There was a time, not too long ago, when you paid no attention to them: after all nothing could be more ordinary than electrical junction boxes, silver coloured, smothered in layers of peeling poster ads — for IIT coaching centres, massage parlours, meditation clubs.
But not anymore. The electrical boxes dotting Kolkata neighbouhoods aren’t just casings for wires and switches and sockets now, they have become capsuled lessons in the city’s history.
So you have, at the beginning of Park Street, a colourful painting of Sir William Jones, an Anglo-Welsh philologist and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. You learn that he is buried in the cemetery further down the road.
Electric shades
Not far off, on Elgin Road, another box is a hat-tip to Subhas Chandra Bose — a painting of him is accompanied by the line: ‘Netaji, 1897- Eternity’. (Bose lived and escaped from house arrest on Elgin Road.) At Lake Temple road, where Satyajit Ray lived for a while, junction boxes bear the paintings of a train, a pair of opera glasses, and a forest — they introduce three Ray films, Pather Panchali, Charulata and Aranyer Dinratri . A painting of a wine glass on a box in an adjacent lane pays a cheeky tribute to the anguished, alcoholic and lovelorn Devdas of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novel.
The man behind this sudden splash of colour on Kolkata’s streets is Mudar Patherya, an investment advisor and heritage activist. In the early 1990s he saw blue heritage plaques in London, which connected historical figures to the buildingsthey were associated with. Patherya was inspired to do something similar in Kolkata, with some help from the electric boxes of Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC). “Getting permission from CESC wasn’t difficult. I got a thumbs-up sign on Whatsapp from Sanjiv Goenka (chairman of CESC). He was surprised at how these boxes have been transformed into something beautiful,” says Patherya. Today, 40 such boxes present eclectic snapshots of the city’s history.
At South End Park, where music composers S.D. Burman and R.D. Burman lived, one box celebrates the popular song ‘Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyar Tera’, composed by R.D. Burman for Teesri Manzil . Not far, Debaki Bose, who introduced innovations in background music, gets a nod. A few blocks away from the Trincas pub on Park Street we see singer Usha Uthup — it was here that she started her career.
Walking museum
Down the road are paintings of J. C. Galstaun and Arathoon Stephen to acknowledge the city’s rich Armenian connection. The duo contributed to the city’s skyline in the early 1900s. I spot artist Ranjit Das painting Mirza Ghalib’s verses on a hot afternoon. He hasn’t read Ghalib, but he wants to paint the city, he says, without taking his brush off the box. Ghalib visited Calcutta in the 1820s and wrote about the city’s greenery, fruits, and the people he met. For ₹2,600, Das has transformed an ordinary metal junction box into a canvas that narrates stories and poems.
“Kolkata is a walking museum. It was the only city built by the British from scratch. The magic of the city lies in its neighbourhoods,” says Patherya. “There are hundreds of stories waiting to be told. They don’t necessarily have to be of celebrities, but of ordinary people who made the city proud.” Dipping into his savings, he is looking to paint about 200 more such boxes.
In a few weeks, lines and characters from novels by Mahasweta Devi and Premchand will remind passers-by of the many frames of their city. They will also be reminded of a poet who lived 5,000 miles away. After all, a road was named after Shakespeare in 1964 to mark the bard’s fourth birth centenary, and now a junction box will continue the love.
A journalist based in Uttarakhand, the writer explores the lives of those who walk mountains.
