The history of Post Office is the history of mankind, particularly civilized human being. The first man who wanted to communicate with his counterpart must have created the first piece of mail for the Post Office. In this background it requires tremendous effort to write something about postal system which has become a part of life for the civilized society This is also more true when somebody is entrusted with the job of writing history about Calcutta GPO which is one of the oldest major post offices started by the Britishers in this part of the world. The present building of Calcutta GPO which was constructed in 1868 by the then British Govt. has seen the birth of organized postal system in this country, and has been the cradle for experimentation of many of the components of postal services as we see it today. Dr. Basudeb Chattopadhyay in this book on history of Calcutta GPO has arranged in bits and pieces various facets of history of Indian Postal System for which Calcutta GPO acted as arena of operation for British Postal Administration.
As an officer of Indian Postal Service who has spent more than 35 years in the Department I have always felt the need for a properly documented history of Calcutta GPO a fore-runner institution in the field of establishing postal system in this country. Earlier books on postal history including Geofrey Clarke's The Post of India and its Story published in 1919 speaks in detail about birth of Calcutta GPO and its nodal importance in Indian Postal history. But being a study on history of the post office in general, it has no focus on Calcutta GPO as such. Dr. Chattopadhyay's book for the first time attempts to give appropriate coverage to the history of this institution and brings out its relevance with reference to history of the post office in India. In this context this book fulfils a long felt need of highlighting about unique existence of an institution in Indian Postal System.
I congratulate Dr. Chattopadhyay in his efforts in bringing out this publication. I am sure this will be of great interest to those who are concerned with postal history and also will be a lasting contribution as a research work in the field of postal history.
This small book is symbolic of my abiding interest on social history of vintage Calcutta. It began somewhat fortuitously in the early 90s of the last century when the authorities of the Eastern Command of the Indian Army at Fort William requested three of us of the history faculty of the University of Calcutta -Suranjan Das, Bhaskar Chakrabarty and myself to write a history of Fort William in Calcutta. Although it is one of the oldest vestiges of the colonial past, this impressive citadel of British military presence in the east had no history. We took up the challenge more as a labour of love and the outcome was an authoritative work, which had won the approbation of scholars and laymen alike. A few years later Mr. Harshvardhan Neotia goaded me to reconstruct the story of yet another historic building. The Town hall of Calcutta was built by the European community of the city in the early years of the nineteenth century. Initially conceived as a permanent place for public gatherings and formal receptions, the Town Hall eventually became a contested space and a site for confrontation between John Bull and the Babu. I tried to recount the story in my The Town Hall of Calcutta. This was followed by a short history of the Government House, later renamed the Raj Bhavan. This was built by Lord Wellesley, the 'sultanized Englishman', in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This was indeed the time when the Company Bahadur was desperately trying to shed off the counting-house attitude and imbibe the imperial ethos. The Government House, which derived its architectural inspiration from the Kedleston Hall at Derbyshire, symbolized this crucial transformation in the mentality of the Company's government in India. I tried to recapture some of this spirit. His Excellency Shri Viren J. Shah, the present Governor of West Bengal graciously extended the necessary facilities required to complete the work. The present work on the General Post Office, yet another impressive edifice of the colonial rule, is the fourth volume in the series. I intend to include a few.
more vanishing landmarks of vintage Calcutta in the near future. Until I undertook the project, I did not quite realize that the seed of it was sown in me in my childhood. As one of midnight's children born in Calcutta, I am incurably addicted to the city that had, over the years, almost become part of my being. From the early 50s I used to spend a few months every year at Taltala, a predominantly middle class locality in central Calcutta. Some of those memories are simply ineffaceable. These are etched in my mind. The familiar sight of the turn with water-sack on his shoulder wiping the street greeted me in early in the morning. I used to sprint through the Indian Mirror Street till I reached the Wellington Square, which was close by. Despite the fact that some parks in the city had already been turned into sites for holding public meetings, it was spared the ordeal, at least for the time being. Its thick greeneries had a charm of its own. In the evenings I walked past Rani Rashmoni's house at Janbazar, past the mouth-watering aroma of the Lahore Restaurant adjacent to Bourne and Shepherd, to where S.N.Banerjee Road met the Chowringhee. The giant neon sign of the Lipton Tea filling up empty teacups illumined that crossing. Across the road on the north was the Metropolitan Building, which till the other day, had housed the Whiteway and Laidlaws, the most well known departmental store patronized by the European community in the city. On the south were the Grand Hotel, the Firpo's and the Indian Museum. On the west, across the Chowringhee, lay the vast expanse popularly known as the Garer Math, Le., the field of the Fort, which stretched right up to the Strand. Right in the middle of the field stood in its magnificent solitude what Mark Twain described in 1897 as the 'cloud-kissing monument to one Ochterloney'. The Fort, of course, was a no-go area for the ordinary public, so was the Government House on the northeast. The huge building, with forbidding neo-classical gates crowned by lions provoked a sense of awe. In close vicinity to the stately Government House stood the Town Hall, the High Court, the General Post Office and the Writers Buildings, each representing a distinct phase in the growth of the colonial architecture. Regrettably, much of the heritage buildings had been irretrievably lost. Having seen the demolition of the Senate House in my own eyes, I increasingly felt ignorance is the root of our collective indifference. We need to know a bit more about what Richard Cobb calls 'history on the ground to save them from the axe of the demolitionists. The present series is a modest contribution in this regard. The present project was the brainchild of Shri Tilak De, the past Director of the G.P.O., Kolkata. He took great personal interest in discovering many old artefacts relating to the evolution of postal system in eastern India. During his tenure, the building got a new facelift.
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