ABSTRACT

Calcutta 1811. The rich travelled on the shoulders of the poor in Calcutta in 1811. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, in his palanquin, bobbed along above the heads of the coolies and beggars in Tank Square. He did not see the short man with a sailor’s gait and a scarred, neartoothless face. But Edward Robarts saw him. Seeing Raffles gave Robarts hope. For ten months on this, the harshest of his beaches, Robarts had been on the slide. Calcutta was a Company town, an East India Company town. A white man without Company connections, or without a trade that the Company valued, had nothing to sell but his poverty. In an empire city, there was no space between the empowered rich and the disciplined native population who did their work for them. The relentless pressure on the poor white man was downward. A man never went up in the rounds of begging a few rupees from vestrymen’s wives and daughters. There was only the trading of one disrespectful gaze for another degrading judgement.