Books

Speak, New Market’s Cannon

An intimate insider’s viewpoint about a juicy gossip session with people you might have met a few years earlier.

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Speak, New Market’s Cannon
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Sixty years is more than most of us remember in a fast-changing city. Calcutta became Kolkata and is still trying to shake off its colonial roots—albeit unsuccessfully. Strains in a Minor Key is Rani Sircar’s account of her life and times in Calcutta and the var­ious houses she lived in and the different communities she came into contact with. Sircar herself is half Tamil and half Bengali and actually found herself writing a Bengali exam in Lahore where her mot­her tau­ght. It is obvious that with that beginning any book she would write would turn out to be a mel­ange of experiences.

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Sircar’s first book, Dan­­cing Round the May­pole, was the life of a brown memsahib in colonial times. Her second is based in a post-Independence society where identities tend to be confused, characterised by a heritage building on Chowringhee where Rani Sircar and her husband find a home and circulate between upstairs and downstairs neighbours and their various quirks. A file of domestics coming to view Rani’s Christmas decorations for example, confected from egg white and paint, the understanding that beef should not be cooked at home. The twin sisters Gossip and Rumour ever on the alert for fresh scandal—and there is a lot of scandal-mongering in the book since that, Sircar says, is the way it used to be with people living one on top of the other and families in each other’s pockets.

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The book holds up a mirror to a vanished milieu, that of a certain sort of anglicised Indian family, which was proudly Indian, proudly Christian and both directly influenced by and resisting the British customs of undivided India. And which flitted in and out of various worlds and encounters, explaining why those worlds were the way they were and how those encounters came about. Ind­ian schoolgirls learnt traditional English songs without realising the incongruities in what they were learning, simply because it was far too close to British times. All this would be forgotten a few decades later as the New Market shops would take on new avatars to fit into their changing world. The Sircar’s world comprises a colourful mul­ti­­plicity of people: those who stayed back, Anglo-­Indian schoolmistresses, Jewish fri­ends who married Bra­­hmins, Indian Christian parsons, prin­ces, women from bhadralok families who became film stars, the American diplomatic enclave, dowagers, the nouveau riche, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs who dished up rasomalai in America and providers of services with a smile. She speculates on Vivien Leigh’s mother’s surname, the marital squabbles of the dom­estic class, and how it affects the running of the home and other assorted things. Through the book Sircar changes houses and locations, though the vibrancy of her stories remains fairly constant.

While Sircar is a sharp-eyed observer she has a habit of running on about relative after relative, how they were rel­ated and what they said to each other on certain occasions, so that it becomes hard to keep track. However, the book does impart an intimate insider’s viewpoint about a juicy gossip session with people you might have met a few years earlier.

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