Brian Cox's Jute Journey [DVD]

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They have a cemetery in Calcutta which is full of people from Scotland, and actually has a whole section of people from Dundee who were all buried there."

Goan Voice Newsletter: Thursday 01 Jun. 2023

Top) Brian Cox on the Scottish Cemetery premises. Picture by Aranya Sen. (below) The crew shoot at the Tollygunge Club In a revealing documentary from BBC Scotland, Hollywood star Brian Cox, whose films include X-Men 2, The Bourne Identity and Braveheart, traces the history and varied fortunes of the city's jute emigrants. With India’s partition in 1947, the best quality jute-growing areas fell into East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), tantalisingly out of reach for Calcutta’s jute mills. In the orgy of violence that befell the countries in the wake of that great sundering, the Dundonian Jutewallahs found themselves protected behind their compound walls, defended by stalwart Gurkhas. Shortly thereafter, the Indian government issued directives that more and more locals should be employed in positions that were held by Europeans. Many Jutewallahs thought that the mills would collapse once they left and the Indians took over; the know-how, after all, was with them and not the natives. There was a mass exodus of expatriates out of Bengal, and by the early 1950s, most of Calcutta’s mills had passed into Indian ownership. A Dundonian himself, Cox was visibly moved. “To uncover the history of my fellow Dundonians who travelled all the way to India to work under extreme conditions and died in an alien land is extremely emotional.” The shooting went off smoothly, with the crew having little to complain about. Except the sweltering heat. “The sun is a scorcher and the heat is killing. I have been through three shirts already,” laughed Cox.Calcutta’s first mill opened in 1855; seventy-five years later, the city was producing 70% of the world’s jute products. With a never-ending supply of raw materials right on its doorstep, it made far more economical sense to concentrate the industry in Bengal, rather than half-way around the world in Scotland.Today there are Scottish veterans forming the Calcutta and Mofussil Society: veterans of the Indian jute industry who like to congregate in places like the Monifieth Golf Club, to partake of Indian food, speak Hindi, and reminisce about their days in the East. The majority of Calcutta’s mills were owned by expatriate British businessmen, but they were run by Dundonians. Ambitious jute workers moved from Dundee to Calcutta in the 1850s, and they ran the industry there for the best part of a century. The last ones returned to Scotland in the late sixties, having been made to feel rather uncomfortable and unwelcome in independent India. They joke about it now, of course, but they heard the labourers keeping the rhythm while loading and unloading jute, singing what sounded like ‘hey-ho, the sahib’s a saala’ (meaning, pretty much, that the boss is a bloody bastard). The 63-year-old travelled to Calcutta to make the film, along the way sampling some of the less-obvious uses for the vegetable fibre which kept Dundee working for years. Brian said: "In India, I sampled jute pakora. I had no idea you could eat it. It's actually very nice. They make soup from it too, but I didn't try that. My ancestors came from Fermanagh to Dundee to work in the jute mills. So many people in the mills were Scottish crofters or Irish farmers who came to Dundee for work.

Jute route to roots - How actor Brian Cox soaked in the city Jute route to roots - How actor Brian Cox soaked in the city

This was the day that the crew in general, and Cox in particular, was looking forward to, as they were to shoot at the jute mills on the outskirts of the city. “We went to a number of mills, from one at Chapadanga to the famous mill at Howrah,” said Cox. For many of them, the move to India paved the way for a lavish lifestyle of parties and luxurious living. For others, it was the end of the road. They were among hundreds of manual workers who left Scotland to establish what they hoped would be a better life, taking their knowledge of jute weaving to India. He added: "The Scots organised the Empire and organised it very well. But you can still feel the shadow of the Empire in Calcutta all these years later. But more entrenched was the social divisions among the colonials. The Establishment of the Colonial masters and their descendants, members of the Tollygunge club (which only admitted, for instance, its first Indian member thirty years after Independence!), looked down upon the Jutewallahs as mere labourers, bottom of the social heap. The bankers in Calcutta considered themselves higher than the jute mill office managers; naturally, the latter had to find people in the mills to look down upon as well, people like the assistant mill managers and their flunkies. These various hierarchies very rarely mixed socially. Those raucous parties were always among Jutewallahs of a particular social stratum.

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The Marwaris, business-oriented clans from Rajasthan, became the new kings of jute. They had been involved in India’s jute industry from the very beginning, but they continued to employ Dundonians as managers. Interaction between the Scots and the Indians increased substantially. The Jutewallahs trained up Indian colleagues; in some conservative mills, however, there were still lines that could not be crossed. Several of them who fell in love with Indian women found themselves fired from their jobs. The workers in these mills will find maximum footage in the hour-long documentary. “It was wonderful to see the women working so tirelessly. I was taken in by the amazing grace of Indian women who can take on the most menial tasks and impart such respectability to it,” marvelled Cox. He said: "When you're born in Dundee, the thing you're very much aware of is the River Tay and the water. Being so close to water you get that sense of journey, of travelling to go somewhere. There are still some unanswered questions for me. One of the questions that the programme only touches on is how did these people - most of whom were men - learn to spin and weave?