Calcutta Houses: A Photography Collective Keeps The City Of Joy¡¯s Fading Architectural Heritage Alive

A yellow saree hangs on a clothesline on the second floor of a three-storey building, reminiscent of a way of life that¡¯s conspicuously absent in today¡¯s apartment complexes. A brown door is bordered by stained glass with the trace of a face in the middle, a combination of influences you will not find in modern building design. The curve of yet another building is evident in its circular balconies, which taper at the bottom, rimming its windows, a feature replaced by hard, geometric lines today. Scattered shrubs sprout from between the patterned grills fencing a home, taking root in the loose mud that¡¯s absent in highrises.

These images are a few of the several captured by the Instagram photography project Calcutta Houses, started in 2014 by three friends, Manish Golder, Sidhartha Hajra, and Sayan Dutta. "Our handle name may surprise city dwellers, but we have grown up calling the city Calcutta in English and Kolkata in Bengali," said Golder.

The page, featuring photographs and little stories of the city¡¯s unique and picturesque houses, has built a community of over 20,000 architecture lovers, city enthusiasts, and nostalgists alike. Its followers include historian William Dalrymple and beloved writer Amitav Ghosh. Sometimes, the posts focus on windows, grills, doors, and other smaller aspects of the house; sometimes, they focus on the house as a whole. Much has changed in the close to ten years that they¡¯ve been doing this. Hajra, a photographer, is now in Delhi, and Dutta, a graphic designer, lives in Dubai. This situation has left Golder, a digital marketer, as the only active participant in the project.

Credit: Calcutta Houses

¡°As photographers, my co-founders and I had been documenting the streets of Calcutta for a long time,¡± said Golder. ¡°We noticed that the houses were disappearing.¡± Sophisticated camera phones and the growing popularity of Instagram inspired the trio to start shooting Calcutta¡¯s old and unique houses in a bid to preserve this slowly eroding built heritage. When Calcutta Houses first launched, two to three posts a week went up. Now they pop up whenever something is worth discussing.

A Love Of Built Heritage

Among their most popular posts is that of a two-storey building divided down the middle: The right side has straight lines and is painted a bright yellow with red windows, and the left side is circular and painted white. The two styles complement each other, giving the home a whimsical and intriguing aura. Another popular post is a brief video of the sun reflecting gently on a gallery set to "Charu¡¯s Theme" from Satyajit Ray¡¯s Charulata. The sunlight, passing through patterned cloth blinders, forms a beautiful mesh of designs on the red floor, transporting the viewer, for a moment, to a different, slower era.

The project serves as a visual record of a city in slow motion. They have documented homes all over Kolkata, including in places like Lake Market and Bhowanipore, among the oldest parts of the city¡¯s southern area, the area near Scottish Church College in North Kolkata, and several others. ¡°Bhowanipore, in particular, houses some of the most interesting architectural structures surviving in the city today,¡± Golder said.

Credit: Calcutta Houses

It¡¯s also an attempt at writing a partial history of these spots. For instance, in the past century, Bhowanipore¡¯s illustrious residents have included freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, filmmaker and author Satyajit Ray, and educationist and barrister Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee. During the city¡¯s development, several wealthy families settled here and built luxurious homes since the area was still considered to be on the city¡¯s periphery and prices were comparatively lower. Post-Independence, Marwari and Gujarati business families bought these British properties, adding to the area¡¯s demographic diversity.

Just as a city¡¯s history is archived in its architecture, Kolkata¡¯s old homes depict the confluence of traditional Bengali architecture with Mughal influences and European colonial styles. For over a century, Calcutta was the capital of British India and the zenith of trade and professional achievement, attracting residents from all over the world. "That¡¯s why you see such contrasting architectural designs," said Golder. On a routine walk through the city, you can find neoclassical, art deco, and elements of different Indian architectural styles, with each home portraying the individuality of its residents.

In more recent history, as development tightened its inevitable grip on the city, several older buildings were replaced with modern residential and commercial projects. Kolkata started losing a part of its identity. "Post Covid, there has been a surge in construction. More houses have been torn down recently than I can remember," said Golder. "What replaces them is entirely devoid of any aesthetic."

Credit: Calcutta Houses

A City Disappears

As Kolkata¡¯s visual landscape evolves, what¡¯s lost is not just a house or a moment in history but the representation of collective memory and tradition, a way of living, thinking, and expressing. Together, these houses form a narrative of the city, rooted in togetherness while being unique.

"Photography to me is like taking portraits, and these structures are like family members. If not documented, it¡¯s like they never existed," added Golder. He recounts that they were faced with hostility earlier since people didn¡¯t quite understand why their homes were being photographed. "Now, people invite me to their homes for pictures."

Projects like Calcutta Houses and author Amit Chaudhuri¡¯s initiative, Calcutta Architectural Legacies, are signs of a general uptick in awareness about the importance of preserving heritage sites. "There have also been instances where people have brought old homes to restore them," said Golder. The art gallery, caf¨¦, and store The Z¡¯s Precinct, housed in an old Ballygunge mansion, is one example; the boutique hotel Calcutta Bungalow, set in a 1920s townhouse, is another.

Credit: Calcutta Houses

The city has a knack for being charming, but always in its own strange way, Chaudhuri wrote in his book Calcutta. "The Calcutta I¡¯d encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity; it was that peculiar thing, modernity, that I first came into contact with here (without knowing it), then became familiar with it, and then was changed by it. By "modern," I don¡¯t mean "new" or "developed," but a self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life. By "modern," I also mean whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful. It was that arguable beauty that I first came across in Calcutta and may have, without being aware of it, become addicted to."

This addiction is really just a form of nostalgia, an unrequited longing, as Calcutta Houses¡¯ many followers will tell you. The hanging yellow saree will continue to sway in their minds.