Barabazar

Anindita Mazumder

Barabazar, located on the northern part of Dihi Kalikata adjoining Dihi Sutanuti owed its original nucleus to the yarn market of Sutanuti with its trade controlled by the Seths and Bysacks which later expanded into the Great Bazar. The banians and diwans –intermediaries in English trade and administration began to set up their great households in the area surrounded by dwellings of servants and rent payers. Raja Shukamoy Ray of Posta, the Mullicks and the descendents of the famous Seths and Bysacks of Sutanuti occupied huge residences in Barabazar.

Located in between the White Town at Chowringhee and Black Town at Sutanuti, Barabazar was at the centre of the city and densely populated because it was the locale for business activities. A conglomeration of bazaars, Barabazar was the central point of the market network in the city and connected the city with its hinterland. In all probability, Barabazar was already an important market place in the mid 18 Century. It owed its name to Shiva, often affectionately referred to as “Buro” by his devotees. However, the upcountry merchants who usurped the position of the Seths changed it to Barabazar or Burrabazar- the great market. When Nawab’s troops attacked Calcutta in 1756, Barabazar was set on fire.

In 1774, P.D. Stanhope described the Calcutta Bazaar as “streets of miserable huts and every Indian man who occupies one of this is called a merchant.”    Nearly a hundred years later Colesworthy Grant’s Anglo-Indian Sketches (1850) provides a fine description of what Barabazar became in the mid-nineteenth Century: “For oriental traffic, oriental tongues and oriental heads, commend me to Burrabazar, a mart tailed on to the north end of the China bazaar and occupied and visited by merchants from all parts of east.”

“Here may be seen the jewels of Golkanda and Bundelkhand, the shawls of Cashmere, the broad clothes of England, silks of Murshidabad and Benaras, muslins of Dacca, Calicoes, ginghams, Chintzes and beads of Coromondel, firs and fruits of Caubul, silk fabrics and brocades of Persia, spices and myrhh from Ceylon, Spice Islands and Arabia, shells from the eastern coast and straits, drugs, dried fruit and sweetmeats from Arabia and Turkey, cows’ tails from Tibet and ivory from Ceylon” said Grant on the wares on display.

With a fine eye on details Grant wrote: “A great portion of these and various other articles too numerous to mention are either sold or bought by the natives from the countries where they are obtained who together with visitors, travellers and beggars form a diversified group of Persians, Arabs, Jews, Marwarees, Sikhs, Turks, Parsees, Chinese, Burmese and Bengalees.” Fanny Parkes also spoke of the “dexterity with which seed pearls are bored by the natives” at shops in Barabazar and since this was a difficult task, seed pearls were sent from England to be pierced.

Barabazar was actually a hierarchised conglomeration of highly specialised bazaars, each concentrated in a particular area within the great market according to the commodity it traded in along with narrow lanes and bylanes. Thus a buyer would go to Dhotipatti, Fancy-patti or Pagia-patti for apparel, to Sutapatti for imported thread or cloth to Tullapatti for hessian or cotton, to Chinipatti for sugar and so forth. There was further specialisation within each branch of trade, creating subdivisions like katra, chowk or kothi.

A katra is a multi storied building with many rooms and a covered verandah with a square courtyard in the centre. The rooms open into the central courtyard. Some of the important katras are Sadasukh Katra, Punjabi Katra, Raja Katra, Manohar Das Katra and so on. The management of katra is done through an elected executive body who raise annual subscription and undertakes maintenance work. The Kothis in Burrabazar are organised differently than Katras. They are managed and controlled by the shareholders. Patties in Burrabazar are shopping ribbons dealing with special kinds of goods for wholesale. Overwhelmingly, a large portion of space in Burrabazar is occupied by business cum residential areas and due to want of space the rooms often have multiple uses. But apart from such spatial concentration of particular commodities there was ethnic specialisation in business with strong ties of personal cum business relations within that ethnic group. Barabazar with its cosmopolitan culture has been home to Marwaris, Gujaratis, Punjabis and migrants from UP and Bihar spreading over Cotton Street, Kalakar Street, Muktaram Babu Street, Hariram Goenka Street, Maharishi Devendra Road, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Armenian and Ezra Street.

The Marwaris started arriving in Burrabazar in large numbers in the 19th Century eventually replacing the Bengalis and even the North Indian Khatris. As early as in 1872, Reverend James Long had noted Barabazar to be populated by Marwaris and a Census of Calcutta in 1826 found that only 11 per cent of the population of Barabazar was native to Calcutta. Even Kaliprasanna Singha in his Sketches of the Screech Owl mentioned Barabazar as being inhabited by Marwaris and Babus along with their companions flocking to the garden houses of the descendants of Raja Sukhomoy Ray at Posta to witness Ramleela celebrations for want of better entertainment.

The Marwari gradually established themselves in Barabazar and Bengal. Well entrenched in indigenous banking and upcountry trade the North Indian merchants also entered into internal trade in Bengal, the marketing of imported clothes and procurement of agricultural commodities such as jute on behalf of English business houses. Their merchant houses which maintained kothis and operated through munims in Barabazar started making Calcutta their headquarters and place of residence in later part of 19 Century. Initially, they lived without women folk in mess-buildings or slep at their gaddis at night. In contrast Bengali indigenous capital turned to rentier investments while holding on to some traditional businesses with little prospects of growth.  Around 1892, when Harrison Road (renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road) was constructed, the land on the flanks was sold in small plots. Marwaris purchased most of it. The Bengalis were further pushed back to Beadon Street with the construction of Central Avenue in Calcutta by 1912 since the compensation amount was not enough to buy the roadside plots after prices rocketed following the construction of the thoroughfare.

After settling down with families the Marwaris felt the need to set up educational institutions for imparting education in mother tongue. Besides a number of humanitarian institutions and dharamshalas were set up by the various ethnic groups. With the passage of time the Marwaris also progressed towards being industrialists from merely a trading community. However, in the past few decades the young and educated among the Marwari community have chose to leave the congested lanes and bylanes of Barabazar, preferring to reside in localities like New Alipore, Salt Lake and Ballygunge.