late 19th century

The late 19th century serves as a provisional historical cutoff in the Hotel Shahjahan’s past: a period when women served drinks at the bar, and when the hotel’s customs and physical spaces were already subject to change. Its history reaches the reader not as a continuous record but through scraps preserved by witnesses, including a framed newspaper clipping, an old advertisement, and recollections that leave some dates unresolved.

A Historical Cutoff, Not a Complete Record

When Sutherland asks how long the bar has occupied its current location, he specifies that he is interested in the late 19th century, when waitresses served drinks at the bar. The answer is difficult to establish: the hotel had changed hands many times since Simpson sold it, and each owner had altered the establishment according to personal preference. By the narrator’s account, little remained intact except the building’s outer shell. The question about the bar therefore opens onto a broader problem: the hotel’s history cannot be read straightforwardly from its present arrangement.

The hotel nevertheless presented itself as an institution with a past. Drawings by artists whose names were unknown hung in its lobby, welcoming visitors and announcing that this was an old hotel east of the Suez Canal, with a tradition behind it. A framed clipping from the Englishman likewise included a sketch of the Hotel Shahjahan. These images offered visible evidence of age, but they could not restore the spaces or practices that successive owners had changed.

Women’s Work and Confinement

An old Hotel Shahjahan advertisement, preserved among Hobbs’s newspaper clippings, makes the conditions imposed on women workers unusually explicit. It announces the arrival at Kidderpore of Marian Booth and Jane Grey aboard the SS Hawaii, presenting them as women expected to satisfy the guests’ pleasures and comfort. The advertisement also boasts that the two would be kept locked up during the day and after their night’s work. The women were not legally enslaved, Hobbs says, but the humiliations he witnessed and heard about seemed to require a new word of their own.

The clipping turns what might otherwise be a vague recollection of bar service into evidence of a system: women’s work was advertised as part of the hotel’s attractions, while their movement was restricted outside working hours. Its boastful publicity preserves the hotel’s own language of reputation and guest service, even as the confinement it describes reveals the coercion beneath that polished promise. The text does not supply an exact date for the advertisement, so it cannot establish precisely when these arrangements began or how long they lasted.

Ownership, Anecdote, and the Hotel’s Material Past

Hobbs’s scrapbook reaches back through newspaper cuttings collected over several decades. The advertisement leads him into further recollections about Silverton, whom he knew as the hotel’s manager and who would eventually buy it. Hobbs recalls a period when the owner neglected the establishment, the building was falling apart, and supplies were scarce. An Armenian Christian guest, Gregor Apkar, quarrelled with the staff and challenged the manager to find a hotel worse than the Shahjahan, offering a reward of five hundred rupees. The account places this episode within the hotel’s older history but does not give it a precise date; its significance lies in the contrast between the hotel’s later claims to tradition and a remembered period of neglect.

The hotel’s past is thus assembled from objects and testimony rather than from an unbroken institutional account. The scrapbook preserves particular words and incidents; the lobby drawings supply a visual claim to age; and the narrator’s questions expose how uncertain the arrangement of rooms and services has become. Together, they make the late-century bar a point of entry into a history that remains partial even when a witness can produce evidence.

The Nineteenth Century and Historical Forgetting

Elsewhere, Bose-da recalls an encounter between Vidyasagar and Michael Madhusudan Dutta in an episode placed broadly in the 19th century. A hotel receptionist witnessed their exuberant meeting, but, in Bose-da’s telling, that receptionist is the only person from the scene whom later generations remember. The episode is not dated specifically to the late 19th century; it instead widens the book’s view of the century as a past in which dramatic events and ordinary witnesses do not receive equal historical attention.

That imbalance echoes the Hotel Shahjahan’s own archive. Clippings and drawings can keep a hotel’s name, advertised customs, and memorable incidents in view, yet they cannot preserve every worker or every experience behind them. The late 19th century matters not as a fully reconstructed timeline, but as a period glimpsed through surviving traces—and through the absences those traces leave behind.