Calcutta Read online

  The plight of such people was displayed with much subdued militancy and a great deal of warm camaraderie at a congress of peasants in the village of Barasat, not far beyond Dum Dum, at the beginning of 1970. It was held under the auspices of the Communist Party of India which, within India’s great and perplexing variety of communism, is the party which holds most strongly to the undefiled truths revealed by Moscow alone. Barasat is where Bengali serfs rose up against the infamous planters in one of the local revolutions which followed the Mutiny, and in the literature of the congress there were even references to ‘the notorious despot Warren Hastings’. There were many displays of propaganda, of course; stands bearing drawings to illustrate the domination of India by the British, others showing the life and times of Lenin, photographs demonstrating the people’s struggle in Vietnam. Very small and articulate boys led illiterate old men round these displays, gravely pointing to the pictures with their canes while they described the meaning and significance of each one. Older girls dispensed tea and chappatis to hungry comrades while their brothers, wearing red berets and carrying bamboo quarter staves, marshalled crowds who were not in the least disposed to be unruly. It must have been a bit like this in Russia when the Narodniks were planning revolution before Lenin turned up, or in the backblocks of Kweiyang before Chiang Kai-shek was sent packing into Formosa. There were many, many speeches for days on end, for this is what the congress had been called for, and there were delegates to hear them from every part of India.

  One of them was a man called Sibsankar Jha, who had fraternally come from his party cell somewhere in Bihar. He was small, he was dark, he had a shy, attractive smile and he wore his party badge dangling lopsided on the breast of his dhoti. He was forty-six years old, he was the father of seven children and he and his family inhabited one room made of brick and five others constructed of thatch in a little compound of their own. He was a peasant farmer owning five acres of land, which meant that he was far better off than the average peasant farmer of Bihar. Most of it was rice paddy but the crop had failed for three successive years and so the family income had depended almost entirely upon what they could grow of sugar cane instead. The rice would bring them in Rs 3,500 in a decent year but the sugar cane had a smaller market and made only Rs 2,000.

  Sibsankar Jha and his family had last eaten meat so long ago that he could not remember when. They enjoyed milk every other year, when their buffalo cow had calved, and once a day they ate rice as a luxury. Otherwise their diet consisted of grain and pulses, which is a crop of low nutritional value that can eventually cause beri beri if taken for too long in too much quantity. Two children were at school, while the eldest, a young man of twenty-two, had acquired his BA at Bihar University. But he was unemployed; he was, in fact, learning to type to give himself a saleable skill, riding a bicycle eight miles each way every day to his lessons, which cost Rs 5 a month. The family were permanently in debt and this was quite the most terrible thing in their lives. The beginning of Sibsankar Jha’s loan is a bank which lends money to a credit society at six per cent interest. The credit society then advances money to a moneylender at an interest of ten per cent. The moneylender then gives Sibsankar Jha the cash he wants on condition that he pays interest of twenty-five per cent. Some people say that these figures are, if anything, on the low side of such transactions in this part of the world. And Indian economists will tell you that no local substitute for this system of usury has yet been devised. In Sibsankar Jha’s case, it meant that he could see the time rapidly approaching when he would have to sell his land in order to pacify a moneylender who would no longer be prepared to grant him a loan. And if that happened, Sibsankar Jha would probably have to do what many Biharis have always had to do, at last go down to Calcutta to look for work.

  If that happened he would probably hold onto his little compound so that his family could stay behind and at least have shelter, while he prospected the city for a new home. If he was lucky he would find work. He might get a job as a labourer in one of the jute mills of Calcutta and if this were so he would be a fortunate man. There are many worse things that can happen to a Bihari peasant in the city. The wages are comparatively high and though the work is hard and rough, it is not by any means as bad as some employment there. If you go into the shed of a jute mill and you have had any experience of a Lancashire cotton mill, you find that the differences between them are fewer than you might have anticipated. The noise is about the same, though the humidity here is appreciably higher and there is generally much less natural light. The jute operative is considerably worse off than the cotton worker in the conditions of his labour insofar as his is a much dirtier job. The atmosphere is dusty as well as humid and for the men slashing the filthy bundles of raw jute into hanks that can be managed by the washing machines and then the looms, a management careful of its workers would provide protective masks; which certainly doesn’t happen in Calcutta. But elsewhere there are no thick clouds of dust; you can see fairly clearly to the opposite end of the shed, two or three hundred yards away, across row after row of clattering machines.

  A great number of the men working these looms, slashing the dusty bundles, pushing the finished gunny sacks and the hessian mats into the warehouses on trollies, are immigrants to Calcutta. One day they left their villages in search of work, in the hope that eventually their families would be able to follow them. But the weeks tended to stretch into months and then into years because the workman, though obtaining employment, has never had quite enough money to keep his wife and children on the higher cost of living in the city; and, above all, because he has not been able to find anywhere they could all live together tolerably by even the impoverished standards they have been accustomed to. And so he has shared his tiny room with two or three other immigrant husbands and fathers, each week he has gone to the General Post Office in Dalhousie Square or to one of its branches, and there he has queued for a small but vital postal order and sent it back home to his wife. Every year, Calcutta despatches the equivalent of £14 million in this way and for this purpose, for there are very many men sharing in its wealth, which at any level is much greater than that of any village. So it has remained what it has always tended to be, a city dominated by men, to a greater extent maybe, than any other in the world. It was so in the East India Company’s heyday and it was unchanged when the twentieth century began. In 1901 there were no more than 515 women to every thousand men. In 1961 there were still only 612.

  In such circumstances is jute manufactured, still accounting for almost a quarter of the country’s export trade in spite of heavy competition from East Pakistan, which acquired most of the jute-growing lands at Partition. Calcutta and West Bengal almost monopolize what was left, between them. There are nearly two million families dependent upon growing jute in Calcutta’s hinterland, and in the city there are 200,000 people working it in the mills; of the 109 jute mills in India, 98 are to be found in West Bengal. It is a vastly profitable trade for those who control it, in spite of its great dependence upon fluctuating world markets. The British ran it almost from top to bottom of management until they left, though the fantastically golden years had become just a little dulled by then. The time for a well-respected man with his origins in the Scottish Lowlands to be running jute mills in Calcutta was during and just after the First World War, shortly after he and his compatriots had been howling with rage and bitter prophecy at the transfer of the capital to Delhi. Apart from any normal manufacturing during the war years, the millowners were then selling eight million sandbags a month to the War Office to protect the brave lads in Flanders and elsewhere. One of them boasted to the Governor of Bengal that they could rise to ten millions if asked. They and their friends in the city made so much money out of their war production that in the first few months of peace they surreptitiously began to coin a local epithet for Armistice Day. They called it Black Friday, because it was going to make such a severe cut into their profits. Then they consoled themselves at the Saturday Club, where
they could hear forty Goanese musicians dressed like Central European ringmasters, playing ‘In a Monastery Garden’; or took their wives to dinner at Firpo’s new restaurant, whose management had imported a jazz band and furnished the premises in the best P and O Louis Quinze style. For five or six years after the war the bonanza went on, with the average dividend from the jute mills exceeding 100 per cent and frequently reaching 150 per cent. Mr Nehru was one of the Indians who bitterly noticed in those years ‘within an hour’s drive of the palaces of Calcutta, semi-naked women, wild and unkempt, working away for the barest pittance, so that a broad river of wealth should flow ceaselessly to Glasgow and Dundee as well as to some pockets in India’. And though the enormous fortunes that expatriates had always made out of Calcutta had dwindled by the 1930s, though their controlling interest in its treasure had to be abandoned on Independence Day 1947, the British continued and still continue to play a very decent hand in the wealth of the city.

  There are many British firms in the Bengal Chamber of Commerce which have been connected with the city for several generations, such as the descendants of Sir Thomas Lipton, who entered the local tea trade in 1890, or Brooke Bond, who followed in 1902. The chamber’s membership is littered with dozens of other old, familiar trading titles – Associated British Machine Toolmakers, Associated Electrical Industries, Atlas Assurance, The Avery Company, British Insulated Callender’s Cables, Eagle Star Insurance, English Electric, National and Grindlays Bank, Imperial Chemical Industries, Norwich Union Life Insurance, Wiggins Teape and many more. Occasionally a British firm modifies its title in the interests of tact, as the Imperial Tobacco Company of India did when it became the India Tobacco Company at the end of the sixties, though this doesn’t necessarily save it from local suspicions of lingering Imperialism. A purely Indian tobacco company not long ago bought two full pages in The Statesman in order to mount what it called an expose of the foreign monopoly in India’s cigarette industry. This pointed out that while 60,000 million cigarettes were smoked in the country each year, only 12,000 millions were produced by totally indigenous companies. It claimed that in recent years not only had many Indian companies found themselves working below their full capacity, but that some of them had been obliged to shut down a total of ninety-six factories, including eleven in Calcutta. It suggested that the market was dominated by two foreign giants, the American Tobacco Company of the United States, and the Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain, working in consort as the British American Tobacco Company Ltd. It claimed that in the case of ITC, the foreign shareholding amounted to. ninety-four per cent of the company’s total. And it is perfectly true that the British companies remaining in Calcutta still try to pay a good dividend to investors at home, while attempting to keep the city afloat with their investment on the spot. They do not always succeed in both objects and at least one of them, the Calcutta Tramways Company Ltd, is virtually a British charity to the city, for although it still has shareholders in the United Kingdom it is run by the West Bengal Government, which expropriated the concern some years ago.

  It is instructive to read the files of these British firms in the Board of Trade’s company registry in London. One of the thickest, running to two or three volumes, is that of the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation, which began to generate power for the city as the Indian Electric Company in 1897. This has managed to do rather better for itself than the tramways company. There was not a year between 1965 and 1968 when something called the Adjusted Profits of Calcutta Electric (gross profits before deducting depreciation and after deducting debenture interest) were less than £3,487,000 and in 1965 they were £5,132,000. Even in 1969 they were £2,810,000 and, as the chairman pointed out in his annual report for the year, this meant that when loans, interests and several other encumbrances had been dealt with, no less than £1,177,971 clear profit could be declared, paying a dividend for the year of 9 per cent He was not entirely happy about this figure which was, he said, £20,405 less than the Reasonable Return agreed upon by the Electricity (Supply) Act of 1948. ‘As I have said before’, he remarked on that occasion, ‘the lot of industrial management in Calcutta today is not a bed of roses – this is especially so in the case of a public utility like ours.’ Now, Calcutta Electric provides more than 10,000 very badly needed jobs in the city, quite apart from producing electricity, and although these employees are doubtless as dutiful as any workmen there (at least they always get a vote of thanks for their services in the annual report) the fact is that the chairman was on that occasion speaking during a high wave of industrial and political unrest in Calcutta. This, and several other trying local factors, was reflected in the Corporation’s next annual report, which could only present a clear profit for 1970 of £787,301 – and this time, the Reasonable Return was missed by the margin of £449,000. Nevertheless, it was possible to make an ex gratia payment of £6,000 to a retiring director and donations to charitable organizations in India amounted to £743 that year, as against £521 in 1969.

  One of the difficulties for a British company like Calcutta Electric, doing business in the city but registered in London with its head office in Bloomsbury, has been its subjection to Indian Corporation Tax amounting to 70 per cent. It was chiefly in order to reduce this to the rate of 50.6 per cent imposed on domestic companies in India that in January 1970, the firm shifted its headquarters to Chowringhee Square and controlled itself from Calcutta. Where, until 1970, it had two Indian directors in Calcutta and five Englishmen living either in Suffolk, Sussex or London, it now has four directors resident in India and three in Britain. The list of shareholders remains unchanged by a strategy which, after all, has been adopted chiefly for their benefit. Half the shareholders have for many years been Indians, a majority of them inhabiting the more salubrious parts of south Calcutta. The other half are sprawled on fixed and fluctuating incomes throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles and elsewhere. There is a Burnside in Derby and a Bushell in Richmond, a Callow in Maidenhead and a Ballantyne in Glasgow, a Hook in Exeter and a Wylie in Belfast, a Thompson in Tunbridge Wells and a Ward in Brighton. There is a clergyman in Bury St Edmunds and a lady living on the Costa del Sol. There are companies and groups of shareholders, like the Scottish Union and National Insurance Company of Edinburgh, which holds 10,000 shares, and Twenty Nine Gracechurch Street Nominees Ltd, which holds 3,725. The list of British shareholders in Calcutta Electric is a long and lingering one, in fact, a very paradigm of the British connection with the city itself.

  Calcutta’s commerce is manipulated most carefully and transacted most powerfully in the streets around Dalhousie Square. This was once Tank Square, when the burra sahibs sent their bheesties to draw water by the bagful from old Loll Diggy, and the tank is usually brimming today, though it is now circumnavigated by tramcars and a high fence is intended, and utterly fails, to discourage people from so much as washing their clothes in the water and putting them to dry on the sloping concrete banks of the tank. On one side is the Writers’ Building where the Government of West Bengal, when there is one, functions loudly behind Early English openings and classically pedimented entrances which have been uniformly colour-washed in burnt sienna. Opposite is the pale ochre skyscraper of the Telephone Bhavan and, between the two, the square is dominated by a green copper dome above a Doric colonnade, which belongs to the General Post Office, and very nearly to the army of pavement tradesmen who also skirmish up its steps and over the inlaid brass line which marks a boundary of the first Fort William.

  In the streets to the North and West, along Lyons Range, up Clive Row, down Fairlie Place and beside the full length of Netaji Subhas Road, are stacked the offices and company headquarters of Bengal’s new Nabobs and their British progenitors. Trim-suited and Westernized very often, but sometimes in chadar and little astrakhan cap, the babus come each day past the armed guards on the door (for there is much money here and there are many impatient poor) and up to the boardroom in quietly-humming lifts. And down below, in the deep sha
des cast by the Royal Exchange and the buildings round about, the streets seethe with the passage of clerks in pastel shirt and slacks which deteriorate to highly-pointed shoes over fluorescent socks, or in brilliant white dhotis with bare legs ending in sloppy rounded shoes and no socks, all of them bearing leather briefcases and canvas pouches and documents zipped into plastic folders. The traffic in people is so great here that the pavements are inadequate to contain them and they overflow onto the roads and become as confused and shapeless as a football crowd coming out of the stadium after the final whistle, swirling and darting in every direction between the cars, the handcarts, the taxis and the lorries, leaving small and intermittent spaces where workmen in shabby khaki shorts, their chests glistening through the holes in their singlets and their heads swathed in grubby makeshift turbans, are flinging sand upon tarmac which is gently bubbling in the heat.