The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 marks a turning point in Hobbs’s account of Calcutta’s hotel and bar trade: a new sea route helped connect the city to European workers and customers, while exposing how commercial change sat atop older histories of exclusion and exploitation.

Before the Canal

Before the canal was built, Hobbs says, adventurers bound for Calcutta sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. With no hotels available, they spent nights on barges at Chandpal Ghat. The city’s bars also predated the canal: in 1762, William Parker opened one for the entertainment of Calcutta’s gentlemen. Its licence permitted alcohol but required the premises to close during the day, lest younger customers skip school. The plan did not include female attendants; later bars were served by men known as khidmatgars.

A New Route and a Changing Trade

Hobbs links the canal’s opening to the subsequent flourishing of Calcutta’s restaurants and hotels. In his vivid, deliberately provocative description, the new route brought women from Europe to serve drinks in the city’s bars. Hotel representatives recruited them through correspondence and newspaper notices, and some arrived on six-month contracts, others on contracts lasting two years. The arrangement joined personal employment to commercial calculation: a recruiter praised the women’s contribution to hotel bar sales while worrying that they might leave before their contracts expired, interrupting the share of their wages he expected to receive.

The canal thus signifies more than a shorter passage between regions. In Hobbs’s telling, it altered who could reach Calcutta and what its hospitality businesses could sell. The earlier image of travellers sleeping on barges gives way to hotels competing for customers with European bar hostesses; the city’s hospitality trade grows through the movement of both capital and people.

The History Beneath the Story

Hobbs’s recollection is not an uncomplicated tale of progress. When the younger listeners wonder whether the bar hostesses had also been enslaved, he rebukes their ignorance: human beings were still bought and sold in Calcutta as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. He recalls English households and local aristocrats buying children from Murgighata, and owners placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards when enslaved children escaped. The account places the changing hotel trade beside a city whose prosperity and social life were shaped by coercive histories as well as new routes.

A later account of Rosie makes that history persist across generations. She explains that she is African, not Anglo-Indian, and that many people in her neighbourhood descend from enslaved Africans brought to Calcutta. Her ancestors, she says, were landed at Chandpal Ghat in the early nineteenth century with shackles around their ankles and sold at Murgighata for twenty-five rupees each. Although a later law freed the enslaved, they remained in the city, often taking the surnames of former owners; Rosie observes that her community had still not joined the native mainstream. This history does not make the canal the cause of slavery or its aftermath. Rather, it gives Hobbs’s account of Calcutta’s changing connections a longer, more unsettled frame: the city’s movements and markets repeatedly carried people into new circumstances without erasing the divisions inherited from the past.

Narrative Significance

The event is presented through Hobbs’s historical account to the narrator, not as a directly staged scene of the canal’s opening. His movement from the practical history of bars and licences to the arrival of European hostesses, and then to slavery and its continuing legacy, complicates the idea that improved access alone amounts to progress. The canal opens a route; it does not, in this telling, dissolve the inequalities through which Calcutta’s commerce and identities were formed.