by Dave Carson
I very good Bengalee Baboo
In Calcutta I long time stop ;
Ramchand Tun da Ghosh my name,
Radha Bazar I keep my shop.
Very good Hindu, smoke my hooka.
Eat my dal bhat every day ;
Night come I make plenty pooja
Here is the nautchwalla tom tom play.
Kooch parwa nahi good time coming
Babu never make islave (slave).
Dave Carson came to Bombay with a small troupe called the Original San Francisco Minstrels…The San Francisco Minstrels spent several months working their way towards Bombay, stopping en route to perform in a part of a palace in Lucknow that had once served as the Nawab’s harem, to clamber atop Bahadur Shah Zafar’s recently vacated throne in Delhi and to be presented with a woollen shawl from the Maharaja of Kashmir. By the time they got to Bombay, where they gave their debut concert at Grant Road’s Theatre Royal on February 28, 1863, Dave Carson had, according to the Brisbane Courier, actually “attained Hindustanese”. Carson used his newly acquired vocabulary and keen sense of observation to great effect. In addition to blackface caricatures of African-American life, he began to perform sketches of “native life”.
— Taj Mahal Foxtrot by Naresh Fernandes
But it was that humourist, Dave Carson, who really made the Grant Road Theatre famous among the play- going folk of Bombay and for years together attracted thousands to the house with gratification to them and great pecuniary benefit to himself, and his versatile company. Dave Carson himself was a facetious actor, of ready wit and humour and knew how to catch his audience, specially with local topics of interest and many a topical song. He was Protean in many respects and was never more happy than when he donned the garb of the Parsi masher of the period and made love to ” Rati Madam.” The house used to go into roars of laughter at both his sallies of wit and his songs.
— Shells from the sands of Bombay; being my recollections and reminiscences, 1860-1875 by Sir D. E. Wacha
Nothing escaped Carson’s attention. He parodied the eccentricities witnessed in the Bombay Police Court. In the decade after 1862, as reclamation schemes enlarged Bombay’s land area from 28.8 square kilometres to 35.3 square kilometres, he composed a tune called “Tight Little Island”…His best-remembered tune was “Bengalee Baboo” which continued to be performed by Bombay street bands well into the 1920s.
— Taj Mahal Foxtrot by Naresh Fernandes
