Gulam Momen’s 1937 Rolls Royce 25/30 and (above) Saloo Choudhury’s 1928 La Salle. Pictures by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Vintage wheels are drawing more collectors in the former ‘car capital of India’, reports Anasuya Basu

A 1941 Armstrong Siddeley changed hands recently in Calcutta. A two-door convertible, the Siddeley is one of the rare classics produced by a British company that operated during the first half of the 20th Century. The company is no longer there, but their cars with the Sphinx logo are much sought after.

This Siddeley, currently residing at a Theatre Road address, has an illustrious history. A witness to the tumultuous Sixties and Seventies in Bengal, it was once owned by the former chief minister of Bengal, Siddhartha Shankar Ray. Current owner Saloo Choudhury, along with a host of other vintage car collectors, had been eyeing it for long. It was only recently that Ray decided to let it go. An ecstatic Choudhury is already at work on restoring the beauty.

As the number of vintage cars has gone down — cars produced between 1919 and 1930 are generally labelled vintage while the classic era starts off somewhere between 1925 and 1930 and ends in 1948 — the number of vintage car enthusiasts has been growing. The city now has around 60 to 70 vintage and classic models. “Prices of these dwindling models have trebled and quadrupled in recent years,” says Somenath Roychoudhury, who has built his fleet —comprising a 1926 Rolls Royce Phantom, a 1934 Bentley, a 1926 Lancia Lambda and a few post-50 Jaguars — over the past decade. “Like art, these cars are an investment now,” he adds.

But the ride is not so smooth yet. Unlike the West, where car auctions are held and are regulated by established auctioneers, the market in Calcutta and India have remained unorganised, says Choudhury, also a rallyist.

“Prices range in the vicinity of one to two million dollars for a good Rolls or 12 million dollars for a Bugatti,” he says. “Prices sky-rocket only when they are exclusive”.

So what makes a car exclusive? “A custom-built car will be more in demand than factory models.” Prices also escalate depending on the coach-builder and the lineage. Models like Bentley, Rolls, Aston Martin, Lagonda, Mercedes and Bugatti are known to fetch handsome prices.

There is just a handful of experts who can restore the cars to their original conditions. While Rahul Sircar of Electrical Enterprises and Sanjoy Ghosh of Rajiv Auto Centre restore cars for their clients, collectors like Choudhury, Partha Sadhan Bose and Sashi Kanoria work on their cars by themselves.

The best cars in India, Choudhury says, belonged to the erstwhile princes and maharajas. The royal families of Patiala, Nabha, Darbhanga, Travancore, Vijaynagar and the Nizams of Hyderabad had the best collections, while in Bengal, it was the maharajas of Burdwan, Murshidabad and Cooch Behar and the scores of zamindar families such as the Mallicks of Pathuriaghata and Marble Palace.

The latter owned a supercharged Mercedes 540K while Sir Biren Mukherjee had three Rolls Royce Phantoms. Calcutta, says Choudhury, was “the car capital of India”.

While the well-heeled imported their models, the city also had some reputed dealers like Walford Transport, Austin Distributors, Leslie and Poddar Auto, which sold imported models as Complete Built-up Units, says Bishnu Sadhan Bose of Bhowanipore Motor Accessories, an auto spares shop.

There are a few good models in the city. Gulam Momen has a few Rolls in his stable, including a 1937 12-cylinder Phantom 3 by Hooper that was bought by his mother “brand new from the UK”. From Sashi Kanoria’s stable Vijay Mallya purchased a pre-1900 Daraaq.

But most rare cars have been trundled out of the city from before the ban on export of vintage models in 1953. “The city’s vintage collection is visible at the sole vintage car rally held every year,” says Partha Sadhan Bose, who has a fleet of nine rare vehicles.

With the rise in the car prices, however, the hunt for old treasures has intensified. Bose has picked up some of his cars from remote villages and run-down garages.

“I came across my first vintage car, the Model-T Ford on my way to the Dakra mines in Bihar. It was way back in1985. I had stopped at a dhaba for tea when my eyes fell on a wheel rim that seemed to belong to a by-gone era. I traced the body to a paddy field where I saw the skeleton of a 1917 Model-T to my utter amazement.

“The sarpanch was more than happy to part with the junk, but not its engine, which was being used to draw water from a well. I immediately ordered my driver to get a Kirloskar pump from the nearest town.”

Collectors will go to any length to get vintage cars and restore them to their pristine glory, to be driven occasionally on a pleasant winter evening, “slowly to rub it in”, as a Merc ad went.