The Hindu Business Line : Elegance revisited

On February 2, 1959, Julien Huxley wrote in the visitors' book of the famed BNR Hotel at Puri: "We have had a wonderful three days here, comfort and good food, splendid bathing, and visits to Puri and Konarak."

Four months later, Satyajit Ray penned the following remark: "We have just spent a delightful one week here at the South Eastern Railway Hotel. Food and management are all that one could wish for... I would strongly recommend the place for rest as well as work in peaceful comfort... "

Among a host of other personages who have stayed in the hotel are John Kenneth Galbraith, Oskar Lange (the economist), Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, R.C. Mazumdar, Jehangir Ghandy, Siddhartha Ray, Air Marshal Arjan Singh, and Paul Gore-Booth (the diplomat). These people stayed in the hotel till the early 1960s and, without exception, praised it. However, sadly enough, the condition of the hotel is no longer what it once was. What's more tragic is that its days are probably numbered.

The hotel's establishment was linked to the introduction of the Bengal Nagpur Railway's (BNR) Howrah-Puri train service in 1901. As Puri was a popular pilgrim place (the Jagannath temple) for people in Kolkata (then Calcutta), the train service came in very handy, and with time the place also blossomed as a seaside resort. The Railways felt the need for a resting place for its valued clientele (who could not possibly be lumped with the hoi polloi) and thus the search began for an appropriate hotel establishment. Very soon its attention was drawn to the two-storeyed Ashworth Villa on the sea, which was then acquired from a Dr Elms for Rs 50,000.

In October 1923, Rs 1.84 lakh was sanctioned to turn the villa into a proper, and larger, hotel establishment, the premises being opened to guests in 1925 with a Mr C. Stoner as its first manager. The hotel — said to be the first building in Orissa with an RCC roof and made with steel imported from England — was extended in 1938. A second extension — giving the building its present shape — followed in 1986. It has an impressive lawn, a billiards room and a table-tennis room, the last two clearly fallen into disuse indicating, among other things, the gradually deteriorating state of the hotel.

During a recent stay one was pained to see the signs of creeping decadence not merely relating to the 29 or 30 spacious old-world rooms but also the dining room, which once was acclaimed to be among the finest on the subcontinent. True, the beds are still comfortable with clean linen but some of the bathrooms have crossed the limits of acceptability. The lights and fans and geysers are still working, but the furniture is fast becoming decrepit. In past years, the cane chairs and tables in the spacious verandahs provided hours of somnolent comfort to visitors. But now this lazy quietude is marred by a shortage of chairs and tables. Even the dining room is woefully short of chairs, which reportedly have to be brought from the office when there is a full house.

Mercifully, the quality of the food is still good and the service even now smacks of an indulgence that gave the BNR Hotel its name. But the telltale signs of drift and destitution are written all over the dining room what with the unclean livery of the bearers (at least one had no livery on), not to say anything about the state of the tablecloths, the napkins, the crockery and cutlery which, not so very long ago, were the definitive hallmarks of excellence and uniqueness of all railway catering establishments across the country.

Even now, in its declining years, the staff at the Puri BNR Hotel is almost universally courteous and helpful, which strongly suggests that the hotel's deterioration is more a management and finance problem than a human one. Indeed, there is hardly a member of the staff (nearly all of whom have put in around 15 years and more, going back to three-plus decades) who does not rue the passing of the old times and suffers in silent embarrassment when guests point out things which go against the grain of the hotel's reputation.

These employees are even more concerned about the future of the establishment in view of the fact that — along with other catering establishments of the Indian Railways — the hotel is on the verge of being taken over by the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) from the East Coast Railway, which in turn had taken over the establishment from the South Eastern Railway (formerly the Bengal Nagpur Railway) a couple of years ago. Indeed, at least one distinguished visitor from Kolkata — who has been coming to the hotel for decades — says that the hotel's deterioration is somewhat coincidental with its transfer to the East Coast Railway, possibly because this particular division of the railways is far less conversant with the establishment's rich, tradition-bound past tinged with excellence than SER.

The principal fear today is that if the IRCTC leases out the management of the BNR Hotel at Puri — declared a heritage establishment in 1998 — to a private party which successfully bids for the associated tender, the little that is left of the hotel will be extinguished altogether. This would be nothing short of a calamity for it would snuff out a link with the past of which the railways — and the hospitality business generally — have been justifiably proud.

As one visitor from England wrote in December 1987: "I am terribly worried that somebody will try and modernise this hotel, and introduce nasty plastic coffee shops like in the chain hotels. This would be a dreadful mistake. This hotel is perfect as it is." Even today, when the hotel is not much more than a shadow of its former self, this remark remains generally true. One would like to suggest that simple material refurbishment of the BNR Hotel — keeping its present service levels and old-world ambience intact — would be enough to produce a result of which its creators would be proud and its guests immensely thankful.