Calcutta Read online

  For the British the day was overloaded with sentimentality, as it was almost bound to be. The BBC was giving them their daily dose of that everlasting serial radio diary, ‘The Robinsons’, on its long-wave broadcast from London at breakfast time, with ‘Music While You Work’ and ‘Those were the Days’ to follow later. Listeners could see from their morning paper that Queen of the South had just beaten St Mirren 8–0 at home in Scotland. They could also see that in England there were people with the same sharp trading instincts that had been sending them and their ancestors to Calcutta since 1690. The Dormy House Hotel in Westward Ho, the Montpelier Hotel in Budleigh Salterton and sixteen other hotels in the West Country were all anxiously enquiring ‘Are you leaving for England?’ and offering a refuge if they were, for a consideration. Miss Grove, of The Garden School at Gulmarj in Kashmir, was offering to escort children to their final destinations in England in exchange for the part-payment of her own fare home. The British, in fact, were coming excellently up to scratch. Burmah-Shell was giving its employees an Independence Day bonus. The Statesman, which was still owned in London, was bubbling with proper pride. The speed with which, during this final, brilliant Viceroyalty, less than five months in duration, the transfer of power has been achieved, is almost stupefying, ‘it said that morning.’ Nothing of comparable magnitude or such spontaneous generosity has been effected in the annals of mankind.’

  There was a letter in the paper a few days later from an Englishman which caught far better than any editorial what many of his compatriots in Calcutta were doubtless thinking and feeling, though few of them would have cared to show this, because to be British in this great imperial city had always meant that at the very best, you never unbuttoned yourself too much in front of the natives, however friendly you might have become. ‘Yesterday‚’ wrote this Mr Stephens, Apostrophe for the first time, and from the heart, much to my surprise, I said “Jai Hind”. In itself, for its bigger meaning, I have always liked the term, as I like India. But its recent historical associations are most obnoxious. It stuck in my throat. My whole energies and idealism as a civilian had been put into helping to win World War II for what I thought was righteousness. Like other British folk in India, I at that time underwent bitter personal suffering, in long separations and in loss of dear friends and relations, also of my home, and scarcely more than two years ago “Jai Hind” was still being shouted on the Burma front against those fine men, British and Indian, fighting on my side, the right side as I believe, by those others – traitors to my thinking – who had Joined Subhas Bose and the Japanese. I was not, until yesterday, able to forget these things.

  ‘“Jai Hind” was also shouted at British people here in Calcutta with plainly insulting intent, during the cold-weather riots of ‘45/’ 46; and forgetfulness of insults is not easy. Even last Friday, Independence Day, it sometimes seemed to be meant more in challenge than friendship. In general, however, that was a wonderfully friendly day, our harried, hatred-filled Calcutta was transformed, and I felt happy too, so I smiled and waved in answer to the shoutings; but I could not bring myself actually to utter the phrase. It was one for which I felt perhaps almost as much repugnance as Muslims themselves have for parts of “Bande Mataram”. Yesterday, the day of Id, in Chowringhee, next to me in a traffic block, was one of Calcutta’s countless lorry-loads of jubilant, slogan-shouting people, Hindus and Muslims intermixed. They waved and smiled, shouting “Jai Hind” and I waved back. Seated nearest to me, on the wooden footboard, was a young Muslim in colourful fresh f clothing for the Id. He had evidently noticed that, though smiling too, I had carefully avoided answering. He bent forward. “Please say it, sir,” he pleaded. “We didn’t like it either, but we do now. We have forgotten about quarrels.”

  ‘I said it at once, without reflection, readily, from the heart; and I do not think I will have further difficulty.’

  The moment when every Englishman would have to swallow his pride and the insults it attracted, when he would have to get out of India with a sore but rather soft heart, had been a long time coming, but it had been prepared some years before it actually happened. It was certainly within the scheme of things maturing in the collective mind of Mr Attlee’s Labour Government which, two years before, had appointed the gentleman who was packing his bags in one part of Government House while the jubilant citizens of Calcutta were removing his cups and saucers from another. Sir Frederick Burrows, in fact, departed in some confusion. In order to catch the flying boat from the river at Bally to England at the appointed hour, his bodyguard had to hustle him and his lady wife through the crowds so unceremoniously that there was no time to say goodbye to his civil and military officers or to any of the leading citizens. Thus did Calcutta see off the last British Governor of Bengal. It would never have done for Queen Victoria, or even for Lord Curzon, who had also represented the mightly Raj here.

  But, then, Sir Frederick Burrows, GGSI, GCIE, DL, had never been quite as other men usually were when appointed to sit in Government House at Calcutta, in spite of his various decorations. In the place of men who had never, during their own military service, been much less than a captain of Lancers or a lieutenant of Dragoons, here was one who had been but a company sergeant major in the Grenadier Guards. And where Wellesley, Hastings, Amherst, Auckland, Hardinge, Bentinck, Ronaldshay and most of his other predecessors in that splendid palace had been peers of the realm, Sir Frederick, on stepping into their shoes, had just completed several industrious years as President of the National Union of Railwaymen.

  Notes

  1 A Handbook to India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, ed. Professor L. F. Rushbrook Williams, C.B.E., Murray 1968

  2 ibid., p. 88

  3 ibid., p. xix

  4 ibid., p. xxi

  5 Twain, p. 517

  6 Macaulay, Essay on Warren Hastings

  7 Quoted Kincaid, p. 236

  8 Hardinge, p. 4

  9 Ghosh, p. 442

  10 Churchill, p. 297

  11 Casey, p. 225

  12 Quoted Doig from A Picturesque Voyage to India by Way of China, by the Daniells, London 1810

  13 et seq – There is an informative essay on the Daniells by Mildred Archer in the RIBA Journal September 1960

  14 Roy, p. 89

  15 The Monthly Review (Journal of the UKCA) January 1969

  16 Statesman, 13 July 1926

  17 ibid., 29 February 1961

  18 ibid., 2 March 1961

  19 Andrews, p. 15

  20 Statesman, 15 August 1947

  21 ibid., 17 August 1947

  22 ibid., 20 August 1947

  * Even the National Portrait Gallery in London catalogues a painting of Warren Hastings by Kettle and attributes it on postcards to Reynolds.

  THE PETRIFYING JUNGLE

  THE Western world began to take notice of Calcutta’s now celebrated plight fourteen years after Independence. Many people were well aware of it before then, but only if they had been in professional contact with it, or if they had actually seen it developing themselves. In the spring of 1960, however, the World Bank sent a mission to India to review the progress of the republic’s economic development during its First and Second Five-Year Plans, and to investigate the prospects of the Third Plan which was due to come into operation the following year. The mission was shocked by what it found in Calcutta and said so in its report. At almost the same time, the Indian Prime Minister was quoted in the international press on the same subject. ‘Calcutta‚’ said Mr Nehru, ‘is the biggest city in the country, its problems are national problems, quite apart from problems of West Bengal, and it is necessary that something special should be done. If the whole city went to pieces, it would be a tremendous tragedy.’ From that moment Calcutta became news, for here were clearly the makings of disaster, which always has provided the most stimulating news, mankind being never more lively than when he can respond to the dreadful with a twinge of horror and a spasm of compassion.

  A handful of mankind from the world outside becam
e involved. Some went to Calcutta to see what could be done, they usually returned and they heightened the sense of impending catastrophe by what they had to tell. A typical excursion was that of Professor Colin Buchanan and eight other Anglo-American town planners, who in 1967 reported: ‘A city in a state of crisis. We have not seen human degradation on a comparable scale in any other city in the world. This is one of the greatest urban concentrations in existence rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in its economy, housing, sanitation, transport and the essential humanities of life. If the final breakdown were to take place it would be a disaster for mankind of a more sinister sort than any disaster of flood or famine.’ Which stimulated more journalists and television crews to fly into Dum Dum to collect more copy and more film. Meanwhile, the great cities of the West, New York in particular, began to have faint and uneasy intimations that what they were hearing about Calcutta might indeed be in store for them one day. The metropolitans of Europe and the United States are now quite frantically certain that it is possible for a city to strangle itself in its own traffic, to poison itself with its own pollutions, to tear itself to pieces by the hand of its own people; and they no longer need the example of Calcutta to convince them that this is so. So they struggle with themselves and, spasmodically, they cast a glance over their shoulders to see how the forthcoming disaster is proceeding in the first city in the world scheduled to perish of its private misfortunes. They continue to send their emissaries from time to time, with their notebooks and their cameras, and Calcutta has become so weary of these visitations, which have brought little but expressions of sympathy so far, that a man with a camera is now very likely to have it smashed in anger and resentment, and a man who flaps his notebook too obviously may swiftly be surrounded by a mob who will not question him gently.

  A city does not suddenly break down. A metropolitan collapse has not yet happened in the modern world, but if Calcutta should provide the first example then the ultimate civic disaster is clearly preceded by a long and gradual process of neglect and decay which undermines the city’s foundations to a point at which a very small push will send the whole structure tumbling into ruins. This process can take just as long as the process of a city’s growth to maturity and supremacy. The two can even be seen, passing the years in tandem, one of the city’s parts thriving and becoming grand while the other becomes increasingly wasted and diseased. This is manifestly so in Calcutta’s case. Almost from the moment there was something more than a collection of straggling mud huts by the Hooghly here, proud and imperial voices have proclaimed the glories of this city, and they have been well heard in the heart of Empire and beyond. Yet every time boasts were made, there was someone pointing out other things that were nothing to boast about. Just occasionally, someone cried shame in the same tongue and with the same breeding as the boasters; and, generally, he seems to have gone quite unheard by his fellows, his message lost maybe in the historically well-known difficulties of communication.

  Lord Valentia, an early tourist, was one of the best-known scrutineers of Calcutta in its early period of magnificence. He came just ten years after Sir John Shore was appointed Governor-General with that ringing and Biblical assurance of service to every native of India, whatever his situation might be. Lord Valentia seems to have been the first man to remark on the palatial grandeur of the city, particularly of Chowringhee. He also took the trouble to investigate the native quarters and was honest enough to report that ‘The Black Town is as complete a contrast to this as can well be conceived. Its streets are narrow and dirty; the houses, of two storeys, occasionally of brick, but generally mud and thatched, perfectly resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland.’ In 1803, no literate Englishman could be expected to imagine greater human wretchedness than that. Throughout the nineteenth century the developing picture is one of a burgeoning European city, accommodating a small proportion of acceptably wealthy natives, surrounded by a swelling cantonment of helots; and while the first progressively equips itself with all the amenities of civilization as they become available to it, the second is more or less left to its own resources, or at best provided with one or two spare parts of urban equipment long after the needs of the masters have been attended to. In 1836, the Chief Magistrate, Mr Farran, was noting that ‘The only broad streets in the native part of the town are Amherst Street and the Central Road, the former unfinished and neither of them considered thoroughfares. The Chitpore Road is the great thoroughfare, but it is narrow, winding, dirty and encroached upon, while the cross-ways are all lanes, very narrow, very filthy and bounded generally by deep open ditches.’ Sixteen years before that, the British had started metalling the roads of their Calcutta.

  It was the perpetually watchful and usually caustic Girish Chandra Ghosh who remarked on another disparity between the two communities a couple of decades later, almost on the eve of the Mutiny. ‘Calcutta is flatly getting too rich for poor people to abide in it … as we see from the last meeting of the Legislative Council in the debate on the report of the select committee on the proposition for lighting the St James portion of Calcutta with gas … The Gas Company is not a philanthropic body whose mission to India owes its origins to a Christian desire of rescuing the people of the country from eternal night and blessing them with a light equal in radiance to that of the God of day – free of charge! … we are obtuse enough not to perceive how the comfort and convenience of men who inhabit hovels and breathe the contaminated air of cess pools can be augmented by their European neighbours revelling in a light which is seventeen times more bright than candlelight …’ It was Mr Strachey, the sanitary commissioner for Bengal, who in 1864 pointed out a hazard to local health that not even the British could have escaped very easily, unless they took the most stringent domestic precautions. ‘More than 5,000 corpses have been thrown from Calcutta into the river,’ he wrote, ‘which supplies the greatest part of its inhabitants with water for all domestic purposes and which for several miles is covered as thickly with shipping as almost anywhere in the world. One thousand five hundred corpses have actually been thrown into the river in one year from the General Hospital alone.’

  At about this time, Florence Nightingale was writing from England to Sir Bartle Frere, who had served in Calcutta and had then become Governor of Bombay. That city, she remarked, ‘has a lower death-rate on the last two years than London, the healthiest city in Europe. This is entirely your doing. If we do not take care, Bombay will outstrip us in the sanitary race. People will be ordered for the benefit of their health to Bombay …’ This was not a thing that anyone could ever have said of Calcutta. There was another difference between the two cities and Girish Chandra Ghosh had inevitably picked it up. The same debate that had produced the gas-lighting proposals had produced a reference to the taxation of wheel-and-horse traffic. ‘These taxes exist in Bombay,’ wrote Ghosh, ‘and it was a great mistake to have withdrawn them after Calcutta had begun to be accustomed to the new imposition. The horse and carriage tax is a tax on luxury and its operation is not therefore grievously felt by those who come under it, whereas a general tax to the benefit of particular classes is a never-ending source of discontent. ‘The tax had been withdrawn in Calcutta, as many other things unwelcome to the British community there were frequently altered to suit them, because they had the Imperial Government cornered where they wanted it, and could press it into an acceptable shape.’ In India‚’ wrote Ghosh in 1863, ‘there are two interests. There is firstly the government interest, which rightly employed is identical with the interest of justice and native interests … and secondly, there is the non-official English interest, claiming special immunities and consideration by right of conquest, superior intelligence, energy and power of consideration. This gives birth to an antagonism by no means unnatural … It is injurious only to the interest which assumes that India is a family preserve of the fifth-rate men of England – not even of the classes which supply the Civil Service – which claims the privilege of obtaining land under co
nditions only slightly removed from those of an absolute gift, which clamours for a contract law calculated to enslave the native population, and demands immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the established courts of the country.’

  A few months later, he logged his own progress report on the physical state of Calcutta. ‘The Imperial city in the middle of the rains is a sight worth the enthusiasm of the tourist. Perhaps no other chief city in the world presents variations of road scenery so great or so interesting. The traveller who lands at Chandpal Ghat, fresh from the atmosphere of European civilization, is regaled with the view of a splendid metropolis, with church steeples reaching up to the clouds, rows of palaces on each hand, streets smooth as bowling greens – wide, dustless and dry – the very perfection of macadamization. He drives into Chowringhee through all its by-lanes and larger thoroughfares, and his heart cannot wish for higher displays of municipal talent and conservancy genius and activity than those before him. Everything except Dhurmtollah Bazar is neat, clean and tidy; even the lamp posts wear an appearance suggestive of the idea of being weekly varnished … But should business or curiosity call him to the native town … he will see or rather feel by the jolt of his carriage, streets than which the natural paths of the forest are better fitted for travelling. He will have his nose assailed by the stench of drains which have not felt the ministering hand of man ever since the last rains, his affrighted horse will obstinately back from pits in the thoroughfares wide enough to bury all the rubbish in the adjoining houses, his carriage wheels will stick resolutely into ruts from which release is possible only by the aid of half a dozen men and as many bamboo poles … After a heavy shower of rain he will in some places deem it more pleasant and advantageous to hire a boat than swim his horse.’