1762

The year 1762 is the historical starting point Hobbs gives for a new kind of urban entertainment in Calcutta: William Parker opened a bar for the city’s gentlemen. The date is not presented as the opening of the Suez Canal. Rather, Hobbs connects the bar’s story to the world that preceded the canal, when reaching Calcutta by sea meant a long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope.

The Bar and Its Licence

Hobbs says Parker’s plan included alcohol but no waitresses. The licensing board permitted the bar to open on the condition that it remain closed during the day, out of concern that younger men would otherwise skip school. The restriction made the bar’s hours part of its public regulation, while its original staffing plan reflected an establishment conceived around drink rather than female service.

Calcutta Before the Suez Canal

In Hobbs’s account, before the canal was built, the most daring travellers reached Calcutta by sailing around the Cape. With no hotels available, they spent nights on barges at Chandpal Ghat. His description contrasts that earlier travel world with the later presence of European women who crossed the ocean to entertain male visitors; before them, he says, travellers had only Indian women to turn to. The contrast places Parker’s bar within a changing city of maritime access, accommodation, and commercial entertainment, without making 1762 the date of the canal’s construction.

Bars, Service, and the Historical Record

Hobbs adds that many bars appeared after Parker’s, but their servers were men known as khidmatgars. As an illustration of the businesses that served Calcutta’s colonial-era institutions, he recounts Le Galle’s contract to supply food and drink to court employees and their friends during Nanda Kumar’s trial. Mohan Prasad ordered sixteen meals and sixteen dinners each day, at two rupees and seventy-five annas per meal and dinner. Although Nanda Kumar’s execution secured him a place in history, Hobbs says no trace remained of Le Galle or Mohan Prasad; Le Galle’s surviving claim was a lawsuit to recover 629 rupees in unpaid bills. This anecdote is not dated to 1762, but it extends the account from the bar’s founding to the less visible labour and debts behind the city’s public history.