The freshly painted principal’s quarters on the Besu campus. Picture by Gopal Senapati

Students and faculty members of the institute call it the White House. Till last year, it was a decrepit building standing on the edge of the Hooghly on the Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) campus. With Ajoy Roy taking over as the vice-chancellor of the university in 2009, this stately building with its twin turrets was renovated and painted a sparkling white. Hence the moniker.

The building, previously referred to as the principal’s quarters, was built in 1820 for Bishop Middleton, the first bishop of Calcutta, who founded the Bishop’s College where Besu stands today. In 1880, Bishop’s College shifted to its current location on AJC Bose Road. And Bengal Engineering College, popularly known as BE College at that time, moved in.

“It was on November 15, 1820, that the bishop came to live here and I shifted on the same day in 2010, exactly 190 years later,” said Roy. “Bishop Middleton didn’t live very long after he started living here and curiously enough none of the others did,” Roy added with a touch of humour.

The various principals of Besu had also made the building their home. However, the quarters had been lying unused for 10 years when the vice-chancellors preferred to live away from the campus. It was Roy who took the initiative of renovating the building and shifting here to “live with the students”.

The ground floor of the building has a guest house and a small archive on the Bishop’s College. Another room houses the archive on Besu. A grand flight of stairs leads to the first floor where the vice-chancellor lives.

Nearby is a graveyard where many teachers from the early days of the institute lie buried. “There is a kind of eerieness to this place after dusk. On my first night here, I heard a plaintive melody of a flute at 2.30 in the night,” said Roy, with humour again.