A proposal to display in a park old Calcutta street furniture like gas lamps, garden benches, old water spouts that are languishing in the storage of Calcutta Municipal Corporation found popular support at a lecture by Trinamul Rajya Sabha member Jawhar Sircar at the Alipore Museum a few days ago.
The chief of HIDCO, which manages the museum, instantly agreed to have such a display in the park in front of Snehodiya, the senior citizens’ home in New Town.
Sircar proposed such a display during the course of his lecture titled ‘Lacework in Iron: Balconies in North Calcutta’, at the Alipore Museum.
The former Union culture secretary said: “All these cast iron street furniture are just languishing with the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. It wouldn’t take much to put them in a park. If we displayed them, Calcuttans would become aware of such furniture and the craftsmanship that created them.”
Bonani Kakkar of PUBLIC, an NGO, said: “I had proposed to the corporation many years back that these street furniture be placed in the park in front of the corporation headquarters. Today, the park is blocked from sight by hawkers.”
The talk about street furniture arose as Sircar showed photographs of the cast iron work that could be found in elaborate balustrades in north Calcutta.
“Verandah is a Portuguese word that refers to the extended structure of a house. These verandahs often had elaborate cast-iron balustrades. Calcutta has a wealth of such balustrades, some of which still exist today,” said Sircar as he showed pictures of such cast iron work.
Tracing the passage of cast iron technology from the 1770s in Europe and the US, it arrived on the Indian shores in the 1840s.
Showing photographs of cast iron and glass structures sprinkled in Manhattan, New York, Paris bridges, Vienna, Convent Garden in London or the Kew Garden or the George Peabody Library, the former bureaucrat pointed out how European motifs like Christian and Grecian urns and wreaths were copied in India too.
“The verandah at Star Theatre has Corinthian pillars with 20th-century baroque work in cast iron. There are multifloriated arches. The Firpo building, too, has such work,” he
said.
Not just verandahs, such cast iron work can be found in the gates of Raj Bhawan, Serampore College, which came made from Europe.
