Calcutta Read online

  In a city where it is possible to telephone London only between 10.45 in tne morning and 9.30 at night, the British must sometimes feel even more beleaguered than they actually are. They have been dwindling in number quite rapidly this past year or two; a large proportion of their post-war, post-Independence population decided to call it a day when the rupee was devalued in 1966; by 1968 only 2,000 of them remained on the books of the High Commission; by the beginning of 1970 these had shrunk to 1,350, though there are possibly a few more than that who have never bothered to sign themselves in. The British are thus reduced to roughly the same number of people as were here a few years before the Black Hole happened.

  You get a queer feeling sometimes that they may not have changed very much in those two centuries. A small number swivel round the British Council, decently if rather earnestly interested in Bengali culture. A handful of women take care of everybody’s conscience by doing whatever they can to help Mother Teresa in her various works of charity. But these do not represent the general flavour of the British in Calcutta. The general flavour tends towards the pursuit of tigers in the Sundarbans and wild pigs around Meerut for the exceedingly rich, towards golf at Tollygunge for the merely wealthy and towards the Racecourse for almost everyone. It includes the Vintage Car Rally, mounted each year by The Statesman, by no means an exclusively British occasion, in which someone’s Delauney Belleville from Ballygunge will be competing with a 1914 Humbrette which has lumbered over from Lucknow and a 1913 Model T Ford which has rolled down from Shillong. For those who have been in India since before the war, or who are over forty, it usually means being deeply involved in the meetings and collective attitudes of Calcutta’s branch of the United Kingdom Citizens Association.

  This started life as the European and Anglo-Indian Defence Association, and under that name it was founded to defend the position of the white and the rather off-white when Lord Ripon’s Ilbert Bill threatened to put darker men on equal terms in the courts of law. One of its members will tell you quietly that it really exists to organize the entry of duty-free booze and to speed the passage of remittances to and from England, with an OBE each year almost guaranteed to the chap who’s just served as President. A recent President, quite naturally, saw it more importantly as something ‘to enable the British community in India to speak with one voice’; to which he added that ‘We have a great stake in this country and it is inevitable that for many years yet, British Nationals will continue to come to India, albeit on short-term basis, to supervise the administration resulting from that investment’. Then he went on to tell that attentive audience of compatriots in the Bengal Club of the progress made by their lobby at Westminster and its efforts to obtain some Government relief in the high cost of educating, at British boarding schools, the children of those Great Britons who were spending their working lives in India (‘… our very sincere appreciation of the terrific amount of work undertaken by both Sir Percival Griffiths and Sir Ridgeby Foster in an endeavour to arrive at a solution to our very pressing problem’). The young expatriates, he sadly noted, were not nearly as interested in the UKCA as the old India hands.

  The young expatriates, smart young things in their mid or late twenties who would go down well in South Kensington, are too mobile by far to become involved in anything as static as the UKCA. They belong to British firms whose trading posts are strung across the world, so that they come to Calcutta full of talk about the Sudan, or Rhodesia, where they’ve already spent three really super years; and before they’ve been in the city six months they are beginning to wonder what their chances might be of a posting next to Buenos Aires. They are Oxbridge almost to a man and wife, usually with one good Second between them, and their life in Calcutta inclines towards the Rowing Club or the Swimming Club. Even when they are not actually rowing or swimming in these establishments they are holding a dance there, planning or taking part in a revue there.

  When one of these young couples are about to leave the city at the end of the Indian tour, they are wont to throw a party on the Hooghly. They hire a small steamer, invite all their friends to share it with them for the day, load it to the gunwhales with booze and stride aboard with much loud merriment at the Swimming Club Jetty on Strand Road. The loudest of them, eye-catching in straw hat, Bermuda shorts, the deepest and most fashionable of sideburns, pauses before stepping off the jetty and assumes the utmost amazement. He is contemplating two or three hundred Indians who are bathing off the adjacent ghats. ‘I say,’ he shouts to his compatriots, ‘look at that bloody crowd.’ Then he raises his cine camera and proceeds to shoot the natives. Thereafter he spends his day downing one drink after another, never seeming to become more than slightly unsteady, while he flirts with every woman aboard except his wife. A mile or two downstream, when people have started to peel off their clothing to the decently minimum for sunbathing, three of these young expatriate women, reduced to their bikinis, pretend to begin a strip routine by the rails for the especial benefit of half a dozen Indian boatmen who are just passing close by in a junk; and their gestures are as archly provocative as any that come out of the classier joints of Soho. They are well aware that the boatmen probably haven’t had a woman between them since their last visit to their home villages down in Orissa, six months or more ago.

  Yet these are not Wog-bashers by any old-fashioned definition of the term. It is just that they have areas of blank incomprehension or indifference. Two nights before, one of the couples have been talking sensitively about the Indians he knows in his work and the ones she patronizes once a week in her expeditions to the New Market; they have been discussing the terrible dilemma of every soft-hearted person in town who finds himself half-wanting to kick the umpteenth beggar child out of his path. Their bearer brings the coffee into the lounge after dinner, the cups rattling because an electric storm has been raging all night and it frightens him. She tells him to leave the washing up till morning, that he can go home now, at a quarter to midnight. You ask how far he has to go. Neither of them has any idea; they have never asked him where he lives. One doesn’t, it seems, in Calcutta.

  The same curious inconsistency is quite liable to happen in reverse. A pillar of the UKCA, a man of much money with that boarding school problem hanging unbearably upon his purse, behaves very badly indeed to his servants in front of his guests; he bawls at the first like an incompetent sergeant major and attends to the second with the exquisite courtesy of a colonel on ladies night in the mess. A few days later you surprise him at a piece of homework on his desk. He is painstakingly creating a book picturing the birds and animals of Bengal, with simple informative captions to each, which he is going to have printed at his own expense. He is then going to distribute copies at Christmas to the children of his many Indian employees. ‘Better they should feed on this‚’ he says briskly, ‘than be stuffed with a load of bloody Communist propaganda.’

  People like that man have generally been in India at least since the war and frequently for a few years before it. They probably soldiered with the 4/10th Baluchis or some such regiment, and Johnny Gurkha is always a damn good chap to them, however lowly he might be. Or else they joined their old-established family firm in Calcutta after Oxbridge and National Service at the tail end of the war. Their homes are still palatial in scale and comfort, the residue of a century’s healthy profits. They may, both man and wife in their early forties, be running to unhealthy bulk themselves, though they ride for exercise most days and they are particularly keen on shikar, hunting the Bengal tiger whenever they can get away to their property down in the Sundarbans along the edge of the delta. Three of their children are at school in England, the fourth will soon be going, and the absentees come over to Calcutta whenever there is more than a week of school holidays to be spent; where the boys, who will also be gentlemen of substance one day, are called ‘darling’ by their father and charged with mixing gins and tonic for the adults. They see quite a bit of their parents, one way and another, for Mummy and Daddy always manage to
spend a couple of months each year at Home. It seems a very well settled, enormously rich existence, though Daddy confides that in Calcutta these days it is very difficult not to be cynical; and you can see what he means. ‘It’s virtually impossible‚’ he says, ‘for anyone in this country to net over £2,000 a year’ because of the high Indian rates of taxation upon the wealthy. Then he goes off to business in the Mercedes, driven by his liveried chauffeur, leaving behind in the garage the ageing Jaguar, the recent Fiat and the stout and knockabout Landrover.

  Gone forever are the days when The Statesman’s headlines would include ‘Lancashire Fusiliers Survive’ – which was no cause for great alarm, for it meant only that those artisan soldiers had managed to effect a goal-less draw with Wari Athletic on the Brigade Ground football pitch; an achievement, in the heat, quite equal to any regimental battle honours taken from Minden or Spion Kop. But at least once since Independence the pride of the British-Indians was restored to the high level of the glorious years of the Raj. In 1961, the Queen and her consort visited Calcutta. They were preceded, several weeks before, by their Commonwealth Secretary, Mr Duncan Sandys, who let it be known that he thought it an inspiring task to try to improve the conditions of the city’s slum dwellers. Mr Sandys had scarcely removed himself when the city was visited by a cloud of locusts, five or six miles long in the sky, which was proceeding in roughly the same direction. The day after that the World Health Organization reported that a major disaster threatened Calcutta unless there was an immediate solution to its water problem. Then Her Majesty arrived.

  There were twenty-five thousand people waiting when she flew into Dum-Dum, and though it was never likely that she would finish her journey in the Black Maria, as Bulganin and Khrushchev had done six years before, the Chief Minister of West Bengal kindly remarked when she reached the Raj Bhavan that he could not remember larger or more disciplined crowds in Calcutta. That night there was a reception in the former Government House, which must have been quite like the old days of Lord Curzon’s entertainments. A reporter wrote that ‘in a fairyland setting, 9,200 wide, glistening and intent eyes were fixed on the Queen, who was in pale blue net with a full skirt embroidered with silver roses and wearing a sparkling diamond tiara, a ruby and diamond necklace and a pair of earrings and bracelet to match’. Indian musicians performed a song by Tagore, whose first line translates as ‘In this world of dust of ours …’ Next morning the Queen and her Prince attended a service in the Cathedral, where the string quartet of the Oxford Mission out at Behala played ‘Sheep may safely graze’. In the afternoon they watched Pa Bear win the Queen Elizabeth Cup at 25 to 1 on the Racecourse.

  The rest of their time in Calcutta was in the same pattern. They dropped in at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club. They visited the National Agricultural Fair at Alipore. They met British children at a special reception for juvenile expatriates in the Raj Bhavan. They toured the Victoria Memorial, where two men were arrested for disorderly conduct. The Prince played polo. He and his wife did not see a jute mill in Howrah, as Bulganin and Khrushchev most carefully had. They went nowhere near any of Mr Sandys’ inspiring bustees. Six years earlier, never one to miss an opportunity, Khrushchev had told the people of Calcutta that there were countries which sucked the blood of other countries as leeches suck human blood. Her Britannic Majesty might well have agreed with him, seizing the chance to point out that such countries were to be found in the East as well as in the West. But she was Queen Victoria’s great grand-daughter and very well bred, so she merely remarked, on leaving a city which was, in a highly constitutional and quite remote manner of speaking, still hers: ‘We have been highly impressed by the reception Calcutta gave us. We shall never forget it.’

  There have been few other opportunities for the beleaguered British to cheer in Calcutta since Independence. They have suffered the end of Empire and their own supremacy in the city. They have endured the devaluation of their money, first in Britain, then in India. They have remained exceedingly wealthy by anybody’s standards in spite of these blows, fabulously rich in the context of Calcutta. It is not enough for them, it never has been. They enjoyed the power of their wealth, just as their ancestors enjoyed it through two and a half centuries before them. In this city they have had to stand by and watch not only the power vanish, but the old symbols of that power wither and shrink.

  Even the Bengal Club is now merely a haunted and much reduced miniature of what it once was. After Macaulay came the clubmen’s carriages, which would trot through the high wrought-iron gates and pull up on the driveway before a domineering frontage of high Corinthian columns. The ladies of British Calcutta half a century ago picketed that frontage to collect money for the subscription fund that had been set up in London to comfort the wretched General Dyer, who had lately made Indians crawl on their hands and knees down a street in Amritsar after shooting nearly four hundred of their countrymen in one of its squares. They were talking Dyer’s language inside the Bengal Club just after the Mutiny had failed even to scratch them in Calcutta. And within three years of the Dyer subscriptions being collected, the men of the Bengal Club were organizing a Citizens Protection League to supply armed assistance to the police and subdue the Bengali nationalists. There always have been in Calcutta some Britons at odds with the attitudes of the clubmen. During the Mutiny there was Canning himself, the Viceroy in person. At the time of the Citizens Protection League there was Tagore’s great friend and correspondent C. F. Andrews, who wrote that in Calcutta ‘a circle of advanced thinkers and workers may be found with whom it is a pleasure and a privilege to converse on subjects covering the widest range of thought and life. They are the men who will mould the future – men of character as well as intellect, men who have surmounted difficulties such as we ourselves have never experienced.’ But men like Andrews, the ones who came before him, the ones who came after, have always been a small minority of the British population here. The majority have always aspired, even when they have not managed to belong, to the superior and exclusive manipulations of the autocrats at 33, Chowringhee Road.

  So many of these latter-day Moguls had taken themselves and their small fortunes back to Britain for good by the end of the 1960s that the Bengal Club had sold off its impressive exterior and its library and moved in close order and closer confinement to the back of the building. Early in 1970 came the two mortifying days when the auctioneers disposed of the last remnants of the power and the glory in the front, and there never was a gloomier moment in Calcutta’s long, long history of the Raj and its reach-me-downs. For the front rooms of the club had been reduced to a jumbled heap of junk. On the terrace, with its commanding view across the Maidan, there were thirteen bathtubs drawn up in line ahead, and they were all very grubby. Beside them were thirteen lavatory bowls, and heaven knows what degraded future lay ahead of them. The corridors were piled with wicker rocking chairs, springy bedsteads, mahogany tables and disconnected lamp brackets. The front rooms were buttressed with wardrobes and chests of drawers, more bedsteads and rolls of mirzapore carpet. Pictures were stacked in their frames on top of the drawers – two copies of a print by Stubbs, of William Evelyn of St Clere in Kent, a version of Man with a Soft Hat by Franz Hals, dozens of watery reproductions of boats, among them Prince Philip’s Bluebottle. On top of everything there was a layer of dust. During the hours of viewing before the auction, the occasional British memsahib could be seen and heard bustling around the premises with her bearer dogging behind ‘… can’t find them … and I haven’t got time to mess about today …’ But when they actually auctioned this decrepit residue of the old Bengal Club, practically everything in sight was knocked down cheap to once subservient Indians. Who never, in all Calcutta’s history, would have been allowed past those wrought-iron gates for any other reason at all.

  The British were merely repeating, on a small and ingrown scale, what they had experienced twenty-three years before at Independence. But that had differently and perversely been a time of hope as well as a time o
f regret and nostalgia. For there had just been horror in this city, which had seemed bent on destroying itself, and suddenly this had stopped, as though a tap had been turned off. So that when the end of the Raj came, it came in Calcutta rather decently and well, with expressions of goodwill and old comradeship in arms and mutual aid in the years ahead.

  The only people hurt in the city that Friday, when imperialism was over and Indians ruled themselves at last, were the ones who fell off overloaded lorries which were rolling round town as mobile grandstands. They had been Independent since five minutes past one in the morning, Calcutta time, when bells had started ringing, conch shells had been blown and people in the streets had started shouting ‘Jai Hind’ (Glory to India) whether they were Hindu or Muslim. A few hours later Mr Suhrawardy, the Prime Minister of Bengal, returned to Mahatma Gandhi, who was praying and fasting in their house among the bustees, and told him; ‘I have just been round Calcutta and I have seen a miracle.’ At eight o’clock a salute of seventeen guns boomed from Fort William, the Indian flag was broken for the first time from the masthead there, and half an hour later Mr Fairbairn, secretary of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, unfurled another brand new flag over the Royal Exchange. Charitable institutions started feeding the endless poor of the city.

  Throughout that day there were crowds everywhere, happy for the first time in well over a year; 200,000 surged round Government House, where the last representative of the Raj was packing his bags. Some of them scaled the gates, got inside the building and pinched some of the gubernatorial crockery as souvenirs; the Mahatma let it be known next morning that he would be glad if every plate and saucer were returned at once. There were even Hindus of the lowest castes ducking each other exuberantly in the swimming pool that Lady Lytton had installed long ago for persons of much higher rank. On the streets, portraits of the Mahatma and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were held high by dancing people. Brass bands mounted on some of those lorries played the British and the Indian national anthems alternately, with ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack up your Troubles’ on the side. The Grand Hotel had thought fit to announce beforehand that Scotch and beer would be available on this occasion in its Palm Court, for there had been much austerity since the war and during the year of terror. The Golden Slipper Club held a dinner-dance that night at which evening dress was essential. The Empire Cinema was showing Robert Young and Susan Hayward in They Won’t Believe Me.