A photograph of the city by Clyde Waddell

One of the most popular websites dedicated to Calcutta photographs is that of the University of Pennsylvania Library which displays sepia prints of the city described as “the greatest city of Romantic India, ‘Jewel of the East’ and enigma of the world”. The website http://oldsite.library.upenn.edu/etext/sasia/calcutta1947/ has been forwarded and shared by thousands of Calcutta buffs and NRIs and residents of this maddening city, for it shows images of the more unhurried 1940s when the houses were beautiful, there were fewer people around and streets were clean, never mind the beggars and buffaloes and tram employees on strike.

What added a touch of mystery to these photographs in the possession of the South Asia Section of the Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, was that they were attributed to an “Unknown GI” who took the trouble of charting not just Chowringhee and Park Street, but the mosques and burning ghats of north Calcutta, the ornate Sheetalnathji Jain temple, opium dens of Chinatown and houses of ill repute around Free School Street as well.

But as David N. Nelson, South Asia Bibliographer, Van Pelt Library, revealed in an email, the man responsible for this valuable piece of documentation was the photographer Clyde Waddell. “I received an email from a person who had seen the collection and had a copy as well of the album. She was the one who clarified this to us.”

Waddell was the chief photographer for the Houston Press before he joined the army. He wandered around Calcutta taking these pictures. Waddell was in Ceylon from November 1943 up to February 1945 when he was sent to Calcutta and was the news photographer. So it seems he did the documentation during 1945. Waddell was the personal press photographer of Lord Mountbatten and news photographer of Phoenix magazine, a weekly sponsored by the combined US-British command. Waddell dedicated the album to “all my fellow GI’s.”