Calcutta Page 22
That will be one reason why the Marwaris are at least suspected and more frequently detested by almost everyone else in Calcutta, particularly by Bengalis. There are others. Suspicion and distrust have only been increased by the perpetual refusal of Marwaris to lend themselves to any cause other than those of purely private and sectarian interest. They ostentatiously held themselves aloof from the swadeshi movement at the time of Curzon’s partition, boycotted the local boycott, and continued to trade in any commodity that might be profitable to them. They offended Muslims by their deeply Jain distaste for the slaughter of cows (curious in a people who were capable of adulterating ghee) and were so surrounded by hostility in the Burra Bazar part of the city, which they largely shared with the Muslim community at the time, that by 1918 they were importing armed guards from Rajasthan to defend their homes and their warehouses; which only increased their offence. Yet their isolation was to become, ironically, even more profitable to them. For the British, struggling to contain local nationalism, were very ready to replace a stroppy Bengali who might be in some position of influence or substance with someone politically more reliable, whenever possible; and the most reliably apolitical Indians around Calcutta during the first three decades of the twentieth century were the Marwaris, even though they were carefully cultivating Mahatma Gandhi on the side from the moment it seeemed he might become a power in the land. So they prospered exceedingly in the last few years of the Raj.
When Independence came, and a lot of British investment was withdrawn, Marwari capital was swiftly popped into its place. When British managers decided, as they increasingly have decided over the past twenty years, that their current contract to work in Calcutta should be their last, Marwari managers have generally been found the most competent and the most accessible to take their jobs. And when British directors have bowed to the inevitable and relinquished their seats in the process of Indianization, almost always it has been a Marwari who has slipped into the boardroom behind them. An Indian has characterized them to an Englishman thus: ‘They do not, as you do, think of an ever-expanding market: they mark off an area, turn their attention on it in detail, set out to pick the bones absolutely clean’; which is a habit psychologically formed perhaps by an ancestry in the desert, where vultures are known to do the same thing. In Calcutta today, you will not find many Marwaris living in the confounding congestion of Burra Bazar or the Lower Chitpore Road. They are domiciled much more comfortably, more frequently, in Old Ballygunge, beyond Park Street, and down in deepest Alipore; which are places where the masters of this city have always lodged for preference. Their most conspicuous success story is that of the Birlas. Their most glittering monument is the Jain Temple, a shrine of filigree delicacy and sherbet sweetness built by a jeweller, with mirror-glass mosaic smothering its interior, with precious metals and stones inlaid upon its principal deity, and with very fat goldfish waiting to be fed in its adjacent pond.
Notes
1 Kipling, The Song of the Cities (A Song of the English)
2 M. K. A. Saddiqui, ‘Caste among the Muslims of Calcutta’ (paper given to I AS seminar)
3 Bose, p. 62
4 Calcutta Handbook, 1921 census, p. 32
5 Ronaldshay, p. 80
6 Hopkins, p. 282
BENGALIS
ENCIRCLED by this maze of migrants are the Bengalis, the only natives of this strangely beloved Kalkatar. These are the Basus, the Boses, the Mitras, the Sens, the Duttas, the Chowdhurys, the Chakrabartys, the Roys, the Majumders, the Banerjees, the Chatterjees and the Mukherjees of the city; or variations of these names, for there are thirty-one ways of rendering Chakrabarty, ranging from Chackerbutty to Chuckervertty, and there are fourteen forms of Mukherjee, eleven of Banerjee, eight of Chatterjee. The Bengalis have distinctive personal habits, like a Bengali way of sitting, which consists of resting on your left hip and left hand with one leg drawn up, unlike a Bihari, who simply crosses his legs and sits on his heels. They have their own New Year’s Day, which is 15 April, when their astrologers take counsel and advise that in 1377 (which is also 1970) life in Calcutta will be eventful and unpleasant because Saturn is in an unfavourable position. They have a Bengali way of declaiming, either in the theatre or in politics, a rhetorical style of pumping out words and phrases on a rising intonation to a final explosion, which mesmerizes in the theatre but which can make a Communist party meeting sound alarmingly like a Nuremburg rally. A more commonplace adaptation of the same trick has been beautifully described by a European who knows Bengalis better than most: ‘Whenever we ran into an acquaintance – that’s to say, every two hundreds yards or so – we would stop and my guide would launch into a long introduction: “This is Dr John Rosselli, he’s half-Italian, he has a wife and two sons in England, he’s from the University of Sussex, he teaches history, he’s studying Bengali, he learnt it in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, he eats sitting on the floor in the Bengali posture” (beaming smiles all round) “he eats with his right hand, and oh yes, he’s eaten khichuri, and ilish mach – but of course he has a bit of trouble with the bones – and he’s had paish” (a special sweet). “Ah, paish!” Paish everyone would say. It was like going about with one’s own herald extraordinary.’
There are probably more generalizations made about the Bengalis than about any other people in India. Some of them are demonstrable, but some are so far-fetched that you wonder how they could have originated. Considering the history of Bengal over the past hundred years, it is impossible to believe the legend of the Bengali as a gutless and pacific individual, an excellent fellow for talking but no good at all for action. Yet in the nineteenth century a British ruler, Mountstuart Elphinstone, was noting that while every Mahratta above the rank of messenger invariably sat in his presence, in Bengal there was scarcely a native allowed (or, by implication, daring) to; and in the twentieth century another representative of the Raj, Mr R. G. Casey, was remarking that ‘he is probably the cleverest and quickest of Indians but … practically no Bengalis serve in the fighting services’. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Charles Stewart even ventured to suggest that ‘should the English ever be driven from all the other parts of India, they may find in Bengal an asylum where no enemy will venture to follow them. They are secure from a foreign invader, they are equally safe from any insurrection of the natives, whose mildness of disposition and aversion to war are such that nothing short of the most atrocious cruelty or of religious persecution could induce them to draw swords against their present masters.’ Which is almost a comical misjudgement in view of all that was to follow. It is said that the Bengalis of Calcutta are particularly soft-spoken and courteous, though East Bengalis believe them to have honey on their lips and poison in their hearts; and this may be so, for we have the word of Bengal’s most distinguished living writer in English, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, for it. The most celebrated Bengali social scientist, N.K. Bose, has written that ‘The Bengalis seem to have a strong sense of local patriotism. The range of their social combinations also appears to be small. Small combinations take place easily among them for building up a library, a club for physical culture, a sports or a social service organization and the like … A Bengali seems to feel happier in the company of those with whom he closely agrees, rather than in the company of others with whom he may have points of difference. Unities are not stressed; differences are not easily tolerated.’
There is a rampant fiction that the Bengalis have never soiled their hands with trade and commerce, preferring to dwell loftily upon a plane which is intellectually and spiritually higher than anyone else’s; it is usually repeated in Calcutta by someone who has just remarked caustically that Kalwars have cornered the local scrap-iron market. Yet when the Bengal Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1853, the good Bengali names of Guru-charam Sen, Harischandra Bose, Ramgopal Ghose, Rajendra Dutta, Kalidas Dutta and Shyamcharan Mitra were among those of the first members; the flourishing coal, shipping and banking combination of Carr, Tagore and Co.
had belonged to the Calcutta Chamber which preceded it; and when India’s first jute mill was started at Rishra in 1855, it was a joint effort by George Auckland and Shyamsundar Sen. In the days when East India Company writers depended upon Indian banians to find them house, horse and enough money to get along with, there were quite as many Bengalis as anyone else waiting by the wharves along the Hooghly when the latest boat came in, to secure their share of young Englishmen and offer them the benefits of their agency. It was in this fashion that the Tagore clan began their rise to remarkable power and prestige in the city and abroad. In the second half of the eighteenth century there were millionaire Bengali banians like Hidaram Banerjee and Monhur Mukherjee, while the Bengali merchant and shipowner, Ramdulal Dey, was eventually so rich that American traders used to borrow from him.
Where the Bengalis did not dirty their hands was when they were upper-caste landowners, refusing to till the soil in person. Unlike most men of their status and position throughout India, they maintained that manual labour was degrading. They had usually obtained their land after long service and good conduct as some kind of officer (a khan, maybe, or a chowdhury or a sarker or a mazumdar) working for the Mogul Emperor. One of the biggest such landowning families were the Subarna Roy Chowdhurys, the leaseholders who sold the first three villages of Calcutta to the Company for Rs 1,300 current coin of that time; it was they who in 1809 replaced the original temple at Kalighat with a new one and it was Subarna Roy Chowdhurys again who gave old Loll Diggy its name in Tank Square by pouring red dye into the water (and thus making it Lai Dighi) as an act of gracious patronage during the colourful Holi festivities. People such as this were the original bhadralok of Bengal, who became so respectably refined in the changing times of India, carefully avoiding the dialect and coarse speech of the lower castes while embracing eagerly the best of Western culture as it was made available to them, that they became even more alienated from their own people. They would boast, eventually, that their activities in the nineteenth century were as much as anything destroying the class structure of traditional Hindu society and they would then await the applause they felt this claim deserved. In fact, apart from making things hot for the British, they had merely achieved some demolition of the barriers separating the upper three castes of Bengal. By the time the British removed their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, it was not not only men of the ICS who regarded this Bengali élite as headmen in ‘a despotism of caste, tempered by matriculation’. It was a Bengali periodical which wrote one day ‘These irreligious, luxury-loving beggars are the creation of English education. The country and society have nothing to do with them. The mass do not know them, neither do they care for the mass. By virtue of their begging through the Congress they secure high posts, start subsidized papers and try to win fame and respect in the country.’
Education (and its by-products) has been prized in Bengal more obviously than in other parts of India. Calcutta University has recently been described as the world’s largest degree-granting factory, which it probably is; at the same time it is almost certainly headquarters for the most aggressive student population on earth, and the principals of Berkeley, the Sorbonne or the London School of Economics, who doubtless feel they have a hard time from undergraduates these days, can count themselves lucky not to sit where a succession of Bengali Vice-Chancellors have been for the past few years. Yet the university symbolizes something more (and conceivably even more extensive) than revolutionary anger and mass-produced qualifications. If you go up College Street you find yourself in what might well be the biggest second-hand book market in the world. It is not just College Street itself which contains one shop after another full of literature, for perhaps half a mile, together with stalls full of books and pamphlets on the pavements over the same distance; the same goes for ten or a dozen streets round about. Much of it is printed in Bengali or other Indian scripts but, at the very least, half of this treasure comes in Western typefaces. Nor is it all by any means examination fodder. You can poke around many of these shops and find one genuine and purely pleasurable old edition after another; and the bookseller will be well content with your company and your chatter about books long after he has realized that this time he is not going to make a sale. He and his fellows are perhaps the only tradesmen in town who will leave you alone if that’s how you prefer to be. They are part of a climate that is as inseparable from Calcutta as the monsoon.
There are far more poets in this city than there are novelists in Dublin, and a much bigger difference is that in Calcutta the writers have usually at least put pen to paper. You can see a lot of them every weekend on the Maidan, generally in groups of twenty or thirty, holding a Mukta Mela, which is a kind of cultural jamboree in which poets recite their verses to each other, composers sing the ballad they have just finished, artists discuss their most recent brushwork and lots of people simply roll up to listen, for the whole thing is entirely informal. On any night of the week there will be much music in the city; an East German ensemble sweating their way through Schubert in the Max Muller Bhavan for the wealthy, perhaps, but in many places there will be recitals on sitar and tabla, at which office clerks will sit rapt and intoxicated with understanding while someone thrillingly executes the major raga Jayjayanti (and if his thumri has some nice alamkarik combinations, so much the better). There will be extravagantly-staged Bengali theatre, depending upon symbolic gesture almost as much as Peking opera. There will be much cinema. This is the city of Satyajit Ray, after all, though it probably values him less than do Western connoisseurs and has lately taken to heaving bricks at his cameras whenever he tries to film on location in Calcutta; for there is much professional jealousy in the film world and here politics enter everything and Ray, like the Frenchman Louis Malle, has been unacceptably realistic in his artistic responses to Calcutta. Nevertheless, it esteems the cinema and produces much film, even though more often than not this provokes the local critics to begin their newspaper columns; ‘So it goes on: one incompetent Bengali film after another that is neither minimal art nor more than minimal box office.’ But creation is everything here.
This urge has produced more publishers in Calcutta, it is said, than in all the rest of India. They sometimes operate from small back rooms which probably accommodate half a dozen members of the family at a time, as well as the man of literature. And so great is the clamour of other men of literature to get their thoughts and observations into print, that such a publisher sometimes makes quite a modest living from launching books of 28 pages and 1,500 words (complete with source notes) on serious topics at two or three rupees per copy. No author of a thumping bestseller in the West ever put more of himself into these small classics. One of them begins with the dedication ‘To the Memory of my Beloved Cousin Chirantan Bhattacharya, a Sergeant of Calcutta Police Knocked Down Dead by a Fleeing Lorry on 28 October 1965’, and there is a verse to go with it. Then there is a foreword. Then comes a preface; ‘In 1958, on request of my friend Sitangsu Chatterjee, I contributed a series of articles on DeRozio to the Radical Humanist. Since then many a friend of mine has been urging upon me to bring them out in the form of a booklet. I have been in search of a publisher for all these years and at last find him here … My publisher looked through the manuscript by chance and practically snatched it away from me for publication. Words can hardly express my gratitude to him.’ Then comes the book proper.
This great local pressure to execute and create for yourself, in whatever way you can, perhaps accounts for the fact that even the very best artists in Calcutta, like Jamini Roy with his delicate linear paintings, and Meera Mukherjee with her metal sculpture rooted in ancient traditions which she is gradually restoring to her people, find it difficult to sell their works in a place which is not always stuck – even inside the plaintive Bengali community – for the odd rupee; that and the fact that most of the rich in Calcutta do not often wish to know about Bengali culture. Yet the Bengalis are so proud of this side of themselves that they will quite solemnly ass
ure you, and believe it to be true, that one of their scholars had translated Moliere into their tongue before ever the English heard him in theirs. Nor do they fail to point out that the three Nobel prizes so far associated with India were each awarded for work done in Calcutta. The most cherished, naturally, is the one Rabindranath Tagore won for his verse epic Gitanjali in 1913, for that was Bengali through and through. But the city’s first honour from the Nobel committee came with Sir Ronald Ross’s medical prize in 1902 for making that breakthrough in malaria, up at the Presidency Hospital with his servant Mahomed Bux. And though C. V. Raman was a Madrassi, he collected the physics prize in 1930 for discovering some important thing about the diffusion of light while he was occupying a professorial chair at the university here. These are scarcely coincidences. Calcutta has always been better provided with intellectual facilities than anywhere else in the country. Above all, it has evolved an atmosphere for perpetual cerebration, even if much of its thinking has often been wildly and extravagantly impractical.
It has been persuasively argued that the Mutiny failed in Bengal as it did nowhere else in Northern India because not only had local nationalism (which has frequently taken precedence here over Indian nationalism) not at that stage focussed on a political objective, but because the natural leadership in Bengal was obsessed with acquiring whatever advantages the British could give them; that whereas in Delhi people thought of expelling the foreigner and establishing Indian government, in Calcutta the educated were content with assuming equality and sharing in administration. One Bengali poet, Iswarchandra Gupta, even went so far as to celebrate in verse the victory and the retribution of the British when they recaptured Cawnpore from the mutineers. The tide turned against the British in Bengal very largely because of the appalling behaviour of these badly-frightened foreigners in Calcutta and elsewhere after 1857; and because the education which the Bengali élite acquired and sought from their Western teachers was bound to promote a fervent desire for freedom, being based as it was precisely on those values. The first effective thing the educational apparatus of nineteenth century Calcutta did for the Hindu Bengalis (from whom the bhadralok exclusively came) was to draw them far ahead of the Bengali Muslims in power and influence. The Muslims, having been dethroned in India by Westerners, were not inclined to embrace Western values until their pride had started to heal again by the beginning of the twentieth century. Significantly, of 2,738 college students in Bengal in 1881–2, only 106 were Muslims; only 8.7 per cent of the 44,000 high school students were Muslims in that year; while in 1871, the Bengal Government service was officered by 60 per cent Europeans,30 per cent Hindus and only 4.5 per cent Muslims.