Streetwise Kolkata: Red Road — A tarred highway from which as soon as Spitfires took off

The two-kilometer-long Red Road that slices the massive expanse of the Maidan in Kolkata and one a part of the guts of town, is just not actually purple. In truth, it’s extra asphalt black than gray. The solely patches of the color one would discover alongside that stretch of town are the flaming blooms of gulmohar and palash when each begin flowering inside days of one another, in late spring.
Yet, the highway is certainly one of Kolkata’s extra iconic thoroughfares, very very like Park Street, instantly related to town’s historical past. Like many different Kolkata roads and neighbourhoods, there are various tales about how the highway actually received its identify. Nearly 4 many years in the past, the stretch was renamed Indira Gandhi Sarani, after the nation’s former prime minister, however this nomenclature isn’t used, in official communication or when instructing taxi drivers within the metropolis.
Built in 1820, the extensive expanse of the highway begins south of Fort William’s west gate and runs all the best way as much as Eden Gardens. Remnants of the forest land that existed is seen within the clusters of bushes which have survived storms that threatened to uproot them, each pure and artifical, however that quantity too has been diminishing over the previous few many years.
Red Road (Express Photo Shashi Ghosh)
According to Tathagatha Neogi, historian and co-founder of Immersive Trails, Red Road was initially constructed to function a driving course and a driving course for horse-driven carriages within the Maidan and Fort William neighbourhood. In colonial India, historic paperwork point out that the thoroughfare’s identify was “The Course” in addition to “Secretary’s Walk”, says Neogi. But using purple gravel for surfacing when the highway was first constructed probably resulted in an oversimplification of its nomenclature, one which has caught until date.

But in 1914, says Neogi, the Englishman’s Overland Mail, a newspaper printed in Calcutta, carried a letter from an nameless reader asking the British authorities to alter the identify of the Red Road since by that 12 months, the purple gravel had been changed by tar. But the petition didn’t bear fruit, and the identify remained. “The tarring probably happened in 1910 prior to the visit of King George V in 1911-12,” Neogi says.
Sometime publish 1717, the dense forest land that existed on this neighbourhood was slowly cleared away by the British authorities who transformed Fort William into an official base for his or her use of the construction as a customs home and a navy station. In the method of the conversion of Fort William, a number of architectural parts have been included into the massive complicated of the fort, requiring extra bushes to be lower down for the increasing floor space. The clearing of the forest land served one other function: it supplied an unobstructed view of the encompassing environs, vital for a 360 diploma line of firing ammunition.
According to Neogi, the chopping down of bushes was met with criticism from the English gentry who discovered themselves unable to go for open-top carriage-rides underneath the blistering solar in Calcutta on Red Road, compelling the federal government to think about replanting bushes. “So attempts were made to make the municipality to plant trees along it, which were not successful,” he explains.
The size and width of Red Road made it very best for internet hosting parades. Even now it’s used for parades, particularly on January 26. Neogi says one of many grandest parades this highway witnessed was in 1911-12, when King George V and his spouse Queen Mary of Teck arrived in Calcutta on their tour of India.
“Two triumphal arches were made on two ends of the road to welcome the king and his guards. The roadside was blocked with bamboo barriers so that no one can come on the road during the parade, much like today.Also, temporary pavilions were set up on both sides of the road complete with neoclassical columns made of wood. A flag mast was raised where a specially designed welcome flag was flown for the event,” says Neogi.
As is seen in Kolkata even at this time throughout public occasions at Red Road, for King George V’s arrival too spectator galleries have been constructed on both aspect of the highway. This association was repeated in the course of the go to by the Prince of Wales in 1921.
Police Memorial on Red Road. (Express Photo Shashi Ghosh)
There have been celebrations right here following the top of the Second Boer War in May 1900, the place the British military had fought towards the South African Republic and the Orange Free State, securing a victory, in what got here to be referred to as the Relief of Mafeking. Then British cyclists organised town’s first bicycle rally, racing down the size of Red Road.
“The Red Road was also the start and ending points of paperchase races in Calcutta in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Neogi.
In January 1910, the primary profitable flight in British India took off from Red Road, marking its use additionally as an efficient runway for small planes. This first aircraft was a design of Calcutta-based electrical and vehicle engineer W. E. Debrunner, the proprietor of Continental Electric and Motor Car Company. “The biplane was 20 feet long and had a wooden body, wooden propellers and cloth covering. A motorcycle engine was repurposed to give it driving power. This was meant for a trial flight so no passengers or aviators were present in the plane,” explains Neogi.
Debrunner first tried to fly the aircraft with the assistance of his two Sikh engineers that morning, however failed as a result of technical glitches. Debrunner was profitable hours later, the place the aircraft achieved significantly good top and landed safely on Casuarina Avenue close by, he provides.
During the Second World War, it turned a touchdown strip for Spitfires and Mohawks of the 17 and 155 Squadrons, the place aircrafts have been dispersed alongside Ochterlony Road, a smaller highway that connects Red Road to Chowringhee, writes Robert H. Farquharson, in his e-book ‘For Your Tomorrow: Canadians and the Burma Campaign, 1941-1945’.

But the highway had its drawbacks as an airstrip, Farquharson provides, largely because of the ever-present haze that hung over the metropolis of Calcutta, making it more durable for pilots to find the strip. In addition, not solely was it narrower than a standard airstrip, nevertheless it additionally had balustrades on both aspect of the highway, and was like “any well-engineered road”, topped within the center.
“There was a high building at the north end of the strip and pilots taking off toward it could wave to the office girls as they flew past,” Farquharson writes. “Under normal circumstances Red Road was just long enough, but circumstances were not always normal.”
In the final 15 years, the balustrades operating on each side of Red Road have undergone renovation that didn’t seem vital, the place the older bricks have been changed with newer ones and the peak of the balustrades elevated by a number of inches. The purple and cream color mixture of those constructions have been completely modified to white.

On both aspect of Red Road, the Maidan grounds have been sectioned into smaller public parks and varied sports activities golf equipment, a lot of which have been established over the previous century, and stay in operation at this time.One of probably the most iconic sports activities services is the Mohammedan Sporting Ground, a multi-use stadium with a pure grass turf, that’s principally used for soccer matches and is the house stadium of Mohammedan S.C., certainly one of Kolkata’s hottest soccer golf equipment.
When driving down Red Road, the swatches of stamp-size public parks are dotted with statues of people related to India’s freedom wrestle. Between 1947 and 1983, the West Bengal authorities changed statues of British officers and East India Company staff with these of revolutionaries, women and men who had devoted their lives to the liberty of the nation, like Pritilata Waddedar and Matangini Hazra.