Brian Cox's Jute Journey [DVD]

Product Information

You see that in the people who went out there - they were up for an adventure. For me it was to go south and become an actor. Dundee had one of the best theatres in the country but I didn't properly appreciate that at the time." The cemetery is in a terrible state. Many of the graves are broken, it’s overgrown with weeds and the entire place reeks of extreme neglect,” said Cox. In their search for the graves of fellow Scots, the crew was helped by Norman Hall, the caretaker of the cemetery for years now, and his wife Loretta. Cox and the crew were rewarded — “we discovered a good 10-15 graves of people from Dundee who had lived in Calcutta and worked in the jute mills in the vicinity,” said Archer.

On one hand, jute gave people a whole new life, but at the same time it also reduced life for many people, and gave them a really tough time," he said. I use Stevenson's great saying: 'I travel not to go anywhere but instead to go, the great affair is to move...' The migrants from both places – equally remote, equally poor, equally foreign to the Scottish lowlands – came to “build the roads, to build the canals, to go into the engineering jobs. But the psychological change was so momentous that there was not the ability to adjust to it.”Dundee (1939, b/w), The city of Dundee, its people and industries: jute, jam, and journalism. Premiered at a meeting of the British Association in Dundee, September 1939, the screening was abandoned midway owing to the declaration of war. Director: Donald Alexander. Cox’s journey has made him favour Scottish independence in this September’s referendum. “I am not a nationalist, but I believe in independence because I believe the whole thing has got to start over again.

It is about the disparate nature of Scotland, it’s two faces: the romantic and the realistic,” he said. “I was very interested in the ‘spin’ that Sir Walter Scott gave Scotland in the 1800s. I’m interested in how this is something we’re caught up in, the false history, the romantic extreme. And then there is the other part, the grim, gritty reality, like in Trainspotting and the drug life of Edinburgh.” This will not be Cox’s first encounter with Kolkata and West Bengal. In fact, the area has a very personal pull for the Dundee-born actor. His parents worked in the jute mills by the River Tay, processing tonnes of the yarn shipped from the subcontinent. Cox recently made a BBC documentary, Brian Cox’s Jute Journey, about Dundee’s and his own links with West Bengal. The Marwaris, business-oriented clans from Rajasthan, became the new kings of jute. They had been involved in India’s jute industry from the very beginning, but they continued to employ Dundonians as managers. Interaction between the Scots and the Indians increased substantially. The Jutewallahs trained up Indian colleagues; in some conservative mills, however, there were still lines that could not be crossed. Several of them who fell in love with Indian women found themselves fired from their jobs.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

It was exhilarating to see Hindus and Muslims working together in such harmony. In fact, jute for me is a metaphor for binding. We even discovered a mosque and a temple standing side by side in the vicinity of one mill,” said Cox. He added: "The Scots organised the Empire and organised it very well. But you can still feel the shadow of the Empire in Calcutta all these years later. He also gives the voice to one of the farmers in the much-anticipated reimagining of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox with Meryl Streep and George Clooney. The Scottish Government has highlighted India as one of its key international partners. While educational, financial, heritage and political links are being built between the two nations, Cox said they would be for nothing if culture, like this film festival, was not at the centre of it.

The workers in these mills will find maximum footage in the hour-long documentary. “It was wonderful to see the women working so tirelessly. I was taken in by the amazing grace of Indian women who can take on the most menial tasks and impart such respectability to it,” marvelled Cox. Calcutta’s first mill opened in 1855; seventy-five years later, the city was producing 70% of the world’s jute products. With a never-ending supply of raw materials right on its doorstep, it made far more economical sense to concentrate the industry in Bengal, rather than half-way around the world in Scotland.Today there are Scottish veterans forming the Calcutta and Mofussil Society: veterans of the Indian jute industry who like to congregate in places like the Monifieth Golf Club, to partake of Indian food, speak Hindi, and reminisce about their days in the East. The majority of Calcutta’s mills were owned by expatriate British businessmen, but they were run by Dundonians. Ambitious jute workers moved from Dundee to Calcutta in the 1850s, and they ran the industry there for the best part of a century. The last ones returned to Scotland in the late sixties, having been made to feel rather uncomfortable and unwelcome in independent India. They joke about it now, of course, but they heard the labourers keeping the rhythm while loading and unloading jute, singing what sounded like ‘hey-ho, the sahib’s a saala’ (meaning, pretty much, that the boss is a bloody bastard). The Hooghly was the centrepiece of the world of jute, providing berthing for ships bound for Dundee as well points of disembarkation for the Jutewallahs arriving to take up their new jobs and accommodations along the river banks. The actor remembers the last days of the jute industry, and considers the pioneering spirit of the jute emigrants to be something he has in common with them.In a revealing documentary from BBC Scotland, Hollywood star Brian Cox, whose films include X-Men 2, The Bourne Identity and Braveheart, traces the history and varied fortunes of the city's jute emigrants.