Calcutta Page 25

  Yet none of these festivities compares to the four days each October of the Durga Puja. Durga is Kali’s alter ego, a matriarchal figure rather than a terrible one. She had always been there, of course, lurking in the shadows behind the fearsome Kali, she had always been celebrated, but she was not invoked as the object of Bengal’s most powerful cult until the composer of Bande Mataram, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, represented her as the image of Motherland at the start of the twentieth century. At almost the same time the Swami Vivekenanda and his closest disciple, Sister Nivedita (who was Irish and known to her family as Margaret Noble), were urging Bengalis to consider the lessons of Kali in a contemporary setting; both were invoked for nationalism, but whereas Durga was for pure symbolism, Kali was for destruction. Kali is by no means a back-number in Calcutta now, but she has been far outstripped by Durga in popular esteem.

  All year hundreds of men at Kumartuli have been preparing for Durga Puja in their sheds and workshops. Here, in a few streets alongside the river in North Calcutta, is the district of the idol-makers; there must be many thousands of images in preparation at any time, to Lakshmi, to Ganesh, to Kali and even (unless your eyes deceive you) just here and there among the more homely stuff, to Father Christmas. But by far the biggest quantity is always in the smiling image of Durga; no more than a bundle of straw tightly packed into shape to start with, but men with projections of lath and cane, and then with grey clay added and smoothed most delicately and thickly along the manifold arms and legs. The whole thing is painted in the brightest colours when finished and nothing exhibited at the Blackpool Illuminations or along Regent Street at Christmas was ever half as magnificent as some of Durga’s images that come, larger than life could possibly be, from the ramshackle sheds of Kumartuli. People compete to produce the biggest and the most dazzling idol in their part of town, in their street, in their block of flats, so they do not flinch from the cost of bartering with the craftsmen.

  As Puja approaches, the shopkeepers of Calcutta go dotty with offers of ten per cent discounts on all purchases, while some people prepare to leave town for a holiday. But most stay, while the Corporation workmen string fairy lights along the outlines of public buildings, illuminate a couple of trams, and make ready to put out the fires when people accidentally set their Durga stalls alight. For the next three days and nights people rush about in funny hats, inspect the Durgas one after another, listen to drummers thumping their way along the exhibits, spend a handful of paise to watch an indigent student sit in a whitewashed garage with twenty-five king cobras, pick each other’s pockets, knock each other about when discovered, and generally fall around laughing. There are prizes for the committee which has produced the most sumptuous pandal, with Durga surrounded by other god-figures, perhaps, in which even her consort Siva is consigned to a secondary and admiring role. And while Puja is on, Calcutta will not seem such a desperate place after all, there will be renewal in the fairy-lit air, and the promise of hope and better things to come.

  But on Dasami, the fourth day, something perfectly terrible happens. With evening well on its way, it seems as if the entire city has gone down to the river, standing so thickly along Strand Road and upon the ghats that anyone arriving just before dusk will be lucky to catch a glimpse of water. Lorries begin to appear, bringing Durgas from all parts of Calcutta, together with the people who have worked and saved to make their Puja as find and spectacular as the last. Each of these groups take their Durgas down to the water very gently and with reverence, bobbing her smiling face up and down on their shoulders as they go, making her marigold garlands swing and sway in the lamplight. They put her into the Hooghly and give her a push and soon the river is teeming with scores of gaudy goddesses, floating and foundering in the direction of the sea. Eventually the crowds turn away from the Hooghly and this time they are not so gay. The days of rejoicing are over for another year, leaving behind them images of perfection which have been cast away with the everlasting prodigality of India.

  Yet however much is colossally wasted in this land, in this city in particular, it is always replenished. However many people die here, there are always many more to take their place. It is said that the very biggest crowd to assemble with a sense of purpose in Calcutta, did so in 1955 when the Russian leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev visited the city. Mr Nehru, the Prime Minister, (an uneasy man that day, for he had a political tightrope to walk between East and West, and Russian technicians in Delhi were coincidentally and ostentatiously offering to build India a brace of coveted atomic reactors) said that he believed the meeting of welcome on the Maidan was the biggest ever held in the country. The newspapers talked of two million people, and it may have been so. Apart from congregating on the Maidan, they thickly lined a route from Dum Dum to the Raj Bhavan which had been decorated with twenty-four massive ceremonial arches, one every quarter of a mile. Lamp posts had been painted silver, and when the Russians finally reached the city centre they found that every Government building had been freshly colour washed, that the towering Ochterlony Monument had been festooned with lights. They very nearly didn’t arrive because of the crowds. Their car was stopped several times after leaving the airport because people were pressing too close, and the enthusiasm was so great that at one stage there were fifteen extra and strictly unofficial passengers aboard. Finally, the long-suffering vehicle broke down under weight of numbers (as many a local bus has done since) and the Russians completed their triumphal entry into Calcutta quite hidden from view inside a police van. After they had taken pan from the Governor, after they had doffed their straw hats to the people once more, and after five hundred pigeons had been released across the Maidan, the rest of the day’s programme had to be abandoned, simply because of Calcutta’s impossible enthusiasm and its even more impossible numbers.

  Its crowds can be much more alarming than that, even when they are infinitely smaller. These are the people who refined Gandhi’s technique of passive resistance by numbers beyond a crafty weapon of offence into an instrument of wicked, torture called the gherao. The gherao began as a form of industrial action when labour relations had become strained. It meant that if an employer refused to submit to the normal pressures of workmen for the improvement of their wages or conditions they would, quite literally, surround him. Whether he was in his office, walking down a corridor, crossing the factory yard or simply preparing to drive home in his car, a mass of men would appear and stand round him; they might or they might not jeer at him, but they would not touch him; the thing that mattered was that the employer could not budge without their permission or until police could be summoned to get him out of that intimidating mob. The gherao was so effective in obtaining results that it has been extended to cover every situation where one man can yield anything imaginably required of him by a number of men; teachers have been gheraoed by their students, tax collectors by their debtors, bus drivers by their passengers; even a judge has been gheraoed by witnesses at a judicial committee of inquiry. Men have collapsed half-dead from exhaustion and dehydration in Calcutta after being gheraoed in the blazing sun for the best part of a day by perpetually fresh mobs operating a shift system.

  It is irrelevant for a brave Westerner to wonder why a man in such a predicament doesn’t charge the mob and try to battle his way through them; the man knows perfectly well that they would beat him to death without hesitation with their fists if they had nothing else handy. The only thing you can do if you are gheraoed is to sit tight with as much calmness as you can manage, and hope for the best. When a newspaper in this city reports that a car, a bus or a lorry knocked someone down in the street the day before, it frequently adds, without explanation, that the driver fled. Every reader in Calcutta knows that a driver in such a mess who doesn’t fly, stands an excellent chance of being lynched on the spot. Tram-burning is almost a auricular activity among students in Calcutta; and the trams, like most other public-service vehicles, are increasingly provided with heavy wire mesh round the drivers cab, to protect him from m
ob violence. People are quite often found decapitated round here, or stabbed or axed to death.

  There are several reasons for the terrible violence of Calcutta. One is the anger of excessive poverty confronted by excessive wealth, and all the complex and sometimes cynical things that follow from it. Another has something to do with the fact that there are so many men without women in this city. Another has traditionally been a clash of religions. Another has come from frictions of cultures and sub-species of people. Even in 1857, Girish Chandra Ghosh was writing that ‘Calcutta contains a fusion of races as antagonistic to each other as the tribes of American Indians’. There has been a much greater fusion since then; and much, much more violence. Apart from the violence offered the British in the cause of nationalism, which was considerable and which lasted almost until the Second World War, the most common cause of brutality and bloodshed in Calcutta during the first half of this century was the bitter communal differences between the Muslims and the Hindus. Curzon’s partition had given the overwhelmingly Muslim population of East Bengal a sense of freedom they had not felt since the rise of the Hindu bhadralok, and they had deeply resented the Hindu agitation which had led to Partition being revoked. It was thus typical of local feeling that, when a festival procession passed a mosque during Durga Puja in 1924, the Hindus should clap their hands in a mixture of high spirits and provocation. The Muslims attacked the procession at once with ballast from the nearby railway line and six people were wounded, one of them fatally. That sort of thing became so commonplace that it was barely worth reporting. There were more serious communal riots in 1918 and 1926.

  In 1926 there was tension on several fronts in Calcutta. There had been years of terrorism directed against the British and the British had reacted vigorously, which is to say brutally as often as not. They had also been playing off Muslim leaders against Hindu leaders, in their efforts to maintain a balance of power themselves. On the Hindu side, the bhadralok had almost totally lost the support of their own lower castes, who quite properly suspected them of self-interest; Chitta Ran jan Das, recently dead, had made notorious use of Calcutta Corporation as a patronage machine during his mayoralty. On the Muslim side, their leader, Sir Abdur Rahmin, had long since decided that Islam came before India and had just told the All-India Muslim League conference that the time had come for an organized fight for Muslim rights. Apart from a few Muslims in the Swaraj Party there were, by now no groups of Muslims and Hindus working together within the legislative body of Bengal. This was the climate when the Hindu Arya Samaj held its annual procession in North Calcutta on 2 April 1926. It was led by a band, it had the usual police escort and it had marched a couple of miles when it reached the Dinu Chamrawalla’s mosque in time for azan, the Muslim call to prayer at four p.m. A Muslim ran out of the mosque and asked the band to stop playing till it was out of earshot. The inspector of police with the procession advised the Hindus to do as they were asked. One drummer alone kept up his beat. At once a crowd of worshippers rushed out of the building and began to pelt the procession with garbage. The procession began to hit back. Instantly, Hindus and Muslims from surrounding streets began to pour into the confusion and the fighting spread across that part of the city; mosques and temples alike were desecrated by mobs. For the next fortnight the riots continued throughout Calcutta, shops were looted, places of worship were burned down, fifty people were killed and seven hundred were injured. It took troops with armoured cars to stop the fighting, and even that was only a short relief. Three weeks later a drunken brawl in Central Calcutta started a fresh riot which lasted a fortnight, killing seventy and injuring four hundred. The most frightening thing about these collisions was the suspicion afterwards that they had been deliberately engineered by leaders on both sides. Almost from the start, leaflets had appeared on the streets, exhorting both Hindu and Muslim to combat. One said; ‘Moslems Beware! Otherwise the Hindus will eat you up.’ Another said ‘Rise up, O Hindus! girding up your loins, and stand up steadfast on the arena of the fight … Let all the higher and lower castes unite and exhibit the glory of the Hindus.’ Yet this, with the intermittent riots which followed during the rest of the year and the ones that occurred in the thirties, was merely a small rehearsal for the horror that came a couple of decades later.

  At the turn of the century Muslims had outnumbered Hindus throughout Bengal by ten per cent, and they at least maintained the distance between them in the years ahead. They were always a minority in the towns, though; even in Dacca and Chittagong, in the middle of an enormously Muslim area, Hindus were able to outweigh them. By the end of the war the Muslims formed no more than twenty-three per cent of Calcutta’s population, yet they had dominated the political affairs of the city and state for several years (as the Marwaris had started to dominate native commerce) under the patronage of the British, who found them slightly more reliable than the insubordinate Bengali Hindus. The first Muslim Vice-Chancellor of the University had been appointed in 1930 and Fazlul Huq had become the first Muslim mayor in 1935. Since 1927, moreover, successive ministries in Bengal had been headed by Muslims, dependent for existence upon the combined votes of Muslim and British members of the legislative body.

  In April 1946, Mr H.S. Suhrawardy – the same Suhrawardy who had underplayed the seriousness of the Bengal famine in 1943 – formed a new Muslim League administration. By this time it was quite clear, though the intention had not yet been officially declared, that British rule had not much longer to go in India. The wrangle was now between Mr Nehru and Mr Jinnah about a division of the country into Hindustan and Pakistan when government was eventually relinquished by the Raj. Stoutly backing up Jinnah from Calcutta, Suhrawardy at once threatened to declare Bengal an independent state if the British eventually handed control of all India to the Hindu Congressmen in Delhi. ‘We will see that no revenue is received by such central Government from Bengal,’ he said, ‘and consider ourselves as a separate state having no connection with the Centre.’ July came, with Jinnah and Nehru locked in acrimony and Jinnah calling upon all Muslims to make Friday, 16 August, a Direct Action Day. In Calcutta, one strike after another marked the restlessness there and on 13 August Suhrawardy declared that Friday would be a public holiday; at which all Congressmen in the state assembly promptly walked out. One of Suhrawardy’s ministers said the holiday had been declared because the provincial government feared there might be communal troubles that day. It is doubtful whether even he realized what his government had just deliberately let Calcutta in for. Even amidst the atrocious insincerities of local politics at the time, it is not conceivable that the Muslim League could have been prepared for anything on the scale of what followed.

  In Bombay, that Thursday, the two national leaders met for over an hour, at the end of which Jinnah said, ‘There will be no more meetings between me and Pandit Nehru.’ In Calcutta, it was announced that bank employees would demonstrate on Saturday against a police lathi charge that had taken place during a bank strike the day before. Rita Hayworth was appearing in Gilda at the Tiger Cinema that week and on Friday the Elite was due to start showing Intermezzo, with Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Marie Desty, French dressmaker, was going to reopen her showroom and make the best of holidaymaking shoppers. The Calcutta Stock Exchange had just had a quiet day. On Friday morning the temperature was 88 degrees, the humidity was 91 per cent. And for the next few days, Calcutta became hell.

  It began where trouble has almost always begun in this city, in North Calcutta, with stabbings and lootings and bombs of soda-water being thrown. Mobs made for wine shops and got drunk on the spot. Then they went in search of more plunder and both Hindu and Muslim shopkeepers were clubbed and stabbed to death trying to defend their property. Goods worth Rs 7 million were taken from a store in Dharamtala Street. All this was just a preamble. On Friday afternoon there was a mass meeting of Muslims at the foot of the Ochterlony Monument, part of the Direct Action Day strategy. They streamed in procession from every direction, and when their demonstration
was over they streamed off again into streets where men were now rushing about with shouts of ‘Jehad’ (Holy War). An old man walking down a lane with a small bundle was tripped by one of a gang coming in the opposite direction; as he fell, the lot of them set upon him and beat him with lathis (which are staves of bamboo, usually iron-shod at the tips) until he was still; a moment or two later he stirred, whereupon one of the gang ran back and stabbed him until he would never move again. Four men walking down another street were attacked by another gang and, when they appeared senseless, they were picked up and hurled into an open sewer. A mob surrounded a bustee and, when some of the inhabitants rushed out, these were hacked to death with axes; the mob then set fire to the shanties, and the slum-dwellers who remained in their homes were burnt to death, until nothing of the bustee and its people was left but a pile of ashes.

  A curfew was imposed on Friday night, but Calcutta had only just started to tear itself to pieces. At dawn on Saturday, the atrocities were still mounting. The 36 Down Parcel Express train was stopped just outside the city and looted, its crew butchered. Defenceless people were now sheltering together in the hope that this would make them more secure. The families of four houses gathered in one, when a crowd appeared bearing lathis, spears, axes and blazing torches. They battered the doors down and rushed in shouting ‘Plunder and kill’. The families took refuge on the roof while the mob ransacked one room after another, taking away everything portable; then they set fire to the rest and one man survived the wreckage to tell what happened. In some parts of the city, where Hindus and Muslims lived close together, pacts were made to keep the peace and to protect each other from mobs. A Muslim family in a predominantly Hindu district on the banks of Tolly’s Nullah were saved when a large crowd was marching upon their house; their neighbours hustled them into a boat and got them away down the canal. In a Muslim district, a Hindu family were about to be attacked with iron bars and daggers when three or four Muslim women rushed in, stood between the two groups, and warned the mob that it would be necessary to kill them first.