Day 46 Calcutta

Day 46                        Monday 10 October 2011                   Calcutta

We walked around the corner to Shakespeare Sarani to the State Archives at No 43.

We had been told that it opened at 11am but thought this was odd so got there at 10am.  Five men were sitting at an empty front desk, all reading newspapers. We were told to sit & wait which we did.

At 11am a woman took us up to the Archives & explained that they only had records from 1904 there & in any event we would need a letter from our Embassy (there isn’t one in Calcutta) to look at any records.  Records from the earlier years were at another branch, near

College Road

.

Armed with the address in Bengali, we got a taxi there.

Again, we were told that we would need a letter from an Embassy or Legation in order to look at anything held there. We were allowed to look at an index. This had an entry from 1820 about Dr Macwhirter letting his house in Lal Bazaar to the Police Office. In order to look at the original document we would need to get a recommendation & tomorrow we were told was a holiday for government offices.  We asked how many pages and the woman went and looked, 2 pages, it was that close but we were not permitted to see it.  There were also other indexes, but these were treated as “records” so again we were not permitted to see them

So, we went off in a taxi to the National Library. Thunder & lightning all around & darkening skies. Running through the rain we reached the Library only to be told it had moved to a newer building close by in the same grounds.

After getting through security & storing bags, we were told we didn’t need a membership card but could go up to the second floor to see the Assistant Librarian.

We then spent several hours reading through old gazettes & papers but didn’t find anything of interest.

We then got a taxi to the Asiatic Society. It was pretty disorganised & books we ordered up couldn’t be found!

A rather frustrating day but that is India!