Out of the box Photographs of Calcutta a hundred years ago found recently in a shoe box in Edinburgh have generated tremendous interest, reports Amit Roy

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Out of the box

Photographs of Calcutta a hundred years ago found recently in a shoe box in Edinburgh have generated tremendous interest, reports Amit Roy

When historians in Scotland announced a week ago that they had found a shoe box containing rare photographs of Calcutta taken exactly 100 years ago, they could scarcely have anticipated the reaction they have had to their remarkable discovery. Clare Sorensen, an architectural historian who is gathering as much information as possible about the photographs, admitted to The Telegraph: "We are a bit blown away by the amount of interest." The Edinburgh headquarters of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), where 178 glass plate negatives were found in a shoe box, have been inundated with emails and phone calls. "What we have seen in the last few days is there's certainly a lot of interest from Calcutta because it's photographs of their city," disclosed Sorensen. "The people of Calcutta are very proud of their city." She has become almost a female Feluda trying to decipher as much as possible about each and every photograph. One idea is to make high quality prints from the negatives, now all digitised, and hold an exhibition in Calcutta. That would serve the purpose of people providing information about streets or paras they might recognise. "The New Bengal Club is gone," she noted. "I think it was probably built in 1909 and demolished in the 1950s. It was enormous." The identity of the photographer remains a mystery though the chances are he was a Scottish civil servant who took the pictures in January 1912 when King George V and Queen Mary came to Calcutta after attending the Delhi Durbar on December 12, 1911. Although the Emperor had announced he was shifting the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, the city's administration lit up the main public buildings and organised spectacular guards of honour to accord the royal couple a ceremonial welcome. A Reuters report, on January 4, 1912, said: "The King and Queen attended the races in Calcutta yesterday afternoon.... Their Majesties were greeted with an ovation.... their Majesties, who took their seats in the Royal stand amid a further outburst of cheering." St. Olaf's Church in Serampore, built by the Danes in 1805. William Carey, the English Baptist missionary who established the first printing press in Asia, conducted the first service Metro asked Krishna Dutta, author of Calcutta: A Cultural History, to look at the photographs. "It seems to me very little of the everyday lives lived in the place has changed much over 100 years," she commented. "It has only become more crowded and congested now." But a Calcutta resident, who knows the city of his birth intimately, spotted differences. "Streets have become wider, bridges and flyovers can be seen running across the entire city, thus increasing connectivity and accessibility. But free space nowadays is a rare sight. The architecture, too, has changed drastically from big old houses with high roofs and giant windows to multi-storeyed buildings and flats. However, places like BBD Bag have been successful in retaining the old-world charm." One slight jaundiced architectural journalist remarked: "Nothing aesthetically pleasing has been built in Calcutta since the British left." Sorensen had no idea Calcutta would become her ruling obsession when she visited the city in 2008 with the Calcutta Scottish Heritage Trust that is surveying and renovating the Scottish cemetery. Back in Edinburgh last year, one of her colleagues, Lesley Ferguson, head of collections, found the shoe box with the 3.5in x 4.5in glass negatives in smaller boxes inside marked "The Imperial Glass Plate Company". Sorensen recalled the moment. "She showed me one which looked like India. I knew it was Calcutta straight off — the first slide had the Post Office across the tank in Dalhousie Square — I have seen the building. It hasn't changed much. I was gripped." She added: "For me what stands out is what a good eye the photographer had." Of the 178 images, some 100 are of Calcutta; the rest have been taken in Odisha or the Bengal countryside, according to Prof Barun De, former chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission whom Sorensen consulted. De speculated that the unknown photographer had some spoken Bengali, judging from the relaxed smiles on the faces of his subjects. The Gangasagar festival attracted pilgrims and musicians from out of town, said De. Sorensen is also gathering information on the Scots who lived and often died in Calcutta. "A lot of Scots were connected with education, missionary work and jute." Given the long relationship between Scotland and India in general and Bengal in particular, Sorensen has been pondering the merits of holding an exhibition on Calcutta bringing together material from the major national collections. "It's fantastic that a small shoe box contained such a treasure trove of photographic imagery, but in some ways it's not unusual," she said. "Our experience as an archive has shown us that some of the most interesting discoveries can be made in the most unlikely of places."