From there to here

The graceful old lady, at 75, is intertwined with the image of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). She is the Howrah Bridge. For, this bridge, straddling the twin cities of Kolkata and Howrah across the Hooghly river, has been a living entity, written about in poems and prose, evocatively captured as the backdrop in Gunday, Barfi!, Love Aaj Kal, and the English film on Dominique Lapierre's book City of Joy.

Old-timers also remember Howrah Bridge with Ashok Kumar and Madhubala, made in 1958 by Shakti Samanta. Of Bengali films with the bridge as the backdrop, there are so many that it does not need elaboration.

The bridge is also associated with the humongous Howrah Junction railway station connecting the east with the rest of India. It is the country's oldest railway junction. Academy Award-nominated 2016 film Lion, based on a true story, is about a poor boy from the hinterland who arrives at the station after taking a wrong train. That he landed in an orphanage and was adopted by an Australian couple to become an author after discovering his roots is another story.

Anyone landing at the Howrah station usually takes the bridge to cross over to Kolkata.

Thousands of people among them travelling by suburban trains, cars and buses, cross this bridge every day, making it arguably the busiest bridge in the world. Around 1,00,000 vehicles move on it and 1,50,000 pedestrians use it on a daily basis.

Not alone

There are other bridges built over the Hooghly - locals call it Ganga, but the Howrah Bridge is the prima donna among them. It was renamed Rabindra Setu in 1965 after the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, but somehow the old name has stuck, at least in common parlance.

During the early British rule, a pontoon bridge connected Kolkata and Howrah. The problem was that every time a ship had to move up and down the river, dotted with ghats or river ports, some of these pontoons had to be removed. As is well known, the city under The East India Company grew around the river with its easy navigability to the sea, which made it possible for easy access to the colonist's Far East trading posts.

Later, Calcutta became the capital of British Indian empire; it lasted till 1911, when it was shifted to Delhi.

The bridge was officially opened to the public in 1943, named New Howrah Bridge, as it replaced the old pontoon bridge. A tramcar was the first vehicle to roll down from the city-end to the station-end. Today, however, a tram track does not run through it. At that time, it was the third-longest cantilever bridge in the world.

Today, it is the sixth-longest bridge of its kind in the world. The length of the bridge is 2313 feet and width is 71 feet with two footpaths of 15 feet on either side. Astonishingly, not a single nut or bolt is used in this 26,500-tonne steel bridge. In an engineering feat, it is entirely held by rivets.

The bridge, however, had a quiet opening as World War II was still raging and the government feared the Japanese would bomb the newly constructed bridge. The Japanese did bomb Kolkata between 1942 and 1944, but it was left unharmed due to some swift action by the British administration. The bridge, of course, was not the work of a sole engineer, neither was the design arrived at unanimously.

In 1862, the Government of Bengal asked George Turnbull, chief engineer of the East India Railway Company, to study the feasibility of bridging the Hooghly river. In 1921, a committee of engineers, 'Mukherjee Committee', was formed.

The Howrah Bridge Act, 1926, was enacted to provide for the construction, maintenance and control of a new bridge across the river. The war had another fall-out. When the global tender was floated, it was a German company which bid the lowest. But the looming unrest in Europe and the inevitability of a war made it a no-no proposition. Eventually, the Braithwaite Burn and Jessop Construction Company Limited was awarded the construction contract. The Commissioners for the Port of Calcutta were made the commissioners for the bridge. The tradition continues as the Kolkata Port Trust is the custodian of the bridge even today.

Shaky story

Even before the bridge was completed, stories - some real, some imagined - were built around it. One night, during its construction, workers were removing muck when the entire lot plunged two feet down, shaking the ground. People thought it was an earthquake. Even the seismograph at Kidderpore (Khidirpur) registered an earthquake. Then, when the muck was cleared, objects of value like anchors, cannons, cannon balls, brass vessels and even coins emerged, dating back to the East India Company.

Maintenance of the bridge is not an easy task. Bird droppings and spitting of tobacco have cost lakhs of rupees for its repainting.

When the bridge was lit up during the 75th birth anniversary, it showed off another facet, the evergreen heart of the City of Joy.