Last November’s high court order made the pavement outside Oberoi Grand walkable again, but in a city starved of employment avenues hawkers are likely to make a comeback, as they have done after numerous clean-up drives over the past 50 years
Before it became
Oberoi Grand
, the hotel was called The Grand. Locals still call it Grand Hotel. But once upon a time, it wasn’t such a grand place. During the 1930s, six people died there during a typhoid epidemic and it was closed in 1937. Mohan Singh Oberoi came to the rescue. He leased the property, reopened it in 1939, and bought it in 1943. The hotel couldn’t have been better located – right on Chowringhee in the city’s heart with its wide roads and wide pavements.
What Oberoi could never have imagined was that 80 years after he bought the hotel, while the property would grow in grandeur the
pavement
outside would all but vanish, taken over by
hawkers
who would spread out their multicoloured, multipurpose wares – toys, underwear, mobile covers, tees, chequered pyjamas – and hang thick, shiny plastic sheets with ropes from those white British-era neoclassical columns to keep the Chowringhee sun out. It is hard to imagine another setting where squalor does a daily tango with grandeur.
English (US) ·