BackWalking city
Escorted tours that offer everything from architectural jaunts to literary journeys, even a glimpse of a ghostly colonial past
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Kolkata may well be the only Indian city to offer night walking tours, so it’s perhaps not surprising that these are becoming a preferred way to see the sights there. More than half-a-dozen tour operators now offer trails on European architecture, revisionist history, culinary and secular traditions, literature and culture and royal Muslim heritage, slum areas and a tour of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, even colonial ghost narratives. We pick some tours, which can range from ₹ 1,200-1,800 per person and last for about 3-5 hours.
Knowledge Street
This tour of College Street tells you how the area became the fulcrum of Bengali enlightenment. Suddhabrata Deb of The Story Walkers tour group calls it the Road of Tolerance but, interestingly, begins the tour with the story of Gopal Patha—the man who led a violent Hindu response during the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 and ran a “Hindu slaughter house" at Bowbazar.
Close at hand is Haarkata Goli, a lane that was once home to businesses dealing in human bones collected from the nearby Calcutta Medical College and Hospital (CMC). While the 1835-established CMC, touted as the first such in Asia, would inevitably lead to the demise of Ayurvedic research centres situated on College Street, it cemented the area’s reputation as the nerve centre of education in Bengal—the Calcutta University, Presidency College (now university), Sanskrit College and Hindu School are in the vicinity.
College Square has the Jahan Khan mosque, buildings of the Buddhist Maha Bodhi Society of India, the Bengal Theosophical Society, the Baptist Mission Church, the publication office of atheist Communist literature and the University Institute Hall, known for hosting radical political events—a true convergence of faith and belief in “an area which hasn’t ever seen a single communal riot since independence," says Deb, whose family runs the Bengali publication house Pratikshan.
With around 60-odd publishers and around 600 booksellers concentrated in the area, College Street is unique as a hub of knowledge dissemination, says Deb.
He recalls the time when he guided American university scholars interested in the history of the Bengal partition to a small bookshop, Ekushe. The owner asked the group if they were interested merely in the partition, or the history of migration and the diaspora. “The Americans were stumped. They weren’t expecting such a nuanced answer. I was overjoyed," says Deb.
The Sutanuti Walk (The Early Calcutta Walk)
Sutanuti, in north Kolkata, was one of the three villages that existed before Britisher Job Charnock famously arrived there by boat in 1690. This walk, conducted by Kolkata Story Tours, begins right where the once exclusively European White Town melds into Grey Town and Black Town—the homes of settlers and native Bengalis, respectively.
From Esplanade, in central Kolkata, the trail leads to the Chinese-inhabited Territy Bazar area (one of the two Chinatowns in Kolkata, the other is in Tangra in the east, not part of the walk though), before heading for the Anglo-Indian quarters known as Bow Barracks.
Along Chitpur Road—Kolkata’s oldest road—walkers get a sense of why Kolkata was known as the “city of palaces", with its impressive mansions and buildings reflecting an amalgamation of architectural styles. The evident opulence and grandeur of the past is balanced by stories of debauchery, “when almost every Bengali aristocrat kept a mistress and nautch dances were common", says Kaushik Chatterjee of Kolkata Story Tours. “But this was also the beginning of the Bengal Renaissance, led by the Tagore family in Jorasanko and the coming of revisionist Brahmo Samaj and the Young Bengal Movement," he says.
The tour is as much about sights as it is about storytelling, he adds. One such story is based on thread shops where the thumbs of weavers used to be chopped off by the British in their zeal to promote mill-produced Manchester cloth; indeed, this history of exploitation, among other reasons, led to the Indigo Revolt. The walk is pretty much bespoke in nature, and guests often take the ferry ride on the Hooghly to soak in the crumbling edifice of what used to be Sutanuti.
Culture Kaleidoscope
With so many tours to choose from, Manjit Singh Hoonjan knew he had to create a niche. He married his passion for photography and Kolkata to come up with the Calcutta Photo Tours. Among his more popular tours is the Culture Kaleidoscope, one that has been featured in international and national publications and documentaries.
A short distance from his home in Bowbazar, which falls right in the middle of this particular walk, are the Christian dwellings of Bow Barracks, with its locally produced bakery items and wines, and the Buddhist Temple Street, with its resthouse for travellers. The route also blends in the city’s Chinese heritage. Kolkata is the only city in India to still have a Chinatown—the Overseas Chinese Commerce Of India, the only Chinese daily in India, is published from Tangra.
The route makes its way to Chitpur, a cosmopolitan and colourful area, known as much for its Muslim heritage—the Nakhoda Masjid, Kolkata’s principal mosque, which can seat 10,000 at the prayer hall, is there, for instance—as the Zoroastrian fire temple, Armenian Church and three synagogues in the Brabourne Road area. All the three synagogues have Muslim caretakers. “While Muslims and Jews fight each other across the world, here you find a Muslim man lighting the Shabbat lamp in the absence of a Jewish member. This tour shows how everyone celebrates everyone’s religion in Calcutta," says Hoonjan.
Walking With Ghosts
As gimmicky as it may sound, the Walking With Ghosts tour, which starts at 11.30pm from the historic New Market area, can send chills down your spine as you walk down eerily empty roads, past crumbling colonial mansions, to the haunting soundtrack of dogs barking. Organized by Let Us Go and guided by Anthony Khatchaturian—the descendant of an Armenian builder in British Calcutta—this unique night tour begins with the Gothic-design New Market, which was inaugurated in 1874. The trail winds through the rich architectural landmarks of colonial Calcutta, once a prominent city of the British empire.
Khatchaturian offers nuggets of information on the sites—Chaplin Square, Futnani Mansion, which once housed the famous Golden Slipper nightclub, and Bourne and Shepherd, the world’s oldest photography studio, which shut down recently—before the first of the ghost stories begins. The story is about Statesman House and the sound of invisible typewriters.
The tour then heads towards Raj Bhavan, the erstwhile home of the British administrative head in India and now home to the state’s governor, the much photographed Esplanade Mansion and Peliti’s—reportedly India’s first Italian restaurant, established by Federico Peliti, the personal chef of British viceroy Richard Bourke, better known as Lord Mayo.
At the heritage precincts of Dalhousie Square, guests hear the story of how government officials managed to save the Standard Life Assurance Co. building from destruction. Garstin Place, the former headquarters of All India Radio, is where some people have reported hearing the piano notes of Bach and Mozart from a vacant room. Cries for water can be heard, it is said, from the site of 1756’s infamous Black Hole tragedy—where British prisoners of war, including women and children, died of suffocation after being held in captivity by Siraj-ud-Daulah’s troops when the Bengali army captured Fort William.
Gate No.4 of the majestic Writers’ Building, dominating Dalhousie Square, is where the horse carriage of the first governor general of British India, Warren Hastings, can be heard rolling in. Standing close to court No.13 of the impressive neo-Gothic Kolkata high court building, in the dead of night, Khatchaturian reminds guests that this court once used to pass the largest number of death sentences in India.
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