The Pice Hotels of Kolkata
Volume 4 | Issue 2 [June 2024]

—Srijita Biswas

Volume 4 | Issue 2 [July 2024]

I discovered the term ‘pice hotel’ when I started writing my research proposal on food and public eating in Kolkata. Before that, it had only been ‘bhaat-er hotel,’ ‘rice hotel’,  a place where rice is the staple on the menu. Living a hundred kilometres away from Kolkata, my first experience of eating in a pice hotel was clearly purpose-driven: a KVPY (Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana) entrance when I was still in school, for which I had to travel to Kolkata, the examination centre closest to my hometown Krishnanagar. It was especially when time was limited and Baba and I had return train tickets; there were no plans of visiting my aunts in the city, and so we had to eat before boarding the late noon or evening Sealdah-Krishnanagar local. There were other occasions: a visit to hospitals in the capital city for better treatment, not available in the suburbs; or sometimes a layover for a longer journey elsewhere. But it was only as an undergraduate student, when I started living on my own in the city, that I started eating at these hotels regularly.

In Food Studies, my area of research, the relationship between food and place and identity are read to be naturally entangled. Mine is no exception. It was weird at first: why am I eating whatever was available at home outside? The attitude of the middle class towards outside food is that its either meant for special occasions or its “fast food” and is not good for health, the root cause of degradation in health and morals among youth. However, the food at pice hotel was homely and it began to sink in much later that pice hotels were my go-to places when I was daydreaming of piping hot bhaat dal alubhaja and pati lebu or craving a lot of fish and rice on banana leaves. While my friends ate fried rice, chowmein, momos, egg rolls, kachoris, biryani and so on from the shops surrounding our college, I patiently waited for fish and rice at the hotel near Gate No. 4 of Rabindra Sadan Metro Station.

The second phase of this craving for home food was triggered by a new probashi or the Bengali-in-exile kind of feeling when I started living in Varanasi during my Masters, when I longed for fresh fish and eating on banana leaves, like I used to, at my maternal uncle’s house. On special occasions like pujo, bhai phota, and festivals where the family gathered, lunch at my maternal uncle’s was served on freshly-cut banana leaves from the backyard of the house surrounded by gardens. Later on, for my interest in research on food and practices related to food, I took up field work in these pice hotels. The underlying impulse that made me interested in food systems was to find out more about eateries serving daily meals that were simple and necessary but often not paid attention to. The process of looking closely at pice hotels as archives of culinary history, commensality and commercial establishments of Bengali food, unravelled testimonies of food, society, the people, and the city. I could sense how it became an inseparable part of my suburban identity where eating at a bhaat-er hotel arose primarily out of necessity but came to gradually mean and imply something more.

What exactly is a pice hotel?  A hotel is a place, as we say in Bangla, meant for ‘fooding and lodging.’ This is an idiosyncratic cultural invention stemming from the very Bengali urge to suffix any noun with ‘-ing,’ for example, lyadh-ing or being lazy (nobody knows how ‘lyadh’ became a Bengali word for sloth, but we say ‘lyadh khachhi’ which roughly translates to ‘consuming sloth’). Hotels became the successors of serais or taverns that were popular during the British era. The word ‘pice’ is a British denomination for the lowest currency, which perhaps is derived from ‘paisa.’ Devashish Chattopadhyay mentions that a meal was uniformly priced at 1/16th of a rupee, that was ‘six paise’; Pice indicated an ‘Aana or Anna’, a monetary unit in undivided India.

Pice hotels began coming up as early as the 1920s. Mostly established to ease the problem of eating outside the boundaries of home by providing homelike food to men living away from home or travelling for work or other needs, they were favoured because here meals were inexpensive. Besides savings, there were also strict caste purity concerns and other concerns about health as well. Food that was simple and fresh and could revive one from the exhaustion of the day while being sustainable and kind on the alimentary tract was desired. Bodhojom-bukjwala (Indigestion and heartburn) and other gastrointestinal problems are recurrent jokes about Bengalis who are infamous for being ‘pet mora’ or ‘pet roga,’ lacking in digestive power, with a religious reliance on antacids like Digene and Gelusil. A mildly spiced stew of seasonal vegetables and a piece of fish are still the most sought-after items on the pice hotel menu. Their names emphasise their goodness: ‘light jhol bhaat’ or a runny stew of vegetables and fish in Mahal Hotel & Restaurant in the College Street area and ‘kobiraji jhol’ which translates to a ‘stew prescribed by the doctor’ at Siddheshwari Ashram in the New Market area.

On entering a pice hotel, one will find a menu written on a blackboard with white chalk. The menu keeps on changing and so do the prices depending on market rates of raw items, the seasonal produce and so on. Each item is separately priced in the pice-hotel system. The menu is like a mystic writing pad; the changes signify the codes of eating at a pice hotel in times past. Most pice hotels have now permitted chicken in their kitchen, but some still boast of only serving duck eggs. Historically these hotels have followed a no-onion, no-garlic, and no-chicken policy, as these were proscribed within the Hindu kitchen.

Courtesy: Mohamushkil’s blog

The location of the hotels are usually near places of work like judicial courts, government offices, colleges, and universities; the most recent ones are near Kolkata’s Sector V IT park. From my own experience of eating at several pice hotels, I have concluded that “all bhaat er hotels (hotels serving rice) cannot be pice hotels, but all pice hotels are bhaat er hotels.” The hotels selling rice in areas like Sector V are in a meal system where the pricing is based on the entire meal and not pice system where each item is separately priced. Earlier there were systems of pet chukti or a kind of contract also called ‘pet thika’ or ‘pet furon’ in the Nadia dialect which basically implies ‘eat till you have your fill.’ I also think the word ‘furon,’ which in English would mean ‘to finish,’ might hint at ‘Finish whatever you can eat.’ Perhaps there should be an asterisk saying ‘conditions apply’ or a better disclaimer: ‘till stock lasts.’

In his essay about mapping pice hotels in Murshidabad, Prakash Das Biswas writes about how the pice system evolved as a means to counter the cunning of some customers. At some hotels rice was a chargeable item and not the sabji or stew which was generally complimentary. A few customers took this as a chance to exploit the hotel owners: they only ordered rice and ate a mound of it with curries that came free. Tales of how the hotel owners were bullied by the appetites of voracious eaters are many, and hence the adoption of the pice system. This reminded me of a funny incident my mother told us often from her college trip to Digha. Men in the group ate on until it drove the hotel owner crazy that he requested them with folded hands to stop eating. Maa recalls how some of them did ‘don-boithak’ or squatted and exercised to make some space for the next round of rice and curry at one such hotel which went by a generous ‘eat till you reach your fill’ contract. To save their business, this cunning of the customers was combatted by the introduction of the pice system, where each item on the menu is separately priced.

This meant that anyone could get their regular fill, or could also build it up to a more elaborate meal if their pocket permitted, for example, on their payday. I remember eating at one such hotel near Burdwan station when I went to write an entrance at the university because the entire meal of basic ‘dal-bhaat-sabji,’ lentil soup, rice, and vegetables, cost me only twenty-one rupees. Now, living in Bhopal, without such a hotel around me, I am mostly forced to eat at the mess. Some pice hotels rooted from messbaris or boarding houses for men, they saved homesick men coming to the city for an education or jobs. Presently, they continue to save a homesick and bheto – a rice-lover – girl like me who was living in a paying guest house, someone who did not know how to cook and was clueless and irritable the whole day for want of rice.

Literature about the messbari abound in the Bengali literary tradition. Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, the creator of the Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi, stayed at the Presidency Boarding house, that was also shared by Jibanananda Das. This boarding house was transformed into Mahal, the famous pice hotel in the College Street area. After Partition, the messbari culture that lined the lanes of North Kolkata gradually began to fade away, with the owners transforming the kitchen into a pice hotel, without boarding facilities. The ambience at a pice hotel is a humble one – wooden chairs and tables; one can expect some distant endearment despite the rush of office hour or dinner time clientele. First, you would be greeted with a banana leaf plate, and some salt, a wedge of lime and green chilli in the corner. A waiter, gifted with a rich memory, will attend you – he can recite the menu at a peculiar yet amusing speed. The customer, if not a regular, might have to say, ‘Dada please repeat, I couldn’t quite follow.’ For a confused eater, there are suggestions based on their preferences for fish, meat, or vegetarian options. For the regular and loving customer, there are added perks of getting the best piece that was specially kept aside for them. On asking if the food will be good, one might be met with ‘We don’t have a fridge,’ meaning they do not store leftovers of the day.

My visits to pice hotels are now often due to my fieldwork. I look forward to such days. While working at the archive at Jadunath Bhavan, I deliberately walk from Rashbehari Metro Station to the archive and stop by Tarun Niketan. Every time I visit, I see their walls filling up with newspaper cutouts announcing their ‘iconic status.’ The last time I was there, I saw a group of people with tripods documenting the hotel, perhaps for their YouTube channel. Eating at a pice hotel has become fashionable now, as it seems from titles of blog posts or the flurry of social media and YouTube content, even an OTT show and a daily soap, with the hotel owner becoming an influencer and a famous internet personality. It is urban nostalgia, stemming from a middle-class ethos, it is a recollection of their heydays,  a time when they participated in nationalist movements and added the prefix ‘Swadhin Bharat’ to the pre-existing Hindu Hotel or naming the eatery as the Young Bengal Hotel in Khidirpore after the radical Young Bengal group. It is believed that during the 1943 famine, Swadhin Bharat Hindu Hotel was involved in relief work;  Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and the writer Sandipan Chattopadhyay were among their regular customers there. My doctoral advisor once told me about how she had met Sandip Dutta, the founder-curator of Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, on her visit to the hotel.

While writing Adarsha Hindu Hotel in 1942, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay could perhaps foresee how hotels like his fictional hotel in the novel would become indispensable to the everyday life in the city, with its increased speed and mobility. It is almost ubiquitous in the 21st century, in forms well suited to the times. After COVID when the rules of eating out were modified, the pice hotels, functioning on a shoestring budget, faced a blow and had to navigate hard to adapt to the new ways of hygiene associated with eating in a pandemic-hit globalised world. The QR code for accepting digital payments at their cash counter was a new introduction to this system. It juxtaposed with the blackboard where the ever-changing menu is written with chalk by hand.

When I visited Mahal in 2022, sitting outside the hotel on a porch of a house opposite to it, I was chewing fennel seeds mixed with sugar, a mandatory after-meal indulgence and was casually dangling my feet after a wholesome lunch. I caught the sight of a cycle stopping by at the door of the hotel with a Zomato bag tucked behind. The pice hotel had embraced urban digital modernity.

Photos – Srijita Biswas