocutors together into an urban public. The instantaneous exchange of information in myriad bits, with no particular demand to make on reflection, generates a concern which, for all its indefiniteness or volatility – or, precisely because of these – constitutes the very ground of that publicness. It is not what people are talking about that is vital to such gossip, but the fact that they are talking to one another in a state of average intelligibility. ⁶²

Trying to make sense of the new city, there emerged a flood of cheap printed literature in Calcutta towards the end of the nineteenth century, recording the dramatically transformed social, material and technological realities in metropolitan life. The literary genres involved were various, from novels, dramas, satires and songs to pamphlets and periodical publications. By far the most articulate and emblematic were the songs based on contemporary events and themes with an impact on city life. Authors were invariably well known already, having made a name in the writing trade and moving seamlessly between songs, dramas, novellas and trivia. The language is stylized but with a tendency to slip into coarse imagery and vocabulary and racy alliteration, as well as sensationalized rhetoric – all suggestive of a non-serious, superficial readership. ⁶⁴

Songs, often published as small pamphlets (fifteen to twenty pages), gave shape to the emotions, anxieties and concerns of residents during catastrophic events or spectacular occasions, and translated for them through familiar idioms their own lived experiences. Significantly, the songs almost invariably employed mythological tropes to ‘understand’ a seemingly baffling course of events, whereby cosmic and extra-terrestrial occurrences shaped the destiny of mortals on earth. It is possible thus to see the genre as a legacy of the earlier mythology-based pnachali and kobi songs, but using more modern themes and references. ⁶⁵ Overall, however, the sensibilities were pastoral and moral, rather than modern and urban. ⁶⁶ Although locating the specific readership/s for this genre is difficult, it is possible to infer from the considerable print-runs (two to three thousand) and the prevalence of authors well known in the popular press, as well as from evidence of wide readership of such ephemeral vernacular literature in contemporary Bengal, that they reached a substantial audience of not very well educated, marginally literate readers. ⁶⁷

Alongside mainstream newspapers, I suggest, these pamphlets too circulated select news from the city, providing equally valid, if more expressive, emotive registers of urban experiences and events. Some element of journalistic fact-based reportage is involved (as in ships thrown up on land in the cyclone pamphlets of 1864), ⁶⁸ which betrays the genre’s closer connection with actual events than with the mythological tropes it employed as meta-narrative. A larger global repertoire of contemporary images was mobilized to display the canny worldliness of authors, reporting volcanic eruptions in Africa while discussing natural disasters, ⁶⁹ and the tunnel under the Thames when talking of British technological feats. ⁷⁰

Scandals and major events in the city provided much fodder. For the burgeoning popular press in the city, this was ready material for authors and printers alike wanting quick turnover. The commercial vernacular print-world reacted with predictable delight, with songs and plays being published within months of the incidents being reported. ⁷¹ Tanika Sarkar’s useful study of the world of scandal literature outlines the shape of a new kind of Bengali public sphere, which made a ‘remarkable downward reach in the 1870s’. ⁷² As a sphere peopled not by well-educated and cultured Bengali gentlemen, but by street people, prostitutes, labouring menials, and illiterate theatregoers, it was brought together by sensational events like the Elokeshi-Mohanta scandal. ⁷³ As seen below, while dealing with the ordinary and everyday, such events compelled discussion on serious social themes of general interest, and oversaw the intermingling of different social worlds.

Although produced partly for private consumption, as with other ephemeral literature of this kind, the city song was meant to be read and/or sung aloud, and perhaps even performed. The importance of songs in the vernacular print culture in Bengal during this time cannot be overstated. Local jatras and later the Bengali theatre we know found songs irresistible and early theatre was purely musical in format. Songs subsequently lived on for a considerable while as necessary interruptions – often as comical interludes – within the structural format of stage plays. The works themselves refer to street-singing about contemporary subjects. ⁷⁴ And although direct evidence of these songs being actually sung is wanting, it is not hard to imagine them being performed during communal festivities or in private gatherings – especially as there are detailed directions on vocal styles, stage entries and exits, and characterization. ⁷⁵ There are instructions on both real and imaginary ragas (moods) and taalas (rhythm) in which the songs should be sung, some of the latter quite cheeky in their plays on words. Alongside the more serious and conventional guidance on style, rhythm and mood, were also more playful directions from the author. The cyclone songs were thus to be sung in raginis such as kothay jabo (where shall I escape?) and gelo re (reference to impending disaster), while the rhythms were to be Sri Durga bole pran tyajibo (invoking Goddess Durga when I die) and shaamaal, shaamaal (be warned! be warned!). At once irreverent and relevant, such light-hearted nonsense must have served to predispose readers to the casual nature of the reading material in their hands. The direct form of address was also frequently used, a characteristic of oral tradition.

DECADENCE AND DISASTERS: WOMEN, SIN AND TROPES OF RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

The standard literary tropes for talking about the times – some of which we have encountered above – were those of decay – moral and material. An added dimension to the flamboyance and corruption created by wealth, often bemoaned in topical print, was the corrosive effect of women of easy virtue on men’s moral character. Calcutta in the nineteenth century seemed to offer endless temptations to young men. Night-life in the city sizzled with shops selling alcohol, opium dens and vigorous business generated by the red-light district.

Interestingly, unlike Victorian London as portrayed by Judith Walkowitz, Calcutta in the nineteenth century was fearful of its women, and young men were constantly warned of the dangers posed by prostitutes adept at baiting the likes of them. ⁷⁶ The figure of the enticing and wily prostitute, who lurks in the city’s red-light districts waiting for the earliest opportunity to deprive men of their hard-earned money, is a recurrent motif in contemporary street literature. The pnachali composer Dasarathi Ray, for example, sings:

When I was in Calcutta recently one evening

I saw [prostitutes] sitting in the verandahs on both sides of the streets;

Like lightning they were!

Covered in jewellery, they were singing tappas [light classical] .

While the babus tried hard to win their hearts in a manner most servile. ⁷⁷

Educated women from well-to-do and prominent families were increasingly declaring their presence in public, and they too earned the wrath of songsters. Another of Dasarathi’s pnachalis targeted them:

Oh such a spectacle it is in Calcutta in this Age of Kali

The woman rides the coach ( feting-juri )

Wielding a fashionable walking stick and donning a hat.

She wears gowns and rides horses

And even goes to public lectures, holding the hand of not her own but another man. ⁸⁰

A recurrent theme in such scandal literature, as indeed with other topical literature of the period, is that of the kaliyuga : in Hindu cosmology the epoch of sin, destruction and revival. Conceptualized as cyclical, there are four eras or yugas , it is believed, eternally repeated, and characterized by their moral positions. The kaliyuga , from a Hindu brahmanical point of view is the most degenerate epoch of all, when familiar social and moral worlds disintegrate, ushering in a period of prurience and disorder.

In popular imagination the city had to pay for its sins. So when natural disasters struck writers pointed to the inexorable hand of fate. ⁸³ In 1864 and 1867 Calcutta was hit by devastating cyclones resulting in the loss of valuable lives and property. Within a month the city’s vernacular presses were turning out songs about the events. Predictably, the songs explained the devastation as divine retribution for the world having lost its values. At the same time they drew on an extant culture of recalling and discussing past calamities that survived in public memory for decades after the actual event had taken place. ⁸⁴ In the guise of offering graphic descriptions of an actual catastrophe, the authors presented their personal views on society, morals and politics, acting as valuable registers of the communities that they represented.

In many ways, the poets affirmed, the storm had acted as a leveller, not sparing anyone, rich or poor, and both built-up areas and temporary shantytowns had suffered badly ( Fig.1 ). The babus had been chastised, and prostitutes and babus alike were being tyrannized after the storm by builders claiming exorbitant rates for reconstruction work. ⁸⁵ The storm in these imaginary renderings inexorably exposed the city’s sin and immorality – in its aftermath illicit lovers were found in cheap hotel rooms, an elderly brother-in-law even locked in clandestine embrace with the younger brother’s wife. ⁸⁶ The recurring unnatural and fantastic image is that of the world turned upside down. ⁸⁷

In fearing loss of their own flimsy residences and imminent death in a ‘foreign land’ far from family and friends, the writers echoed the sentiments of many immigrants to the city who eked out a modest living amidst much adversity. ⁸⁸ The city was confirmed as a temporary, unfriendly and uncertain place in allusions to the abandoned and decomposed bodies desecrated in the post-mortem operations that would inevitably be carried out by the state: one author expressed his fear of such a fate in the event of his dying in a house-collapse. ⁸⁹ The songs also offer a vivid glimpse of more modern civic markers of urban dislocation caused by the storm – overflowing drains, torn telegraph lines and broken gas lamps. ⁹⁰

Songs and tracts on the epidemic of worm-ridden fish which afflicted the city in 1875 relied on similar tropes of cosmic intervention to right a reversed world order. Although those (invariably men) who moved in the wider and seemingly wiser world reported that scanty rainfall over the past few years had caused dried-up and filthy river-beds where fish picked up infections, women in these narratives – and presumably also the expected readers of the tracts – firmly believe that the catastrophe was brought upon the city people by their own wrong-doings. ⁹¹ Cast variously as the curse of the small-pox goddess Sitala in retaliation for an insult from a group of fishermen or the challenging of the goddess Kali by the river Ganga, the spread of virulent disease among fish in the riverine tracts of eastern Bengal and even Hooghly is presented as causing untold misery among the fish-loving Bengalis. ⁹² As with the cyclone, this calamity too was supposed to have acted as a leveller affecting all – those who could afford fish and those who could not. ⁹³

The image of a beleaguered Bengali population trying to cope with the absence of fish, that vital ingredient in Bengali cuisine celebrated endlessly by poets and litterateurs, is touching and designed to evoke the ready empathy of readers sharing the misfortune. The weakening of constitution and vitality resulting from long-term deficiency of fish in household diets, it was thought, would have a disastrous impact on Bengalis as a race. Reduced to rice, lentils and vegetables, one author feared, Bengalis would turn into Hindustanis or khottas – offensive terms for the supposedly inferior Hindi-speaking up-country migrants in the city. ⁹⁴ Buried in the narrative is also a veiled dislike for the migrant fisherfolk, usually from eastern Bengal, who were depicted as deceitful and likely to inflate the price of fish even in the best of times. ⁹⁵

Women in this literature bear the burden of sin, guilt and atonement. Bengalis can be delivered from the disaster if the married women in every household fast for a day, worship Sitala, and forego fish for three months. ⁹⁶ The voracious consumer housewife of Hindu reformist literature is echoed in the aggressive fisherwoman whose insatiable demands, it was asserted, had led to the current debacle. Without her relentless greed, fishermen would not have engaged in malpractices and brought reprisal upon the community. In a powerful direct address, one author thus cautions men to keep their wives under control:

… ‘Be warned’ says the author to his male readers.

The women of inferior households invariably ignore their husbands;

Indulged beyond repair their confidence is increased.

[As we have seen in the case of the fisherwoman insulting her husband …]

It is not a good idea to pamper your woman;

Irrespective of high and low families. ⁹⁷ [Brackets mine]

LONG LIVE THE BRITISH: PAYING TRIBUTE TO COLONIAL TECHNOLOGY

Historiographies of the East-West encounter in colonial India have centred on the image of a despairing colonized élite being crushed under the ruthless wheels of western modernity. The printed songs discussed here, however, in celebrating urban technological achievements in nineteenth-century Calcutta, establish alternative images of this cultural encounter. At a time when Calcutta was rapidly changing beyond recognition with its tramways and gaslights, parks and avenues, and unprecedented levels of commercialization in daily life, we see how non-élite groups reflected upon and engaged with these changes through participation in and patronage of street songs that became immensely popular in the contemporary urban culture. In fact, the city’s technological innovations also figure in other street songs of the time. Hugh Urban has shown how marginal esoteric religious sects in late nineteenth-century Calcutta used both the material lay-out of the city and new technology like the railway as allegory in describing the human body and its journey through a world of suffering and death. ⁹⁸

While gloom dominates the moral and social imaginary of the bhadralok residents, the songs lavishing praise on the unmitigated technological success in the metropolis are unequivocal. In 1874 the Hooghly River, a distributory of the Ganga which flowed past Calcutta, was spanned for the first time, by the Howrah Bridge. This was a wooden bridge supported by a series of boats. It had taken three years to build, and was 1,528 feet long with a roadway for carriages forty-eight feet wide, as well as footpaths. The middle section was movable, so as to allow the passage of vessels up and down the river ( Fig. 2 ). ⁹⁹ The resulting bridge of floating pontoons amazed Calcutta’s residents. Songs, dramas and poems celebrating the ‘miracle’, and congratulating the British for achieving it, were published the same year. Incredulity was constantly expressed at the ability to ‘float iron on water’, a task where even the Gods had failed. ¹⁰⁰ One such song ran as follows:

Oh what a pole [bridge] has been built by the sahib company

How could a bridge be built over the Ganga?

Even Vishwakarma [the builder-god] has admitted defeat …

Such intelligence and skill … there is no problem anymore

All can easily cross the river now …

The bridge has brought happiness upon this earth. ¹⁰¹

Another work marvelled at the city’s sophisticated underground drainage system, along with gaslights and motorcars. The author revels at the thought of covered sewers, clean surroundings, and most importantly, ‘peaceful nights without mosquitoes’. ¹⁰⁵

An incredible amount of painstaking detail marks the songs; both technological and also immensely visual in nature, they invite the listeners or readers to come and investigate for themselves. The writings on the city’s underground drains carry minute descriptions of the different stages of construction – from the digging and groundwater extraction, to the erection of wooden arches for containing the pipes, and the fine brickwork. ¹⁰⁶ There must have been great interest in the actual mechanics and building processes for the authors to present them so elaborately, as seen here in a vivid and loving portrayal of the Howrah Bridge:

Wrapped in copper sheets and shaped like a[n inverted] boat

The bridge is afloat on the river.

Iron chains running below secure it to anchors.

Arranged diagonally on a series of boats are a collection of mighty supports

Resembling the mythical moonbeam-drinking bird.

The actual bridge rests on this structure

Itself a fine weave of beams and rafters.

There are attractive footpaths on both sides

Lined with charming railings. ¹⁰⁷

Part panegyric and part pnachali style, the works sang enthusiastically of the achievements of the British, comparing the Raj to the idealized rule of King Rama, and scoffed at the pretentious babus who superficially aped the English without seeming to internalize any of their technological prowess. ¹⁰⁸ Positive racial attributes – steely determination, fortitude, courage – are showered on the ruling nation and contrasted with lack of the same qualities in Bengalis. ¹⁰⁹ Thus the British are just and fair in their rule, benevolent and mindful of the woes of their subjects, and authors fervently hope that their rule in India will be permanent. ¹¹⁰ Being supreme amongst humankind, accordingly, it is hardly surprising that they look down upon Bengalis as an ignorant and lowly race. ¹¹¹ While the temptation may be to read this simply as an inward critique of Bengalis looking for redemption, the eulogy is entrenched enough – recurring with remarkable consistency in invariably every single tract – to prompt other more ambiguous understandings.

The admiration of technological feats was incessant and compulsive. Frequent cross-referencing in the tracts meant that while highlighting the wonders of one marvel, poets would also sing of others. The Howrah Bridge composers also paid tribute to the steam train, telegraph and gaslights, ‘refine[sic]’ tap water and drains. ¹¹² One work listed on the cover page all the technology it was going to cover – from railways, telegraph and steamships to the travelling balloon, jute and sugar presses, and road rolling machines. ¹¹³ Just about anything seemed possible:

If they wish to they [the British] can even build a staircase to the heavens,

We have already seen how they can make men fly in balloons in the sky.

Now only if they could bring back the dead to life

(I am sure) all would accept them as Gods on earth. ¹¹⁴

It is perhaps also why the songs apply familiar and comfortable mythological tropes to ‘translate’ and transmit the overwhelming experiences to an audience struggling to make sense of it all. The Howrah Bridge is compared to Rama’s mythological bridge; ¹¹⁷ and the seeming inability of the otherwise mighty Ganga River to avenge herself, despite being fettered by iron chains, is explained away by her cosmic flight from the mortal world. ¹¹⁸ In one tract, the author ends by chastising those who, in their uncritical admiration of the rulers, forget their shastras or holy scriptures and defy their dharma or prescribed Hindu codes. While drawing attention to the current plight of the Gods, particularly Ganga, he triumphantly reminds all of the cosmic resurrection for her and other divinities at the end of the Kali Age, predicted in the shastras . ¹¹⁹

CONCLUSION

By the end of the nineteenth century a vibrant street presence and increasing visibility in print of marginal social groups matched the growing social and economic opportunities presented by the colonial metropolis of Calcutta. As huge numbers of low to middling-class workers arrived in the city, they constituted a significant layer in the urban experience, even consciously acknowledging the tremendous role that Calcutta played in their everyday lives. Popular street and print culture, particularly songs, consistently foreground the city as a location for discussions on social and topical themes.

Street songs about colonial Calcutta were essential sites for the construction of urban discourses and the shaping of various community, caste and social identities. Alongside the more elevated platforms of the press and the literary and civic societies of the educated, they too presented an opportunity for public debate on the contemporary urban experience and significantly influenced the ways in which various non-elite groups made sense of themselves and their new environment. The city is the fundamental organizing category in the songs, the common referential frame for writers, performers and listeners alike, and while dealing with the everyday the songs offer occasion for reflection on various aspects of city life. For a beleaguered and uprooted population the songs provided vital maps of the urban terrain, and helped in the navigation of a rapidly changing world.

The overwhelming centrality of the Bengali educated middle classes in studies of modern India has resulted in a lopsided narrative that ignores other less powerful, but robustly articulate groups peopling the contemporary public sphere. Attention to their critical role in shaping the city – as evident in contemporary popular culture – permits a dramatic reconceptualization of the Bengali social and cultural, and to a certain extent, political, world. The telling of such stories also helped to consolidate a new public sphere and announce the presence of new social and political actors in Calcutta. In this sense, the songs represented a certain dexterity, a canny manoeuvring for space in the highly contested social landscape of the colonial urban metropolis. They reinforced a sense of belonging to certain communities, and helped to clarify multiple positions on women, migrants, bhadralok and the colonial government.

An earlier version of this paper was shared with the World History Reading Group at the University of Manchester. I am grateful to my colleagues and friends, Steven Pierce, Natalie Zacek, Laurence Brown and Aaron Moore for their valuable feedback.

NOTES AND REFERENCES