Serampur Serenade

                                                                              Ian Jack                                         

In 1989, Ian Jack, former editor of The Independent on Sunday and Granta, travelled through Bengal and Bihar, looking for remnants of the Raj in small towns and forgotten villages. In Serampur, 15 miles from Calcutta, he found his Scottish roots.

                                                                                                 

 Serampore College, founded 1818 (image: wikipedia)

Serampore Danish Church
(image: www.wmcarey.edu)

A view of Serampore by James Baillie Fraser 1826
(image: www.oldindianarts.in)

(As published in The Telegraph, September 27, 2009, Calcutta Edition) Also published as "The Serampur Scotch" in "The New Granta Book of Travel", copyright Granta Books, 2012. In Serampur I had an awful dream. I dreamt of my mother and brother. They stood on the slopes of a public park. Behind them lay a Victorian bandstand — octagonal with a curved roof like an onion — and behind that a line of trees. The landscape was in shades of green. I woke up in tears. I had lost my childhood, the people I loved, the kind of country I came from — there would be nobody else who knew me as these people had done, memories could no longer be exchanged, the sense of isolation from the past would be permanent and absolute. Only slowly did my surroundings penetrate and diminish this self-pity. First, the fan racing and creaking from its pivot on the ceiling, and then the chants of the Krishna worshippers who had set up camp a few hundred yards away on the banks of the Hooghly. Life began to fall into place. I looked at the luminous hands of my watch. It was two in the morning, a warm April night in Bengal in the year 1989. My mother and brother were alive, though my mother was old. By subtracting the time difference it seemed possible that they were settled in front of their gas-fires and televisions in Fife and Edinburgh and watching the evening news. I crawled out from under the mosquito net and felt the coal smuts on the floor scratch under my feet on the way to the bathroom, where I bathed in scoops of cold water from the bucket and, remembering my tears, thought ruefully: this was a dream of the middle aged and homesick. For the rest of the night there were no more memorable dreams. When I woke again at seven the Krishnaites were still chanting — they worked in relays — but now their shouts mingled the sounds of Christianity from the chapel opposite my bathroom window. There a sparse congregation drawn from the Christian students and teachers of Serampore College were singing a hymn, a low murmur of piety easily pierced by the cymbals of Krishna and, for a moment or two, just as easily drowned by the steam hooter of the Serampur jute mill over the wall, which sounded to call the morning shift to work. Twenty minutes later the singing stopped and there was a knock on my door: my next-door neighbours, the missionaries, having sung in the chapel, were summoning me to share their breakfast. Mr and Mrs Knorr had said that this would be the best arrangement, otherwise I would have to share rice and dal in the students’ canteen. ‘You should eat with us. It’s no trouble. We’ve hired a cook.’ The Knorrs were Baptists, energetic and practical Canadians with personalities so apparently unshaded by ambiguity or introspection or melancholy that they stood out in Serampur like a daub of primary colour on a sepia print. There was nothing false in them; to me, they were kind and direct. But Mr Das, their Bengali cook, seemed by contrast to represent a different race separated not just by continent and colour but by an infinite wistfulness and obliqueness, as though he had stood in the wrong queue when the rations marked ‘Energy’ and ‘Happiness’ had been given out. The Knorrs were hearty eaters. At breakfast, Das came out of his kitchen with bananas, tea and toast as well as porridge. At lunch there might be rice, vegetables, dal, curried chicken, followed by fruit and a rich Bengali sweet of boiled sugar and milk. For afternoon tea, always promptly observed at half-past four, the table was laid again with biscuits (‘Britannia’ brand), fruit, dishes of salty Indian mixtures made from lentil flour and dotted with bright green peas, and — perhaps the cook’s greatest success —loops of sweet and sticky jelabis plucked crisp from the frying pan. Finally, for dinner, Das had been persuaded to switch to the old British mode which had reached him, perhaps more as a rumour than a recipe, via some previous employer. Soup would be followed by plates of chips, tomatoes and omelettes, rounded off with more fruit. I was grateful to the Knorrs. For the past three weeks I had been travelling alone up-country in Bihar on a diet of hard-boiled eggs and oranges, and now the profound weight of so much food and religious certainty had a dulling, convalescent effect, burying the embers of my dream like spadefuls of sand on a fire. Early morning is always the best time in an Indian summer. The sun is still friendly. On the road beside the river I passed old men in their dhotis and sandals taking their daily exercise, while in the river itself families bathed from the muddy shore; the men struck out boldly into the river and held their noses and bobbed under, while the women stayed close to the bank and soaped themselves discretely under wet saris. By midday it was too hot to walk and by afternoon the fierce light had bleached the landscape. Trees that in the morning looked green now looked grey, the brown and blue of the river had turned to a sheet of silver. The crows and rickshaws fell silent, the lizards stuck motionless on my bedroom walls. Even the Krishnaites sounded defeated, their chants ragged and tired. I walked to the end of one of the little jetties that carried narrow-gauge railway lines from the jute warehouses, where barges were loaded with finished jute and towed downstream to the Calcutta docks. Once it had been a considerable traffic, dotting the river with barges and steam-tugs trailing banners of smoke, upstream and downstream for dozens of miles. Now the river traffic was much less considerable — most jute swayed down the Grand Trunk Road in large, elaborately decorated lorries — but the shine on the rails and the grease on the crane indicated that sometimes a fleet of barges would still arrive and coolies would still push wagons to the end of the jetty and attach bales to an iron hook and watch the bales swing into the hold. The river had changed from silver to dark glass. Downstream on either side mill chimneys pricked the evening sky from mills which bore Scottish names: Dalhousie, Waverley, Angus, Kelvin, Caledonia. Nearer, a hundred yards or so upstream from the jetty on the same bank, stood a grand block of flats — impossibly grand for a place like Serampur; ‘mansion flats’ they would be called in London or Calcutta — with bay windows and balconies and crude classical pediments on the roof and the gateposts. That morning I had met an elderly Bengali out on his stroll and asked about this building: who had lived there? ‘Scotch,’ he said. The jute mill manager, perhaps? No, he said, the manager had a separate villa. Assistant managers, foremen, engineers, that kind of person had lived there. ‘Scotchmen and their families, all of them. But they went away a long time back.’ The flats were still occupied — I could see pale electric light shining through the shuttering on the third floor — but they did not look well kept. Damp from the monsoon had streaked the yellow lime-wash on the walls, the plaster of the facade was crumbling, the gardens had run riot. The evening hooters began to sound, first from the Serampur mill and then from the other mills up, down and across the river. There was nothing alarming or rousing in the noise, nothing that suggested fires or air raids, or even that a day’s work had been completed and a night’s work was about to begin. It was a slow, reedy expulsion of steam and it resembled nothing more than a collective sigh, as though old men were turning in their sleep. It completed a scene of the purest melancholy. I remembered my dream then, as I stood on the jetty and watched the flickering fire from the Krishna camp and the black silhouettes of the figures who walked and danced around it; the evening had renewed their vigour. Sometimes it even seemed, particularly in a place such as Serampur at dusk, that I had come home; or if not home, then to some tropical version of the time and country that my Scottish parents and grandparents knew, as if I might turn a corner of a Serampur lane and meet them dressed in dhotis and saris. That was absurd. But among the mill chimneys and the steamboats and the hissing locomotives this waking dream persisted, like a tribal memory.

Extracted from: The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, Writings 1989-2009, by Ian Jack.  Courtesy: The Telegraph, Calcutta.