124 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814-1914. 
is now hidden away in the midst of the higher and more 
imposing structures that face Chowringhee and abut on 
Sudder Street. It is a bungalow built in 1790 and some years 
afterwards the scene of a tragedy described in Miss Blechynden’s 
'‘Calcutta Past and Present” (p. 208). Later it became 
the Sudder Dewanny Court and so gave a name to Sudder 
Street. A drawing of it by Sir Charles Doyly, as it appeared 
from Kyd Street when the tank beside it was of much greater 
extent than now, is represented in the Victoria Memorial 
Exhibition by a lithograph by Robert and Dickenson. 
It is at present occupied as residential quarters by certain 
officers of the Museum. 
So far as the actual Museum is concerned, the original 
building (which was completed in 1877 but occupied in part 
some years earlier) is now represented by the Main Quad¬ 
rangle, the front of which extends along Chowringhee 
(the chief thoroughfare between the commercial and the 
residential quarters of Calcutta) for 312 feet, facing the 
open reaches of the Maidan and thus occupying one of the 
most conspicuous sites in the city. In the last few years 
this building has undergone considerable alterations. Its 
aspect from the Maidan previous to these is shown in the 
photograph reproduced on the plate opposite. 
We are informed by Mr. H. Crouch, Consulting Architect 
to the Government of Bengal, that the original plans for this 
building were drawn up in the “ sixties ” by W. L. Granville, 
who was also responsible for several other buildings still prom¬ 
inent in Calcutta, notably the General Post Office and the High 
Court. They were prepared in consultation with the late Dr. 
Thomas Oldham, Director of the Geological Survey of India. 
It was at first intended that a third floor should be 
built along the front, in addition to the two actually com¬ 
pleted; but funds gave out, and in any case the ominous 
cracks that appeared in the building owing to the unstable 
nature of the ground on which it had been founded, would 
probably at the time have rendered this impossible. As it 
stood, the building had a certain dignified simplicity not 
without value in a city of stucco palaces and hovels of rubbish, 
although the materials of its structure—-bricks overlaid with 
