BENGALI BABOO

1 R B E N G A L I B A B O O D E B O R A H B A K E R Hatibagan, 139 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta, Early Twentieth Century Calcutta, the capital of the province of Bengal, was once known as the Second City of Empire. Like London, the First City of Empire, it sat astride a river, the Hooghly, that carried tra≈c rivaling the Thames. For most up-and-coming Bengali youth of the city, and the handsome and quick-witted Sudhindranath Datta most certainly was one, attendance at Oxford or Cambridge, combined with access to unlimited credit, entitled them on their return to full membership in the high echelons of the Anglo-Bengali elite, otherwise known as the Set. Perhaps because World War I had prevented Sudhin from attending Oxford, he tended to cast a gimlet eye on his milieu. Following British traders with imperial pretensions, members of the Set built homes that mixed classical motifs with abandon. Whimsical palaces and stately homes were crowded with Empire sofas, gilded clocks, and candelabras. The walls displayed copies of sentimental paintings by Landseer and Leighton. In Sudhin’s maternal grandfather’s home, after-dinner music recitals were held 2 B A K E R Y in a Paris-style salon, accessorized with nymphs made of alabaster, porcelain from Sèvres and Dresden, and a billiard table. Family libraries of the Set boasted calf-bound copies of Tennyson, Wordsworth , Coleridge, Shelley, illustrated folios of Shakespeare, and the entire run of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, reflecting the Set’s boundless respect for the worthies of English literature. Many also acquired a taste for English mustard, marmalade, cheese, and roast beef. They kept exotic birds, bred dogs and racehorses, and dressed their bearers in whiter liveries and larger turbans than the English had theirs wear. Prodigal sons returning to Calcutta after a ruinous fling at Oxford introduced themselves loftily as ‘‘England returned.’’ Deprived of cutlery, they ate their rice with ladles in run-down mansions mortgaged to pay for their English airs. Though Bengalis relished their halcyon days at Cambridge or Oxford as much as anyone, they were destined to always fall short of that exemplar, the English gentleman himself. For Calcutta’s English residents, the Bengalis’ cultivation of English habits was more evidence, should more be needed, that their rule was the destined natural order. They granted Bengalis a kind of imitative intelligence as well as a capacity for breeding more and more Bengalis. But unlike the manly warrior races of the North-West Frontier, the Bengali was believed to lack the spirit, physique, and sense of honor required of a ruling race. Consequently, the Anglicized Bengali was reviled and ridiculed. ‘‘By his legs you should know the Bengali,’’ Winston Churchill’s favorite globe-trotting journalist wrote. Whereas an Englishman’s legs were straight with a tapered calf and a flat thigh, the Bengali had the skin-and-bone leg of a slave. ‘‘Except by grace of his natural masters,’’ this writer concluded, ‘‘a slave he always has been and always must be.’’ Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, another author whose violent prose style Churchill did his best to emulate, agreed. The Bengali was ‘‘thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.’’ A British resident once pointed out the perfidy of hymning the praises of liberty and democracy to Bengalis when everyone knew their realization was unlikely. Think of the bitterness, hatred, and resentment that will eventually arise, he warned. ‘‘If the baboo had a soul, it might well demand a reckoning.’’ B E N G A L I B A B O O 3 R Bengalis had met the arriving waves of eighteenth-century Englishmen with little of the hostility or indi√erence the East India Company would encounter elsewhere. Initially, baboo or babu simply referred to an English-speaking Bengali clerk. Yet while Bengalis may have begun as clerks, they quickly progressed to revenue agents, solicitors, and High Court judges. As Bengalis ascended these rungs, English mockery of the baboo’s facility with the English language became as unrelenting as the contempt for the figure he cut. ‘‘What...