Photographer: Clyde Waddell.
Rabindra Setu, Kolkatta, India.

Stretching its massive size over a gently flowing Hooghly, the Howrah Bridge awns to connect the nearby cities of Howrah and Calcutta with its entire length of some 2,150 feet, in this photo taken by Clyde Waddell sometime in 1946 – the last year of British India.

Constructed at the time by the joint effort of the three English civil construction companies of Braithwaite, Burn and Jessope, over a course of seven years with 26,000 tons of steel, largely obtained from world wide steel conglomerate, Tata Steel’s production facility located at the yesteryear village of Sakchi, Singhbhum – now the bustling city of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, India.

The bridge that is presently the 6th largest feat of cantilever engineering in the world, was a casual topic of interest for American photographer Clyde Waddell, touring British Calcutta to gather a collection for friends curious to know about the city, described at the time as the Jewel of the East.

Formerly a photographer of the Houston Press located in west Mississippi. A news agency founded on 26th September, 1911 and later acquired by its rival, the Chronicle Company. Waddell, since signing up with the allied army in 1943 had previously spend over two years covering the proceedings of World War II in its eastern theater, as the personal photographer of Commander Louis Mountbatten, and later as a news photographer based in Calcutta – till the surrender of Japan in 1945 had ushered in his leave from war time duties and presented him with a spell of free time.

During which he had toured the city and its restricted to public areas, photographing her streets and life. The collection of photos he produced had been such a hit in American and British quarters, that to meet a growing demand for copies, he had later produced an album of 60 prints titled ‘A Yank’s Memory of Calcutta’ for general circulation among the public.

The album of photos now hailed as a rare piece of visual documentary of yesteryear Calcutta.