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.

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 labour of the Indian workmen was far harder. Day in and day out they toiled in torrid heat and corrosive dust. Discipline was harsh in the mills. As long as they worked hard and were punctual, they had jobs. If not, well, there were millions others desperate for a job, any job. Just as in Dundee decades earlier, the conditions and support for Indian workers in Calcutta were dire. There were no tribunals, no unions, no reprieve. 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. May: Times of India. Startups, tourism to figure in June G20 meets… The third meeting of the Startup Engagement Group is planned for June 3-4… The third meeting of the International Financial Architecture Working Group (IFAWG) of the G20 is scheduled from June 5-7 … Supreme Audit Institutions will take place from June 12-14 … 4th tourism Working Group Meeting from June 19-20 …My family are all Irish. My great-grandfather came from Derry. My great-grandmother came from Donegal – the McCann side of my family. The Coxes all came from Enniskillen. They were forced to move, to wander and be uprooted.” 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. The only reason they came to my part of Scotland – the east coast – was because the women could spin and weave; the men didn’t have any employment,” Cox says. “So in the east coast in Dundee, 80 per cent of the population were women. And they were Irish and Highland women: the men became househusbands. They had been farmers and smallholders and literally their whole world had changed overnight.”

In their prime, though, walking about Chowringhee was like ambling about Dundee High Street, what with all the accents of home they heard at every turn. The Jutewallahs left Dundee for India in search of better lives, a fortune perhaps. They imprinted themselves in Calcutta’s being. Even in the 1980s, long after they had returned home, the jute barges on the Hooghly River still bore marks of Dundee’s great mills – Eagle Works, Baxters… The 63-year-old travelled to Calcutta to make the film, along the way sampling some of the less-obvious uses for the vegetable fibre which kept Dundee working for years. The film also touches on the taboo, as it was at the time, of Anglo-Indian relationships - and Dundee's dual status as the UK's whaling capital as well as having one of the country's biggest populations of females per capita.

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. 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. The highlight of the day for Cox? Having freshly fried pakoras made with the jute plant! “They were delicious and I gobbled up quite a few of them,” he laughed.