Calcutta Read online

  Not all the private wealth of Calcutta is schemed and programmed in these few streets; there is many a thriving little empire conducted from one of the rising tower blocks beyond the Maidan. But this is Calcutta’s Wall Street, its City, its Bourse. It is rife with company directors whose pay cheque may only amount to Rs 5,000 a month but who can safely slip almost all of that in the bank, for everything they possess – house, cars, servants, refrigerators, pots and pans – is thoughtfully taken care of by a board which is very wise in the ways of self-defence against India’s high taxation rates. It is full of men like the late Shri Y. L. Agarwal, whose colleagues once took a very large advertisement in The Statesman in his revered memory; there was an uplifting text beneath the photograph of a gentleman who gazed at the readers benignly from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles and who passed away on 26 December 1967. ‘Shri Agarwal,’ so it said, ‘dedicated his whole life to the betterment of the scrap industry and set us the guide-line we religiously follow. Our Humble tribute to him lies in our achieving the Certificate of Merit recently awarded to us by the Government of India for the highest export of scraps.’

  This is where the biggest giants of Indian business abide. The mammoth Tata Iron and Steel Corporation is anchored here, which may be compared to the Bethlehem combine in the United States. And here, in an almost too tasteful suite of offices at the top of the Royal Exchange, are to be found the Birla Brothers, who can only be compared to the Fords or the Rockefellers or the Krupps as a wealthy dynasty, but who are otherwise totally unique. If it is possible to conceive of a London family which owned Imperial Chemical Industries, Shell, Unilever, British Leyland and half a dozen lesser concerns the size of Saisbury’s, it is just possible to grasp the position of the Birlas in the Indian order of things and their ridiculous hold on the national economy. In assets it may be that Tata of Bombay – who founded Jamshedpur fifty years ago and started the airline which was eventually nationalized into Air India – are still slightly ahead of Birlas; but the Birla Brothers are growing at a rate which far exceeds anyone else’s. They have a total monopoly of motor car production in India with Hindustan Motors and they own one of its biggest newspapers, the Hindustan Times; they control the Indian Shipping Co. Ltd, the Hindusthan Investment Corporation Ltd, Hind Gas and Industries Ltd, Jayashree Textiles Ltd, Minerals and Minerals Ltd, Textile Machinery Corporation Ltd, Universal Electric Co. Ltd, Universal Cables Ltd, and the Usha Development Co. Ltd – all of which merely gives an idea of their range, for these are simply a few of several dozen Birla enterprises.

  They came from the deserts of Rajasthan in Western India, like every other Marwari family. There was once a Birla Prime Minister of Jaipur State and, half a century ago, his son set out by camel from the ancestral home at Pillani to seek his fortune in Bombay. He made it as a bullion broker there and from it founded the commercial House of Birla, which had almost achieved its present consuming size by the time he retired to Benares where his sons, the Birla Brothers, would come from time to time to seek his sage council. They have congregated elsewhere outside Calcutta when necessary and, not infrequently, careful newspaper readers of India’s equivalent of the European court circulars have been able to note items issuing from the Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi like this one: ‘Nov. 5 (1956) – The following came to lunch: Shri Ghansyamdas Birla, Shri Brijmohan Birla, Shri Lakshmi Narayan Birla, Shri Basant Kumar Birla, Shri Gangaprosad Birla, Shri Madho Prosad and Shri Prabhu Dayal Himatsingka.’ This has meant that all the important members of the Birla family, together with their solicitor, have been breaking rice with the President of India. They have always been deeply involved in the politics of the nation, and the Congress Party for several decades would have been quite lost financially without them. Gandhi himself looked to them for support and stayed with them often. He was assassinated on the prayer ground of their Delhi mansion and another great Congress and national leader, Sardar Patel, was nursed through his last illness by Birlas in the same place.

  They have a colossal and well-publicized reputation for charity. Among many other things, they have founded a university in their native village of Pillani, they have built the splendid Lakshmi Narain Hindu temple in Delhi, they have set up the Birla Education Trust. Calcutta has benefited from a Medical and Relief Society, the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum, and, at the top end of Chowringhee, the only planetarium in the country, whose dome houses a collection of projectors and optical equipment expensively imported from East Germany. Oddly, not a single Birla rupee has yet gone in the direction of Mother Teresa and her sisters, who exist on charity which they then pass on to those even poorer than themselves. And the Birlas have many, many rupees. Twenty years ago, when India was just emerging from war and dominion, their total output was worth £45 million, and they have been expanding ever since.

  They have also, once or twice, been investigated for the possibility of evading their taxes on a monumental scale. In 1948 an Income Tax Investigation Commission under Mr Justice Varadachariar was set up and two years later reported that the following Birla concerns were culpable of evasion: Cotton Agents Ltd Rs 1 crore 10 lakhs, Birla Brothers Ltd Rs 90 lakhs, Model Knitting Ltd Rs 15 lakhs, R. K. Kejrinal Groups Rs 24 lakhs, Loyalka Groups Rs 40 lakhs, Birla Cotton Mills Ltd Rs 2 crores, Orient Paper Mills Ltd Rs 2 crores.* No sooner had it dropped this bombshell than a Birla nephew, Sarojmall Mohta, filed a suit with the Supreme Court, challenging the basis of the Commission’s constitution; and the Court found that the Act under which the commission had operated offended Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, that the commission was therefore void. So the investigated cases were handed over to Government officers for further action, and nothing more was heard of the tax evasion cases officially. But an advocate of the Calcutta High Court, who also held his Master’s degrees in economics and commerce, eventually published two books, which amounted to a one-man investigation of the Birla companies, immensely detailed in its evidence, garnished with photostats of relevant documents. And though the first book, in two volumes, is now twenty years old and the second has been on sale since 1957, the Government has done nothing very much apart from setting up a judicial commission of inquiry into Birla affairs, at the end of 1969, in response to the lobbying of left-wing MPs who drew its attention to the findings of the Dutta Industrial Licensing Committee some months previously. But Mrs Gandhi’s decision in 1969 to abolish managing agencies would not have been welcome in the House of Birla which, among other roles, is the managing agency in excelsis with assets in 1967 of more than £265 millions.

  The Birlas have that mansion in Delhi, they have ample retreats at Mussoorie and at Nainital in the hills, but home as well as headquarters has long been in Calcutta. At the headquarters in the Royal Exchange the initials of the leading Birlas – L.N., K.K., B.K., G.P., S.K., M.P., B.M., and G – are engraved beside little sliding panels to indicate whether each is in or out. On the top storey of the building, above the accounting machines and the electric typewriters, the Birlas lunch and negotiate their business in air-conditioned opulence, seated upon red leather and under soft diffused lighting, while the food is served through a wrought-iron grille; it is vegetarian and no drink is taken with it, nor do the Birlas smoke, for they are exceedingly rigorous in their religious observances. They are also exceedingly careful of their privacy and their security. Across the city in deepest Alipore, far from the contamination of the bustees, lies Birla Park, surrounded by a high wall invigilated by guards who scrutinize each visitor very carefully at the gate and then announce his coming by telephone to whichever of the Birla families is prepared to receive him. For inside the wall are several separate Birla dwellings, one for each active brother, as well as various communal features of a considerable and highly cultivated landscape. Here is a breakfast garden shaded by bamboo, there is a Japanese garden modelled exactly on the traditions of Honshu, and much of the space in between is occupied by lily ponds and crazy paving and shrubbery and coadstone urns, not nearly as worn-out
as those of the Mullicks at the Marble Palace. But the climactic moment for a visitor to Birla Park is the discovery of a possession that marks this astonishing tribe for who and what and how they are in the context of Calcutta, above all the other things that they own and control and manipulate from one end of India to the other. It somehow signifies their real wealth much more than any calculation of rupees that might be made even by an accountant not employed by the Birlas. It is an ice-skating rink, insulated frigidly from a normal temperature of 100 degrees in the shade. Such is the environment of an interview which one of the ladies of the compound, Mrs Sarala Birla, gave one day to a man representing the magazine which Pan American Airways give away to their passengers. When he asked her what she would do if she found herself Prime Minister of India, she began her reply with the words ‘Make people work …’

  *

  There are aerial photographs of Calcutta to be seen in this or that guide book which might make any stranger wonder what on earth was all the fuss about poverty in this city. They have usually been taken from the top of some high buildings a few blocks East of Chowringhee. From such a vantage point, what is visible through a carefully-positioned lens consists of wide streets much shaded by trees, stretching unbroken by anything more ominous than a glaring modern tower block to what is clearly an enormous park, with an intriguing prospect of a few ships’ funnels and the Howrah Bridge indistinctly on a heat-hazed horizon beyond. The streets will probably be Rawdon or Hungerford or Wood or Camac, or what used to be Theatre Road but is now Shakespeare Sarani, or what was once Harrington now translated as Ho Chi Minh. The park is indeed enormous for it is the Maidan, and that stretches for two miles in one direction and one mile in the other. You could take a similar photograph from somewhere along the very top end of Broadway, looking towards the Cloisters, and it would be just as unrepresentative of New York as a whole; or from high above Cromwell Road where it is crossed by Queen’s Gate, with the camera aimed past the Albert Memorial, and it would give you the same highly selective view of London.

  This is not yet Alipore, where the unbelievably rich of Calcutta live; Alipore is the next stop South, beyond the Maidan and the Racecourse, proclaimed on one side of the road by the Zoo and on the other by the old Hastings house at Belvedere, with its Bengal tiger still flexed above the entrance to what is now the National Library. Nor is it Old Ballygunge, where there is another well-landed enclave. Here, just before Alipore, here is the residential district of those who by the most comfortable Western standards are pretty well to do, who by the norms of the city are rich beyond comprehension. It is also the territory of the imperial and ex-imperial brainwashers – the Soviet and United States Information Services, the British Council. It would not be safe to say that there is no bustee within a mile, for Calcutta has a horrible habit of surprising you with just where she can park a couple of thousand poor, at the end of a side alley leading off a fairly respectable-looking road. But pavement sleepers are comparatively thin upon the ground here and you could easily walk a quarter of a mile at midnight round these streets without stumbling over a bundle of rags that stirs and proves that it is still alive. For the most part, when the gutters run with water here it is because someone is handling a pump deliberately fixed at a street corner to provide for small tradesmen, taxi drivers and anyone else far from or without a domestic tap, and not because a standpipe has been smashed into a permanent gusher. The movement of people here is much like that along the spacious roads of New Delhi above Connaught Place; scarcely more crowded than in a British suburb, with a group of idlers gossiping by a corner, a handful of cyclists wheeling along, a coolie striding beautifully with a great basket of vegetables on his head, taxis rolling past the potholes and honking baritonally at every intersection, rickshaws with their sleighbell ring, and maybe a man with a pair of half-dressed monkeys on a lead, who stand up and prance the moment he shakes his little cord-lashed drum in the hope of attracting your patronage. The houses here stand back from the street behind walls that are not repellently high and there are sometimes lawns, with the mali rearranging a water sprinkler, sometimes gardens that are vivid and intoxicating with bougainvillaea and jasmine, sometimes courtyards with a range of sheds just inside the wall that could contain ponies but which harbour the servants instead. All this is the province of the superior tradesmen, the managers and the rising young executives of Calcutta.

  The province is terminated to the North by the busy brash line of Park Street, which links Chowringhee and the Maidan with the tough underside of Calcutta represented by the Lower Circular Road. In a sense, Park Street is its focal point also, for this is where many rich drift when work is done, where they take much of their amusement, where many of their values are paraded in public, where they can be seen making fastidious contact with the poor; or very carefully and blankly avoiding it. Park Street was not always a combination of honky-tonk and urbane shopping centre, as it mostly is today. Its name came out of the deer park which Sir Elijah Impey had here. The exclusively erudite Asiatic Society built headquarters at the Chowringhee end, where the spiritual descendants of Jones and Colebrooke still come to pore over the twenty thousand increasingly dusty volumes of orientalia. And towards the Lower Circular Road, where the bright lights have faded, where garish neon has given way to butter-coloured and standard electric, is the cemetery where the old British masters of India buried their dead and raised astonishing monuments to their memory. But the pyramids of Park Street Cemetery are now almost (though not quite) a world and a century or two away from the general flavour of the thoroughfare at its upper and fashionable end. Right alongside the Asiatic Society’s drab and unobtrusive frontage is a high and faceless hotel whose cultural origins lie somewhere in the post-war concrete jungles of the midtown United States; and, indeed, this is where the Pan American limousine finishes its journeys from Dum Dum, depositing its last passengers at Reception before being parked itself in the mezzanine garage. And this is the aspiring tone of the next five hundred yards of Park Street.

  The Park Hotel contains a night club called the In and Out, where there is ‘Cabaret by Heather. Also Mina in exotic Oriental and Continental dances. Music by Paul Correia with Hazel at the mike. Panday with his telepathic wonder show. Reva, the lady with the radar mind, answering all the innermost questions.’ There are many other niteries along the road, like the Moulin Rouge, the Blue Fox, the Mocambo and Trincas (‘Enchanting Eve, popular Toto, Shilling’s Fentones, irresistible Iqbal Singh. Morning discotheques from ten a.m. to noon’) and once you are over the threshold it is scarcely possible to distinguish one from the other. The lighting is concealed and barely adequate even for flirtation, the menus are almost the size of the tables-for-two and the liquor comes at a price to make an Englishman gulp in this wettest of all Indian cities, where only Thursday is theoretically non-intoxicating. When an irresistible Iqbal Singh or an exotic Mina is not performing, the ledge at the top of the room is invariably occupied by a three-or four-piece band whose players may have been born and bred in Bombay or points East but whose music, deafening even when it is meant to be soothing, was beginning to die down in London or Manchester ten or fifteen years ago. There are usually special lighting effects playing upon the band, a succession of greens and oranges and blues slowly flooding glass panels behind and around the instrumentalists, which are identical to those which used to suffuse the most popular British cinema organists in the thirties and the forties. It is generally a nostalgic indulgence to be there and a relief to get outside again, even though this means forsaking the crisp pleasure of air-conditioning for the sopping humidity of the night.

  The shopping style of Park Street is Westernized, too. There are occasional cubby-hole tradesmen, usually dispensing tobacco or pan or bootlaces, but most business is conducted behind plate-glass windows with a till instead of an old tin to contain the currency. There are emporiums here which sell anything from plastic toys and lavatory paper to patent medicines, bottles of lime-juice, and biscuits whic
h have been packaged by the factory in several layers of waxed or tin-foiled paper to prevent them going rotten in the climate. There are shops which do a roaring trade in nothing but saris and silks. There are businesses which specialize in pop-up toasters, or thermostatic irons but which, in all their electrical commodities, never offer a vacuum cleaner for sale, because in Calcutta a human carpet sweeper is infinitely less expensive and much more durable as well. Park Street also includes two or three of the best bookshops in town, where you can purchase your Basildon Bond notepaper as well as Mr Manchester’s account of a President’s death, but very little that is not written in English. It contains a rambling auction sale room, where bargains can be obtained in garden statuary, middle-aged upholstery, mounted buffalo heads and bundles of electro-plated cutlery which have been abandoned by the latest British family to leave the land. At several points there are news stands – a sheet or two of cardboard on the ground, bearing five or ten yards of Indian newspapers and Western magazines running a gamut from Time to True Confessions, from New Statesman to Health and Efficiency.

  It has restaurants as well as eating places which are chiefly night clubs, and here there is a very fine demarcation line between those which cater for the shopkeeping or the rickshaw-owning rich and those which pander to the executive rich. The first of these people are rather more likely to eat in family outings at the Chinese house next to the auction rooms, alongside Westerners who feel like a break from curry. The decor is universal chinoiserie and My Fair Lady is coming moderately loud and clear through amplifiers, but when the dhobi arrives with his enormous load of newly-laundered tablecloths he counts it piece by piece with the management upon the floor beside the diners. Somewhat more polished than this is the Kwality just over the road, where the clientele is in rather better business or still clinging, like the handful of Anglo-Indian ladies who pop in at teatime for a gaudy icecream confection with nuts on top, to the fading remnant of an ascendancy which the British and mixed blood once gave their sires and their grandams.