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Updated: May 24, 2025
An enormous banyan tree stands on the lawn at Barrackpore. I should be afraid to say how much ground it covers; perhaps nearly an acre, for these trees throw down aerial suckers which form into fresh trunks, and so spread indefinitely.
Aldeen is five minutes' walk south of the Serampore Mission House, and a century ago there was only a park between them. The garden slopes down to the noble river, and commands the beautiful country seat of Barrackpore, which Lord Wellesley had just built. The house itself is embosomed in trees, the mango, the teak, and the graceful bamboo.
Like the Maidan in Calcutta Barrackpore is a very fairly successful attempt at reproducing England in Asia.
There is an excellent eighteen-hole golf course in Barrackpore park, but when you hear people talking of the second "brown" there can be no doubt but that you are in Asia. A "green" would be a palpable misnomer for the parched grass of an Indian dry season, still a "brown" comes as a shock at first. The gardens merit their reputation.
The whole settlement finally formed a block of at least five acres, with almost palatial buildings, on the right bank of the Hoogli, which, with a breadth of half a mile when in flood, rolls between it and the Governor-General's summer house and English-like park of Barrackpore.
The district or county of Hoogli and Howrah, opposite Calcutta and Barrackpore, of which Serampore is the central port, swarms with a population, chiefly Hindoo but partly Mussulman, unmatched for density in any other part of the world.
The anticipated mutiny has now come, its first symptoms were treated with utter want of judgment, and its power is shaking the whole fabric of the English rule in India. One day toward the end of January last, a workman employed in the magazine at Barrackpore, an important station about seventeen miles from Calcutta, stopped to ask a Sepoy for some water from his drinking-vessel.
He wrote an ardent letter, full of happiness and affection, to the kind father, which he shall find a month after he has arrived in India, and read to his friends in Calcutta and Barrackpore. Clive invited many of his artist friends to a grand feast in honour of the thirty shillings.
The reply was prompt, "Far be it from me; though I have not your botanical tastes, the care of the garden in which you have taken so much delight, shall be to me a sacred duty." Of strangers his most frequent visitor was the Governor-General's wife, Lady William Bentinck. Her husband was in South India, and she spent most of her time in Barrackpore Park retreat opposite to Carey's house.
I don't see why you need be ashamed to go on the Course with your wife in her carriage, Clive," remarks the Colonel. "The Course! the Course is at Calcutta, papa!" cries Rosey. "We drive in the Park." "We have a park at Barrackpore too, my dear," says papa. "And he calls his grooms saices!
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