Job Charnock – the man who discovered the swamp that became Calcutta, the one who apparently rescued a Brahmin widow from a sati pyre and gallantly married her. Madhurima Vidyarthi’s Job Charnock and the Potter’s Boy does not introduce readers to this familiar figure from the pages of the usual histories. Instead she starts by depicting a ‘wolf’ out to plunder, frustrated by the machinations of the nawab of Bengal who is under Aurangzeb’s orders. The narrative takes us to Charnock though a burning village and the deaths of Indubala and the potter Gobardhan who leave their 12-year-old son Jadu to fend for himself. Jadu loses his parents because of the war between the East India Company and the nawab a deliberate game of cruel chess.

Vidyarthi’s book is very much in the line of writers like GA Hnety and Henry Treece, young people caught up in battles and forced to come of age. Not that Jadu is on his own – he has his father’s friend Ilyas who then hands him over to the half Portuguese, half Bengali D’Mello and Madhu Kaka who introduce him to the world of boats and pilots on the river. 

The author’s in-depth research is very obvious in her account of battles, strategies and sieges on river islands, not to mention the different types of boats and ships that the British have introduced to the waters. Though she has an outline of fact to work with, she builds on it with fiction. It is a primarily male book – women are few and far between. We don’t realise Charnock has a wife until the author resurrects Maria - historically she had passed away by then - on Hijjili island with no warning and occasionally drapes her in a sari to suggest that she might be Indian. A great deal of the book is conversations on the political strategies of the time which tends to hold up the action though is relevant in giving readers a context.

With his parents’ cruel death before him, one might have expected Jadu to be an early revolutionary turning against the East India Company – instead he gradually begins to be drawn to Charnock, a wise man with tired thinking eyes who is forced into a situation beyond his control. The man who discovered Calcutta and rescued a widow from suttee is absent, instead we find a ‘Colonel’ who is something of a military tactician driven to acquire battlecraft through the cross currents of trade. One would have expected more women in the book but Vidyarthi chooses to go into the depths of how greed turns men into monsters regardless of the race they come from and how humanity nonetheless lurks beneath. 

Ultimately of course, as history tells us Calcutta has to rise and Jadu comes to the big city in the making to possibly chart a future for himself after acquiring a wife and child. Ilyas is brought back abruptly and sent away again, equally abruptly to ensure that readers realise he was always part of the narrative.

Vidyarthi’s language is fluid, poetic and grim by turns adapting itself to the twists and turns of her story. She mentions the hogla grass that gives the river Hooghly its name. She provides a glossary for those unfamiliar with certain phrases and a bibliography for anyone who might be interested in finding out more about Charnock.