Calcutta Read online

  By the time Kipling came to Calcutta, twenty years later, it was notorious in some circles as the City of Stinks as well as palaces. This was at the bottom of his abiding dislike of it and ‘in spite of that stink, they allow, they even encourage natives to look after the place! The damp, drainage-soaked soil is sick with the teeming life of a hundred years, and the Municipal Board list is choked with the names of natives – men of the breed born in and raised off this surfeited muck-heap.’ He took the view that an efficient municipal government in England would have made short work of Calcutta’s obnoxious problems; they wanted shovels, not sentiments, in this part of the world. Which was slightly beside the point, even though Indians by then had a loud voice in municipal affairs. In 1876 the Bengal Government had created Calcutta Corporation largely, though by no means completely, on an electoral basis. Its Bengali councillors could not have been much encouraged by the condescending patronage of their masters in the provincial government, let alone that of the even more superior beings of the imperial ruling body. When the Entally drainage system was opened in 1896, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, told them what he thought of their struggling efforts in self-administration in the roundest terms. ‘You have, gentlemen, no doubt‚’ he said, ‘been hampered in the task of improving Calcutta by many things, and perhaps by nothing so much as by your own constitution. The marvel is that with such an impracticable organization so much good work should have been done. You have a constitution borrowed en bloc from the most advanced models in England, and without any reference to the utterly different circumstances of an Oriental city, and a very mixed community. It seems to have been supposed that because Birmingham, for instance (which I know well), is admirably managed by an elected Council of 72, Calcutta could be equally well managed by a council of 75, of whom 50 are elected. But in Birmingham, to begin with, the population is homogeneous and accustomed for generations to managing its own affairs on lines as to which all parties are agreed. The council there is composed entirely of shrewd, capable men of business, manufacturers, merchants, tradesmen and the like, whose one object is to treat every question before them not as an opportunity for speech-making, but as a matter to be settled as promptly as may be in the most practical way … Now I think everybody in Calcutta outside the Corporation, and a good many people inside it, will admit that there is here far too much speaking for the sake of speech …’

  A great deal of Calcutta’s problems, clearly, arose from the enormous migration of Indians to the city, which had occurred almost from the moment of Charnock’s first settlement. At the time of the Black Hole the population was estimated at 400,000 or so, and no more than a couple of thousand could have been Europeans then. By Kipling’s day there was something approaching a million people here. They had not been driven to Calcutta to provide some kind of slave labour for European masters (although the Bengal Chronicle in 1831 was remarking on a slave market in the city then, and the practice throughout India was not effectively outlawed until 1845) even if the conditions of their employment might sometimes be indistinguishable from those of slavery. They had poured down the Hooghly in search of wealth, just as the Englishmen had sailed up it for the same purpose, and they had been incited to do this, as likely as not, by their own people. In 1823, Bhabanicharan Bannerji had written a book called Kalikata Kamalaylay, which can be translated as ‘Calcutta; dwelling place of the goddess of fortune’, which described the city as a ‘bottomless ocean of wealth’ and which was intended as a guide to countrymen arriving in the metropolis for the first time.

  There is an indictment of the British to be made out of the relative living and other conditions of Calcutta, but it is not one of brutality and deliberate degradation of the native population; the indictment is the same one which has stood from start to finish of the British connection with the city, of indifference and incomprehension by all but a comparatively small handful of exceptions who felt some moral obligation (especially in those self-consciously Christian times) to be much more than indifferent. It was the British, after all, who started this place in order to tap the wealth of this land. The fact is, of course, that until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the relative conditions of rich and poor in Calcutta were not vastly different from those of Britain; it is scarcely surprising that men who had been unconcerned about them at home should not notice or care about them here; it is approximately from 1875 onwards that the developing conscience of the rich in London becomes the more conspicuous by its almost total absence in Calcutta.

  Lord Curzon well knew what Calcutta stood for, and he put it all into one noble paragraph when he was addressing the businessmen of the city in 1903. ‘To me, Calcutta is the capital, not merely of a province, great as that province is, but of the Indian Empire. As such, it appears to me fitly to symbolize the work that the English have done, and are doing, in this country. For though, of the enormous population of over 1,100,000 souls that make up the city on both banks of the river, not much more than 30,000 are returned as Europeans and Eurasians, yet a glance at the buildings of the town, at the river and the roar and the smoke, is sufficient to show that Calcutta is in reality a European city set down upon Asiatic soil, and that it is a monument – in my opinion one of the most striking extant monuments, for it is the second city to London in the entire British Empire – to the energy and achievements of our race.’ Within twelve months, the local historian H. E. A. Cotton had written that ‘Ten minutes walk from Dalhousie Square will land the seeker after sensation in a labyrinth of narrow, unpaved winding lanes, polluted with odours that put those of Cologne to shame and swarming with humanity, where the scavenging carts are the rarest of visitors and the ghostly glimmer of an occasional and inadequate gas lamp furnishes the solitary illumination. Not a thousand yards from Government House, troops of jackals may be heard after sunset sweeping through the deserted street and making the night hideous with their fearsome howls.’

  One reason for the excessive anger of the local British community when they heard that the imperial capital was to move to Delhi, was that a Calcutta Improvement Trust had just been set up, which had involved a certain amount of expenditure even though it had not yet started to yield results. It was established by an Act of 1911, which sought to improve and expand the city ‘by opening up congested areas, laying out or altering streets, providing open spaces for purposes of ventilation or recreation and … the rehousing of the poorer and working-classes displaced by the execution of improvement schemes …’ A member of the Institute of Civil Engineers and the Town Planning Institute in Britain, Mr E. P. Richards, was appointed Chief Engineer of the Trust six months after the Viceroy’s flag had been removed from Government House. He subsequently had a breakdown, which caused him to return to England before he could actually engineer any changes in Calcutta. But in 1914 he produced a report for the Improvement Trust, based upon his investigations while he was in the city. He had been consulted in Calcutta, among other things, about the possibility of replacing the single bridge across the Hooghly and he had agreed that this matter was extremely urgent and of paramount importance, but it had become very clear to him ‘that the proposed new bridge as tendered for would be too narrow even from the first day it was opened to traffic’. And so the tender was withdrawn, and the proposal was quietly forgotten, and although a second Hooghly bridge was put across the river six miles upstream at Bally in 1931, the main crossing to Howrah remained as a contraption of pontoons until 1943, when it was replaced by the present towering structure. Although work had started on the Howrah Bridge in 1937, it might have still been building if the military had not required a proper crossing at that point for fighting their war against the Japanese.

  Quite apart from the incompetence imputed to the bridge planners by Richards, his report would have fallen as a piece of anarchy upon the ears of Lord Curzon for one. ‘The writer’ – Richards generally referred to himself in the third person – ‘The writer found that very many Europeans who lived
in Calcutta possessed little or no knowledge of the dense back blocks that compose three quarters of the city … Most of us have had no occasion to go about anywhere except in the Dalhousie Square, Old Court House Street, Chowringhee and Park Street area, which make a mere fringe along only half the West side of the built-up mass of Calcutta … One can walk day after day for hours in the lanes of North Calcutta without meeting a single European … the general public of Calcutta are not conscious of the state of their city; it has never been put before them forcibly and clearly … we have all heard Calcutta described glowingly and quite sincerely as the fairest city in the East … but the speakers are plainly unaware of the real conditions … Reform measures are looked upon with suspicion, indifference or with a positive and powerful hostility. It should be made thoroughly known that the city is in a most serious condition, and that only prompt, big and concerted action will maintain our commercial supremacy and save Calcutta and Howrah from becoming the largest slum in the world.’

  This is a very angry man writing. He has found the housing conditions of the city ‘scandalously bad. An acute housing famine prevails and increases. It has prevailed during the last thirty years and nothing has been done to remedy it … Rents are tremendous and the accommodation given is all too small and far too crowded. Comfortable, wholesome family life is being pushed right out of existence in Calcutta. It has already vanished to the extent of forty-five per cent … infant mortality and tuberculosis stand at world records.’ Richards estimated that at least 800 acres of 2,500 acres in central Calcutta must be classified as ‘rank slum’; at least 250,000 people were living in houses that, under any ordinary by-laws, would be condemned and closed as unfit for human habitation. ‘Nearly all the working-class families can afford but a single room in which they have to live, eat, sleep, propagate their species and die. It is seldom a room of decent size and usually it is ill-lit and badly ventilated and is in a slum or chawl. Often two families exist in one room. Men – most especially in India where family life and early marriage rules are so potent – would certainly bring their families to Calcutta if accommodation for them existed … 900,000 people live in 45,000 houses; i.e. the average number of people per house is twenty. The average Indian house contains twice as many rooms as an English house, so that for genuine comparison, the Calcutta housing squeeze is equal to about ten people per house in Great Britain.’ And there, at that time, the average content of a house was just over five people.

  As for town planning, it was virtually non-existent. ‘A casual glance at the Calcutta plans shows instantly that the city, as a whole, actually possesses no streets. There are but two small areas in Calcutta having the normal street system which is found throughout the whole area of almost every city in the world …’ The mass of lanes shown on most of the survey maps available were, Richards had discovered in those lonely rambles of his, fictitiously broad, having been represented on paper wider than they were on the ground so that the draughtsmen could get the names printed along them. ‘Urban, built-up Calcutta has no street system; 2,500 acres are provided only with highly irregular lanes and passages. It would require the creation of 110 miles of ordinary 30–40 ft streets to bring Calcutta into line with even the old built-up sections of European cities.’ Since 1875, a British public health act had forbidden the building of any street less than 36 ft wide in the United Kingdom and most British towns insisted on a minimum of between 40 and 50 feet. In the second city of the British Empire, where there were roads at all, they were scarcely ever more than 20 ft wide and more frequently they were only 10 ft from wall to wall; and not one road in the entire city, British or native quarters, started in the middle and ran out into the surrounding country.

  For the two hundred and fifty or so pages of his report, Richards enumerated one defect after another. The tramways of Calcutta did not belong to the city, but to a limited liability company and there were no tram tracks at all across the Hooghly; Richards called this unprecedented, and pointed out that it was one reason why North Calcutta, on the East bank, was so fearfully congested. He suggested that one cause of overcrowded dwellings in Calcutta was a habit of settling litigation which happened neither in Bombay nor Madras. It was called the ‘partition suit’ and it meant that when two or more brothers quarrelled over an inherited property and took their quarrel to court, the court usually ordered that the house should be divided by partitions into separate habitations for the warring factions and their families; elsewhere, judges usually ruled that the property should be sold, if no agreement could be reached, with the money divided between the brothers. The former Chief Engineer pointed out that the dock sills at Kidderpore were not deep enough to take vessels of six thousand tons and above unless they had been partly unloaded first. He also strongly advised the city fathers to look to their accounts, for no great headway with their enormous problems could be made unless they substantially increased their revenue. He even compiled a table of towns and cities in India and Great Britain, so that Calcutta could compare its financial position with communities that were something less than second in the whole Empire. Part of it showed these figures:

  Rateable Average

  city Population Value Debt Rate

  Calcutta 896,867* £2,478,000 £2,951,294 12s. 9½d.

  Bombay 979,445 £3,217,000 £2,796,510 14s. 6½d.

  Birkenhead 131,000 £679,000 £2,227,000 39s. 6d.

  Bolton 182,000 £852,000 £3,852,056 31s. 11½d.

  Dundee 170,000 £975,000 — 37s. 4d.

  Manchester 720,000 £4,657,000 — 54s. 10½d.

  Throughout his report, Richards was taking Lord Curzon’s proud estimation of Calcutta at its face value. It was indeed the second city of the whole British Empire, and not merely in population. By the time Curzon’s former aide-de-camp Ronaldshay became Governor of Bengal in 1917, the seaborne trade out of Calcutta was running at £175 million a year. Richards was therefore insisting on comparisons in keeping with its substance and its status. He pointed out that, a few years earlier, Chicago had felt itself degenerating into a mess but that with a firm sense of purpose (and a population twice that of Calcutta’s) it had pulled itself together and become proud with reason again. He even ended his report with a series of helpful suggestions for making Calcutta more handsome after it had been made more habitable, with models taken from a number of great European cities. There was a picture of the Beethoven Square in Vienna, with its trained creepers, and Richards thought that eventually Dalhousie Square might look quite becoming with something similar. There was an illustration of the ‘tank’ in the Parc Monceau in Paris – ‘a good example of the artistic treatment of small artificial ponds’. Calcutta, he well knew, had a long way to go before it could afford to think of embellishing itself like that. He had found only one thing to applaud from start to finish of his report. With the largest water tank in the world, the city could, by 1914, be proud of its water supply.

  It is impossible to judge from his report whether Richards was extremely naïve, or whether he was writing with his tongue jammed into his cheek, when he challenged the British of Calcutta in their proudest assumptions about their city. Curzon’s claim clearly invited comparison at an international level, yet there is no sign that he or any of his local peers measured their second city of the Empire in any terms other than those of population statistics, trading returns and sovereignty over an enormous territory. Richards really was baying at the moon if he seriously thought that the Bengal Chamber of Commerce or the membership of the Bengal Club would lift a finger to prettify a water tank that no Englishman need ever go near from the moment he came to Calcutta to the moment he left. Nevertheless, in the next few years, certain of his submissions were taken up. A great widening of streets and cutting of roads occurred, and something approaching £5 million was spent in the process, though Calcutta still waits for the thoroughfare that will start in the city centre and finish up in the country.

  When the 1921 census was taken, the author of the official report o
n Calcutta’s progress in the previous decade remarked that ‘The city may have lost a few officials from the changes that have been made’ (with the shift of capital) ‘but otherwise it has been little affected.’ He also spoke of ‘the crying need for better communications, whether by tram, tube, electric railway or other means between the business quarters of the city and its immediate suburbs’. He further remarked that ‘In the localities of Barabazar, Bowbazar, Bentinck Street and Dharamtala, the Marwari community, the Chinese, Anglo-Indians and others live under conditions of overcrowding unimaginable until they have been witnessed, and are rack-rented to an extent far exceeding that to which the Bengali population or the better-class European population is obliged to submit.’ No. 10 Gas Street, he noticed, was a bustee with several hundred huts pitched behind its street front and a population of three thousand. Nor was this by any means unique. ‘It may be taken as a fact … that the accommodation offered in Calcutta to its population is about 1.8 rooms per family.’ At almost the same time a committee on the increasing industrial unrest in Bengal was reporting that between June 1920 and March 1921 there had been 137 strikes in and around the city; 74 of them totally concerned with grievances about pay, another 36 pressing for higher wages and other things simultaneously. In 1930, a report on the standard of living among jute mill workers in Calcutta showed that, judging by samples taken from six mills, 76 per cent of the working families were in debt by an average of more than two and a half times their monthly income, even though labourers were putting in a sixty-hour week.