POSTCARDS OF A CRUMBLING PAST
An online project in Kolkata is documenting, and trying to save, some of the city’s most iconic messbaris. These colonial-era town houses were some of India’s first working men’s hostels, and housed legends of Bengali literature too
Dip into Bengali pop culture and it won’t be long before you come upon the term messbari. Byomkesh Bakshi, the famous fictional detective, lived in one; as did his creator, the author Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Classic novels have been set in the messbaris; films too. But you don’t hear the word often, even in Kolkata, where most of them stand. The messbaris were some of India’s first urban hostels. By the early 1900s, they were housing and feeding thousands of young men who had headed to the rapidly industrialising colonial province of Bengal. Most were looking for jobs, some for education, says Jayanta Sengupta, a historian, and curator and secretary of Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial museum.
People preferred to live with those from similar backgrounds, so the messes were organised by community — a Marwari mess, an Odia one, a Goan messbari, one for nurses, and one for refugees from China. There were even some posh boarding houses in central parts of the city for Europeans.
Today, most are crumbling and forgotten; the ornate facades that remain hide decrepit interiors. But there is hope. In January, a heritage startup called Heritage Walk Calcutta (HWC) began to document the messbaris through photographs, residents’ accounts and cultural references. They found 53 that were still standing.
Some of the images they took are now on an Instagram page called The Messbari Project; the project report on their website.
In October, a team from HWC met West Bengal Heritage Commission chairman Subhaprasanna Bhattacharjee to discuss ways to preserve the structures. “We will submit our documentation to the commission in April,” says Tathagata Neogi, an architect and co-founder of HWC.
“The Messbari Project is a wonderful initiative and I will help take it forward in my capacity,” Bhattacharjee told HT.
A SECOND COMING
“In 2017, we were working on ideas for short documentaries on the history of Kolkata. That was when Dibakar Banerjee’s film Byomkesh had just come out and there was a lot of noise in the newspapers about the Presidency Boarding house being used as a model for the set,” says Neogi. “We went to see that messbari and found it in a terrible state. So we did an episode on mess houses as part of Sutanuti Diaries [Sutanuti is one of the three villages that merged to become Calcutta].”
Not far from the Presidency mess is Khetra Kuthi, its bricks jutting out and heaps of garbage at its base. On the second floor is the room where the legendary Bengali author Shibram Chakraborty spent most of his life and died in 1980.
“I only realised that someone so impor-
People come looking for the room on the second floor. One man, when he got there, bowed and touched the floor with his forehead. DIP CHAKRABORTY, 27, who lives in the messbari where the legendary author Shibram Chakraborty spent most of his life and died in 1980
tant lived here months after I moved in,” says Dip Chakraborty, 27, who works at a travel agency and has lived here for three years. “Multiple people have come looking for his room. One man, when led to his room, bowed down and touched the floor with his forehead. It was thrilling to see.”
Realising that there were many stories to be told, HWC launched an internship project to study the messbaris. Armed with literary references, anecdotes and street directories dating back to 1915, interns began cataloguing the physical structures, and uncovering historical references. Like a newspaper report from
1920 on “the curious development whereby two or more men are seen to be sharing rooms in newly mushrooming boarding houses”.
Today, some messbaris have survived as hotels. The Chinese mess for refugees in Tirretta Bazar now houses a Chinese restaurant. The Parsi mess is well-maintained and still functional but also has a Parsi takeaway joint, a rarity in the city.
STUCK IN TIME
One reason most messbaris are crumbling is because of the tangle of ownership claims. “Many are stuck in litigation, making it very difficult to act,” says Bhattacharjee of the heritage commission.
The messbaris are in the generic style of the city mansions of the time. “Most have a courtyard, and spacious verandahs ringing the rooms. If the stakeholders could come together, it wouldn’t be hard to make them commercially viable,” says conservation architect Anjan Mitra. Calcutta Bungalow, for instance, is now a heritage hotel offering an experience of 1920s domestic life in the city.
Meanwhile, Neogi and Sengupta are hoping that the government will at least mark the most culturally significant of the messbaris — like they use blue plaques in the UK, to commemorate a link between a location and a famous person, Neogi says.
Till then, these mansions stand by the wayside – grand and anonymous – holding within the history of a time and people.