The City's Mirror

Every grand story has a humble beginning, and this one starts with bread. David Wilson arrived in Calcutta as a baker and confectioner and set up near Government House. Officers, merchants and travellers queued for his loaves and cakes, and his shop came to be called the “Bakery of the East.”

In 1840, Wilson turned that success into the Auckland Hotel, named after the then Governor-General. With around a 100 rooms and a department store on the ground floor, it became one of Calcutta’s grandest addresses. In time, the Auckland became the Great Eastern Hotel, and its growing reputation began attracting writers and travellers from around the world.

Rudyard Kipling stayed in 1888. He was hard on Calcutta in “The City of Dreadful Night,” but described the hotel as humming with life through its hundred rooms. Mark Twain followed in the 1890s, and his description of it as the “best hotel east of Suez” became its most famous endorsement. Over the years, the same staircases saw Gandhi, Queen Elizabeth II, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, and jazz musician Dave Brubeck.

“A writer, a freedom-movement leader, a monarch, two Cold War politicians and a jazz musician don’t normally have the same address,” said hotel manager Ayan Halder. “It was a city on everyone’s route.”

Writers, it seems, have never quite left. The hotel has stayed on the page, and that tradition continues with a novel set within its walls.

A Whole City, One Hotel

Novelist Ruchir Joshi came to the hotel through his father. “My father moved to Calcutta from Ahmedabad in 1939,” he said. “He stayed here during the war years. He was a young man working in Burrabazar, but also wanting to be a writer and an artist.”

When fears of bombing gripped the city, those who could leave did. “They thought the Japanese were coming,” Joshi said. His father’s reason for staying was simple: “I wanted to see what would happen if the Japanese came. So I was going to stick around.”

The hotel was not his father’s world, but it sat at the centre of wartime Calcutta. “Great Eastern was the posh hotel,” Joshi said. “During the Second World War, it had major jazz bars, cabarets, restaurants, tearooms, and tea dances.” American servicemen also made it part of their wartime Calcutta.

That world fed Joshi’s novel, “Great Eastern Hotel.” “As I began to write the novel and the characters developed, I realised that it was actually the whole city of Kolkata that had become a massive hotel in the Second World War,” he said. “For all kinds of different people who were visiting or coming to stay or being forced to come here.”

A Second Life

After Independence, the hotel came under government ownership and gradually lost its shine. In 2005, the Lalit Suri Hospitality Group took it on, with CMD Dr Jyotsna Suri overseeing a restoration that had to balance preservation with the demands of a contemporary luxury hotel.

The ageing structure was reinforced, while historic elements such as the façade, iron pillars, beams and staircases were retained. A new atrium was introduced to bring more light into the interiors, and a contemporary block was added alongside the heritage wings. The hotel finally reopened in 2013.

“It was more than a renovation. It was to revive the glory of a momentous place,” Halder said.

The old hotel survives in smaller details too. Wilson’s dough-kneading bowls have been repurposed as planters, while the original bakery remains in place. A German piano from the early 1900s, once housed in Maxim’s Bar, has been restored and plays again. An antique telephone still connects guests to the operator.

“We don’t want to put the past behind glass,” Halder said. “We want it to keep breathing.”

The Information

• Address: 1, 2, 3 Old Court House Street, Dalhousie Square, Kolkata, West Bengal 700069

• Keys: 215 rooms and suites

• Connectivity: Approx 17 km from Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport and about 4 km from both Howrah and Sealdah railway stations

• Website: thelalit.com