Transforming Landscapes: Painted Postcards of Colonial Calcutta

It was only after the arrival of Lord Wellesley that erstwhile colonial Calcutta became the subject of systematic town planning and civic improvement. The institutions that were set up to organise this effort of planning and construction included the Committee for the Improvement of the Town of Calcutta in 1803, followed by the Lottery Committee, which was started in 1817 after Wellesley’s departure. These were carried out to complete a process of transition, as Ranabir Ray Choudhury writes:

“…the process of ‘importing ideas and procedures relating to landed property that were not the same as those of the nawabs’ had already begun which later became ‘the basis of property rights in Calcutta and also of the regulation of space in the city (rules about public and private land, markets, encroachment, preservation of roads, ghats, etc.).’”

To envision the new civic spaces that were already anticipated by Wellesley’s Minute on Calcutta (1803), one would have to see them as producing the “effect” that the Governor-General intended them to communicate. Arriving by river, he wrote about his first impression of the city in a personal letter to his wife, Hyacinthe, on 5 June 1798:

“Nothing could equal the magnificence of my approach to this town (erstwhile Calcutta). For nearly three miles the river, which is as large as the Thames in London, is bordered by lovely well-built country houses with porticos and colonnades. The town is a mass of superb palaces in the same style, with the finest fortresses in the world—all this is, as in Rome, mixed up with miserable huts and gardens. The green of the lawns surpasses anything you can ever have seen—an extraordinary effect in so hot a country. The trees are more beautiful, their foliage more luxuriant, than in any European country.”

Painted postcards of this capital city played a significant part in communicating the effects of this vision. It was partly a fantasy of imperial belonging (the reference to Rome, with its Romantic-imperialist past, points to this), and partly a clear-sighted project of “improvement” that would transform the landscape, create new spaces amenable to modern regimes of hygiene and public use, and make them habitable for European residents. 

To read more about colonial representations of erstwhile Calcutta, please click here.

All postcards from the private collection of Kazi Anirban.

Click on the image to view the album