Tag Archives: Barrackpore

Of Dogs and Men

Sometime in May 2017, a litter of puppies was born just outside the gates of the West Bengal Police Training Academy, in Barrackpore , where the Viceroy’s weekend retreat had once been. The litter had little idea of the trials of life. They snuggled up to their mother as she fed them. Their glazed slits soon developed into eyes and their thin little bodies began to stumble and lurch away from the mother dog. But they were born on the mean streets and were no match for human cruelty. As they smelt the broken footpaths and scrabbled among the plastic wrappers they began to die. Two were crushed by buses, one died of worms. Their mother had been quite surprised by their birth and unsurprised by their deaths. She was tired, her teats were meagre, the milk was insufficient and food was unavailable. She struggled to lift her starving body, let alone keep track of her children.

One of her puppies began to stray inside the black gates of the Training Academy. There were smells here that promised more than days of empty grubbing. A kind policeman gave her biscuits, another stroked her ears, till one day a miracle happened and a meeting was held about her in a senior officer’s office room. She would be an experiment. She would receive training on how to be a police dog, a stray, a pariah, an Indie receiving the full attention of the Canine squad. She became Asha.

As time passed Asha became dextrous at her job. If the other pups- a mixture of German Shepherds, Labradors and Rottweilers took their lessons excitedly, or with boredom or with little enthusiasm, Asha took up the challenge. She sniffed better than the others. She did obedience as well as them. When the ‘don’t take’ test- placing a bowl of food within reach and waiting forever for the Take command came, Asha held out the longest, hardest, toughest. She was the star of the batch. In hurdles she sprang nimbly over the wires and fences and swung through the hoops of fire. She tasted the heady intoxication of publicity and praise. A newspaper covered her and she became modestly famous. 

But at mealtimes class barriers had to be maintained. The other dogs gulped down their food in a row, but Asha was placed near the wall. She was scared of  the breed dogs. Humbly, with the centuries-old slinking manner of the street dog, she had her meat and rice in a corner, her brown eyes sliding away from them. And after her training period was over and the other dogs roared off majestically to their posts all across the districts of Bengal, it was clear that Asha, the Indie, was not quite wanted for V.I.P duty. A V.I.P had demanded a proper Labrador, not a stray, for his duty.  And so, she stayed on at Barrackpore, fed, exercised, trained but unwanted.

Police dogs have difficult lives. They have to survive worrying terrain, heat, rain, railway stations, airports, raids. They have to love their trainers and their work but miss out on the joys of chasing birds, running with balls, living with families, being cuddled by Dog Mom and Dog Dad. They are brave little soldiers. And one day, when they are old, they have to retire. Sometimes their handlers take them in, sometimes they are put up for adoption. 

Asha lives in her kennel. She is walked, fed but she was never in active combat. Her eyes tell the story of deep hurt, longing, sadness. Ay, but to die and go we know not where, to waste days in cold obstruction and to rot. She is almost ten. Lately she has been depressive and revengeful. She bit two other dogs because her trainer, her man, was re-assigned to another. To have that Pygmalion moment, and then to be forever doomed to a wretched existence. Comfort, yes, security, yes, but work. Never. 

As I watched Asha grow old in bits and pieces, I began to wonder about Police Dog thoughts. What if they could, like Virginia Woolf’s dog Flush, write an autobiography? What if, like the dog in the movie Good Boy, they could sense horror, foreboding, death! It was the start of the pandemic and a story formed in my mind. What if Asha could solve a crime?

And so it was that Asha changed, mutated, dissolved and grew into a dog who, like Everyman, became an EveryDog. Everydog, go thy way, and I will be your follower. She melted into all the dogs I had, we had, all of us who love all creatures great and small, but especially dogs. She took on the personalities of all my dogs who had died and in their deaths had taken  pieces of me with them. She became the protagonist of my detective novel. I called it “Death, by Fire”, partly because the phrase was from The Tempest and like Prospero’s dream, all writing can weave new worlds, and of course wholly because I had seen Police dogs up close and had a great tenderness for them.

Good luck to all the Ashas of this world. With eyes shining, tails wagging, ears flopping and a riot of sniffs, may you always have the chance to serve your workplace, do your duty and have a warm word now and then, and perhaps a biscuit afterwards. 

And, well, thank you! 

All photographs courtesy of the Dog Squad at Barrackpore’s Swami Vivekananda State Police Training Academy.

Some have been taken by the author when she first visited the dog sqad while writing her book on Barrackpore Park and found Asha, like Eliza Doolittle, trying so hard to belong!

Barrackpore

Barrackpore Park is today a forgotten piece of history.

The West Bengal Police Training Academy operates here, as does the State Armed Police and the Barrackpore Cantonment of the Indian Army. Its once rolling grounds have been divided and built upon by brutal-looking twenty- first century structures, many painted in an alarming shade of white and blue. Somewhere on the edge of the river stands a tomb built over the final resting place of Lady Canning, first Vicereine of India, while a statue of Lord Canning who passed away soon after returning to England stands guard at the foot of the tomb. It was brought here from the streets of Calcutta in the late 1960s as the city administrators went into an overdrive to remove colonial memories by erasing British era statues. Someone, somewhere, placed the magisterial figure of Lord Canning beside his wife’s grave, perhaps mindful both of the pathos of the situation as well as the silliness of defacing or removing statues to obliterate what can only be described as a definite moment in India’s past.

Other statues from colonial India are found on the lawns of the Flagstaff House, which was once the residence of the private secretary to the Viceroy and is today the Governor of Bengal’s riverside retreat.

Few Governors use it though.

The house stands empty and a little run down, with the sofas in the vast high-ceilinged hall sagging forlornly, the cinnamon tree in the garden looking sadly at the scrubby lawn. Only the statues of the great Governors General and Viceroys, the Mintos, a Curzon, a John Lawrence and a Mayo (there are twelve statues in all, of exquisite workmanship) and a semaphore looming out of the grass are reminders of what this house, this garden and this estate once was.

For Barrackpore Park had been begun by Lord Wellesley in 1801 to rival Government House in Calcutta, to function as a weekend retreat for the Governor General and to be a piece of England in a foreign land with its vast mansion — Government House — a rolling park styled and landscaped like an English garden, an aviary, a menagerie, and a cluster of bungalows for the guests and the officers.

In time the estate grew, became a point of leisure for the British administrators where they partied, danced, came on a honeymoon, played golf, rowed on the river, painted, hunted and had a grand time. There was Calcutta — stiff, formal and crowded, and there was Barrackpore, the Latbagan as the Indians called it, the place for pleasure and sport.

Image credit: Dufferin Papers, Public Research Office of Northern Ireland

The photograph above is a picture taken by a Vicereine. Hariot Dufferin, wife of Lord Dufferin or Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood who ruled as Viceroy from 1884 to 1888 was an avid photographer and took many images of India during her stay here. Lady Dufferin’s photo is one of the many enthusiastic ones taken by other Vicereines or painted by earlier Ladysahibs in which the great Banyan Tree stands as the centre point of this country mansion. The tree stood outside on the lawn in the southern side of the mansion, hundred years old already when Wellesley began his mansion and was a beloved shaded spot under which meals were had, sore minds were rested, games were played and the stiff starched British upper lip could dissolve into merry-making and fun.

After India’s Independence in 1947 the British past began to fade, so much so that sometime in the 1980s a muddled Indian bureaucrat decided that the sepoy Mangal Pandey, whose defiance had flamed into the Sepoy Mutiny (or India’s First War of Independence, as we had been taught at school) had been hanged from the banyan tree outside the Governor General’s bedroom and not the tree in the Cantonment where the hanging had actually taken place. Thus began a completely inaccurate representation of the Government House banyan tree as the scene of India’s spirited defiance. Everybody we spoke to before our research believed it to be so, without pausing to think.

Why would you hang a man in chains at the spot where you had your breakfast and your children played catch!

But to return to Lady Dufferin. Her journal contains riveting accounts of her viceregal life in India, including scenes from her stays at Barrackpore and the picnics, charity balls, levees, dancing and music, Christmases and summers spent there.

Banyan Tree, Barrackpore inside the State Police Academy today.
Photo- Monotosh Paul

No ominous note in her account. Perhaps she didn’t quite realise the full import of the fact that fifteen miles away, in the heart of Calcutta, the seeds of a tiny organisation called the Indian National Congress through the Indian Association had been planted, a flower that bloomed in Bombay in 1885. No one took any notice of it.

God was in his heaven, the British ruled the land, this land and many, many more and the sun would never set on them!

If you would like to know more about Barrackpore Park and Government House, Barrackpore, do read Under the Banyan Tree: The Forgotten Story of Barrackpore Park co-written with my husband.