Calcutta Read online

  CALCUTTA

  GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE

  To the men of the CMPO who are incorruptibly there and to E. P. RICHARDS, sometime Chief Engineer of the Calcutta Improvement Trust, who restored some of my national pride

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  List of Illustrations

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Ultimate Experience

  2 Imperial City

  3 Poverty

  4 Wealth

  5 Migrants

  6 Bengalis

  7 People, People

  8 Faded Glory

  9 The Petrifying Jungle

  10 The Road to Revolution

  11 Zindabad

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Calcutta 1971 – A crossing along Chowringhee (Keystone Press)

  2. Two of the most impressive monuments to British rule – the domed Victoria Memorial and St Paul’s Cathedral (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  3. Rabindranath Tagore (Camera Press; Photo: R. J. Chinwalla)

  4. Jyoti Basu (Camera Press; Photo: Sunil Dutt)

  5. The Tollygunge Club (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  6. Ochterlony Monument, on the edge of the Maidan (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  7. A few of the homeless, asleep outside the Great Eastern Hotel (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  8. A slum of makeshift shanties by a suburban railway line (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  9. Bathing and washing clothes at the side of the road (Picture-point)

  10. Park Street Cemetery (Photo: Geoffrey Moorhouse)

  11. The ultimate poverty – the Hooghly as a grave (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  12. The voice – and the mood – of Calcutta in 1971 (Photo: Mark Edwards)

  The author and publishers are grateful to the copyright owners for permission to reproduce the pictures.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A GREAT deal of this book is the product of my own observations in Calcutta. I hope the extent of this will be obvious from a comparison of the text with the source notes at the end. I spent a couple of months there on two visits in 1969 and 1970 and many people helped me while I was in the city. I would certainly have been lost without the guidance and friendship of Prasun Majumdar, who shared a great deal with me, including one of my two gheraos. I would have missed a great deal without the kindness and help of Professor and Mrs Arthur Row Jr and their family. I was also much assisted by Inder Malhotra, Ragau Banerjee, Niranjan Sen, Mr and Mrs S. Sircar, Mr and Mrs D. L. Bannister, Lindsay Emmerson, Tim Scott and Ken MacPherson. My thanks to all of them, as well as to Mr D. R. Kalia and his staff at the National Library, who were extremely helpful during my researches among their bookwormed records. I am similarly indebted to Mr S. C. Sutton and his assistants at the India Office Library in London, on whom I relied heavily for much of the documentation in this book; and I’d like to salute Mr D. W. King of the War Office Library, who dug out a paper on the origins of the Dum Dum bullet. My thanks, too, to my old colleague Peter Preston, who twice smoothed my passage to India. My biggest debt, however, is to John Rosselli, student of Bentinck and Bengal, who presented me with the idea of this book. Without him it would not have been written. I hope it doesn’t disappoint him.

  It would be as well to say something here about my spelling of local names. There is absolutely no consistency, I’m afraid, either in Calcutta or in this book. When Jamshedpur is spelt with a final ‘pur’ the same ought to go for one of Calcutta’s main thoroughfares, but here it is rendered as Chitpore Road; I apologize in advance to any readers who are accustomed to the other version and I can only plead that the one I have used seemed to be the most popular in the city. People who know Calcutta and India better than I do will probably find other examples of a similar kind. Where possible I have used the local telephone directory as arbiter of style; otherwise I have simply tried to be clear. I have thus failed to call Benares by its now customary title of Varanasi and I hope my Indian friends will forgive me this wilful howler; but I have dared to call the River Ganges by its proper name of Ganga on the assumption that even foreigners can absorb the translation without being confused. If anyone needs convincing further of the difficulty in accurate spelling of proper names, it is worth remarking that in September 1969, one of Calcutta’s chief newspapers was publicly asking whether the Ochterlony Monument must now be rendered as Sahid Minar, Saheed Minar or Shaheed Minar.

  This is perhaps the place to say to anyone who may still be in doubt that Calcutta has nothing at all to do with the revue that bears its name. According to Kenneth Tynan, whose brainchild that was, ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ is the title of a painting by an elderly French surrealist named Clovis Trouille. It is a pun on the French Oh! Quel Cul T’as, meaning ‘Oh what an arse you have’. The reference is to the fact that the model in the picture is displaying her bottom to the painter. I’m obliged to him for that information.

  FOREWORD

  I CAN offer no bigger or better excuse for writing a book about Calcutta than something on the lines of the old Mallory quotation about Everest; it is there. It is strange, though, that no one has attempted anything like a portrait of the city since Montague Massey published his recollections in 1918. Since then there has been an excellent but highly technical social survey by N. K. Bose and two or three books on Bengali politics, all written by scholars for other scholars; nothing else except occasional memoirs with fleeting references. Yet this was the second city in the British Empire and, for what the computation is worth, it remains the second city of the Commonwealth. It is also the fourth city in the world. Our failure to take much notice of it maybe tells us more about ourselves than it has not told us about Calcutta.

  In a sense, the story of Calcutta is the story of India and the story of the so-called Third World in miniature. It is the story of how and why Empire was created and what happened when Empire finished. It is the story of people turning violently to Communism for salvation. It is also the story of Industrial Revolution. The imperial residue of Calcutta, a generation after Empire ended, is both a monstrous and a marvellous city. Journalism and television have given us a rough idea of the monstrosities but none at all of the marvels. I can only hope to define the first more clearly and to persuade anyone interested that the second is to be found there too.

  INTRODUCTION

  A hazard facing any writer who attempts to bring history up to date – as I did in the last few pages of this book a dozen years ago – is that events shortly afterwards may make his perspective and his conclusions seem comically inappropriate. It may already be thought that the apocalyptic vision with which I finished Calcutta fell rather heavily into this trap for the unwary author; and I shall be very happy if someone in the next century is able to confirm that this was indeed the case. Certainly no cataclysmic plague has visited the city since I first studied it, nor have the pavement poor risen with ferocity to dispose of the rich in angry bloodshed. Yet I would not wish to change a word that I wrote then. I was expressing as best I could what Calcutta made me feel. Those paragraphs were much less prophecy than speculation. Above all, they were my effort to convey a Spirit that seemed to be abroad in a dark night of the city’s soul.

  In fact, there was a moment soon after the book was published when it seemed that my imaginings might be given dreadful substance. In 1971 there occurred the revolt in what was then East Pakistan against Yahya Khan’s military government in Islamabad, which led to the establishment of Bangladesh. Inevitably this produced, as every other terrible conflict on the subcontinent has always done, uncountable masses of refugees streaming a
way from the centre of violence. With Calcutta only a short distance from the border, the majority of them headed for the city, whose outskirts were soon swollen by many encampments of what the international jargon refers to abstractly (and I abstractedly) as ‘displaced persons’. Multitudes, who would have starved to death without the charity of the Indian government and the aid that came from further afield, lived for a long time in great drainpipes, which were lying in readiness for some half-executed municipal enterprise, and in a new spread of shanty towns. In those first few months after their arrival, until Calcutta had yet again adapted itself enough to demonstrate its resilience in the face of difficult odds, the already overloaded city must have been perilously close to breakdown, urban collapse or whatever we choose to call the ultimate metropolitan nightmare. After a couple of years, by which time even Islamabad had been forced to recognize the independence of Dacca, many of the refugees staggered back whence they had come; but some stayed behind to compound, as refugees always do, Calcutta’s everlasting problems.

  There have been other critical moments in the past decade or so. The political machinations of West Bengal have continued in the fashion of the sixties, always tortuously, often incoherently, sometimes violently. The period of president’s rule ended with a state election in 1971 which produced a coalition government of eight parties led by a Congress man. Twelve months later the Corporation of Calcutta was effectively suspended, its elected representatives removed, its functions henceforth discharged by the state government. In 1975 the political life of the whole country was thrown into turmoil as a result of the emergency powers adopted by Mrs Gandhi’s government in Delhi, and insurrection against those powers was as great in Calcutta as it was anywhere; likewise the Delhi government’s response to insurrection. The prisons of West Bengal became as crowded as ever they had been during the most repressive days of the British Raj. But when, in 1977, the Prime Minister submitted herself to general election (a democratic act which her adversaries, axe-grinding opportunists almost to a man, had insisted beforehand to be quite beyond her), she paid the price for her authoritarian regime in West Bengal as elsewhere in India. Not only did the state return its tally of her opponents to the New Delhi parliament; in its own domestic elections it handed power, with a colossal majority, to a Left Front government – yet another medley of parties, but one dominated by the CPI (M). And so Jyoti Basu, whom I had last seen as the power behind the throne on which sat a bewildered Ajoy Mukherjee, came into his own as Chief Minister of West Bengal.

  It was his Calcutta, in most senses, to which I returned in the spring of 1981. I had flown down from Patna to a Dum Dum airport which was cut off from the city, with no buses or taxis plying for hire, because a strike had been incited by the Basu government in protest against a faction which had just been demonstrating roughly against its rule. Some citizens had been killed and, that weekend, a dozen tramcars were displayed on the Esplanade, to show what the enemies of the people were capable of in their resentment of the people’s willed administration. The smashed windows of the trams and the bodywork scorched by firebombs were testimony enough to the vicious course anybody’s resentment may take in Calcutta. To that extent, nothing had changed while I was away. Provocations, reprisals, politicians playing extravagantly to the gallery, consequential strikes and attendant uproar were still the order of the day. So, thank God, were all the things that have always redeemed the nasty facts of life in Calcutta. The warmth of people and their astonishing vitality were also as I remembered them.

  As was their ability to charm the outsider with some ididsyncrasy of their own which can make him giggle and be moved at one and the same time. My old lodgings on Wood Street having disappeared in favour of some flats, I stayed at the Great Eastern Hotel – as Kipling stayed when he was in town – one of the great social landmarks of British rule. It has long since been transferred from private hands to those of the government of West Bengal; which means, at the moment, that it is run by Communists. I chose the Great Eastern not because of the imperial connection per se, but because I have a taste for bygones which have survived unexpectedly in the modern world. There is much in the Great Eastern that qualifies for my custom in this respect, from the old-fashioned plumbing to the little mosque which Muslim members of the staff have created in an annexe to the boiler room. Above all, there is the inscription which decorates the window of a textile shop near the hotel’s reception desk. There, in gilded letters curving in low-relief above the imperial crown, are the words ‘By appointment to HM the King Emperor and HM the Queen Empress’, which the employees of communism were still polishing assiduously every day, thirty-four years after independence had been achieved. I beg the government of West Bengal never to discontinue this eccentric task. The act of preserving that fragment of history is much more their glory than ever the inscription itself referred to ours.

  But, as I found out in the next few days, changes had been wrought to the Calcutta I had fondly but anxiously left in 1970. The entire length of Chowringhee was sorely disfigured by a deep trench, whose outcrops also made a mess of Park Street and other adjacent thoroughfares. This was the excavation for the underground railway which, one of these days, will run beneath the city all the way from Dum Dum to Tollygunge, the first thing of its kind on the sub-continent. Calcutta’s desperate need for better systems of transport had been tackled in other forms, too. Those poor old Leyland double-deckers, which in their rattletrap way may yet outlast the company that made them, had been reinforced in my absence by a fleet of smart-looking minibuses, splendid additions in every respect apart from the fact that tall passengers who must stand are obliged to do so in a prehensile stoop. On the Hooghly I found diesel-engined ferryboats rumbling back and forth where there had been nothing like them before. A mile or so below Howrah Bridge, what’s more, two concrete arcs were springing towards each other from either bank, due to join up in a magnificent new suspension bridge for road traffic in 1985.

  A degree of salvation – and one dare not hope for an improvement of Calcutta by more than degrees across long periods of time – has come to the city by way of its river, which always was the key to its fortunes. In 1975 the great barrage at Farakka was completed, a few miles from the border with Bangladesh, in up-country Bengal. There have been periodic wrangles since about the proportion of Ganga water which shall be allowed to flow past Farakka into Bangladesh, and what may run down into the Indian Hooghly. But Calcutta has certainly been well served by the engineering up there, as the accumulated silt of half a century and more has been flushed downstream towards the Bay of Bengal by the increased flow. The depth of navigable water is greater now between Kidderpore Docks and the sea, though the Hooghly will always be a treacherous river for ocean-going ships. Nevertheless, in the twelve months before my latest visit, some 700 vessels had brought their trade right into the heart of the city, a figure that hadn’t been heard of for donkey’s years. And that is quite apart from the numbers which dock at Halida, fifty-six miles nearer the sea, where the new port would be flourishing at last if international commerce weren’t in such a bad way, for it can accommodate the largest merchantmen afloat. Not only has Farakka caused those who forecast the death of Calcutta as a port to brighten it up; it has also done its bit to improve (just a little) the local drinking-water supply. The pumping station at Palta was in a state of collapse when I first saw it, corroding under the high salinity of the Hooghly’s sluggish ebb and flow, but now it has been fettled, and fresher water is going through to the taps and standpipes of the city beyond.

  It would be crass to assume that such advances as these mean that a great new dawn is coming Calcutta’s way. The plight of most of its millions remains much as it was when I tried to describe it in the pages that follow. The Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, which has evolved from the gallant CMPO, has tinkered with some bustee defects, but its resources are overstretched and a third of the population still live in bustees. Until these are gone, if ever they do go, t
here is no excuse for anyone to make a song and dance about the basic living conditions of Calcutta. But obviously the deepest pessimisms of 1970 have been lightened a shade or two by what has happened since. I myself underrated Calcutta’s enduring capacity for survival in the face of difficulties that might destroy the will to survive in a civilized fashion in any western community of size that I have known. This is a variation of the most common failing of the westerner when contemplating India, based on the assumption that what is valid in his part of the world is or ought to be equally true on the sub-continent. It infrequently is.

  I should have known better. I rejoice that Calcutta persists in ways that make us, its devotees, grateful always to refresh ourselves at its sometimes stained fountains. I am glad I picked the right word to symbolize what I felt then, what I feel still. Again … Zindabad!

  Gayle, 1983

  ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE

  No traveller from the West is completely prepared for his first experience of India. Whether he flies into the fiery dawn of Bombay or Delhi, as he frequently does, his senses will at once be shocked and stimulated and confused by the strangeness of his new landfall. He may have inklings of what to expect but he can never have more than that, for everything that is about to happen to him is on such a scale and of such magnitude as to defy and almost to dissolve all his careful anticipation. He may have been entranced once by the queer and exotic doings of snake charmers, fire eaters and gulli-gulli men at sundown in the great square of Marrakesh, which will have seemed a marvellous spectacle especially organized for the benefit of tourists. In India the traveller discovers that such things can be customary processes of living. He may believe that he has sighted the utmost poverty in the cave dwellings and hovels of Southern Italy or Spain. In India he realizes that this was not so, and mat something infinitely worse goes on and on, hopelessly and terribly. The traveller’s confusion and the sick feeling he begins to detect in the pit of his sensitive stomach is liable to be increased, moreover, if he happens to be British. For in all this confusion and this riveting strangeness he becomes aware of things as faintly familiar as an old coat of varnish, or a forgotten diary discovered one traumatic day under the dust in the box room. These consist of ways some people have of doing and saying things, of a sign manual casually observed upon a building, of a lingering and homely style inextricably mixed up with all the oddness. They make the traveller fairly blink with recollection as he struggles with some fresh encounter mat he suspects he has had some place before. And men one day, while he is still astonished by his landfall, he takes plane again and flies on to the East; for there, he has heard, lies the ultimate in this weird and marvellous and awful experience.