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A group of photographers captures Chitpur road in north Calcutta, its 18th, 19th century mansions transformed by teeming streets
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In November 2006, a group of 21 German students practising advanced photography spent a month documenting a stretch of north Calcutta’s famed Chitpur Road. Divided into five groups by their professor, Peter Bialobrzeski, they awoke each morning at 3.45 and set off to capture the streets, the enormous mansions built by the city’s uber-rich bhadralok in the 19th century, the present-day tenanted
inhabitants, the flower sellers and potters, the shopkeepers and cart pullers, the women drying clothes, the yellow taxis taking to the road, all waking up to another day. By 6am they would wrap up and leave the bylanes they had spent the past 2 hours observing through their large-format cameras. Bialobrzeski, a professor of photography at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany, had asked each group to shoot at least one good picture. Due to limited funds—the students paid their own airfare, but the project had help from the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller, Kolkata, photography company Fujifilm and German magazine Geo—each team was allowed to shoot only six large-format photographs a day, which would then be developed into silver bromide prints. One group used a medium-format digital camera and clicked more photographs climbing roofs and using ladders. It had to be visually beautiful, they were told. “We’re photographers, not stamp collectors. We’re not here to shoot dead buildings, but valuable living spaces—the neighbourhood," Bialobrzeski told them.
Manish Chakraborti, a conservation architect based in Kolkata, was the reason Bialobrzeski undertook the project. Chakraborti had been taking people on walks through the bylanes of Chitpur Road for a decade and knew that while the fabric of life was strong, having grown organically in the area that was at least 400 years old, its infrastructure was crumbling due to neglect wrought by, among other things, the Rent Control Act, which permitted little by way of rent, and endless legal battles of ownership by feuding family members.
Within two decades, he feared, many of the mansions built by the cultural elite, whose massive façades borrowed from European architectural forms and styles, would be gone. “There was no book on this street, even though it is so famous and rich, culturally and heritage wise," says Chakraborti, who together with architect Kamalika Bose, who was working on her thesis on north Calcutta under his tutelage, helped the German teams document the streets. “It was in these salons the Bengal Renaissance, an intellectual, political and spiritual renewal in late 18th century India, was born," says Bose.
While the book that emerged from the exercise in 2007, Calcutta: Chitpur Road Neighborhoods is now out of print, the photographs were recently revived and restored through a joint effort by photographer-curators Tanvi Mishra and Kaushik Ramaswamy. An exhibition of 56 prints, which opened in Mumbai on 1 October, will travel to New Delhi next month.
Photographs from Calcutta: Chitpur Road Neighborhoods are on display till 31 October, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Fort, Mumbai.
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