100A Garpar Road-A Legacy of History & Neglect
The neglected yet historically rich house at 100A, Garpar Road, North Calcutta is Satyajit Ray’s birthplace and childhood home. Once a thriving hub of Bengali literature and creativity, is now converted into a school, and it struggles to preserve its glorious past.
100A, Garpar Road, North Calcutta, a quaint place in North Calcutta steeped in history, lies in utter neglect. You have guessed it right; the place where Satyajit Ray was born and grew up before moving to another residence. During a cursory visit, I was overwhelmed with wonder as well as ennui once I took a sojourn inside the historic building.
If you ever happen to flip through page after page in the past, time peeping out of the lanes and bylanes often appear blurred, not always indistinct though. To put it a little differently, imagine the first few opening shots of “Mukti”, a famous film by Pramothes Barua where doors and windows open and slide in a quick succession, creating a silhouette of time.
I sort of went through an almost identical feeling when I first stepped into Garpar Road, a quaint place in North Calcutta; as I undertook a gentle stroll on the road, I could as if indistinctly visualise Upendra Kishore Roychoudhury, Sukumar Roy and Satyajit Ray – the three generations of Ray – beckoning me to tread a few more steps to welcome into their grand, no sorry, partially derelict, ancestral house; 100A, Garpar Road, Calcutta.
I paused for a moment and rubbed eyes; is this the house where Rabindranath Tagore used to drop in for a little chit chat with Upendrakishore in the summer afternoons; is it where Sir P C Roy walked up from his earshot residence at Rajabazar just for a tete-a-tete with his favourite student Sukumar; is it where a toddler Satyajit remained glued to his maternal grandfather Kuladaranjan engaged in his regular exercise with dumbbells on the roof?
What man has made of man?
A strong wind outside began mimicking the hurricane of emotions swirling inside my heart. Debating as I was, something goaded me inside and I was left gaping with wide wonder. The ground floor and a portion of the first floor once comprised the famous “U Roy & Sons”, that same publishing house where rows of Bengali letters in lead once descended into prints to produce the mind-boggling myths and “Thakurmar Jhuli” (The mystery bag of Grandma).
‘Sandesh’, Bengal’s once thriving surreal magazine that saw the birth of innumerable mystic creatures which kept kids and budding teenagers glued to those heritage pages, saw its maiden light of the day from here. And the glorious journey it began then during the pre-Independence era, in 1913 to be precise, is still continuing, notwithstanding some hiccups though. After the demise of Upendrakishore, his able son and Bengal’s unique hodge-podge rhyme creator Sukumar Roy took over for a brief period before its spectacular revival by none other than Satyajit Ray.
The formative issues of ‘Sandesh’ throbbed with such marvellous & picturesque portrayal of ‘Tash Goru’, ‘Hukomukho Hangla’, ‘Kaath Buro’, ‘Paagla Dashu’, ‘Kumro Potash’, ‘Vishmolochan Sharma’ and many others by Sukumar Roy in his unforgettable collection of poems ‘Abol Tabol’; his son Satyajit successfully strived to raise it to another level by first introducing his famous detective hero ‘Feluda’ and the ultimate truth seeker in the science fiction ‘Bonkubabu’ in the subsequent releases of the magazine.
As I quietly stood in front of the retiring room of Sukumar Roy, the past and the present evenly merged and was hanging by a bare thread. It was where a Renaissance in rhyme once swept the undivided Bengal. Along the corridor stood the other room where his illustrious father Upendrakishore penned those magical creatures and their world (an unrecognised precursor to Harry Potter in Bengali?). And then finally into the room where our own Satyajit was born.
Suddenly, a gentle nudge from a class VI student going to the washroom broke my midday stupor. The house at Garpar Road, I forgot to mention, has been converted into a co-educational Higher Secondary School – -Athenaeum Institution (Bengali medium) where students from Class VI-XII study. After the ownership passed through a couple of hands, it fell into utter disrepair and the printing press too was sold off.
Later, some funds trickled in to carry out some urgent repairs to make it school go-able for some minuscule number of students. So much for a building of heritage in the so-called City of Joy! Not surprising or shocking though. The authorities simply washed their hands off by installing a plaque that grants the building a heritage status in 2001 under the Kolkata Municipal Corporation Act, 1980.
Yet soon, I found a ray of hope; as I went past the dingy space and reached the garden behind the house, the Bakul tree planted by Upendrakishore has still been standing tall in the midst of gloom all around. This is in sharp contrast to the rooms upstairs where there has not been a single vestige of the ancestral heritage or memorabilia of one of the illustrious families of Bengal. There is a consolation prize though; a big half-bust picture of Satyajit Ray amidst the school furniture!
Unfortunately but tragically true, had this been in Paris, Amsterdam, London or somewhere else in Europe or the United States, the same house would have been preserved with utmost care and compassion. It makes me cringe every time as this only reveals our abject state of mental penury and indigence.
Nevertheless, the house at Garpar left a deep imprint on child Satyajit to a great extent who recollected those days in an engaging memoir ‘Jokhon Choto Chilam’ (When I was a kid). Plus, if we delve a little into Ray’s innovative style of film making, we would notice a young Apu in ‘Aparajito’ taking shelter in a printing press in Calcutta. Again, we discover the same press in a wonderful light and shade backdrop in ‘Charulata’.
During the shoot of a documentary on ‘Sukumar Roy’(1987), Ray travelled to various locations in Calcutta including 100A, Garpar Road. However, Ray vehemently declined to enter the house where he was once born and where he spent the formative years of his childhood. He made it abundantly clear to the members of his unit not to insist or persuade him on the issue.
Ray issued all instructions from outside the building that was already converted into a school. In fact, he had a deep-seated attachment yet suppressed anguish, it was known from his intimate circles, for having failed to prevent the house from getting sold off due to pecuniary constraints of his father who suffered an early death at 36. And the documentary chronicled that part poignantly.
Before Ray, a comprehensive tale or a proper story in films was galore everywhere. However, it was Ray who first demonstrated through ‘Pather Pachali’ before the world audience how visuals could speak volumes to illustrate cinematic storytelling, with the theme following suit subsequently. The deft and unprecedented handling of the visuals sometimes rendered the script redundant in some of Ray’s films.
A storyteller, composer and a visionary, Ray’s films captured the beauty and complexity of life with unmatched brilliance. Well, that’s a different subject, as vast and unassailable as an ocean by me….for, it was a golden era when art was pure and talent spoke louder than anything else.
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