Calcutta Read online

  There are other forms of slum in Calcutta. Up at Baranagar, which is almost within sight of the Howrah Bridge, there is a jute mill which was built and profitably maintained for nearly a century by Scotsmen. Eventually it passed into the hands of Indians, who run it now, almost a model of its kind. It is circumscribed by a high brick wall and in spite of the purely Indian setting – the long row of cooped-up stalls across the street, their owners cross-legged on the counter, the bicycle rickshaws being pedalled laboriously, with much ringing of bells, over the cobbles – in spite of all this, the essence of the mill and its vicinity is still ridiculously British. That raw red brick with its patina of dirt, that gateway with a wrought-iron arch curving above it, those factory attendants in khaki dungarees checking people in and out, those workmen wheeling their bicycles away after a shift, are all part of an industrial landscape which originated half way across the earth and which can still be seen in a thousand examples from Dundee to Bolton and back again. The street curves downhill slightly, alongside the high wall, towards the river, where the mill has its private pier for barges come to collect its gunny sacks and its other makings of jute. And at the bottom, on the bank of the river, those Scotsmen built some homes for their workers; for their Indian foremen, to be precise.

  They stand in terrace rows and they are made of the same glazed brick as the factory, a couple of storeys high. They contain a total of 630 rooms and 1,500 people inhabit them. One room on the ground floor is 10ft by 6ft and three men share it; there is space inside for nothing but them, a string from one wall to the other with clothes hanging from it, half a dozen metal cooking vessels and a few religious pictures tacked into the brickwork. But they have themselves added a short bamboo porch to give them a little extra space for a kitchen of sorts, a small angular horseshoe shape two bricks high; an open drain runs within two feet of it. The men live here by themselves because, like so many men in Calcutta, they find that ends can be made to meet more often if the wife and children stay behind in the village, which may be somewhere in the back of Bengal or even farther afield. Once a year these three men return to their families for two months allotted leave, a fortnight of it paid. Each collects Rs 200 a month for a forty-eight hour week and absolutely no chance of overtime. He has six per cent of his wages deducted for an unemployment benefit scheme. He spends Rs 70 a month on keeping himself alive. The rest he sends home to his family. These three men have lived like this since they came to Calcutta in 1956. By the norms of the city, they are not too badly off, even though the pumps of unfiltered water supplied by the company work out at one for every hundred people, even though the solitary latrine for the whole colony of 1,500 is so foul that most people instead take to the Hooghly.

  There is also a little electricity here, not in the rooms of course, which don’t even have ventilation, but enough to provide two or three lamp standards along the end of the terrace rows. And at night, in the pools of light these create, this colony of company slums can be seen as a haunting throwback to a distant age in a distant place. People sit upon their haunches in the lamplight and gamble with cards; they lean and gossip beside small stalls which are set up even in here, with shelves bearing spices in jars, tobacco in boxes and garish glassy beads threaded into necklaces and bangles on string. On the outer rim of the light, where the thick shadows fade and the deep blackness begins, grey figures steal back and forth, quarrel by one of the pumps, sit very still with their backs to a wall and squat upon their heels to piss in a gutter. There are flickering lights from oil lamps inside some of the buildings. There is iron-blue smoke from fires drifting in small clouds just above head height. There are mangy dogs, their coats almost bald with disease and undernourishment, scavenging listlessly in corners. It will have been something like this in the stews of Whitechapel early in the nineteenth century.

  The sewerage of Calcutta is from the same era, as the city approaches the last quarter of the twentieth century. Along the whole thirty-mile length of Greater Calcutta there is not much of even remotely modern sewerage, and modern in this context means anything up to a hundred years old. Instead there is what they call the service privy. This is a small brick shed with a platform above a large earthenware bowl to receive the shit; it is usually fully exposed and unprotected from flies. It is supposed to be emptied daily by Calcutta Corporation, but things do not happen that way in Calcutta. It is sometimes weeks before the Corporation sweepers arrive. Even with the service at its best, the bowl has usually long since overflowed across the surrounding ground. Howrah, with a population of half a million, contains nothing but service privies. Apart from Howrah and the city proper, there are 126,000 of them in Greater Calcutta. The city itself has another 42,000. Its bustees alone contain 17,000. Unutterably nasty as the service privy is for those who must use it, its implications are much more awful than mere squalor. It represents the beginnings of cholera, of every other gastro-intestinal disease in creation, with smallpox and tuberculosis thrown in as well. For the stinking mess around the bustee’s privy is washed straight into the ponds and tanks of water in which the people clean themselves and their clothes and their cooking utensils. Every year, when the monsoon falls, the incidence of cholera in Calcutta rises from its service privies. It is endemic and sometimes it is epidemic; in 1958 there were 4,900 cases and 1,765 deaths in Calcutta City alone. And this place is not much equipped for the medical care and attention of its poor people. In the whole of West Bengal there is not even one hospital bed for every thousand people. It occasionally happens that an ambulance takes a sick man to hospital, where the doctors refuse to treat him, whereupon he is returned by ambulance whence he came; which, as often as not, is to the pavement.

  It is just possible for the Western mind, contemplating Calcutta from a safe distance, to grasp some of the incidence of its poverty. It is almost impossible, except from personal experience, to understand how congested the poverty is. But some comparative figures can give an inkling. Calcutta is obviously one of the most overcrowded places on earth. In fact, the last time anyone made a count (between 1961 and 1963), it was found that the city contained 102, 010 people per square mile. Even by Indian standards this was an enormous density. Calcutta’s nearest rival at the time was Ahmedabad, with 56,540 people per square mile; in Delhi the figure was 41,280, in Bangalore it was 49,220. In 1963, the city the Western world laments as the most shockingly overcrowded it knows, New York, contained 27,900 people per square mile. The average figure for twenty-two cities in the Central United States was 13,500; Los Angeles rated an agoraphobic 7,870. Figures do not diminish in Calcutta; the density will be appreciably greater by now. In 1961 the average dwelling along the Hooghly consisted of 1.55 rooms, with three people living in each room. But in 1957 it was calculated that seventy-seven per cent of all the families in Calcutta had less than forty square feet of living space per person.

  Life is squalid, it is claustrophobic and it somehow continues on a pittance. A man earning Rs 200 a month by tending a loom in a jute mill at Baranagar is a princeling among such people. He is, for a start, at least semi-skilled, which means that he will have had some education in a city where sixty-four per cent of the adults are illiterate. And he is comparatively secure in his employment. So, in a smaller way, is a man like Bheddari Poshman, who at the age of sixty-five pulls a rickshaw through the pouring traffic of Calcutta. It is not his own rickshaw, of course; the middleman flourishes in India as he flourishes nowhere else; the rickshaw man rents his vehicle for one rupee a day from a fellow who owns forty of them. He then runs and trots and jogs anything between ten and twenty miles a day to make a living. He charges his customers anything between an equivalent of ½p and 1p a mile, which means that he earns Rs 3 to Rs 7 a day, with takings on the higher side on Saturday and Sundays; for he keeps going seven days in the week. Poshman manages to do this, in spite of his sixty-five years, on a diet which one would have thought insufficient even to keep him standing on his legs without support. At the start of the day there is eigh
t ounces of rice or a similar amount of the cereal called chhatu, mixed with some chili and onion for flavour; there is some tea around noon, and chappatis in the evening. Nothing else. Nevertheless, this is still living on a slightly higher income than the infinite number who are employed as servants in Calcutta.

  In 1965 the American Woman’s Club of the city compiled an instructive booklet for the guidance of new members recently arrived from the States. It included prevailing wage rates for servants, and it should be borne in mind that in many cases the terms of engagement probably meant that the employee ate at his employer’s expense on top of his wage, and his lodging in a shed at the back of the house; though whether this also allowed him to carry food away to his immediate relations would depend upon individual American or European generosity. The instructions to the new hirer of servants went as follows:

  Bearer – Rs 90 to Rs 120 or more a month. The higher paid bearers act as butler-bearers, combining the duties of serving man with those of major domo. Cook – Rs 90 to Rs no a month. Does marketing and cooking. Cook-bearer – Rs 100 to Rs 125 a month. Acts as cook and bearer usually for a single person or for a couple. Occasionally may be employed by a larger family Sweeper – Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Does cleaning and heavy work. Ayah or nanny – Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Takes care of children. The ayah usually doesn’t live in. The nanny is usually a more experienced person, lives in and receives higher pay. Personal ayah – Rs 35 to Rs 75 a month, depending upon whether the service is full or part-time. Acts as lady’s maid, washes, irons and mends women’s clothing, etc. Single women with jobs find a part-time ayah a great help. In homes with pre-teen or teenage girls it is suggested that an ayah be hired as a personal maidservant for the women of the family. Driver – Rs 130 to Rs 165 a month. Drives and takes care of the car. Mali (gardener) – Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Takes care of the garden. Durwan (guard) – Rs 60 to Rs 80 a month. Acts as watchman and gatekeeper. Dhobi (laundryman) – Rs 45 to Rs 50 a month. For a part-time employee who washes, irons all linens and clothing, including the servants’ uniforms two or three times a week. Rs 70 to Rs 80 or more for a full-time employee for large families who require daily service. He may live in. Rs 30 or more for ironing only, for families who have their own washing machines.

  Living in, it should be explained, means the shed at the back of the premises. It does not mean having a room in a household of Westerners. The servants, as likely as not, dwell in the nearest bustee.

  The strains of life at this level are sometimes quite alien to the experience of the Western world, and at the most there will be merely suggestions of them in the slums of Southern Europe and the poor men’s ghettoes of North America. They could only be guessed at in Calcutta until a year or two ago. But towards the end of 1968 the Anthropological Survey of India, whose headquarters stand just off Chowringhee, began eight months’ study of life in one bustee which has been sunk just beyond the glow of neon lights near Rashbehari Avenue, in the South of the city. There are sixty-one hutments here, almost all of one storey on a couple of acres, with mud or brick walls, with tin or tiled roofs. Each of them contains anything from eight to forty families. There are 2,451 people altogether, mostly Bengalis, seasoned with immigrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Nepal. They represent something like forty different castes between them. The vast majority of them have come to Calcutta from the villages of Eastern India but the next largest group are some of the refugees who have been flowing into the city from East Pakistan ever since Partition in 1947; after them come a handful whose life began in some other Calcutta slum, and there is a sprinkling of people who once knew something a bit better than this in some other Indian city. They are labourers and ayahs, masons and lathe-operatives, tram conductors and office peons, and they pay monthly rents between Rs 9 and Rs 35 for each room. For this there is a service privy and an open bathing space to each hut. There are seven tubewells and two taps of water for the entire bustee. Right alongside this is the kothabari, the middle-class land of bricks and mortar rising to a couple of storeys (homes are mostly no higher than that in Calcutta), of commercial hoardings and street lights of neon which glare so fiercely at night that the bustee seems to be a place of total blackness with half a dozen guttering candles to mark that it is there at all. It requires some courage for an outsider to step alone into such a place after dusk.

  There are 441 families in the bustee and for most of them income can be almost anything up to Rs 150 a month. In many, the wife is out earning money in the morning and evening and it is the man who is cooking, cleaning and caring for the children. A newly-married couple may go to the cinema two or three times in the first few months, but after that recreation together generally stops. When the wife is at home the man takes himself to a tea shop or plays cards near a street lamp with his friends. The women do not often have friends, only acquaintances. The wives living in the same hut often cooperate in family matters, but it is usually for what each can get out of the other later on; they quarrel and fight a great deal. So do the husbands and wives. The women, with the self-esteem of earning power, sometimes call their husbands ‘Dokno’ or she-man and say ‘I am not afraid of him; I do not depend on him.’ And sometimes men say ‘I have not allowed my wife to work in spite of the hardship I have to endure, because then she will no longer obey me.’

  Where the man is the only bread-winner, the wife is subservient and gets no help at all in domestic affairs. The children of both sexes are taught to cook and do other chores from an early age; the local primary schoolteacher is frequently asked by a parent to let a small boy go home early so that he can prepare rice for the family. From the age of eight the boys begin to stay away from home. By the time they are twelve they have usually started a job and they spend most of the money on themselves; the girls usually get jobs as servants a little later. The parents complain that their children are not respectful once they have ceased to be infants, but what they really mean is that they are disobedient. Children frequently abuse their parents in sexual terms; they are not very old when they start to beat their parents, and this frequently continues for the rest of their lives together. Abuse and beating is common among brothers and sisters as well, and the relationships between them soon become as impersonal as those between people without blood ties. A young man is known to borrow money from his elder brother at five per cent interest.

  A striking thing about the people of the bustee, in a land where kinship is highly esteemed, is how little contact they have with relations outside the immediate family. It is usually only the husbands who maintain any contact at all with adult brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins. Some people have difficulty in recalling the name of their grandparents. And when there is a marriage in the bustee, only the very closest relatives attend. Yet somehow, marriages seem to stand the strain of this life surprisingly well. The rate of husbands deserting their wives is under five per cent, though there are fifty unmarried couples who, on one side or the other, abandoned earlier unions. There is a certain unspecified amount of illicit sex by both men and women who are married.

  There are obvious reasons why relatives should lose contact with each other. One is the expense of travel and another is the difficulty as well as the expense of accommodating someone who might have come to Calcutta from a home village in Bihar to see a son or a niece. But the moral obligations of family hospitality also break down because one side has become wealthier than the other. A man living in the bustee will not visit his aunt and her husband who reside in the adjacent kothabari because he feels they are above his station, and the residents of the kothabari will certainly never descend to the bustee. A small trader who lived in the bustee for three years eventually moved out to Jadavpore, because he thought it would improve his wider family relationships. Moreover, a middle-class Indian can be shocked (you can smell it coming off the pages of the anthropologist’s report) by some of the relationships that do occur in the bustee. ‘I had,’ he writes, ‘opportunity to observe the behaviour
al pattern between “vasur” (husband’s elder brother) and younger brother’s wife, between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, son-in-law and mother and father-in-law, between maternal nephew and uncle, etc. In all cases the element of respect seems to be lacking and the social distance has been shortened considerably. Smoking biri or cutting joke with elderly persons has become common. Normally a brother’s wife when talking with “vasur” must veil herself and use a gentle tone and should show no petulance. The “vasur” on the other hand, should be reserved in his behaviour.. Though this is the ideal norm, none of these conventions are observed in the bustee. I have at least one case to show that sexual relations exist between “vasur” and his younger brother’s wife.’ And sadly, he notes two cases of incest five years previously, the families having since left the bustee.

  Fifty yards away is the towering kothabari, but it is a world apart from the bustee, inhabited by the babus of the bhadralok class who are separated from these slum dwellers by education, wealth and general demeanour. Not by caste; twenty-eight of the bustee families were born at the Brahmin level of Hinduism, which is as high as a mortal can be in this order of things. Practically every other caste is represented there in descending steps of precedence. And none of them deal with the lowest babu except in the relationship of master and servant, tradesman and customer. Yet the bustee dwellers have no strong feeling of community among themselves, in spite of their shared squalor and poverty. A man who has lived there as long as anyone knows everybody inhabiting the same hut and almost everybody living along the same lane; but what he knows is simply their name, which hut they live in and what job they do. A common saying there is ‘People will be good to you as long as you please them’, and mutual help doesn’t often get beyond one family siding with another for a specific purpose. Even when there is a marriage or a death here, where people are living tightly on top of each other, the majority are merely sympathetic watchers. A few years ago the Calcutta Rotary Club decided to try and improve conditions in the bustee, with the help of the inhabitants. The plan collapsed because the inhabitants wouldn’t stir themselves, they wouldn’t even find a few paise each month to keep the paths and drains clean. When they had grievances or wanted anything done, they preferred to argue it out with their thika tenants rather than turn to any well-meaning group of outsiders.