On a still October afternoon in 1934, a fleet of 12 cars starting their journey from Budge Budge trudged along a largely unpaved path known as Kasimuddin Road and arrived at an irrigation canal in a village that was no longer in use. Unable to drive further through the thickly wooded area, some of the passengers decided to walk the rest of the way. Eventually, they came upon the bank of the Hooghly, where two poles flying the Union Jack and the Czechoslovakian flag had been erected. At the centre were placed some bricks, stones and a container filled with unused mortar and a scoop decorated with flowers around its handle.

Beneath a tent close by stood Bretislav Martinec, the architect in charge of implementing František Gahura’s vision of Batanagar, and his team members, John Bartos, general manager, and Bata employees along with visitors including Czechoslovak Consul Dr Lusk, Prof Benoy Kumar Sarkar of Calcutta University, members of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and an assortment of business people and friends from neighbouring regions. After the arrival of guests from Calcutta, Bartos initiated the ceremony with a welcome speech, announcing the laying of the Bata Foundation Stone, which would bear witness to a new age of international cooperation. Invoking the idealistic principles of Rabindranath Tagore and Tomáš Masaryk, Sarkar gave a moving speech. Lusk in his speech remarked that on the same day, a continent away, people in Czechoslovakia were celebrating the sixteenth anniversary of their National Day.

Despite the obscure location and modest circumstances surrounding the event, this tableau played out in a solemn manner, and in a spirit of bracing partnership, the Bata Foundation Stone was laid by members of the Bata team. The document placed within the stone underscored the historic nature of the collaboration, emphasising principles of a global partnership between two firms and two peoples. Authorised by Jan A Bata, the chief executive of Bata globally, and entrusted to B Martinec for building the township, the text was undersigned by Dr Lusk, John Bartos, ML Khaitan, Dr Benoy Kumar Sarkar, BM Das, A Dolezal, Thomas Janda, J Watson, Dr M Ahmad, B Martinec, F Nezval, F Sury, Stanislav Slavik, V Sklendar, Z Haq, J Bursik, Kaisar Ahmad, S Adler and J Janacek. It is striking to note that the pioneers who built Batanagar belonged to a kaleidoscope of religions and nationalities, thus setting the tone for the company town’s ideology of pluralism and community building.

Martinec prepared to build Batanagar modelled after Zlín, which in turn had drawn inspiration from British urban planner Ebenezer Howard’s concept of a “garden city.” Throughout the early 20th century, Tomáš Bata and his company transformed Zlín, then a Czech settlement of around 2,800 inhabitants, into a modern Moravian city built around the needs of Bata workers. The plan was to build a factory-centred township, blending countryside aesthetics with the practical benefits of urban amenities, to ensure a convenient and comfortable lifestyle for its employees. Jan Kotěra, a leading Czech architect who was hired to draw up the plan for Zlín, had been greatly influenced by Howard’s work and his vision of a “garden city”, which can be described as a sustainable community consisting of swathes of greenery such as parks and wooded areas distributed among housing units.

Kotěra’s blueprint for employee housing included modernist homes divided into four units. While his township layout did not resemble Howard’s in the least, Kotěra duplicated the use of green space, a signature of the garden city movement. Bata believed that nature and greenery helped the human mind to relax; he even forbade vegetable planting in garden plots to ensure that, for workers, the home remained a space to rest. Edged by woodland, the Letna neighbourhood had thoroughfares connecting it to the main factory. Homes were built with gardens for communal use, which were thought to be beneficial for workers and to help ease their transition from the countryside.

After Kotěra’s death in 1923, Zlín-born Modernist architect František Lýdie Gahura was employed to bring the project to completion. Executing Bata’s vision of the city as an organ for development, Gahura started building Zlín around factories with employee houses radiating outwards on the hillside. Unlike European cities that have either castles or cathedrals in their town centres, Zlín was based around industry. Gahura conserved Kotěra’s use of green spaces, designating large areas to be covered by woodlands. He built worker housing around a simple design scheme: a standard 20-foot by 20-foot concrete unit that could be easily replicated, supplemented with economical building materials, such as red bricks, glass bricks and steel-framed windows. The uniformity of building fundamentals used for all of the town’s architecture underscored the central role of commerce in the life of the metropolis.

About 5,000 miles away, Martinec had the singular job of replicating the Zlín prototype on the plains of the Ganges delta. Modifying for geography, climate and culture, he set about constructing a town that was unique to its location yet representative of the Bata brand. Martinec’s initial proposal was terminated by Jan Bata, who discovered flaws in the plan, which sent him back to the drawing board. After a new set of detailed drawings was approved, the architect and his team planned to first rebuild the old sluice gate on the river, preventing the surrounding land from flooding every time there was a high tide, around two times a day. Alongside this work, he authorised the levelling of land and procurement of raw materials. While there was no dearth of bricks in the vicinity, other building materials needed to be transported from outside. The biggest challenge continued to be building on the highly fertile Gangetic delta – its rich, loamy, alluvial soil yielding water before digging went too deep.

Construction of the first factory building and housing quarters for Martinec and his team, who had been living out of tents, started in January 1935. By September, they were completed, in time for the upcoming Pujo holidays. Buildings in the factory were constructed to deflect direct sunlight and allow for breeze blowing in from the south. The framework was rectangular, running east to west, with skylights in the centre and windows built north to south to enable cross-ventilation. In keeping with the modernistic prototype of factories built in Zlín, Martinec constructed simple structures with clean lines that would require minimal upkeep, yet provide all the facilities required of a modern factory. He wrote, “Each factory building is of standard proportion, 120 by 260 feet, 16 feet high and the pillars, 12 by 12 inches, are placed at a distance of 20 feet in both directions.” Standard-sized doors and windows were installed for ease of repair and replacement. Buildings were made with reinforced concrete, instead of red bricks, steel and concrete were used for typical Bata constructions, and each structure contained facilities including lavatories, washrooms, showers, lockers and drinking fountains in the American style. Telephone cables, water and electricity lines ran through underground tunnels, in keeping with the modern, efficient aesthetic favoured by Bata in all its industrial towns.

Once factory construction was complete, Martinec realised the Zlín prototype for employee accommodation could not be replicated. This included living quarters for single and married employees of different ranks, encompassing a large swathe of the township. Tropical conditions required major modifications, and to address them, modern sanitation was incorporated into the different neighbourhoods along with a grid of underground drainage lines. Martinec writes, “All over these colonies, there are electric lights, filtered water taps for drinking and bathing, and also unfiltered water for flushing the latrines and urinals. Great care is taken for sanitation and maintaining conditions necessary for happy, healthy and clean living.” A water distillation pump and storage system was built to utilise river water for industrial purposes, while a reservoir with a capacity of 10,000 gallons was completed to provide drinking water to residents of Batanagar.

Excerpted with permission from Batanagar: A Personal History of India’s Forgotten Company Town, Paramita Sen, Panmacmillan India.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.