[Reader-list] Towards a Social History of the Mess-Houses in Calcutta, 1890s - 1990s

[Bodhisattva Kar]

Dear Friends,
 
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“Messing with the Bhadraloks: Towards a Social History of the Mess-Houses in Calcutta, 1890s – 1990s”
 
Subhalakshmi Roy and Bodhisattva Kar
 
In spite of multiple references in a variety of cultural productions and historical accounts of twentieth-century Bengal, the mess-houses of Calcutta continue to escape full-length studies and remain a largely undocumented career of (post)colonial urbanity. Though almost a thing of the past today, the institution and practices of mess-houses need critical attention to appreciate a widespread practice of forging a community in an urban space throughout the twentieth century. Being shot into the status of a colonial epicenter, the city of Calcutta meant education and jobs for many in its neighboring districts and provinces. From the 1890s, the institution of mess-houses surfaced in the city primarily as a residential establishment of the male middle class migrants who could not afford to hire a whole house and bring their families along. In the mess-houses they shared the rent and the cost of kitchen. Apart from the rent-paying residents, the community usually consisted of a manger
 (often the landlord himself), a cook, and a common attendant.

Although the early mess-houses were organized along the track of caste, increasingly locality emerged as the major axis of gatherings. Students and jobseekers from particular districts of Bengal used to group together in particular mess-houses in the capital city. Very soon the mess-houses outgrew their purely residential purpose and developed into identity-hubs of the unsung diasporas in the city. In fact, much of what today comes to be celebrated as ‘the Assamese renaissance’ was a literary movement that started in a couple of early twentieth century College Street messes. As our preliminary findings indicate, caught between the compulsions of harboring district identities and acquiring urban respectability, the little Sylhets and the little Burdwans in early and mid twentieth-century Calcutta were neither closed cultural isolates in the big city nor open anonymous public spaces completely submerged in the mainstream urban culture. In the first place, the project wishes to
 appreciate the role of the mess-houses as lived sites of the constitution, exercise and contestation of the distance between the metropolis and the mofussil. From extensive interviews and dispersed written accounts we would try to recover the fast vanishing histories of the everyday negotiations of identity. Documenting the operation of the family and village ties around the mess-houses, the study would like t trace the complexities of the process through numerous other registers of the community life: the tensed shuttling between district parlance and Calcutta parlance, the quarrels over cuisine, the emotional investments in the ‘week-ends’ (when residents coming from the neighboring localities usually left to revisit their families) and so on.

The unique location of the mess-houses between the intimate home and the anonymous city entailed a peculiar normative structure. On the one hand, mess-houses clearly signaled individual freedom for salaries single males from oppressive familialism and the mid-twentieth-century accounts (fictional and autobiographical) abound in celebratory descriptions in relaxed caste rules, adventurous nightlife and incessant addas. On the other hand, most of the mess-houses typically assumed, what we may call, the family function: sexual behaviors were zealously policed, women were religiously kept out and the “bhadralok character of the mess” was passionately defended even at the cost of rusticating the rule-breakers. It is this forked movement between intimacy and anonymity – variously inflicted by a shared and shifting code of middle class male morality – that our study would like to address. The rigidly gendered nature of the mess-houses seems to have energized a variety of impressions in the
 world of Bengali cultural production: laughter, anger, suspicion, helplessness, and moralization. Examining and analyzing these representational strategies and the exclusionary rules of the mess-house communities, our study would try to map the changing homosocial boundaries of the urban space and record the details of the gradual and checkered emergence of the working girls’ hostels – commonly known as ‘women’s mess-houses’.

The moral character of the ‘mess-walahs’ was a prized target of the neighboring households in times of conflict. Petitions to the municipal authorities advocating the closing down of mess-houses in bhadralok residential areas were not too rare. Women domestics working in the mess-houses commonly found it difficult to get jobs in the local families. ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns in local newspapers continued grudging complaints about the men who did not live with their families. And yet there is ample evidence in the available literature to show that many notable locals frequented the much-celebrated addas of the mess-houses and were viewed almost as regular members of the community. Love affairs leading to marriages between local girls and mess-boys and the extensive participation of the mess-residents in local festivals and functions also testify that suspicion was often balanced by trust and confidence. It is in this conflictual economy of urban neighborhood that our study would
 try to situate the institution of the mess-houses. Condemned to a violent ferrying between the stylized representations as hotbeds of heinous crimes in the Bengal detective stories (the Byomkesh stories, for example), as epitomizing the lures and temptations of the corrupting city life (in ‘Devdas’, most famously), as spaces of loss and detachment (in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Aparajito’), as spaces of rediscovering the lost community (the popular Uttam-Suchitra comedy ‘Sare Chuattar’) and as collections of the struggling middle class wage earners (in Manik Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Shahartali’), the mess-houses provide interesting entry points to the diverse complexities of urbanization in colonial and postcolonial Calcutta.

Finally, we would also be interested in appreciating the conjuncture of the events that brought about the whimpering end of this institution. While successfully surviving a major institutional crisis during the Second World War and a serious social crisis during the Partition, the mess-houses began to slowly disappear in the early nineteen-seventies. We would like to pursue the final days of the mess-houses in and through the various contexts of political situations, flux in the real estate market, growth of the hotel industry, changing job patterns, consumerist tropes and redistribution of social bonds.
 
Till next month!
 
Subhalakshmi and Bodhisattva


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