Suez Canal

The Suez Canal is presented as more than a maritime passage: in Hobbs’s history of Calcutta’s bars and hotels, its opening in 1869 changes who can reach the city and helps transform its hospitality trade. The canal’s story also becomes a frame for histories that are less easily traced, from early bar workers to enslaved people and their descendants in Calcutta.

The Canal and Calcutta’s Changing Routes

Hobbs asks when ships began to sail through the Suez Canal, prompting a history lesson that links the waterway to the city’s own past. Before the canal was built, Hobbs explains, adventurous travelers bound for Calcutta had to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. With no hotels available, they spent nights on barges at Chandpal Ghat. In his account, this slower, more arduous route also meant that European women did not arrive in Calcutta to entertain travelers; men seeking company turned instead to Indian women.

The canal joined the waters of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, connecting Europe with Asia by a shorter route. Hobbs dates its opening to 1869 and presents the resulting increase in arrivals as a turning point for the city’s hotels and restaurants. The change is measured not only in travel time but in the growth of businesses catering to visitors: Calcutta’s hospitality trade began to flourish after the canal opened.

Bars, Hotels, and the Arrival of Hostesses

Hobbs’s account reaches back to 1762, when William Parker opened a bar intended to entertain Calcutta’s gentlemen. Alcohol was part of the plan; female servers were not. The licensing board required the establishment to close during the day, on the stated grounds that younger men might otherwise skip school. Other bars followed, but they were served by male khidmatgars. Even Le Galle, who supplied food and drink to court employees and their associates during Nanda Kumar’s trial, did not employ barmaids.

The canal-era expansion altered that pattern. Hobbs recalls English women arriving in Calcutta to serve drinks, recruited through advertisements and contracts lasting six months or two years. Representatives associated with the Hotel Shahjahan and Europa exchanged recommendations about prospective hostesses, whose attractiveness was treated as a selling point. Their work was also evaluated in commercial terms: one recruiter claimed that the women helped double hotel bar sales, while worrying that they might leave before their contracts ended and stop sending part of their wages. The canal thus appears in Hobbs’s account alongside a labor system that brought women to Calcutta as both workers and attractions for male customers.

The Histories the City Forgets

Hobbs’s recollection of the canal leads into a broader account of human trafficking and slavery in Calcutta. He tells his younger listeners that people were still bought and sold in the city around the middle of the preceding century. English ladies and gentlemen, as well as local aristocrats, purchased boys and girls from Murgihata and took them into their homes; when enslaved people ran away, their owners placed newspaper notices offering rewards.

A later account of Rosie gives that history a family and a place. Rosie tells William Ghosh that her ancestors were brought from the African coast in the early nineteenth century, landed at Chandpal Ghat in ankle chains, and sold in Murgighata for twenty-five rupees each. Although a law later freed the enslaved people, they had nowhere else to go and remained in Calcutta. They also took the names of former owners: descendants of people enslaved by Dickson or Shakespeare continued to carry those surnames. The narrative connects these details to the continuing distance between Rosie’s community and the city’s native mainstream, even after generations in Calcutta.

The canal did not create this older history of enslavement; rather, Hobbs’s account places the changing movement of visitors beside histories of coerced movement and labor. The contrast is especially sharp in the way the city remembers its past. Nanda Kumar’s execution secured his place in public memory, while Hobbs says that little trace remained of Le Galle or Mohan Prasad. Le Galle had to sue to recover 629 rupees for meals and dinners supplied during the trial. The Suez Canal’s significance in the novel therefore extends beyond the new route it opened: it becomes a point of departure for considering which people and transactions enter Calcutta’s recorded history, and which disappear from it.