35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
but less ostentatious – was adopted, and the city grew to look as
much like a weirdly regurgitated London as Bengal’s climate would
allow. Yet, just as there is something dark and sinister about Venice,
so Kipling’s City of Dreadful Night reeked of greed and ruthless
commercialism. Its inhabitants were undeterred by plague and
pestilence from pursuing their business interests for well over two
centuries, filling the coffers of the Company on London’s Leadenhall
Street and then, later, of His Majesty’s Government. And these coffers
were nowhere near as full as they might have been, either, much
loot remaining in sea chests belonging to the white nabobs who
represented the Company in Council House, on Calcutta’s Clive
Street, or presided over gigantic feudal fiefdoms spread across remote
areas of the country. Even Clive himself, Bengal’s first governor, called
Calcutta ‘the most corrupt place in the universe.’ He knew what he
was talking about, being chief among those who helped create and
enhance the city’s dubious reputation early on.
That enigmatic figure, Edward Lear, the poet, painter, and
idiosyncratic mystic, arrived in Calcutta on December 21, 1873, to
spend three weeks there before leaving on January 8 the following
year for Darjeeling and the holy mountains that obsessed him. He
spent the day of January 5 in the lavish gardens of what would soon
become the renowned Tollygunge Club, painting a view of the
place. Lear found the city a little hectic for his sensibilities, dubbing
it ‘Hustlefussabad.’ And his view of his hosts and those he met –
whose gluttony appalled him – is enshrined in one of those
limericks for which he is best remembered, if least understood:
There was an old man of Calcutta
Who perpetually ate bread and butter,
Till a large bit of muffin
On which he was stuffin’
Choaked this horrid old man of Calcutta.
Like North American bootleggers and assorted mafiosi, the Raj that
John Company had metamorphosed into sought to distance itself
from its origins under the guise of imperial legitimacy. When the
Suez Canal opened in the 1860s, the P&O Lines shipping company