Rediscovering Kolkata's Riverside Heritage: Mansions, Bridges, And Lost Stories

I first saw Roxburgh House from the river. It stood at the water’s edge inside the Botanical Gardens, across the Hooghly from Kolkata’s southwestern fringe. The grime on its walls had that exclusive Kolkata palette—a velvety black-green, particularly fetching during the monsoons. I wanted to caress the scabrous walls as one would an ageing relative’s liver spots.

The house hid its age well but did not conceal its abandonment. Facing the southerly breeze from the river, its heavy-lidded, rotund veranda looked bereft. A sprawling three-storey vision of porticos, turrets, and shutters, the house was an archetypal Kolkata beauty—colonial, riverine, wistful.

I later learned that this house was built in 1794 for the Gardens' first full-time superintendent, William Roxburgh, author of Flora Indica—the founding text of Indian botany. It was here, in this very house, that he conducted much of his work, lived for nearly 20 years, and established the first herbarium outside Europe. It was here that he raised a large family and, on his deathbed in Scotland, longed to return to his Paradisus on the Hooghly.

But all that came later.

At that first sighting, my instinct was simply to salve the anguish of a bereft veranda on the river. The house was not ready for entry, but enter I did. As I gingerly climbed the vast wooden staircase, its creaks echoed through the cavernous, empty rooms. Passing through an arched doorway and past an ornate fireplace, I stepped onto the half-shuttered veranda.

A woman on a passing ferry looked up and saw the veranda empty no more.

Colonial Kolkata was a spectacular river city. A 19th-century float up the Hooghly would take you past suburban Garden Reach, studded with the riverside garden villas of merchant princes; past the towering masts of tall ships moored at Hastings; past the central business district along the Strand—a blur of arches, columns, and finials adorning exquisite Victorian edifices. You would drift past the Black Town at Chitpur, with its elegant ghats, and the imposing mansions of the jute lords of Baranagar.

By the time you moored near the ancient panchavati banyan at Dakshineshwar, you would have to collect your lower jaw from the bottom of the boat.

If you took the same float today, what would you see? The river remains as majestic as ever. But as Kolkata has inexorably turned away from it, the riverfront has become a study in the dereliction of beauty. Many remnants of colonial iniquities have been torn down. Some limp along, patched with asbestos and plywood, until a violent fire puts them out of their misery—like the magnificent 107-year-old Strand Warehouse, which perished on Valentine’s Day, 2010.

Yet, a handful of these colonial river beauties survive, effortlessly upstaging everything built on the river since Independence. Each is like Gayatri Devi at 70—indisputably past her prime, yet still carrying tremendous echoes of the heat of her youth. And the promise of a million stories.

If you cross the Hooghly from Roxburgh House, you will arrive at moth-eaten Metia Bruz—once lined with elegant villas where fashionable Kolkata-British gathered for garden parties in Roxburgh’s time. This changed abruptly in 1856 with the arrival of the deposed Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah. As the Nawab bought up properties to settle his vast entourage, Metia Bruz transformed almost overnight from a British garden district into a mini-Lucknow.

Kolkata was introduced to Awadhi biryani and zardozi karigars, mushairas and mujras—and was hopelessly smitten. The Nawab built over 20 opulent palaces along the Garden Reach shore. After his death in 1887, the British razed them, replacing splendour with jute mills and dockyards. Yet, one house survives, predating the Nawab himself—his beloved Parikhana. Known today as BNR House, it serves as the residence of the General Manager of SE Railway.

Floater's Finds

Floating upstream from Metia Bruz towards Garden Reach, you cannot miss BNR House. Strikingly white and set within a verdant garden at the water’s edge, its dainty colonnaded porch lifts the spirits. Built in 1846 for then Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawrence Peel, the house remained his residence until 1855.

Later, the Nawab of Awadh filled this elegant home with nubile women, Kathak and Thumri. Parikhana—as he called it—became a sanctuary where his paris received taalim from the ustads, with all others strictly forbidden entry. Floating past BNR House on a moonlit night, it is easy to imagine the Nawab in the garden, surrounded by his favourite paris, singing Babul Mora, Naihar Chhooto Hi Jaye.

Just upstream from BNR House stand two bungalows, now home to officers of SE Railway, innocuously named No. 12 and No. 13. Their past, however, is far from innocuous. No. 12 once served as the immigration depot for coolies bound for Fiji, while No. 13 processed those headed for Trinidad.

It is likely that V.S. Naipaul’s maternal grandfather, recruited in Banaras and shipped to Trinidad in 1894, was registered at No. 13. This is where Draupadi from Gorakhpur irreversibly became Droopatty, and Fakir from Munger transformed into Fuckyeah—linguistic riddles for their descendants to decipher a century later.

Heading north, as you pass beneath the cable-stayed Second Hooghly Bridge, look to your right. There, standing in stately grandeur, is the Ionic colonnade of the Prinsep Memorial, built in 1843 to honour James Prinsep—the scholar who deciphered the Brahmi script, unlocking Ashoka’s edicts.

Right beside it once stood Takta Ghat—Plank Ghat—where political prisoners, their ankle chains clanking against the wooden boards, boarded ships bound for the Andamans. A little downstream at Hastings, where Tolly’s Nullah meets the Hooghly, coolie ships destined for the Caribbean would dock. The journey across the Atlantic could take up to six months, sometimes claiming a third of the human cargo.

Here, in a tight cluster along the river, the many faces of the British Empire once stood. Of them, only Prinsep’s memory remains.

The Ephymeral Howrah Bridge

On the stretch of the river between the Second Hooghly Bridge and Howrah Bridge, you will float north along the Strand. At Babughat, your gaze will be drawn to the towering mansard roof of the Kolkata High Court, looking extra imperious under a fresh coat of paint. But if you happen to look down, you’ll see streams of human waste draining directly into the river, merging seamlessly with its all-forgiving turbidity.

This, however, is an improvement. Once, tonnes of industrial effluvia from jute mills choked her waters. During times of plague and famine, thousands of corpses were consigned to her depths. She has atomised them all, yet the fish remain—and so do the dolphins. Each time I see the graceful arc of a breaching dolphin, I hear the river say, bring it on.

When you arrive at the Howrah Bridge, the scene at the Mullick Ghat flower market will seem straight out of Emily Eden’s sketchbook, circa 1837—men bearing fat ropes of marigolds twisted into enormous, fluffy coils, their yellow and orange glinting in the sun; women, statuesque in wet cotton, three-dipping in the river. Above it all, the vast silver bridge spreads its limbs wide.

Just a little north, once visible from the river, stands the Old Mint, which operated from 1829 to 1952. Don’t stand too close, or all you’ll see is one of its 40 massive Doric columns. Step back across Strand Road to take in its breathtaking colonnaded portico, a near replica of the Temple of Minerva in Athens. In December 1918, this mint produced 1,90,000 finished coins in a single day—a world record. Abandoned since 1952, it is now occupied by the Central Reserve Police Force, its grandeur obscured by concertina wires and sandbagged gunners.

Beyond the Howrah Bridge, you will float past the Nimtolla burning ghat into the heart of North Kolkata, the locus of 19th-century Bengali wealth. At the Shobhabazar ferry jetty, look up at the glorious but derelict Victorian mansion that dominates the river bend. Putul Bari—House of Dolls—stands with its ornate terrace jutting into the sky, a clutch of dancing figurines frozen in time.

Inside, the two top floors are held up by Corinthian columns surrounding a charming inner courtyard. The resemblance between the house and its owner is uncanny. Makhan Lal Natta, 78, owns the venerable Natta Company, a leading exponent of jatra—Bengali folk theatre—for the past 140 years. But jatra’s heyday has long passed, and Natta is bemused by the government’s "heritage" tag on his crumbling property. “Just the other day, I saw another statue crumble,” he says. Not 20 feet away, a train trundles along the Circular Rail track, adding a few more cracks to the fading grandeur of his house.

The Storied North

North of Shobhabazar and Bagbazar, you will float past the Chitpur lock gates, marking the northern limit of the old city. Beyond this was once the playground of the rich, now transformed into a land of factories—most dead, some still alive.

Belur will soon pass by on your left, and Bally Bridge will loom ahead with Dakshineshwar beyond it. Just before the bridge, on your right, stands Tagore Villa—much more a palace than a villa. This towering confection of arches, rotundas, and balustrades was once a Nilkuthi—an indigo plantation—before becoming the summer retreat of the Pathuriaghata Tagore family in 1853. At the height of the Naxalite troubles in 1971, the family sold the property to the government, perhaps to avoid being conspicuously bourgeois. Today, it serves as a Border Security Force camp, with the commandant occupying the river-facing suite upstairs. From the filigreed verandas, laundry— that most proletarian of flags—flutters happily in the breeze.

I spent a night in the room Rabindranath always occupied when he visited his cousin's river retreat. It opens onto a spacious circular porch overlooking the Hooghly. At dusk, as a plaintive bugle sounded the flag-down ceremony, I felt a sudden, possessive ache for the scene before me—the molten gold in the water, the lone fishing boat silhouetted against the fading light, the glimmering dots of Bally Bridge stretching into the night like an ellipsis. And I could see what propelled Rabi Babu to write in this very room: "Jakhon porbena mor pa-er chinha ei batey"—when my footprints will fade from this house.

If this 21st-century float up the Hooghly leaves you heavy with the weight of beauty teetering on the edge of extinction, don’t expect the river to share your sorrow. History is strewn with cities left destitute when their mother river changed course. But a river does not flinch when the city it once nourished turns away. If I listen closely, I can hear the Hooghly waiting—patient, indifferent—for these last remnants to crumble, to be relieved of a once-glorious river-city that now comes to her only in defecation and death. And in her playful gurgle, I hear her whisper, "Boye gechhe."—I don’t give a damn.