Calcutta Read online

  There may not be another city containing such a hotchpotch of people as this one, with so many crucial differences of subculture, of race, of religion, of caste and of language riddling them and holding them apart even when they are thrown most crushingly together. Ten years ago, Calcutta had reached the point at which, in the city proper, Bengali was the native tongue of only two thirds of its inhabitants; and in the metropolitan district of Greater Calcutta five years ago, something over half the work force was provided by people who had originated outside either India’s or Pakistan’s slice of Bengal. The baffling complexities of these people is illustrated as well as may be by the fact that, twenty-odd years after a Partition which was supposed to divide the sub-continent into two distinctive states on a basis of mutually hostile religions, Calcutta was to be found with thirteen per cent of its population (close on a million people) still practising Muslims who mostly spoke neither Bengali nor Urdu but Hindi as a first choice. At the other end of the racial-religious scale, Calcutta contains enough Jews to support three synagogues and a variety of Christians ranging from its 700 or so Armenians to its handful of Catholics bearing names like DeSouza, Gonsalves and D’Rozario, who doubtless find themselves dreaming from time to time of the days when, under King William’s charter to the East India Company, English Protestant clergymen were required to learn Portuguese within twelve months of their arrival in the city.

  You find people living in communal pockets in Calcutta, just as you find its varieties of trade concentrated in what must be uncomfortably competitive huddles. You find, for example, that almost all its native Christians (excluding the British, that is, who are still mere birds of passage) are congregated along a broad corridor of streets extending eastwards from the Maidan; and you find, if you turn left into Lower Circular Road at the bottom of Park Street, that the next three-quarters of a mile are occupied by men selling bits and pieces of motor-bikes, internal combustion engines, mudguards, axle grease, bicycle lamps and almost everything concerned with getting you or maintaining you awheel, with scarcely anything poked in between one of these stalls and the next, or overlooking the similar trade taking place on the pavement, except the occasional fly-blown butcher’s shop. But to enjoy Calcutta’s various propinquities at their most marvellously excessive, it is best to head half a mile North of the Maidan and the top of Chowringhee, and to start making your way up Lower Chitpore Road, which may not be immediately obvious to you, for it is known almost as frequently by the name Rabindra Sarani.

  Calcutta’s wide open spaces, actual and comparative, are now behind you and its centres of high finance, government and law are to be found somewhere to the left, one after the other, between Dalhousie Square and the river. Just here, where Bentinck Street becomes Lower Chitpore Road, is where Calcutta becomes desperately congested. Instantly, as the tramtracks curve from one into the other, you feel as if you have entered some deep canyon. This is an illusion, for the buildings on either side are no more than a couple of storeys high but they and their contents have simply spilled out onto the pavements beneath canvas and rattan awnings. And while each building and its frontage is a shop without windows it is also, as often as not, a fragment of cottage industry besides. A third of the city’s work force is employed in this way. The building will contain two or three men somewhere in the back who are making the things displayed on the floors and the shelves of the front room and on the trestles thrusting out almost to the kerb; and one or maybe two brothers in commerce will sit cross-legged in the middle of the finished goods, hailing pedestrians to come and buy. There are sequences of these shops, sometimes lasting for a hundred yards or more before giving way to a fresh range of another commodity. You can thus work your way for a start through a stratification of footwear, picking and choosing velvet slippers with curling points and gold embroidery, or winkle-pickers in patent leather, or tanned hide sandals which look most becoming but which tend to have tacks that rise in the first half mile and blister you cruelly, or the local equivalent in plastic of Woolworth’s flip-flops. Finish with the shoe shops and you can move to the shops which specialize in ribbons and buttons and the ones which sell nothing but handbags and gloves. Ahead is still the stretch which competes to offer you brassware and the length of road where the shops sell chunks of marble, with the patterns of Carrara, Genoa and Purbeck on them, which mean that yet another old Nabob’s palace has been demolished and scavenged for what its ruins are worth. And even after that there is the crossing with Mahatma Gandhi Road, where you can buy the best quality bhang and ganja in Calcutta; the first being the shredded and dried leaves of cannabis, the second being its flowering tops; ganja being for chewing when it isn’t smoked in hookahs, bhang being for rubbing into fragments to spice drinks and confections on festival days when it isn’t mixed with tobacco cigarettes for smoking on any day at all.

  There is so much trade along this road that there is scarcely room for anything else, although, this being Calcutta, much else manages to squeeze in somewhere. Because the pavements are almost totally occupied by shopkeepers and their possessions, everyone has to walk on the roadway. Here, for a start, he is competing with trams going in two directions, with maybe three feet between them and the kerbs. There will be taxis crawling between the trams, driven almost invariably by Sikhs, who mysteriously gravitate towards the transport industry wherever they migrate; in Calcutta they usually have a friend sitting for company in the front seat, they generally know far less than any passenger which direction to take, and they proceed with much blowing of horns, with a mixture of alarming dash which quite naturally takes them onto the wrong side of the road to avoid a tram or a pothole, and great caution, which causes them to switch off the ignition when, they are brought to the briefest halt, so as to save on petrol and to delay the moment when the engine will explode with too much heat. Barging between the trams and the taxis and cars are the bullock carts and the high-sided lorries, with ‘Public Carrier’ above the cab, usually manned by dark fellows from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, who have slogged into the city centre each day from their colonies down near the docks in Kidderpore or among those high and bleak buildings with Communist devices daubed on their sides which you have noticed at Maniktala on your way in from the airport. Most of the coolies in towns are Biharis, too, though not many of them come along this stretch of Lower Chitpore Road, for they need a little space and free passage to do themselves and their loads justice, and neither is available here. But watch a coolie striding along the Red Road across the Maidan and the poetry of movement is at once transformed to something more exciting than a cliché; for his hips rotate and his muscles swivel in perfect co-ordination down the length of a furrowed back and there is a great give in his step and his shoulders every few paces, while his head levelly bears a basket containing maybe half a hundredweight of vegetables; or he and three fellows move smoothly, without that giving spring in their steps, balancing the corner of a plate glass sheet or a bedstead or a wardrobe, or almost anything at all. Coolies may be scarce just here, then, but there is always a bhari or two from Orissa to increase the traffic with their cans of water slung from the ends of a pole across their shoulders which they are selling to the shopkeepers and householders who are devoid of taps; or if not bharis with their tin cans, then genuine old-fashioned bheesties bearing goatskins, though in this case they will be on their way to some thirsty Muslim, for no good Hindu will drink anything that has been tainted by leather.

  The start of Lower Chitpore Road conceals what is left of Calcutta’s old Chinatown. A generation or so ago the whole of Bowbazar between here and Chittaranjan Avenue is said to have echoed to the clop of wooden sandals and the ivory click of mahjong pieces, to have been largely peopled by men and women in blue boiler suits (which must have been uncommonly stuffy) and to have boasted at least one opium den. Then the Corporation in one of its rare spasms of development moved in and began to pull much of the area down to make room for high blocks of something or other. Not many high blocks have yet g
one up, but most of the Chinese have been dispersed around the city, leaving a small colony who do not wear boiler suits very often, who patronize their Nanking Restaurant for its Peking duck and other homely dishes, and who worship at the Sea Ip Temple in Chhatawallah Gully, with its collection of antique Chinese weapons, its cooking, its chapel and its curved roofline with two large porcelain fish standing on their tails on top. You would never see this unless you knew where to look for it with a steadfast sense of direction, so confusing and haphazard are the side streets and offshoots everywhere in North Calcutta.

  The Nakhoda Mosque is a different matter, for it dominates the main road the moment you walk into it, like a brick-red cliff pierced by Mogul galleries and topped by a thicket of minarets and a couple of copper-green domes. It is big enough to accommodate ten thousand at their prayers, and there are many times in the year when its courtyards, its marble hall and its balconies are full and overflowing. It is the centre of a Muslim community which contains its own infinite varieties and complicated patterns within the larger confusions of the city as a whole. Not all the Muslims live nearby. A number came as servants and hangers-on to the Nawab of Oudh when he took refuge here two centuries ago and they have remained stranded in their own enclave down South at Garden Reach. But just round the corner there are Muslim Gujeratis who do well for themselves in the textile trade and there are Muslim Tamils who make a living on the boats on the Hooghly; there are Muslim Kashmiris and Punjabis and Afghans as well. There are Muslims here from Indian places in between. They are sprawled across every possible area of Calcutta’s working life. They are kharadi, or woodworkers, churihar, who make glass bangles, mirshikar, who trap and deal in birds, ghosis, who own those awful khatals in the bustees and make a decent packet out of the milk mat flows from them. There are many hajjam among them, and every few yards you will see one squatting on the pavement while he delicately shaves his cross-legged customer’s face. While the majority of all these people belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, there are others like the Shias, who look sidelong at the Sunnis because it was men of their blood who murdered the Prophet’s Shia grandson in the seventh century AD, and others still, like the Lal Begi, who make particular devotion to a Turkish saint of enormous piety and long-blessed memory. It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to pick them out from any other group of non-Western people in the city; impossible, unless someone has told you what subtle sign-manuals to look for, like the red or black shirts worn by one or another sub-group of Muslims from Rajasthan.

  The only time you can be quite sure you are watching Muslims and not Hindus or Christians (Sikhs being obvious, with their turbans, their beards and their bangles showing) is during one of their festivals. The most spectacular of these, in a part of the world where religious festivals are very spectacular indeed, is Muharram. Up in Murshidabad they go in for extravagant exhibitions of fire-walking and flagellation then. Credible friends who have seen this tell you that members of one Muslim sect will walk straight across pits of fiery coals so hot that onlookers find it difficult to sit within ten yards; that they will emerge not only with feet unblistered but with not so much as the hairs singed from their ankles. Later in the day, men will scourge themselves with small hooked knives on chairs till their backs are deeply scored with bloody wounds; but next morning no sign of this remains except a faint hairline scab such as a thorn scratch might have left after two or three days of healing. Yet if someone from another sect attempts either the firewalking or the flagellation, he is in just as much trouble as an Englishman might be, strengthened with nothing more faithful than his weakly bob in the direction of the Thirty-Nine Articles. In Calcutta there is no public firewalking or flagellation (though goodness knows what happens privately in obscure corners of this city) but there is much parading about the streets near the Nakhoda Mosque. The traffic comes to a halt on the climactic day of Muharram, locked solid for hours, while banners pass the end of the road with bands playing, and men dressed in all the panoply of Islam dance like dervishes with bloodthirsty cries as they sweep and swish the air around them with great curved and gleaming swords. Even if it means being jammed uncomfortably in a car till long past dinner time, by traffic so close and rigid that you can’t open the doors to get out, it is worth sweating it out just for a craning peep at the Muharram parade; until a more than uncomfortable thought occurs and you wonder just what would happen if one of those whirling swords swept wider than usual and accidentally removed some bystanding Hindu ear.

  All this is the packed and providential essence of Lower Chitpore Road. And the totally peculiar thing about Calcutta is that if you moved two hundred yards in almost any direction you could be at the edge of some social or religious or cultural condition which was basically alien in some important respect to what is to be found here. Almost across the road from the Nakhoda Mosque, for example, is Armenian Street, which eventually leads, after some long-distance contortions, to the Armenian Church. One of the biggest middens in Calcutta is usually dumped in the gutter beside its little lychgate, but if you pass through that you are in one of the clearest and neatest open spaces for the best part of a mile. The yard is paved with grave-slabs and here, as well as the puzzle commemorating the Mrs Sookias who was evidently dead and buried on this spot before Calcutta was officially born, there is a tablet to poor Esahac Abrahamian who died a hundred and seventy odd years ago from wounds received after he had fought (and killed) a lion in one of the gladiatorial contests that were sometimes surreptitiously laid on in the ruins of old Fort William. On a Sunday morning you could mistake the congregation here for Anglo-Indians, so sallow are their complexions, so very familiar are those best Sunday suits and uncomfortably starched shirts the men are wearing.

  The church itself, with its thick and almost Norman piers supporting faintly Mogul arcadings, and with its spotlessly white walls, could quite easily have been transported from somewhere much farther West than its real point of origin in Persia, though the solid cane-bottomed chairs rather give the game away from the start. There is a black-bearded priest, much coped and crowned, much attended by acolytes, much given to disappearing in small procession behind the altar with gongs beating, incense drifting and candles guttering. There is a small choir of boys in dapper grey suits and girls dressed like Bohemian peasants in billowy white muslin frocks with red bodices and red kerchiefs over their hair. They sing to the accompaniment of a lady in a smart pink two-piece suit, seated at a harmonium in the corner, and their chants are skirling and Slavonic. The people in the congregation cross themselves repeatedly and attend to their prayer-books, which are printed in yet another of Calcutta’s bewildering scripts. And when they leave, scarcely one goes home to Armenian Street, for that is in decaying North Calcutta. These are far from decaying people, for they have come in cars and taxis and in these they disperse across the middle and southern parts of the city. One of them gets into her waiting taxi and is carried with many a lurch and plenty of honks to the vicinity of Park Street, to the private hotel which her late husband bequeathed her, still named Killar ney Lodge as he named it, still with a photograph of Balmoral Castle hanging outside one of its bedroom doors, precisely as he left it.

  There is another people who once thrived round here and then moved off to better things, and they are the Marwaris. Their ancestral homeland lies at the other side of India, in the largely desert region of Rajasthan, which is so very arid that it is common to see nomadic shepherds mounted in long camel trains, driving huge mobs of sheep and goats in search of pastures as far away as the outskirts of Agra and even Delhi. Rajasthan before Independence was divided into several princely states based upon towns like Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikaner and Udaipur, and the Marwaris were traditionally the moneylenders attendant upon these courts and their surrounding society; they were also very often Jains, a sect which began as a monastic organization that parted company from Hindu Brahminism at about the same time as Buddhism, to become another religious development. They are pious people, who support fo
urteen schools in Calcutta alone, simply to train a priestly caste of men to serve as domestic chaplains in the Marwari households of the city. A handful of Marwaris settled in Calcutta a century ago; between 1890 and 1920 they increased their numbers here by 400 per cent, and since then they have never ceased to flow eastwards into the city, to fasten on to its commerce and to manipulate and multiply its wealth. For a start, they colonized this part of the city as moneylenders and traders, but then they began to move into the property market and after that into the highest levels of industrial management and ownership. They were shrewd enough and had capital enough to buy up land adjacent to the new roads that were being cut by the Calcutta Improvement Trust after the First World War and they were sometimes caught out in something more than shrewdness.

  Marwaris were discovered at the profitable end of the great ghee scandal in 1917. Ghee is clarified butter, a basis of cooking in every solvent Hindu household and, being a by-product of the sacred cow, a highly important element in religious practice and diet. In 1917 rumours began to circulate that Calcutta had suddenly become a great market for adulterated ghee, which in this land means something between a criminal act and a cultural disaster. Marwaris by then had almost a monopoly of the ghee trade and when samples were taken it was discovered that only seven out of sixty-seven test cases contained pure ghee; one sample consisted of only five per cent ghee, the rest of it being some unmentionable and untouchable fat; another sample didn’t have a drop of ghee in it. In the scandalized uproar which followed, the local Brahmins summoned learned priests from Benares to advise them what to do. After deliberating for a couple of days, these sages reported that anyone in the city who could possibly have been defiled by the adulterated ghee would have to purify himself by the Hooghly in a ceremony lasting four or five days, accompanied by scrupulous fasting. The result of this edict,’ the observing Governor of Bengal, Lord Ronaldshay, says, ‘was electrifying. Three thousand Brahmins gathered on the banks of the Hooghly forthwith … by the morning of 19 August there was a vast concourse of between four and five thousand undergoing purification.’ And the Marwari Association fined its shifty traders up to Rs 100,000 apiece.