BLECHYNDEN, Kathleen.

£650 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Calcutta Past and Present. First and only contemporary edition of this attractive and uncommon book, the work of a native of Kolkata, "well known for her interest in Calcutta and Alipore", with an "evident love for the Queen of the Ganges" (Beveridge, p.237). Blechynden drew on an extensive family archive, allied to wide-ranging research and an ear for anecdote to produce this entertaining history.Kathleen Blechynden (1855-1925) was the great-granddaughter of Richard Blechynden, Kolkata's superintendent of roads in the early years of the 19th century. Richard left a diary in 73 volumes, now in the British Library and being successively mined for the detail of the life of the city's lower-middle class of European businessmen, officials and professionals, and their Indian assistants. Proper restraint was of course exercised in respect of the tales of her ancestor's numerous concubines and other such matters, but Kathleen certainly had access to material which made possible this richly textured account of the city. The ICS official and orientalist Henry Beveridge was charmed by it in 1906; over 100 years later the West Bengal Telegraph India's reviewer highly recommended it's "vivid descriptions of the social life and streets and houses of the colonial city, whose white quarters were tolerably clean and ordered, and the d*****s were a necessary evil... for education and entertainment".

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