Calcutta Read online

  Add to West Bengal a strip of southern Bihar, a slice of northern Orissa, a fragment of western Assam, and you have what has justifiably been called the Ruhr of modern India. Within less than 300 miles of Calcutta, which is not very far in Asia, almost the whole of the republic’s iron and steel industry is concentrated today in townships cleared out of jungle to make room for blast furnaces, coke ovens and rolling mills. Durgapur, Jamshedpur and Asansol may suggest elephants, bullock carts and the most exotic Orientalism to the Western mind, but they are chiefly the tropical cousins of Middlesbrough, Pittsburgh and Essen. There is a network of similar towns in this hinterland, each with its special development of industry. There are more iron and steel works at Rourkela and Kulti, engineering at Midnapore and Ranchi, textiles at Cuttack, locomotive works at Chittaranjan, an oil refinery at Barauni, a great mixture of factories at Patna and Siliguri. The industry is based upon an endless supply of manpower and a vast accumulation of natural resources. For this hinterland conceals beneath its jungle, in the firmer ground outside the delta, not only iron and steel and petroleum, but limestone and copper, manganese and dolomite, china clay and asbestos, bauxite and graphite, titanium and mica, fire clay and kaolin, chromium, kyanite, talc and potash. There is also much timber and there is tea in the hill country even farther to the North. And all of it gradually being plundered from the earth and sent up and down in some shape or form, by railway, by truck, by lighter and sometimes still by bullock cart, to Calcutta.

  It would not have been so if there had not been a mighty river here, wide and deep enough to let the biggest sailing ships that man could make come tacking into the middle of this Paradise; they once used to voyage from Europe as far as Patna, which took them well over a month beyond Kalikata. The river’s origins are far away across a sub-continent of sweltering earth. It has started in the foothills of the Himalyas to the West and it has come tumbling in a cascade of sky-blue water past Rishikesh, where the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once received the Beatles in an air-conditioned bungalow built on the proceeds of Western adulation, and where there is a township totally given to spirituality and alms, vividly decorated with green and red cast-ironwork, dominated by a Victorian clock-tower, looking and feeling like a cross between Blackpool and Lourdes. Much later the river has rolled powerfully past Benares, a deep sea-green now, past the four miles of ghats and the buildings bearing signs advocating birth control and the piles of timber with people waiting their turn to incinerate their dead; and in the dawn, ghostly figures have started to creep down the ghats in dozens, in scores, in hundreds and then in thousands to bathe in its sacred waters, while birds have meditated on this humanity and perhaps taken thought for their own souls, perched upon rails which have been staked out in mid-stream especially for this purpose. All this time the river has been called the Ganga, though people have called it by other names as well at different places along its course. They have known it as Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya, Born from the Lotuslike foot of Vishnu, Dwelling in the Matted Locks of Siva, Taking Pride in the Broken Egg of Brahma, Triple-braided Stimulator and Cow That Gives Much Milk. But always, and above all else, they have known it as the blessed Ganga, Mother of the World.

  Eventually the river has reached Bengal, and there it has been unable to contain itself in a single headlong rush for the sea. It has become divided into so many channels that it is doubtful whether anyone has ever counted them all. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the mainstream swept confidently past Calcutta in the guise of the Hooghly, but then it began to edge its current towards the Padma and each year since then, more and more of the true Ganga has taken this way to the South, through the East Bengal of what is now Pakistan, with no great Indian city to use it on the rest of its way to the sea. There are gloomy men who call the Hooghly a dying river, though it certainly doesn’t look it yet. It pours in a khaki torrent, a third of a mile across, between the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah so fiercely that there is always a foaming bone in the teeth of the merchantmen pulling anxiously at their anchor cables and their buoys. It is still so full of life that even its pilots have to take a daily briefing on its latest wayward movements, for it is one of the most treacherous rivers in the world. There are 125 miles of it between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal and they are punctuated by sixteen sandbanks which are never quite the same shape and depth from one sailing to the next. The most dangerous one of all, the James and Mary, a shoal three miles long and 600 yards wide in the middle of the estuary, was troubling Streynsham Master and Thomas Bowrey in the seventeenth century just as it has troubled mariners ever since. So were the Hooghly’s tidal bores, which now come rushing up to Calcutta on 144 days in every year and even at that distance from their start they are usually six feet or more in height. The newspapers give warning that they are due so that merchantmen can warp themselves into the safety of the Kidderpore Docks, while the country boats can prepare to ride them hazardously in mid-stream, and people – if they can read – can crowd for their lives on the very topmost steps of the ghats. There are sudden squalls to beware of, that can turn a laden barge over in an instant, or an overladen motor launch on its way up from Diamond Harbour to Kalighat full of pilgrims who will drown in the twinkling of an eye. And there is always the lurking possibility of a cyclone which can devastate the city, wreck thirty-six large vessels and throw steamships high, dry and smashed to bits upon the land, as one did in 1864.

  The Hooghly exposes Calcutta in cross-section like the rings of a sawn-off log. Scarcely a mile above the city centre it proceeds past palm trees which only half conceal temples and the steadily decaying palaces of old zamindars and Nabobs, together with the worst slums in creation. There are crocodiles here, just as there are leopards around Dum Dum and the other boundaries of the city, and while both sometimes snatch a human being, the crocodiles at least are occasionally caught and put on stuffed display in some ambitious motor-showroom along Chowringhee. Then, quite suddenly, there is all the activity of a great cosmopolitan port. On the right is Howrah, which in 1848 was called the Wapping of Calcutta and which does big business in the way of docking and shipbuilding, where oxy-acetylene flashes burst out of deep and cavernous shadows. On the left is Calcutta proper, and close to the river are high buildings in which most of this tremendous commerce is manipulated. They appear much smaller than they really are, though, for the sky here is full of the Howrah Bridge; and there never was a bridge which dominated a landscape as much and in so ungainly a fashion as this one. From any distance it looks as though it was trying to crush the life out of everything beneath, for it is a graceless thing, a great fretworked grid of steel built only to bear footpaths and roads and tramtracks and certainly not to beautify a skyline. There are many bridges in the world constructed upon similar principles and they usually seem to leap across an intervening space with a spring of their own; even Sydney’s metal coathanger manages a pleasing arch across the harbour. But here, it is as if the Howrah Bridge had merely been clamped down over the city, or dropped across the river, and it looks every ounce of its 27,000 tons.

  Far from being crushed, life is teeming in its shadows. Early in the morning there is a market down here, where scores of people sell thousands of flowers in garlands of orange, in swathes of blue, in bunches of crimson and in posies of white, and the servants of the rich come in hordes to buy the freshest tiny blooms to decorate their masters’ dinner tables, while others scramble and barter for something beautiful and precious to give to Kali and the other gods. Lithe young men stand in rows or in intermittent ones and twos, their naked torsos gleaming with sweat while they press up and touch toes and swing long dumb-bells in dangerous-looking arcs, in something that is a combination of physical jerks, religious exercise and sheer racial pride. Nearby, corpulent old men lie like sows bereft of their litters, while some wiry helot pummels each back and massages each gut and rubs each scalp and strokes in oil from top to bottom. And always there are people washing here, slapping clothes up and down against
the stone steps of the ghats, jumping into the water and splashing just for fun, or quietly ladling the sacred liquids of the Hooghly from tin bowls upon their almost private parts. They pay no attention at all to the occasional rime of ashes and sodden fronds of marigold that come drifting down from one of the burning ghats above the bridge. For there is much death here as well as life; and daily, bodies are cremated on steps like these on a bonfire of logs, with a blowing of flutes, before being scattered in the river. But sometimes in Calcutta a man will die and his people will not even have the money for his burning; so they quietly slip him into the Hooghly and the next day, on mudflats a mile or two downstream, dogs are seen chewing over a floppy, seemingly rubberized thing, which by some mysterious chemistry has been bleached almost totally white from head to toe.

  Below the bridge lies the shipping and all the river traffic of the East. Every craft here was built for merchandize. There are no posh liners in the Hooghly, come to see how the other half lives. It has not been possible to cruise up here in all the old Imperial splendour of the P and O, with lascars on the decks and foxtrots in the lounge, since 1931, though Bombay was still enjoying an occasional whiff of that past until the spring of 1970. The shipping at Calcutta comes from the strictly tradesmen’s lines of Ellerman, Elder Dempster, Bank, Clan, American Export and half a dozen others. It has tramped in the hard way from the River Plate, from St John and Halifax, from Odessa and Varna, from Singapore and Port Swettenham, from Liverpool and Hamburg, from Melbourne and Yokohama. It has rust dripping down its sides and underpants drying on its stanchions and only small bikinis of awning to protect its crews from the sun. It waits very patiently, sometimes for weeks on end, while lighters clutter its sides and the Hooghly is much more busy with the comings and goings of smaller fry.

  There are flat boats moving round here with cargoes of hay so huge and overwhelming that the boat itself is invisible and all you can see is a floating haystack on the water; they are often moored in their dozens just above Howrah Bridge, like an aquatic farmyard, and their crews have created a tunnel inside each stack, which makes a sort of home. There are tipsy little boats, long, slim, with low pointed prows, canting over at speed as the wind leans into their lateens. Outriggers flick by, bearing fishermen off to look for bhekti and hilsa. Sharp-stemmed and narrow lighters, with a canvas shelter stretched tight in a hump over the sterns, are parked in rows where they toss and bump each other like a flotsam. And down the middle of the Hooghly there is always a procession of vessels moving rather grandly under square sails cocked at a jaunty angle, known as junks to the European and noayka to the Bengali. They are to be seen at their best when the wind has dropped, however, or when they are trying to make way against it. For on the high curved poop, the serang leans against his tiller above the great triangular sweep of a rudder plunged vertically into the water, while in front of him four or six men stand up and work oars the size of saplings in one of the most graceful movements imaginable. In perfect time together they take three measured and swinging paces along the deck, dip in the blades and then lean back from the shafts while the boat slides forward under their pull. Rhythmically, almost studiously, they and their craft get the better of this turbulent river, which flows so fast that any boat trying to move straight across it rocks and rolls like a mad thing.

  The Hooghly bears all this traffic along, past the ghats and beyond the strollers along Strand Road, which Lord Hastings created as a promenade for ladies and gentlemen. It carries it past the point where the master mariners could satisfy themselves that Calcutta knew how to deal with pirates, whose bodies were hung from gibbets there until 1820; for the next thirty years they were drowned instead off Prinsep Ghat. Opposite is Shalimar, with its ropeworks and a big red neon sign advertising Shalimar Paints, though once it was a country retreat with a miniature garden modelled on the original Shalimar in Lahore, which had been laid out by Shah Jehan’s chief engineer and where pale hands were loved by heartsick young Englishmen. On the Calcutta side is the opening of Tolly’s Nullah, the creek that wriggles away up to the temple at Kalighat and then on to Warren Hastings’ old house and wealthy Alipore; Major Tolly dredged it afresh in 1775 so that pilgrims should still be able to bathe in Ganga water when making sacrifice to Kali; water buffalo now hide in it from the heat, with only nostrils, eyes and horns poised above the surface, and children play skidding games on its steep banks of greasy black mud. The Hooghly is broadening now, turning into its dogleg, and at an angle the Kidderpore Docks have started to succeed the rich southern suburbs, infinitely more complex than Colonel Watson could have imagined when he started to engineer the first berth within a few days of acting as second to Philip Francis in the duel with Hastings; for now the docks sweep away in range after range of warehouses and gantries and superstructures which are all locked in against the disturbance of the tides.

  Calcutta is not quite finished yet, but the worst is over by the time the Botanical Gardens come up to starboard, which Bishop Heber thought just like Milton’s idea of Paradise and which Sir Joseph Hooker used as a base while he was collecting and compiling his famous flora of British India before returning to his Directorship at Kew; and in the gardens is the largest banyan tree in the world, which is supposed to have started life two centuries ago on top of a wild date-palm, under which a fakir would sit and beg, but which is now an astonishing growth like a self-made jungle, with over six hundred trunks of its own, covering so much ground that you can never quite get it all into one photograph however far back you stand. There are occasional brickworks to follow beside the river after this, and a vast Bata shoe factory to port, with two or three townships posted along the banks, but now the Hooghly is making speed, full of intimidating little eddies and swirls, through proper Lord Jim jungle to the Bay of Bengal. In spite of all the horrors that it passes and occasionally inflicts, it is a captivating river, and its romance is precisely the romance of Conrad, who saw it briefly once, when he sailed as mate in the Tilkhurst, bound from Singapore to Dundee in 1885, just before he wrote his first short story.

  It is famous for its sunsets, whose exhausted transformations are best witnessed from somewhere near the Gwalior Monument on Strand Road, where Sepoy Ganga Din and Sepoy Juggernauth Misser and Naick Runmust Singh and a variety of Bombardiers, Roughriders and Farriers, led by a Major-General C. H. Churchill, are commemorated for a battle they fatally won in 1843. Almost always the sun has become a disc the colour of blood orange by the time it is apparently motionless just above the factories across the Hooghly. The cloudless sky is pure orange by now, the river is nearly golden not khaki, the Howrah Bridge has lost its hazy, noon-time pallor and turned to hard grey steel instead. Suddenly, the sun begins to move, not changing colour by even the slightest fading of its heat, but the sky begins to shift from orange to pure white and the river begins to dazzle with more light, as though it were going to recover from a false alarm of dusk. Immediately, the junks and the other boats still plodding up and down acquire a new and sharp outline, which makes them individual and distinguishes them from the blur of the opposite bank. You can now see the sun sliding perceptibly down near the sign of Shalimar Paints, its circle unbroken in one instant, its bottom edge flattened in the next. Everything changes rapidly now. The sky moves again from white to something less vivid than orange, more nearly the colour of burnished gold. Behind you, bats begin to skim and skirmish around the squat grey bastions of Fort William, lying low within its earthworks. On the river, guttering lights are lit inside those tight-humped shelters on the barges, the neon sign at Shalimar begins to jerk and splutter into advertisement, the Howrah Bridge begins to dissolve upstream. As the last kite flogs itself hastily home past the fort and over the tree tops of the Maidan, the sun has become a crescent, thin as a wafer and pure blood now, and the sky has almost completed its spectrum to deep mauve. The bridge has almost vanished, the opposite bank is a lurking shadow, the boats between are the vaguest shapes. Suddenly, like the throwing of a switch, darkness. And a
thousand small lights, flickering over and beside water, with a mustard glow in the sky behind as Calcutta makes ready to pass the night.

  *

  Flowing into Calcutta like the Hooghly is a rich commodity of human beings. It has been thus ever since the foundation and it has never for a moment diminished. Over the past half century this flow has become a torrent, too. These people have been an indirect source of Calcutta’s wealth since the day they were born and they have come to the city to share it at last, for there has been scarcely anywhere else for them to go if they were to have a chance of living above that dreadful line marking absolute poverty. At the start of the sixties the hinterland from which Calcutta has drawn its wealth contained 145 million people – and it now has well over 150 millions – living in one of the least urbanized areas in the whole of India. According to the 1961 census the proportion of urban to total population throughout the nation was 19 per cent. At that time only West Bengal, with 24.5 per cent, exceeded the national average among the states of Eastern India and this was entirely due to the vast compression of people into the 200 square miles of Greater Calcutta; outside the metropolitan district only two and a half million Bengalis out of 28.4 millions lived in towns, a proportion of only 9.2 per cent. Even today, in the four hinterland states of West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam, there are only sixteen cities with populations exceeding 100,000; and on the Indian scale of being, 100,000 is very nearly an insignificant number of anything; there are almost that many people on the pavements each night in Calcutta. In such a situation Calcutta represents, for all its well-known poverty, the possibility of personal wealth not to be obtained elsewhere. At the beginning of the sixties the average annual income per head of population was Rs 194 in Bihar, Rs 259 in Orissa, Rs 319 in Assam and Rs 327 in West Bengal. In the whole of India it was no more than Rs 334. But in Calcutta it was Rs 811. Only Delhi and Bombay could better that, and they are much too far away for any Bihari peasant to contemplate migration in their direction; he can walk to Calcutta if need be in a matter of weeks, but he would be dead before he was even half way to the capital of India. And even if, when he reaches the city, he cannot find work he can find many rich people from whom he can beg enough to stay alive until something better turns up. There is no one to support the destitute in a Bihari village, for everyone there is almost destitute himself.