Calcutta and the Gardens
of Barrackpore

B

ARRACKPORE, IN former times the country retreat of the governor-general of India, lies some fifteen miles upriver from Calcutta. A short distance, one would think, but enough to guarantee a respite from the sweltering heat that descended on the capital of British India for much of the year. Its gigantic trees, luxuriant shrubbery, and gentle lawn sloping down to the river’s edge held the promise of shade and fresh breezes, even a hint of home in a distant land. Like the name of the place itself (referring to the nearby cantonment of soldiers), the garden was a hybrid, both Indian and English. As it evolved, it mirrored not only the individual tastes of the inhabitants of the house but also the exigencies of the country itself. At the moment when India was reeling from the unexpected ferocity of the Uprising of 1857, the gardens of Barrackpore reached their apogee under the gentle hand of Lady Charlotte Canning.¹

From Urbs Inter Paludes to City of Palaces

By the late eighteenth century, Calcutta was renowned for its fine mansions and elegant public buildings. It boasted theaters, an orchestra, and even a choir that performed Handel’s Messiah for homesick Britons.² Few would have foretold this flowering of culture, however, when Job Charnock founded the settlement on August 24, 1690, as a trading factory for the East India Company. Legendary for having snatched his future wife from the suttee pyre, Charnock was, in the laconic words of his epitaph, a “wanderer.” He was also mean-spirited, cantankerous, and eccentric, but above all he had an iron constitution that enabled him to survive some thirty years in the pestilential remotenesses of the Bay of Bengal. Supposedly he chose the site of the future metropolis because of the pleasure he took in sitting and smoking a “meditative hookah under the shade of a spreading peepal tree” as he conducted business.³ His superiors in Madras protested against the choice of a deserted fishing village of no obvious advantages, but history proved him right: a century later, Calcutta was the second city of the British Empire in spite of its insalubrious and often violent climate and the treacherous 125-mile passage up the Hughli, a branch of the Ganges, from the Bay of Bengal. While British India consisted of three autonomous presidencies, Calcutta was primus inter pares, the seat of the governor-general. When the Company was disbanded in 1858 and Queen Victoria became Queen of India, the governor-general assumed the august title of viceroy.

Nevertheless, the first few decades of the city’s history were hardly promising. When Charnock died in 1693, there was as yet no factory; most of the merchants still lived in the stifling cabins of their boats or in mat hovels on the shore. The town took shape with no apparent plan, company agents enclosing land, digging tanks, and building more permanent houses where and as they pleased. Captain Alexander Hamilton, “an eighteenth-century Sinbad” who traded all over Asia and was often at odds with the East India Company, was not impressed with what he found twenty years after Charnock had marked out the site: “[Charnock] had the Liberty to settle an Emporium in any part of the River’s Side below Hughly [an earlier post], and for the sake of a large shaddy [sic] Tree chose that Place, tho’ he could not have chosen a more unhealthy Place on all the River; for three Miles to the North-eastward is a Salt-water Lake that overflows in September and October, and then prodigious numbers of fish resort thither, but in November and December, when the Floods are dissipated, those Fishes are left dry, and with their Putrefaction affect the Air with thick stinking Vapours, which the North-east Winds bring with them to Fort William, that they cause a yearly Mortality.”⁴ The “feverhaunted swamps” beyond the river also exacted a terrible toll. Hamilton estimated that of the 1,200 English resident in Calcutta in 1710, no fewer than 460 died between August and the following January.⁵ Adding to these tribulations were French rivals upriver at Chandernagore and conflicts with local rulers, culminating in the temporary occupation of the fort and city by Siraj-ud-daula and the infamous episode of the Black Hole (1756).

At last, with English victories in 1757, the fortunes of the East India Company in general and Calcutta in particular rebounded, notwithstanding periodic setbacks from epidemics, famines, and cyclones. Calcutta soon eclipsed Surat, a continent away on the northwest coast, as the great emporium of India. With commercial success came almost legendary wealth, mirrored in both public and domestic architecture. A “Georgian city” rose from the malarial swamps.⁶ Count Grandpré, visiting the city in 1789, declared it “the finest colony in the world,” adding, “The magnificence of the edifices, the luxury which has covered the banks of the river into delightful gardens, and the costliness and elegance of their decorations, all denote the opulence and power of the conquerors of India and the masters of the Ganges.”⁷

At the heart of the original settlement was Fort William, flanking the river on its eastern shore. It was subsequently rebuilt and shifted a little downriver. In its new incarnation it was considered impregnable “in case of invasion from abroad or rebellion at home,” with “provisions and stores to withstand a siege as long as that of Troy.”⁸ Unlike the old Fort William, it was never put to the test. To the north of the fort was the Writers’ Building, a long three-story building painted by the Daniells in 1786. Here lowly clerks and wealthy nabobs transacted the business of the East India Company, commonly known as “John Company.” In time it was joined by the High Court, the Custom House, an array of churches and burial grounds, and the palatial Government House, built at the turn of the century by Lord Wellesley. Government House proved so costly that the Company recalled Wellesley before he could extend his extravagances to the weekend retreat of Barrackpore.

The lungs of the city were provided by the grassy—or dusty, depending on the season—maidan, the vast parade ground that would be replicated in cities throughout British India. Originally a “tiger-haunted jungle which cut off the village of Chowringhee from the river,”⁹ it was cleared bit by bit. This, together with the filling in of the creek to the south, opened up the village of Chowringhee to European settlement. By the 1760s the Esplanade and Chowringhee were conspicuous for the fine Palladian houses of the wealthy: “Mansions with classical facades . . . set in smooth lawns with shrubberies and shade-giving trees.”¹⁰ At the northern end of the maidan, the Esplanade was a favorite promenade for “elegant walking parties” on moonlit evenings, although it was a long time before other parts of the maidan were finally rid of the “rascally characters” who had succeeded the tigers and would rob servants returning home at night.¹¹

Anyone who could afford to also built a garden house along the river to escape the heat, filth, and plagues of the city. Before reaching the busy ghats and godowns of Calcutta itself, a visitor tacking up the Hughli in the 1780s would have come upon Garden Reach as a welcome surprise. After being tossed about “in small and confined quarters for anything from three months to a year, with few sights of land and rare stops to lighten the monotony of the voyage,” he (it was usually he in the early years) would make the tedious journey upriver in an oar-propelled and mosquito-infested budgerow, arriving, in Percival Spear’s memorable phrase, “in a very chastened frame of mind.”¹² Then, marvelous to behold, Garden Reach came into view, “rising like a fairy isle . . . and offering to the view a succession of beautiful villas, surrounded by lofty trees.”¹³ In 1780 Eliza Fay described the garden houses as “elegant mansions, surrounded with groves and lawns which descend to the water’s edge, and present[ing] a constant succession of whatever can delight the eye, or bespeak wealth and elegance in the owners.”¹⁴

Sir William Jones, justice of the High Court, Orientalist, and founder of the Asiatic Society, had a house at Garden Reach to which he retreated each night, dating his letters as from “Gardens on the Ganges.” Governor-General Warren Hastings, on the other hand, built a country retreat at Alipur, just upriver from Garden Reach, as well as a house and park, later known as Belvedere, south of the maidan in the city. Hastings was never happier than when pottering about his garden in shabby clothes, experimenting with “curious and valuable exotics from all quarters.” At the same time, he also had honeysuckle and sweetbriar seeds sent out from England, instructing that they be packed for the voyage “in small bottles with ground-glass stoppers.”¹⁵ Hastings’s nemesis, Philip Francis, also had both a mansion in the city and a villa in Alipur. “Here I live,” he boasted to a friend in the 1770s, “master of the finest house in Bengal, with a hundred servants, a country house, and spacious gardens, horses and carriages.”¹⁶ Well might the East India Company inveigh against the sumptuous habits of its employees, listing gardens along with cook rooms and horses as unnecessary expenses, but London was far away and men on the spot could do pretty much as they pleased unless their excesses were on the scale of Wellesley’s.¹⁷

Lest one paint too rosy a picture of the houses and gardens of Calcutta and its environs, it is well to remember that the city always had its detractors; Hamilton was the first but hardly the last. In 1767 a visitor to the city wrote that “after Madras, it does not appear much worthy describing [sic], for although it is large, with a great many good houses in it, it is as awkward a place as can be conceived; and so irregular that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down again by accident as they now stand.” To make matters worse, “the appearance of the best houses is spoiled by the little straw huts . . . which are built up by the servants for themselves to sleep in: so that all the English part of the town . . . is a confusion of very superb and very shabby houses, dead walls straw huts, warehouses and I know not what.”¹⁸ In contrast to the palaces of Chowringhee, the huts of “Black Town” were mostly of mud and thatched, “perfectly resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland.”¹⁹ Sir George Trevelyan declared Calcutta to be “so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse: but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously.”²⁰ Rudyard Kipling is responsible for the enduring image of Calcutta as the “city of the dreadful night’” (the title of a book of essays, later recycled to apply to Lahore as well).²¹

What did the early gardens of Calcutta look like? They are often mentioned but rarely described. Many were undoubtedly utilitarian, growing fruit and vegetables. In 1712 John Burnell found the garden adjoining the Company’s factory “abounding in sallading and sweet herbs, beans, pease and turnips.” But it was not “wanting in flowers, of which it hath variety” and had “a fine shady walk, and a noble large fish-pond.” A visitor in 1748 was impressed with the “elegant, airy and spacious” town houses of the British, “with Gardens producing, Fruits, Vegetables and Flowers of the Torrid and many of those peculiar to the temperate Climes.”²²

The garden houses that came into their own later in the century, however, had greater pretensions. An account of 1792 refers to them as “surrounded by verdant grounds laid out in the English style,”²³ meaning that they probably attempted to translate the landscapes in vogue in late eighteenth-century England, the “natural” style of Capability Brown and his followers, with an emphasis not on flowers but on trees and lawns and ornamental structures, on the creation of picturesque perspectives—thus Fay’s groves and lawns descending to the water’s edge. This seems still to have been typical of Garden Reach in the late 1820s, when Elizabeth Fenton enthused about a “beautiful house . . . on the bank of the river, in an extensive lawn sprinkled with cedar, teak, and mango trees.” There were even a few goats and cows taking shelter from the heat in the shade of banyan thickets. A series of plans and illustrations of Hastings’s Belvedere estate, on the other hand, show an evolution over the century following his departure from India that mirrors changing styles at home but with a significant time lag. The earliest, drawn in 1794, shows the grounds laid out in a simple, geometric pattern in front and behind the house. A plan from 1828 indicates a shift away from formal straight lines and rectangles to groupings of trees along the boundary and surrounding walks. Not long after, the main garden area to the south of the house was transformed into a large lawn leading to a tank and with a path shaded by mature trees winding around it, proper for walking. Finally, shrubs and beds bordered the building itself.²⁴

Phebe Gibbes’s description of Park St. Cemetery, the oldest in the city, may suggest the patterns of other gardens and parks: “Obelisks, pagodas, &c. are erected at great expence; and the whole spot is surrounded by as well-turned a walk as those you traverse in Kensington Gardens, ornamented with a double row of aromatic trees, which afford a solemn and beautiful shade: in a word, not old Windsor churchyard, with all its cypress and yews, is in the smallest degree comparable to them.” Predictably, her description follows reflections on the omnipresence of death in Calcutta and the brevity of life in its clime: “Born just to bloom and fade.”²⁵

The invocation of British parallels would be a staple of all such commentaries on gardens and parks in India for the next century and a half. The first glimpse of Calcutta’s gleaming white houses in 1824 inspired Bishop Heber to compare the effect to that of “Connaught-place . . . as seen from a distance across Hyde Park.”²⁶ In 1836 Emily Eden described a house and garden in Garden Reach as “much like any of the Fulham villas, only the rooms are much larger; but the lawn is quite as green and rivers are rivers everywhere.”²⁷ The botanist Joseph Hooker was so impressed with the riverfront gardens of a chief justice that he dubbed them the “Chatsworth of India,” a reference to the great estate of the Duke of Devonshire and his pioneering gardener, Joseph Paxton.²⁸ Later visitors scaled down their praises, referring, for example, to the “cockney-looking villas” along the riverbank, or invoked their counterparts at Richmond.²⁹ Edward Lear, too, couldn’t resist branding the Eden Gardens, laid out about 1840 by Emily and Fanny Eden and considered the pride of Calcutta, as “a sort of Cockney-Calcutta Kensington Gardens.”³⁰ In due time the Gardens would sport a cricket pitch, a sports stadium, and a racecourse.³¹ The maidan itself struck a visiting journalist at the turn of the century as “magnificently English, Clapham Common, Hyde Park & Sandown Park all in one.”³² Of course the clubs that became so integral a part of British Calcutta replicated life back home even down to the trim lawns and rustic chairs (“Bombay fornicators”) beneath the shade trees; here expatriates could “perhaps imagine themselves on an uncommonly stifling day at home in or on a visit to the suburban woodlands of England.”³³

During the nineteenth century, flowers came to play a much larger part in gardens in England, prompting heated debates about how best to display them. An expanding bourgeoisie could choose from a cornucopia of exotics from all around the world as well as hybrids newly created by horticulturists and nurserymen at home. In India, however, there was already enough that was exotic, and many gardeners yearned for those gardens that seemed to them quintessentially English, even if more and more old-fashioned. Lawns and shade trees were the irreducible minimum; the rest was problematic. Much as Bishop Heber admired the stately houses of Calcutta, “ornamented with Grecian pillars,” he found that they were surrounded “for the most part . . . by a little apology for a garden.”³⁴

Nevertheless, the wife of a chief judge managed to grow violets and sweetbriar in her Garden Reach estate and therefore, Emily Eden allowed, “probably has many other good qualities.”³⁵ But Eden lamented in her diary: “We cannot achieve a cowslip and nobody has ever seen a daisy, but the yucca . . . with its thousands of white bells, grows along the sides of every road, and lovely it looks. Then there are roses all the year round; that is some compensation.”³⁶ Still, the “Sahib” who published an article in the Calcutta Review in 1849 insisted that “although the general opinion is exactly the opposite . . . there is no place in the world, where the flower-garden affords a more pleasing amusement” nor any city in the world with such facilities for gardening as in Calcutta. Whereas in England one has to wait for months to decide if something will grow, and then the verdict is usually negative, in Calcutta results are almost instantaneous. Even as he wrote he claimed to be looking out on a garden “which we venture to say contains as many fine flowers as could be found in any garden in England”—and at much less cost. With a nod to Roberts’s complaint, he acknowledged that one could not enjoy a walk in the garden during the heat of midday, but “where in the wide world is there a greater proportion of really enjoyable mornings and evenings than in this maligned climate of Bengal?” He cited a number of beauties, such as the poinsettia introduced by Lord Auckland (brother of Emily and Fanny Eden), bougainvillea, and other flowering shrubs. Poinsettias, indeed, were a reliable standby, along with mangoes, jackfruit, and other oriental trees, but these were hardly the flowers of home.³⁷

To feed the nostalgia for English flowers and vegetables, Calcutta importers offered a wide assortment of seeds. One advertisement announced that recently arrived stock was “warranted, having been tried in a garden near Calcutta, and all have succeeded.” It included the familiar staples of the English cottage garden: stock, carnation, marigold, larkspur, mignonette, honeysuckle, polyanthus, poppy, and Sweet William. Several decades later another firm advertised eleven sorts of European fruit trees and several thousand European annuals and perennials. While British officials were encouraged to collect Indian specimens for the mother country, the Horticultural Society of London and private nurseries contributed plants they deemed best suited to India in a reciprocal exchange.³⁸

Europeans in Calcutta had no monopoly on gardens. Amid the squalor and jumble of the Indian quarters of the city, some of the rajahs and wealthy merchants had homes every bit as grand (and as Grecian) as their British counterparts. Of the quarter inhabited by Armenians, Parsees, and Bengalis, Emma Roberts wrote that “the avenues which lead to these mansions are exceedingly narrow, but the premises themselves are often very extensive, the principal apartments looking out upon pretty gardens, decorated with that profusion of flowers which renders every part of Calcutta so blooming.”³⁹ Among the earliest and richest was the wily Punjabi Sikh Omichand, who amassed a fortune as middleman “between Country and Company” during the tenure of the equally wily Robert Clive.⁴⁰ The Chitpore nawab, Mahomed Reza Khan, the representative of the Great Mughal during the second half of the eighteenth century, boasted an estate whose buildings were sumptuously furnished and whose gardens were laid out in English style. “They not only cover a wide extent of ground but are furnished with all the beauties and perfumes of the vegetable kingdom.”⁴¹ Mughal influence was more evident in the garden of Babu Hurree Mohun Thakur, described by Bishop Heber as “laid out in formal parterres of roses intersected by straight walks, with some fine trees, and a chain of tanks, fountains and summer-houses.”⁴²

A later “pleasure mansion” belonged to the scion of the Tagore family, Babu Dwarkanath Tagore, the wealthy merchant prince whom we met in the last chapter. Tagore aggressively bestrode the Indian and English worlds of his time, the role that had caused his banishment from the family home because of ritual “impurity.” Undaunted, he created a lavish country villa at Jorasanko. In its heyday in the 1830s and early 1840s, Belgatchia was viewed as a second Government House, the grandest of the bhadralok palaces—the houses of the westernizing elite of Bengal. Tagore redesigned what had formerly been the country house of Lord Auckland with the aid of an English architect, “the gardens and pleasure-grounds being laid out in a style correspondent with the interior.” This meant a spacious lawn “adorned with a mosaic of flower beds, enlivened and refreshed by a beautiful sheet of water” that was spanned by four rustic bridges, with a fountain in the center, and, beyond this, an artificial lake. Sprinkled throughout the grounds were classical statues, Japanese temples, Chinese pagodas, and pillars topped with flames. Here Tagore received “entirely after the European fashion,” even serving meat (except for beef), although a Hindu. Renowned for his hospitality, he held lavish garden parties, complete with elephants on the lawn and boats on the tank, and generously lent the mansion to European brides and grooms as a honeymoon retreat. Emily Eden, a hard guest to please (especially where Indians were concerned), declared that Tagore was “the only man in the country who gives pleasant parties.” After his death in England in 1845, the family was forced to auction much of the estate to pay off debts, leaving the surrounding gardens sadly diminished.⁴³

Family tastes changed, too. Dwarkanath’s grandson, the Nobel Prize– winning poet Rabindranath Tagore, has left a charming description of the very different, very disheveled garden of his Calcutta childhood in the 1870s:

To call our inner garden a garden is to say a deal too much. Its properties consisted of a citron tree, a couple of plum trees of different varieties, and a row of cocoanut trees, In the centre was a paved circle the cracks of which various grasses and weeds had invaded and planted in them their victorious standards. Only those flowering plants which refused to die of neglect continued uncomplainingly to perform their respective duties without casting any aspersions on the gardener. . . . None the less I suspect that Adam’s garden of Eden could hardly have been better adorned than this one of ours; for he and his paradise were alike naked; they needed not to be furnished with material things.⁴⁴

No pretense of an English garden here (Fig. 17).⁴⁵

Perhaps the most unusual “occidentalist” creation of all was the Marble Palace, built in North Calcutta in 1835 by Rajendro Mullick, a wealthy Bengali merchant. A massive Palladian mansion complete with Greek columns and architrave, stuffed full of western paintings, statuary, and curios, it is set in the midst of a vast garden adorned with “a fountain . . . that would not be out of place in the Piazza Navona” and home to “pelicans and peacocks, mallard and teal.” On the surface the palace would seem to be an homage to all things European, but in its private apartments and religious observances it determinedly asserted Mullick’s devout attachment to the Hinduism of his forebears.⁴⁶ Remarkably, the Marble Palace still survives (and is lived in) in a quarter of Calcutta once known as the “thieves’ garden.”

The easygoing relations between Europeans and Indians in the eighteenth century gave way to greater social distance in the nineteenth. European visitors continued to extol the “enchanting beauty of European houses and gardens in Garden Reach” during the first half of the century. In 1857, however, the deposed king of Awadh (Oudh) and “his swarm of followers” (estimated, no doubt with some exaggeration, at 40,000) acquired the beautiful house and grounds of a former chief justice and re-created a microcosm of nawabi culture complete with a menagerie boasting tigers, venomous snakes, and a hookah-smoking chimpanzee. Many Europeans declared the suburb irreparably tarnished and fled to the colonnaded mansions of Chowringhee. Now out of vogue, Garden Reach was gradually overrun with railroad offices, agencies handling foreign coolie emigration, docks, mills, and the like.⁴⁷

Fig. 17. “The inner garden was my paradise”
 [Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences, 1917] 
  

There were other changes as well. By midcentury the railroad was putting its stamp on Calcutta as on all of India. A company town was created ex nihilo outside of the city, devoted solely to the needs of the East Indian Railway and inhabited by its servants. “Its general aspect,” according to Kipling, “is that of an English village, such a thing as enterprising stage-managers put on the theatres at home.” Laid out “with military precision” in the 1850s or early 1860s, Jamalpur’s houses were all of a single design: one- or two-story bungalows loyally situated along Prince’s Road, Queen’s Road, Victoria Road, Albert Road, and Steam Road. Each house had its “just share of garden,” a pounded brick path, and its “neat little wicket gate.” The gardens of the town were shaded with crotons, palms, mangoes, mellingtonias, teak, and bamboos, while brilliant color was supplied by poinsettias, bougainvillea, the so-called railway creeper (morning glory), and Bignonia venusta.⁴⁸

The Maidan

The glory of Calcutta was the maidan. A word of Persian origin, it referred to a large open space, in this case a sort of oversized—two miles by one mile— village common. Sir Edwin Arnold pronounced it “about the finest piece of open ground possessed by any capital.”⁴⁹ Earlier, Bishop Heber described it as a “vast square . . . grassed over, and divided by broad roads of ‘pucka’ or pounded brick with avenues of tall trees stocked with immense flights of crows.”⁵⁰ An 1860 watercolor painting of the southern corner of the maidan probably exaggerates its bucolic as well as its multicultural aspects, with a pair of cows reposing in the shade in the foreground next to a small Hindu temple, several native women with loads on their heads in the middle ground, and the spire of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background (see Pl. 3). A view from the Esplanade at the other end of the maidan a decade earlier is equally romantic: it shows a procession dominated by an elephant with howdah, a camel, and a bullock cart, also enclosed with a domed canopy. Only Indians are depicted, save for two British soldiers leaning against a fence, but Government House and the architecture of imperial Britain loom across the entire background of the print.

In spite of these Orientalist depictions, however, the maidan was quintessentially British space, “a necessity of English life,” as the journalist G. W. Steevens put it.⁵¹ Here small English children would ride out for exercise on beautifully bedecked ponies, accompanied by a retinue of ayahs, coachmen, umbrella bearers, watchmen, syces and other attendants for man and beast.⁵² Calcuttans were also constantly reminded of its military purpose as a parade ground: On New Year’s Day, for example, the entire garrison turned out for the Proclamation Parade.⁵³ With the fort and the river on one edge, the maidan was surrounded on the other three sides with majestic neoclassical buildings, “a line of shining white houses, elaborately porticoed and colonnaded.”⁵⁴ They formed both a barrier and a contrast to the Black Town that lay beyond to the east. It was all too English, however, to suit Lady Canning: “There is nothing Eastern or picturesque here. It is like the Regents Park— large and good houses, and . . . not a particle of Indian architecture.” The view from her quarters at Government House was “covered with short green turf, and quantities of small cattle, like the ugly part of Hyde Park.”⁵⁵

As the century progressed many of these stately mansions were replaced by stores, hotels, and boardinghouses in the ubiquitous red brick, a change that Steevens attributed to the fact that the British no longer settled for a lifetime in India but had become temporary sojourners, staying for five or ten years and then returning home for good, all this made possible by speedier means of transportation.⁵⁶ They had little incentive to match the extravagant but lovingly created garden houses of an earlier era. Steevens might also have added that the civil servants of a later period no longer had the same opportunity to amass huge fortunes as the nabobs of the East India Company.

Lord Dalhousie supervised the planting of trees on the maidan, but many of these were blown down in the great cyclone of 1864.⁵⁷ A photograph of the northern end from the 1870s shows only a scatter of trees, but many were subsequently replanted. Sir Evan Cotton, historian of Calcutta at the height of the Raj, declared that “there are few sights which can challenge comparison with the maidan when it is ablaze with the scarlet splendour of the blossoming gold mohur trees.”⁵⁸ While the tanks scattered around the maidan, from which much of the populace drew its water, were fringed with cool green foliage, there were no flower gardens on the maidan. These were left for the Eden Gardens at its northwestern corner: a large “green sward,” winding paths, a winding artificial lake with an arched stone bridge, “realistic artificial rocks cropping out of the grass . . . a genuine Burmese pagoda,” and “a profusion of flowering trees and shrubs.”⁵⁹ A photograph in Arnold’s account shows the tank surrounded by an abundance of vegetation, not easily identifiable except for the palm trees,⁶⁰ but it did sport the horticultural symbol of empire, a Victoria amazonica water lily.⁶¹ “A pleasanter place for a morning or evening stroll,” Cotton concluded with justifiable pride, “cannot be found.”⁶² With the “unending file of carriages” passing up and down to watch the sunset and the band playing in the bandstand, it is small wonder that Steevens felt that everything an Englishman could wish for was at hand. And just for reassurance, the maidan was crowned with statues of Hardinge, Lawrence, Mayo, Outram, Dufferin, and Roberts, proconsuls all.⁶³

Nevertheless, when Lord Curzon arrived in Calcutta as viceroy in 1899, he found the city sorely in need of uplift and set out with his customary energy, indeed single-mindedness, to remedy the situation. Roads and footpaths were improved and extended; lighting was installed in the business quarter. He was distressed that the maidan was so bare—“unbroken,” he later claimed, “by a single enclosure or even by a single tree.”⁶⁴ He had flowerbeds laid out at its northern end, still known as Curzon Gardens.⁶⁵ Dalhousie Square and its tank were renovated and replanted as well: “I laid out the ground afresh, squared the famous Lal Dighi, or Red Tank, surrounded it with a pillared balustrade and a beautiful garden, swept away the unsightly sheds and public conveniences, and converted it into an open-air resort for the public and a Valhalla for the Bengal Government.” Hither, too, he transferred a number of statues of imperial “forefathers.” As a last gesture, he tidied up the debrisridden area from Esplanade Row to the Ochterlony Monument, filling in the Dharamtolla Tank and converting the entire area into an “exquisite garden.” Some years later he noted sadly that “the site has not indeed relapsed into a wilderness, but my garden planning lost a good deal of the symmetry and completeness which I designed.”⁶⁶

Government House

All these projects Curzon saw as enhancing the majesty of Government House itself, the viceroy’s abode, and “rendering seemly its immediate surroundings and approaches (to which nobody in recent years seemed to have devoted even a passing thought), and thus enabling Calcutta, a city that aroused my warmest affection, to vindicate the proud title which destiny at that time seemed to have placed within her grasp, of Queen of the Eastern Seas.”⁶⁷ It was a curious coincidence that a century earlier Wellesley had adapted the design of Government House from plans of Curzon’s own family seat, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire. Curzon himself was an architect/landscape designer manqué. Or perhaps not really manqué since he was, as we will see, a compulsive renovator of gardens as well as buildings in India and in England.

Job Charnock had had to make do with a thatched hut. In subsequent years, as John Company’s fortunes improved, it housed its governors-general in more opulent quarters, although no more opulent than those of other wealthy merchants. This did not suit Richard Wellesley. Flush with the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799, he set about creating a palace to match his sense of his own importance and that of the empire he was determined to extend. In so doing he displayed the same “sublime indifference” to his London overlords as he did in his military adventures; taking advantage of the fact that communications from London required the better part of a year to make their way to Calcutta, he simply ignored cautions and rebukes from the Council of Directors.⁶⁸

His friend Lord Valentia, who attended the inaugural ceremonies of the new mansion in 1803, defended it against charges of “Asiatic pomp”:⁶⁹

India is a country of splendor, of extravagance, and of outward appearances: that the Head of a mighty Empire ought to conform himself to the prejudices of the country over which he rules; and that the British, in particular, ought to emulate the splendid work of the Princes of the House of Timour [i.e., the Mughals], lest it be supposed that we merit the reproach which our great rivals, the French, have ever cast upon us, of being altogether influenced by a sordid, mercantile spirit. In short, I wish India to be governed from a palace, not from a counting house; with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo.⁷⁰

Bishop Heber’s judgment was more succinct. “Government House,” he declared, “is, to say the least of it, a more showy palace than London has to produce.”⁷¹ Grand it might be, and yet Government House had its awkward aspects. At midcentury, there were still no WCs in all of Calcutta, including Government House.⁷²

There was so little accommodation for guests in the mansion that at Christmastime, when they arrived in great numbers, they had to stay in tents on the lawn. Lord Lytton complained that it was full of cockroaches the size of elephants. Then there was the matter of the kitchen: it was “somewhere in Calcutta,” Lady Dufferin commented, “but not in this house.”⁷³ In fact it was some two hundred yards distant, in the squalid streets to the north, so that every dish had to be carried in green wooden boxes, rather like a sedan chair, with “no means of keeping the soufflés from collapsing on the way.”⁷⁴ This was not remedied until the early twentieth century.

But what is most striking about early views of the new Government House is how barren it looks (see Pl. 4). An engraving accompanying Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in India of 1809–11 confirms this: No trees, no gardens, no leafy paths in the twenty-six acres of grounds.⁷⁵ Were they afraid the tigers, newly removed from the maidan, might again take up residence if the foliage were too inviting? For several decades the only decoration seems to have been provided by guns commemorating notable imperial campaigns, beginning with the victory over Tipu Sultan at Srirangapatnam. Twenty years later Lord Hastings imported “fine sparkling gravel” all the way from Bayswater to mark the walks of the house. But the building itself was so exposed—“like a huge wedding cake on a bare table cloth”—that a viewer on the maidan could see clearly every window and doorway in the southern facade.⁷⁶ During the years of the great uprising, 1857 and 1858, it was said that the lonely figure of Lord Canning might be seen through the balustrade, pacing the (Bayswater) gravel paths, the only exercise he allowed himself during those troubled months.⁷⁷ The openness of the grounds did lend themselves to croquet. Sir John Lawrence, viceroy in the mid-1860s, was so fond of the game that he would often continue to play by lamplight after the short Indian twilight, to the delight of spectators massed in the street beyond the paling.⁷⁸

There were sporadic attempts at a garden before midcentury. Lady Amherst made a start in the 1820s, creating a “magnificent garden round the house.”⁷⁹ Her daughter Sarah Elizabeth described it in a letter to her brother. On the west side was a flower garden, one part of which “resembles the parterre before the conservatory at Oakly Park [the family home in England]. This is on Mama’s side [the governor and his wife inhabited opposite wings of Government House] and the beds are full of beautiful shrubs and flowers and creepers raised on bamboo baskets. On Papa’s side there are larger flowering shrubs dotted about on the grass, and in front [on the north side of the building] large clumps. . . . On the south side of the house, the circle only is planted and the large field of grass left untouched, and beyond it we look over a fine plain of grass [the maidan] enlivened with numerous flocks of cattle.” An artist of some skill, Sarah made several drawings of the house. One shows the circle of flowers set rather starkly in the open space in front of the south portico (Fig. 18). This, Sarah explained, was the “private side of the house,” open only to the privileged few. In the center was a beautiful marble basin. It had been brought hither from Shah Jahan’s imperial bath in Agra in 1825 with the intention of making a fountain, but the water of the Hughli proved too muddy and the problems of raising it from the river too intractable; instead the Amhersts had “two arches of iron made to spring from the angles and meet at the top and with creepers planted at the foot it has a very pretty effect.” Another drawing shows the majestic staircase on the north side used for formal arrivals and departures, and indicates the “clumps” referred to in the letter as well as a regular pattern of circular flowerbeds.⁸⁰

Fig. 18. Lady Sarah Elizabeth Amherst,
the south front of Government House, Calcutta. Pen and ink
 [The British Library Board, WD 3904] 
  

Unfortunately, Lady Bentinck, who succeeded Lady Amherst as chatelaine of Government House, considered flowers “very unwholesome” and saw to it that everything was immediately uprooted. Emily Eden in her turn embarked on a restoration, setting out a garden “close by the house,” in an area where there were no flowers.⁸¹ As depicted in a lithograph made in 1847, a few years after Eden left Calcutta, these gardens consisted of an ornate hourglass pattern of flowers or shrubs, with a central walk leading into a rectangular garden (Fig. 19). Unfortunately, Eden does not say what she planted, and the garden seems to have disappeared by the time Charlotte Canning arrived in 1856. Nevertheless, Lady Canning was enraptured to find a little gem of a garden right under her window at Government House. An accomplished botanist and artist in her own right, she described it in some detail in a letter home: “By this enormous house it looks small and like a London square. The flowers, however, are most beautiful, and there is no smoke to spoil them. Imagine Cape jessamine as high as shrubbery laurels and covered with flowers, scarlet ixoras the same. The roses are very lovely and of a kind I never saw before—very sweet for a short time, and in clusters of six or seven on a branch. Then there are scarlet euphorbias, pancratiums, white bedechium, and scarlet amaryllis, many sorts of Jessamine and palms, oleanders, double hibiscus, &c.”⁸²

An engraving made to accompany the published volume of her letters and journals shows the south facade of the house with an extensive lawn, bordered with some of the plants she lists along a path (presumably the one her husband was to pace a year later), but still few trees except for palms (Fig. 20). Eventually two of these were planted on either side of the majestic staircase on the north side of the building, with ivy circling their trunks—“England and India intertwining.”⁸³ The staircase was used only for ceremonial occasions (durbars); since the palms furnished no shade at all, the “nobles of Hindostan [who] come in all their barbaric pomp to pay their respects at the Viceregal Court” were still left to wilt as they toiled up the “noble flights of steps” in the blazing heat of Calcutta, just as they were in Emma Roberts’s day.⁸⁴

  
Fig. 19. Frederick Fiebig, Government House, View of Calcutta, 1847
 [The British Library Board, APAC P65-70] 

Fig. 20. Government House, Calcutta
 [From Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives, 1893] 
  

The garden was seriously expanded in the 1870s and 1880s under the “fostering care” of vicereines Lady Mayo and Lady Lytton.⁸⁵ By the turn of the century Government House was completely screened off from the maidan; only the dome and the parapet were visible through the “umbrageous garden.” The foliage became so rapacious that it had to be cut away, lest it swallow up the sculpted lions surmounting the gateways. Visitors remarked on the “splendid clusters of trees” and “flowery parterres.” There were great lawns of doob grass, intersected by “leafy walks and winding ponds.” The garden itself was enclosed by a dense belt of bamboos, palms, and other tropical flora, so dense, in fact, that for a time it was home to a colony of thirty to forty malis (gardeners) living in mat huts and entirely hidden from view.⁸⁶

Once a year the grounds were thrown open for the State Garden Party, to which some fifteen hundred to two thousand of the cream of Calcutta society were invited, both European and Indian. The tea party was not only an English institution, it was also, as Percival Spear has explained, the rare occasion that neatly circumvented the dietary obstacles to social interaction between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.⁸⁷ To add to the beauty of the scene, clouds of green parakeets erupted from the trees and roosted on the cornices of the mansion. Still, Curzon admitted that it was, “like all garden parties, a somewhat depressing function.” When it was moved to the evening, it was more exciting: “At that hour great flying foxes or bats used to lurch from tree to tree . . . ; toward midnight jackals emerged from the drains and howled in the shrubbery, and stinking civet cats would clamber up the pillars or pipes to the roof of Government House. There they liked to linger, sometimes descending at night and even entering the bedrooms on the Southern side, in surreptitious search of food or drink.”⁸⁸ The greater seclusion of the garden guaranteed greater privacy for the human inhabitants of Government House as well, who could wander or play croquet now free from the gaze of strangers.

Enthralled by the rich history of Calcutta, Curzon could not resist buying Hastings House on behalf of the Indian government. Warren Hastings built it about the time of his marriage to Marian Imhoff in 1777, giving up Belvedere, his earlier estate in Alipur. With its huge shady jackfruit tree and receding parkland, it forms the idyllic background for Johann Zoffany’s “conversation piece” painting of the governor-general and his wife (Fig. 21). This was the house that Hastings tried to replicate on the banks of the Thames at Daylesford, where he “laid out the grounds after the fashion of an Indian country seat,” extravagantly planting mangoes from Bengal along with Lombardy poplars, acacia, tamarisk, and tulip trees. Whether the estate was in the end more Indian or more English seems to have depended on the eye of the beholder.⁸⁹

By the time of Curzon’s arrival Hastings House was “bedraggled and unkempt” but “alive with memories,” at least to one of his romantic sensibilities. The excuse for the purchase was that a proper venue was sorely needed to entertain visiting Indian princes when they came to the capital. While the princes received touring viceroys “with truly regal splendour,” when they returned the visit, they were “compelled to put up in mediocre hotels where they were mercilessly fleeced.” Hastings House proved the ideal remedy to this humiliating situation. It also provided Curzon with ample opportunity to indulge his architectural and landscaping passions: “I took an immense amount of trouble about the place, laying out and planting the gardens, weeding and mowing the lawns, cleaning the tank, and entirely refurnishing the house. I converted one wing into a fine durbar room for the exchange of the obligatory visits with the Princes, I provided a billiard room for those who had modern tastes (a not inconsiderable number), and I arranged the bedrooms and bathrooms in suitable manner upstairs.” Above the portico he affixed a tablet:

Fig. 21. Johann Zoffany, Warren Hastings and Mrs. Hastings, c. 1784–86
 [Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta] 
  

THIS HOUSE KNOWN AS HASTINGS HOUSE

ORIGINALLY THE COUNTRY SEAT OF

WARREN HASTINGS

FIRST GOVERNOR GENERAL OF FORT WILLIAM IN BENGAL (1774–1785)

WAS BOUGHT AS A GUESTHOUSE FOR GOVERNMENT BY

LORD CURZON

VICEROY AND GOVERNOR GENERAL OF INDIA IN 1901

The house functioned perfectly, hosting a roster of maharajas and other worthies until “in an evil hour” the government of India was moved to Delhi in 1912.⁹⁰

Barrackpore

Curzon himself pointed out the irony embedded in the splendor of Calcutta’s Government House. It has always been, he noted, “a sort of nomad camp, albeit invested with the dignity and stability of a permanent habitation. For at least seven and frequently eight months of each year it remained . . . unoccupied and closed. . . . Then suddenly in the month of December it leaped into life, and a feverish activity converted it into the place of residence and daily work of hundreds of human beings,” to say nothing of the scene of gala entertainments and official pomp.⁹¹ The seven or eight months when it remained unoccupied were those in which the heat and stench of Calcutta were unbearable, and the government moved upriver to Barrackpore and, soon after mid-century, to Simla. Calcutta’s gentry followed suit, shifting their own retreats from the older suburbs to Barrackpore and its environs.

East India Company correspondence refers to a series of “garden houses” providing an escape from the “pestilential smells and abominable unhealthiness” of an already congested Calcutta before Lord Wellesley settled on the site upriver from Calcutta, farther from the city than Garden Reach or Alipur and with fresher air and clearer water. Barrackpore had begun as a British cantonment in 1775. Gradually it acquired bungalows and more elaborate buildings to house senior officers. In 1801 Wellesley appropriated the residence hitherto reserved for the commander-in-chief of the forces. His intention was to tear it down and replace it with a splendid palace in a beautifully landscaped park, a rural twin for his newly erected Government House in the city. Demolition was complete and rebuilding under way when he was recalled by his irate employers; these extravagances were the final straw. Wellesley’s successors were thus faced with an empty shell and a pile of construction materials.⁹²

Even the shell had its admirers, thanks to the bosky, riverain setting. Stepping ashore on a moonlit night in 1810, Maria Graham was seized by an excess of Romantic enthusiasm: “Its unfinished arches showed by the moonlight like an ancient ruin, and completed the beauty of the scenery.” Something about the scenery brought to mind the banks of the Thames—“the same verdure, the same rich foliage, the same majestic body of water.” Grandly trampling on Alexander Pope’s injunction to “consult the Genius of the Place in all,” Wellesley had attacked the flat muddy jungle of the riverbank and transformed it into a park that any English nobleman would have envied. Marshes were drained, earth mounded up to form hillocks—“mountains . . . 15 or 20 feet above the valleys”—and undulating lawns, tanks dug and rimmed with ornaments, bridges and roadways laid out, all the while preserving the magnificent shade trees of the site. The governor-general was pleasantly surprised to find that as convict labor became more and more skilled, it could replace day laborers, a rare nod to economy. Fortunately for those who came after, the park was largely finished before he was recalled. “The grounds around this retreat,” wrote a contemporary of Graham, “are laid out with infinite taste in imitation of our parks in England, and produce a splendid effect on the eye.” To be sure, the trees “through whose branches the moon threw her flickering beams on the river” were not the stately oaks and elms, larches and beeches of an English country home but tamarinds, peepals, mangoes, acacias, and coconut palms.⁹³

Eventually Wellesley’s half-built palace was pulled down and a new one constructed. Although slightly elevated so that it commanded a view more than six miles down the river, it was rather modest by the standards of the day, scarcely able to accommodate the governor-general and his family. This suited Emily Eden very well, since it meant that guests were not underfoot but were housed in thatched bungalows arranged within the park.⁹⁴ Gradually, however, the house was expanded and other attractions added to the grounds: an artificial lake at the north front, graced by an Arcadian bridge (see Pl. 5), an aviary and menagerie, and an elephant stud; a Temple of Fame and Gothic ruin (belated nods to English landscape fashion); and later tennis courts and a golf course. For more than a century the estate was the retreat where the governor-general “could throw off some of the restraints, if few of the cares of State, and where his wife or himself could find in the delights of the garden or in the amusements of the menagerie, the elephant, and the links, some relief from the ceaseless persecution of official routine.” True, the dispatch boxes followed him, and for many months of the year Barrackpore was the seat of government itself. Nevertheless, as Lord Minto so pithily put it: “Barrackpore takes the sting out of India.”⁹⁵

But the chief glory of Barrackpore was the park (Fig. 22). It covered some three hundred acres, with a circumference of about three miles. Visitors and officials alike were unanimous in their praise of its “enchanted glades.” Although almost everything about it was artificial, most concurred with Lady Amherst that it was so well done as to appear “perfectly natural.”⁹⁶ Capability Brown would have approved. Among the many descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, Emma Robert’s is the most complete. Since she counted the trip to Barrackpore from Calcutta “enchanting for those who delight in forest-scenery,” let us join her on her way from the capital.

Fig. 22. Park at Barrackpoor
 [From Bishop Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, 1828] 
  

The journey could be made by boat, but then one was at the mercy of the tides. Roberts therefore came by land, taking advantage of the road staked out by Wellesley himself, “one of the finest roads in the world, very broad, kept in excellent repair, and shaded, to the great delight and comfort of the various traversers, by an avenue of trees.” Was Wellesley thinking of his Hindu and Mughal predecessors who lined the thoroughfares of their empire with ranks of shade trees? The road was always busy, with “coolies and hurkaras [messengers] of every description journeying to and fro at all hours of the day,” although the English tended to avoid the midday sun (pace Noel Coward). “A dense jungle appears to close in on either side. Native huts, of the wildest and simplest construction, meet the eye in the most picturesque situations, many with scarcely any roof excepting that afforded by the overhanging branches of trees, which never lose their leafy mantles.”

Once arrived at Barrackpore, only the house of the governor-general was immediately visible, thanks to its “commanding situation.” The other buildings were

embosomed in trees . . . and only peep out between the branches of luxuriant groves. The country all round is wooded to excess, affording a most agreeable shade, and offering specimens of floral magnificence not to be surpassed in any part of the world. The magnolia attains to a gigantic size, and fills the air with perfume from its silvery vases; other forest-trees bear blossoms of equal beauty; the richly-wreathed pink acacia, and numerous tribes, adorned with garlands of deep crimson and bright yellow abound; and although, with the exception of the park, which has been raised into sweeping undulations by artificial means, the cantonments and their vicinity present a flat surface, the combinations of wood, water, and green sward, in numberless vistas, nooks, and small open spaces, yield scenes of tranquil beauty, which eyes however cold can scarcely contemplate unmoved.

However much Wellesley’s extravagance may have alarmed his superiors, the park he created, Roberts declared, “is justly considered one of the finest specimens of dressed and ornamented nature which taste has ever produced . . . and the gardens attached to [the mansion] are unrivalled both in beauty and stateliness, combining the grandeur of Asiatic proportions with the picturesqueness of European design.”

Roberts goes on to describe the graveled paths wide enough for carriages that wind through the brilliant flowerbeds and shrubberies, “sometimes skirting along high walls of creeping plants trained against lofty trees, at others overlooking large tanks so completely covered with pink blossoms of the lotus, as to conceal the element in which this splendid aquatic plant delights.” Of course she was enraptured with the elephants seen “pacing along the flowery labyrinths, to European eyes strange guests in a private garden.” She does not remark on the menagerie for the simple reason that it had been dismantled by the economy-minded Lord Bentinck, but she does note the abundance of “bright-winged” parrots, which, alas, were often the targets of parrot-shooting, a sport to which some of the great men of the presidency were addicted.⁹⁷

To the beauty of Barrackpore was added the view across the river to the Danish settlement of Serampore. Lord Wellesley had endowed its church with a steeple, even though it represented an alien creed (Baptist), because, he is supposed to have explained, “nothing was wanting to Barrackpore Park but the distant view of a steeple.”⁹⁸ The Baptist missionary, William Carey, created a garden in Serampore that was the envy of many visitors, thanks to his botanical connections. Ever eager for English plants, he was forever wheedling friends at home, suggesting that they pay young boys a trifling amount to gather seeds of “cowslips, violets, daisies, crowfoots, etc.” and send them along with “a few snowdrops, crocuses, etc., and other trifles.” Even common weeds, and nettles and thistles, would be welcome, he added wistfully, as long as they were English.⁹⁹

Serampore was much more open than Barrackpore, with a broad esplanade running along the river, so that the mansions lining it—“Serampore’s proud palaces” in Roberts’s rhapsodic prose—were “mirrored on the glassy surface of the stream.” For all its handsome architecture (she considered it “the best-built and best-kept European settlement in India”) and tidy streets, cleaned and weeded by convict labor, the English viewed the town with some condescension: it was a sanctuary both for those fleeing Calcutta creditors and for others (possibly the same people) contracting clandestine marriages or seeking quickie divorces (“the Gretna Green of Bengal,” according to Roberts). Somewhat paradoxically, Roberts considered it a pretty dull place, its missionary and merchant inhabitants “indispose[d] to gaiety,” with only their daily promenades for amusement.¹⁰⁰

Every governor-general—or more often his wife or sisters—added to or subtracted from the park and gardens of Barrackpore. In a misguided effort to nurture plants from home in a hostile clime, Lady Hastings, wife of Wellesley’s immediate successor, had a large greenhouse constructed on the site of his erstwhile palace. Intended to shut out the heat, it no doubt had the opposite effect.¹⁰¹ As might be expected from her comments apropos of William Carey’s misguided passion for English flowers quoted in the preceding chapter, Lady Amherst reveled in the plethora of exotic plants at Barrackpore. Her delight was to stroll through the garden with Nathaniel Wallich, head of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, as her guide: “I find new flowers, the names, properties, and culture of which I know nothing till Dr. Wallich inform’d me upon all these points. His knowledge of Botany and Horticulture is only to be equall’d by his extraordinary retentive memory.”¹⁰²

Where Lord Bentinck did away with the menagerie, Lord Auckland and his sisters, Fanny and Emily Eden, restored it and added an aviary. They took great pleasure in their almost daily elephant rides about the grounds: “There is something dreamy and odd in these rides when the evening grows dark. There is a mosque and a ghaut [ghat: stone steps leading to the water] at the end of our park where they were burning a body tonight; and there were bats, as big as crows, flying over our heads.” More a gardener than a botanist (unlike Lady Amherst), Emily planted a secluded flower garden for the familiar English flowers that reminded her of home, but she also enriched Barrackpore with quantities of plants provided by Wallich.¹⁰³ With her brother and sister, she converted one of the thatched bungalows to a plant and seed house. Lord Auckland, however, could be something of an ogre. Harriet Tytler, whose father was stationed at the cantonment, remembers taking walks in the park with him when she was a child: “With my passion for flowers . . . I could never resist gathering one or two. Lord Auckland, the governor-general in those days, was a very disagreeable, austere old bachelor. The servants used to terrify me by saying, ‘There comes the Lord Sahib, if he knows you have been gathering his flowers, he will assuredly put you into prison.’” She also remembers that the first strawberry plants to be grown in India were to be found in the Barrackpore gardens about 1836: “My father and mother . . . went to see these wonders, and I was allowed to accompany them”—apparently the berries were reserved for Lord Auckland’s consumption, but Harriet bravely sneaked a couple when no one was looking. Nasturtiums were another novelty in the India of the 1830s.¹⁰⁴

Lady Canning’s “Jungle”

If Government House reached its self-conscious apogee under Lord Curzon, Barrackpore bloomed most splendidly under the tender ministrations of Lady Canning almost a half-century earlier. Charlotte Canning was married, not too happily, to the governor-general (later viceroy) who had the misfortune of serving during the time of the Uprising of 1857. Before her marriage she had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. Surviving are many letters and journals destined for her beloved family as well as letters to the queen, along with a treasure trove of drawings, watercolors, and photographs (she was one of the earliest photographers in India). To the royal children she sent a steady stream of natural history specimens, while the queen, enamored of India and Indians (but too fearful of snakes and insects to travel hither), pressed her for details of the life around her.

Lady Canning’s first visit to Barrackpore a few weeks after her arrival in Calcutta in 1856 was disappointing. The beautiful trees that bordered the road—the trees that had so delighted Emma Roberts—struck her as “poisonously green,” offering “a notion of unwholesome damp.” At last the party turned off “into the most English well-kept green park, of good rounded trees, I ever saw.” But instead of pleasing her, it had the opposite effect. Just as she had compared the maidan in Calcutta to Regent’s Park, so the grounds at Barrackpore were “too English for me to appreciate properly, being quite a matter-of-course-looking place like Sion [Syon, the Duke of northumberland’s estate across the Thames from Kew], or any villa or park anywhere, short grass well-mown and smelling of hay, and not a cocoa-nut in sight.” Bishop Heber had fancied himself on the banks of the Thames instead of the Ganges, save for the fact that he was exploring Barrackpore on the back of an elephant, but this was hardly what Canning wanted from India. Then there was Barrackpore House. Like her predecessors, she was appalled by the shabbiness of its furnishings, so appalled that she had to resort to French to describe the “délabré villa,” “this exceedingly ill monté house; the dinner, with its cotton tablecloth and Bohemian glass and candlesticks, looks exactly like a table-d’hôte.” There were even snakes in the servants’ rooms below stairs. For her the elephants at least offered some solace: “Not quite a pleasure, but I was glad to try the experiment.” Riding on these docile behemoths she found she could look deep into the trees, right on “a level with their flowers.”¹⁰⁵

Canning immediately set out to remedy the deficiencies of both house and park. She had several models in mind. One was Parel, the residence of the governor-general of Bombay Presidency, Lord Elphinstone, which had so charmed her on first setting foot in India with the “beauty of the tropical vegetation” (see Pl. 6). Parel had been a Jesuit seminary during the brief period the Portuguese occupied the islands that became Bombay. When the territory passed into English hands as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, the seminary was converted into a lovely villa. Admirably adapted to the climate, it had verandahs running around all the rooms. From her window, Charlotte could look out on “groves and groves of cocoa and palm overtopping round-headed trees; then burnt-up ground [it was the dry season]; mango-trees in flower exactly like Spanish chestnuts; tamarinds in the style of acacias, but much thicker; peepal-trees, higher a good deal than the rest, with trembling leaves—very green, and pinkish stems, like white poplar; a teak tree, with large leaves and sort of bunches of berries.” She added, “The flowers are lovely—bougainvillia, oleander, jessamine, poinsettia, and there are old cypresses entirely covered with flame-coloured bignonia.” On the table were strange fruits and strange flowers. After Parel, Barrackpore was a letdown but at the same time a challenge: “All my efforts,” she wrote to a friend, “are to try and reach the model of ‘Elphy’s’ establishment, but I hardly hope to succeed.” Some months later, 450 yards of chintz, pictures on the walls, an array of armchairs and small tables, and “flower-pots in numbers” had so improved the house that it could now hold its own with Parel, and she was ready to invite Elphy himself.¹⁰⁶

Her plans for the garden and park were more ambitious and took much longer to realize. It was fortunate, she acknowledged, that the work was well underway before the troubles broke out: “Had it not been ordered in our peaceful prosperous days, it would not have a chance now.” Thanks to her sketches and paintings and the accounts in her letters, we can conjure up the Eden she created on the banks of the Hughli. Her original inspiration may have been Highcliffe, her family home overlooking Christchurch Bay atop a bluff on the Hampshire coast. The castle was built in the 1830s in the “Romantic and Picturesque style of architecture”—and with a romantic and picturesque view out over its landscaped gardens to the Needles and the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. What Barrackpore lacked in dramatic location, she made up for with her own artistic eye, beginning with the terrace overlooking the river. The terrace walk along the riverbank needed to be relandscaped both to position it more properly in relation to the house and to provide an airy seat at the water’s edge—“a stone bench where I can go and sit and breathe fresh air in the evening.” By early September 1858, she could report that the new terrace “is now of an excellent shape, exactly the right line, and it fully satisfies me as to giving a straightening effect to the crooked view, much as the Highcliffe terrace has down,” adding, “Only the foundation and piers of the balustrade are finished, but it looks beautiful” (see Pl. 7).¹⁰⁷

The water itself offered an ever-changing vista. High tides covered the low ground between the walk and the river, an area about fifty yards wide. “When the river is over this, the view is beautiful. It is a sort of lake and covered with picturesque native boats.”¹⁰⁸ Sometimes, indeed, the drama of life and death played out along the river was almost more than she could bear: the religious festivals with their often fearsome deities and the piles of wood stacked along the ghat, ready to be weighed and sold for burning the bodies of the dead— hardly the scenes on view in Christchurch Bay.

Gradually other improvements took shape. She opened up an enormous banyan tree that was hidden by shrubs and it became a favorite retreat: “I can sit out nearly all day under the great Banyan and its creepers” (see Pl. 8). Her overall plan was to simplify patterns and widen walks in the garden. A new raised road led to the boat landing, and “a great many groups of plants with brilliant flowers” were set out near the ponds and tanks. A clipped evergreen hedge four feet high contrasted with a bamboo fence covered with convolvus—“when in flower, it will be like a blue wall.” The soil was so improved that “the starved look of many plants is at an end.” There were roses in abundance and “great sweet pancratiums.”¹⁰⁹

While she cleared excess trees and shrubs to open up new vistas and made new walks about the park, Lady Canning had come to love Barrackpore in all its tropical glory—the “labyrinth of jungly lanes—so beautiful and green.” Indeed, “jungly” becomes a refrain in her letters home: referring to the “jungly groves,” she writes, “I can never describe the beauty of these—like Portlaw Wood, only of mango, bamboo, cocoanut, plantains, arums, &c., paths branching off in all directions, little huts, now and then small temples, ruined gardens; great sameness perhaps, but such beauty, and great variety of trees and creepers, tanks and ponds everywhere amongst all sorts of gardens and groves.” In another letter she is in awe of “the beauty of the Bougainvillias, wreaths of lilac as brilliant as a lilac flame, a colour that seems full of lights, and that no paint or dye could imitate.” The park was at its greenest during the monsoons, when she could fill the rooms with a “luxe of flowers,” something few visitors seemed to appreciate but which she acknowledged to be “a craze of mine.” Other flowers reached their peak in the cold season from November to February: heliotropes, mignonette, and “what are called English flowers.”¹¹⁰ The pools were covered with water lilies, smaller than their English cousins. In fact large masses of flowers—camelias, peonies, and roses—were less common than in England. But, as Charlotte reminded her correspondents, many of the plants she described they would know only from the Palm House at Kew or from hothouses. What English gardeners strove to replicate in the “stovehouses” that had become such status symbols in the first half of the nineteenth century, Lady Canning had all about her, and it delighted her more and more with each visit to Barrackpore.

Alas, these visits were few and far between. Lord Canning was a driven man and for months on end found the pressures of work too heavy to allow an escape to Barrackpore, close as it was. He hardly fit Curzon’s description of the governor-general who spent seven or eight months of the hot season there, to say nothing of long weekends at other seasons. With the outbreak of mutiny in the spring of 1857, the pressures increased a hundredfold. Charlotte, herself a very astute reporter of events as they unfolded, felt obligated to stay with him, for not only was he faced with unending decisions and anxieties, he was also under incessant attack in India and in England, at first for being too lenient—“Clemency” Canning—and then for being too harsh. Fortunately for both Cannings, they enjoyed the unswerving support of the queen. Finally in April 1859, after peace had finally been restored, Lord Canning returned to Barrackpore. It was his first visit in more than two years, Charlotte noted, but at least he could see all that she had accomplished: “my beautiful terrace, which is now finished and full of flowers, and the most wonderful improvement to the place.”¹¹¹ Even the end of the uprising did not bring much leisure. Lord Canning undertook an ambitious round of tours to reestablish confidence in the government and reaffirm the loyalty of local rulers to the man who was now viceroy of India.

Charlotte accompanied her husband on some of these tours, as well as making several long trips on her own. They provided an opportunity to see more of the country, but also to pursue her natural history interests. At Barrackpore she would often gather plants on her morning and evening rides about the park and bring them in to sketch or paint, and she did the same on her travels. Her cousin Minnie joined her on a trip through southern India that included the Nilgiri Hills, a botanist’s paradise. “Char’s genuine love of plants and flowers makes every step in this country of interest to her.”¹¹² As she scrambled up and down the steep hills, Minnie at first tried to keep up with her but soon gave up the effort. “After a rainy middle of the day,” Charlotte wrote in her journal,

we went out, carrying a great tin box, to search for ferns. A slippery path took us down a woody glen, where we gathered eight varieties, and went on & on & down & down by zigzags into another glen, to a beautiful walk I had never seen before. The larger stream was fuller of water and of great beauty. By the side I saw the Hedychium growing wild, but rather of a creamy white variety, and a pretty Begonia on a great rock, for once within reach. . . . I never saw more gorgeous foliage, and a tangle of creepers, sometimes like curtains of great green leaves looped up with coils of ropes, finding the trees together, unlike anything in Europe. A few great black monkeys, jumping from branch to branch, relieve these spots delightfully. The stems of the trees are nearly all white, and a great many have bright pink or red young shoots or leaves.¹¹³

To this day one of her favorite spots for sketching, on the edge of a steep bluff overlooking a gorge cutting through the escarpment, is known as “Lady Canning’s Seat.”

She sent the ferns home to her mother, along with portfolios of sketches of flowers from time to time. When one box arrived, her mother was ecstatic: “C’était à se mettre à genoux devant! The glorious flowers surpass any we have yet beheld, and the sketches took us to the Hills, and along the Ganges.”¹¹⁴ Fortunately these had escaped the fire that broke out in camp near Meerut when she was touring with the viceregal entourage and that damaged or destroyed some of her journals. Perhaps out of politesse, perhaps out of genuine enthusiasm, John Ruskin admired her flower paintings, praising especially the subtle use of color in her depictions of trumpet flowers, bougainvillea, and poinsettia.¹¹⁵

Since her arrival in India, Charlotte had yearned to visit the Himalayas, a fascination that only intensified after her meetings with Dr. Thomas Thomson, superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden from 1855 to 1861. Thomson had spent more than a decade botanizing in the western and eastern portions of the range. With him she could share her passion for plants and flowers. He happily obliged with information and with plants for her gardens. As the long-postponed return to England approached, she determined to make the trek to Darjeeling. She had cared little for the hill station of Simla; why, she thought, should Europeans not prefer Darjeeling, which was so much closer to Calcutta? By rights this ought to be the “Sanatorium of Calcutta,” a bitterly ironic comment, as it turned out. ¹¹⁶

On her last visit to Barrackpore before departing, she sorted and labeled her scrapbooks. “I have been very busy,” she wrote her aunt, “and it is all rather tidily done now—two volumes and a portfolio, a few more flowers, and a great bundle of journal of the last march.” She sent a gardener on ahead “to help me bring back all sorts of treasures in the way of orchids and seeds, &c.,” and predicted, “It will in all ways be a great holiday, and very wholesome.” Some of these plants she looked forward to bringing to her new home in England, fancying that she might rival her friend Viscount Sydney “in garden and flowers.”¹¹⁷

Darjeeling may have been far closer to Calcutta than Simla—350 miles rather than a thousand-plus—but it was still a “tedious journey,” as she wrote Queen Victoria. “After crossing the Ganges and above 200 miles of railway there is still at least 3 nights traveling in the most disagreeable of all conveyances—a palanquin!” Nevertheless, she was looking forward to the trip and to being in a “spot with the highest mountains in the world immediately before one in full view.” In fact, she was able to ride up the last stretch of the mountain on her white pony. Darjeeling did not disappoint. From time to time she was rewarded with glimpses of the sun’s rays striking the loftiest peaks, and her excursions through the wooded hills were sheer delight: “The forests never cease & give me an idea of damp as I never saw, but then it is such wonderful luxuriance—quite unlike all else tho’ perhaps I saw forests as fine before, yet never anything like this extent of them.”¹¹⁸

Her letters to her husband are an antiphony, alternating pleasure in the beauty of Darjeeling with excited anticipation of home and plans for the new house and garden offered them by a grateful queen. From her earliest days in Calcutta, Charlotte had heard about the pestilential jungle at the foot of the hills, the terai, which later gave its name to a felt sunhat stocked by colonial outfitters. Having survived more than five stress-filled years in India, however, she no doubt thought she would surmount this last peril and had the palanquin set down so that she could make one last sketch of the mountains. Whether it was an illness acquired while still in the Himalayas or fever picked up in the jungle, she was very sick when she reached Calcutta and died not long after. “India,” Mary Curzon would observe, “slowly but surely murders women.”¹¹⁹ She may have had Lady Canning in mind; she surely had herself.

Charlotte Canning was buried, fittingly, in a corner of Barrackpore that she had always thought of as her garden. “It is a beautiful spot,” Lord Canning wrote Queen Victoria, “looking upon that reach of the grand river which she was so fond of drawing, shaded from the glare of the sun by high trees, and amongst the bright shrubs and flowers in which she had so much pleasure.”¹²⁰ Leaving Barrackpore’s gardens, she had confessed, would be her only regret on parting from India; now she would never leave it. Lord Canning returned to England, a broken man. He died a few months later. The monument, “in the sweetest nook of the vice-regal gardens,” continued to be strewn with flowers for years afterward.¹²¹

After Lady Canning, succeeding residents of Barrackpore enjoyed the giant banyan tree as an exotic place to pass the time, but they and their visitors chose to see the park once again through English-tinted glasses. Lady Lytton loved Barrackpore precisely because “the park is like England and the river like the Thames at Mortlake.”¹²² For Lady Dufferin it conjured up Cliveden. Nevertheless, it was she who most shared Charlotte Canning’s love of the park and its gardens. “We fell in love with Barrackpore on the spot,” she wrote after her first visit in 1884. She found the gardens “quite perfect,” marveling at the “roses in greatest profusion . . . some of them quite enormous; the large blue convolvus climbs all over along a low wall, which surrounds a little garden full of heliotrope and other sweet flowers, and where a little fountain plays in a marble basin; there are bushes of red and purple blossom and a lovely orange creeper covers the balcony near which I write.”¹²³ The Dufferins’ special treat was breakfast under Charlotte’s banyan tree.

At the turn of the century Lady Curzon also took pleasure in sitting peacefully under the banyan, still festooned as in Lady Canning’s day with orchids and creepers.¹²⁴ Her husband, however, compulsive “improver” that he was, undertook various projects. The course of the river had wandered from its earlier course, leaving a “broad belt of foreshore” some hundred yards wide between the upper and lower landings. This had been used as a polo ground, but Curzon felt it was now time to turn it into another garden. He drew up plans for a “great stretch of sward with broad graveled walks and patterned flower-beds, and a pool and fountain in the center”—a wonderfully English touch, which his successor was forced to abandon when it turned out not to be so far above the flood line as Curzon had imagined. More successful was his “draining and turfing” of Moti Jheel, a long tank north of Barrackpore House, and the expansion of the rose garden to encompass the entire area that had been devoted earlier to vegetables. The nursery thrived so spectacularly, Curzon boasted, that it could at any time supply the three thousand blooms that were required for the state ball at Government House in Calcutta. One suggestion he rejected was the proposal to create a water park, evidently a sort of Disneyland avant la lettre, nearby; Barrackpore Park had long been open to the public, but this would be going too far.¹²⁵

Steaming up the Hughli about the same time, the journalist George Steevens described the potpourri of ships and “country boats and bathing natives,” the low banks of the river “punctuated with red and grey temples, bordered with an unbroken fringe of trees, out of which palms lift their heads daintily.” An oriental scene until at last the grass parts; one pulls up to the landing and proceeds through a tunnel of green to “an English garden and park translated into India.” While broad drives might cleave through undulating lawns, in India’s long dusty dry season, the grass was gray and ill-assorted, with the “trees swayed by the wind into bows, trees shooting bolt upright or drooping to earth, symmetrical or gadding into feathery tumult.”¹²⁶

In truth Barrackpore had lost its main raison d’être. With the consecration of Simla as the summer capital of India beginning in the mid-1860s, Barrackpore was demoted to something closer to Chequers or Camp David—a weekend retreat rather than a seasonal seat of government. This became all the more feasible with the railroad connection to Calcutta or the small steam launch that brought Curzon upriver “in the twilight of a Saturday evening” and downriver “in the dewy radiance of a Monday morning.”¹²⁷ Once Delhi became the capital of imperial India, Barrackpore lost even its status as a destination for visiting viceroys: it was given to the government of Bengal and used for occasional visits by the governor.¹²⁸