New Market in 1964

In the four months from June in 1924 that Subhas Chandra Bose was chief executive officer of Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), till his arrest as a suspected terrorist, he brought out a weekly gazette. Its records reveal market prices of the time.

The Calcutta Municipal Gazette, which began to come out regularly from 1925, used to carry the prices at which butter, meat, fish, vegetable, spices and fruits were sold in different municipal markets such as New Market, College Street Market and Hatibagan Market, as well as the prices of petrol and gold.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Compared with current prices, the price rise has been lowest in the case of potatoes (39 times) and highest in the case of gold (1,083 times). Potatoes came for 23 paise a kg 85 years ago against the Rs 9 now. The price of 10g gold was Rs 18 in 1925; now it is Rs19,500.

The price escalation for flour and milk has been moderate, only 65 and 64 times respectively. Hilsa seems to have recorded a 625-time price hike. One kilogram of the fish came for 80 paise (see chart).

How much would a Durga Puja cost then? A member of the Laha Bari in College Street, organising the puja in their house for the 185th year, says around Rs 1 lakh was spent this year. Yet the arrangements were hardly as elaborate as in 1925, when the puja budget stayed within Rs 2,000.

Eighty-year-old Kashinath Chandra of Chandra family in Bidhan Sarani agrees that Rs 2,000 was sufficient to organise a grand Durga Puja in 1925. The Chandra “barir pujo” was well-known till the first quarter of the 20th century. Chandra remembers the time when one maund (37.32 kg) rice came for Rs 2.

Deepankar Ganguly