Kolkata, where slowness of life clangswith happily insane chaos

Calcutta Then

For Lord Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1905, Calcutta was “in reality a European city set down upon Asiatic soil.” A correspondent in the Englishman, a local newspaper nicknamed “John Bull of the East”, declared more bluntly, “Calcutta is a purely English city. The city belongs and has always belonged to the English, and the native community in it is simply a foreign and parasitical community which would cease to exist if the English were to abandon it.” The English were always a tiny minority. There were only 3,138 of them in a population of 229,714 in 1827. They were birds of passage. A Scots jute mill manager’s percipient wife noted the absence of old folk because they went home as soon as they retired. Other Europeans called them Ditchers. “A Ditcher’s Diary” was a popular column in the European-owned and edited weekly, Capital.

“The history of Colonial Calcutta dates from August 24, 1690,” says P. Thankappan Nair, the city’s dedicated chronicler. That was when the East India Company’s Job Charnock slipped anchor in the Hooghly. Nine years later he paid Rs 1,300 to the Savarna Raychaudhuri family of Barisha for zamindari rights over the three villages of Kalikatah, Sutanati and Govindpur. The town had bad press from the beginning. Robert Clive thought Calcutta “the most wicked place in the universe”. Mark Twain complained after only two days that the climate was “enough to make the brass doorknob mushy.” Rudyard Kipling called it the “city of dreadful night.” The mythic horrors of “the black hole of Calcutta” of British imagination became the metaphor for the city until Saint Teresa, the Albanian-born Roman Catholic missionary, replaced it with an even more horrific image of death and disease.

Although the profit motive created Calcutta, European officials playing at being gentlemen dismissed European businessmen as boxwallahs or itinerant pedlars. Even the Scots Sir David Yule, who headed the biggest British conglomerate, Andrew Yule and Company, market leaders in jute, tea and river shipping, couldn’t escape the taint of trade. The official sahibs didn’t think him good enough to meet King George V who visited Calcutta in December 1911. The king sent for him nevertheless and the two men got on so famously that their meeting, scheduled for 30 minutes, extended for an hour. Office lore had it, recalled Bhaskar Mitter, who became Andrew Yule’s chairman in 1968, that His Majesty was mightily impressed when crossing the jetty to a jute mill, the thrifty Scotsman bent down and picked up a strand of the silvery fibre. His staff was warned not to waste the precious raw material...

The 1940s was the decade of darkness. Waves lashed Bengal’s coastal districts flooding the city with destitute villagers. About three million people died from starvation with the authorities in Calcutta, New Delhi and London in total denial. Corpses littered the pavements. Desperate mothers tried to sell starving infants. The piteous cry “Mago! Ektu phan dao” (Dear mother, spare a little gruel) of children tottering from door to door filled the air. The harvest had been plentiful, but food stockpiles for Allied troops, exports from Bombay, and hoarding and profiteering by local businessmen left nothing for the poor. Whether or not the shortage was also engineered to cripple India’s Independence movement, as American novelist Howard Fast alleges, the British Parliament was told the weekly death rate was 1,000 when it averaged 30,000.

There might have been no relief at all but for the vigorous campaign by the Statesman and its editor, Ian Stephens, who accused the authorities of trying “to play down, suppress, distort or muffle the truth.”

Then came the murderous orgy of 16 August 1946, Direct Action Day, to press for a Muslim homeland. Estimates of the dead ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 and more, with tens of thousands wounded, many critically. Independence the following August meant further waves of Hindu refugees fleeing the new Muslim theocracy next door. East Pakistan refugees accounted for 27 per cent of Calcutta’s population in 1951. Calcutta lost its granary. Its jute mills lost their raw material. Migration spiked during crises like East Pakistan’s 1950 and 1964 religious riots and the 1965 India-Pakistan war, reaching a high peak during the 1971 liberation war when the Pakistan Army’s atrocities drove 10 million refugees to West Bengal. Despite a major repatriation effort when the war ended, many stayed back. Refugee shantytowns swallowed up open spaces. Shops and eateries straddled pavements. East Bengal’s cuisine and dialect diluted Calcutta’s metropolitan culture; the “refugee vote” gave a new twist to competitive politics...  

Kolkata Now

Juxtaposition of space and time is what makes time start-stop in Kolkata, makes spaces look familiar for decades while changing its proverbial leaves. During Durga Pujo, the whole city bears this out with the full ferocity of a city that knows how to love and be loved. Pandals vie for supremacy (read: awards for best idols, best decorations, best themed pandals, best lights, etc.). And yet, like a metronome that keeps the same time and yet changes models, Kolkata keeps the beat — sometimes that of the boom’n’bass sounds from Someplace Else, the nightclub at Park Hotel, sometimes that of the dhaak, the drum that reverbates throughout the city during the pujo, sometimes that of some Hindi filmi song from someone’s television.

But Kolkata, changing by not changing at all, keeps the beat even as many have wondered, since former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once made the mistake of calling it “a dying city”, whether its heart stops every once in a while. It may no longer have the same chutzpah in claiming itself the tag of being the “cultural capital” of India.

But this is a city where the slowness of life clangs on with traffic that knows no laws; a city where the kindness of strangers cohabit with the perniciousness of petty-minded spite — PNPC, “poro ninda poro chorcha” aka bitching is a contact sport; a place which prides itself for its rational and liberal views, and at the same time takes more recourse to amulets, tantriks, godmen and astrologers than any metropolitan town in India.

Kolkata is a mad city because of its chaos, but it is also happily insane as it takes pride in this chaos and unscripted life and living. As it hurtles along in the here and now, its head remains turned to the past. This would be considered a fault in any other big town. Here, time and tide waits, and amid exhortations of “Hobe na” — Won’t happen — Kolkata happens. And keeps happening, quite magically indeed.