Spywalk through Kolkata lanes gives a peek into British vigilantism

KOLKATA: A group of 20 on Saturday participated in a spy-network walk — I Spy with My Little Eye — organized by Heritage Walk Calcutta (HWC) and

Jadavpur University

Press. The walk, based on Humphrey House’s 25-page satire ‘I spy with my little eye’, started from College Street Coffee House and culminated at Dalhousie Square.

The 1937 satire ridicules the ‘spyarchy’, which was aiding the police in Calcutta in 1930s. The civic administration had all but ceased to operate and was replaced by the colonial policing system, giving way to everyday vigilantism. The narrator of the book takes the reader through the streets of Calcutta on a heady journey and the group on Saturday followed his footsteps through non-descript lanes of College Street,

Bowbazar

, Phears Lane and the building that housed the famous Nanking restaurant. The two-hourlong walk gave a glimpse of how spy network operated in Calcutta and the lives of real and suspected spies who waged their own battles against an oppressive regime.

JU PhD researcher Sujaan Mukherjee, who conducted the walk, said, “I found the pamphlet relevant even after 80 years, when the freedom of speech and press is under threat. The idea was to make the participants know of the different spynetworks as well as the colonial thought-policing in a realistic and engaging way.”

House was a member of the ‘Parichay’ adda and was friends with some of the most dynamic minds of that time — Sudhindranath Datta, Buddhadev Bose,

Susobhan Sarkar

, Chhabi Datta, Bishnu De, Humayun Kabir and Dhurjati Prasad Mukherji. He also maintained close ties with Michael Carritt, John Auden and Rev. Michael Scott. He came to be suspected of being a communist spy and was kept under close watch.

The letters exchanged between this group of friends and him (in English and Bengali) even after House’s departure from India have been carefully preserved by his daughter, Rachel Thurley. During the walk, Mukherjee showed photocopies of some of these letters, parts of which were cut off by colonial police to give an idea of censorship at that time.

Mukherjee added that House’s ‘India Box’ was digitized by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.

“The walk unraveled Calcutta as a city of spy during the 1930s when it was no longer the capital,” said Tathagata Neogi of HWC. He added that the British authorities had banned all communist activity during this time, and offered a brief glimpse into how the party had continued to operate.

Radio personality and heritage blogger Deepanjan Ghosh added, “I did not really know that there was a network of spies operating in Calcutta. There was a lot of information about censorship and what the city in 1930s and 1940s was like.”

Subhabrata Ghosh, an IT professional, found the idea behind the walk innovative and “well-researched”.