Blogger Soham Chandra first drew my attention to a
crumbling building near the Sunderbans in South Bengal that he called “Lord
Canning’s Bungalow”. The British Governor General, he said, had once had this
house constructed, which is why the city in the South 24 Parganas District of
West Bengal is also called Canning. But this struck me as rather odd. Lord
Canning had died in 1862 and back then, this part of Bengal was malarial,
tiger-infested jungle. Why would the Governor General of India ever want to live
here? And if it wasn’t him, then whose was the once-magnificent colonial
building? My research led me to one of the biggest commercial debacles of
British India – the Port Canning disaster.
