Calcutta Page 33
By the time the penultimate British Governor of Bengal arrived in Calcutta in 1944, both province and city were in chaos. There was, of course, a war on, though Calcutta curiously missed any direct enemy action apart from a few light air raids which did little damage. On top of this, the famine had only just receded, and there had been half a century of civil disorder. But these events did not explain everything that Mr R. G. (later Lord) Casey found when he reached the city and was welcomed by leading articles which wondered whether the Bengalis had now become a colony of Australia. Anyone as close as he had been to the ultimately Sir Robert Menzies in an administration run from Canberra, was perfectly capable of caricaturing British ruling attitudes in some respects; but at least he had the gift of bluntness and didn’t much mind whose feet he trod on below the level of sovereign. Casey found that he had inherited a machine that ‘was bankrupt, as far as any government can be said to be bankrupt … For the last fifty years the Government of Bengal had been starved of money. The policy had been to keep taxation down to the minimum, with the result that the provincial revenue was wholly inadequate.’ The administration of the province and city, moreover, had evolved without any apparent design over a century or so. It had been originated to administer law, to maintain the public peace, to collect land revenue. ‘Bits and pieces had been tacked on to the system from time to time to keep pace with the increasing functions of government, but frequently the new bits had been attached to the wrong parts. Thus I found one department administering the strange alliance of Forestry and Excise under a secretary who had a full-time job in another department; another department dealt simultaneously with Education and Land Registration, also under a secretary with preoccupations in another department.’
Casey, unlike most men in his position before him, toured the bustee areas of the city and was appalled, as perhaps only an Australian (or a Swiss, or a Scandinavian) could be appalled by slum dwellings. He told an entourage of newspapermen ‘I have seen something of the way in which hundreds of thousands of the citizens of Calcutta are obliged to live. Human beings cannot allow other human beings to exist under these conditions … My only interest is that these conditions should be improved, and neither politics nor vested interests should be allowed to stand in the way. The people of Calcutta have the right to ask in six months time what has been done about it.’ What Casey himself did was to write a memorandum to Lord Wavell, such a document of candour as Viceroys had rarely been accustomed to receiving. ‘At some time in the past‚’ it said‚’ the British administration evidently decided that Bengal should be run on the minimum possible expenditure of public monies, very low taxation, and no expediture of loan monies for development purposes … Quite apart from any specific war-time burdens which have been thrown on the Bengal administration, there is the fact that the functions of government have changed very rapidly in recent years. In Bengal, the administration for generations has traditionally been concerned with law and order and revenue. It is only recently, and relatively suddenly, that they have been called upon to adjust themselves to coping with the full range of matters that concern a modern government, for which their previous training and tradition have ill-fitted them. In consequence, they are making rather a poor fist of things. This last criticism, I believe, applies perhaps with special force to the European members of the ICS on whom, in my opinion, the major responsibility for the administration of Bengal still rests … the risk is that if things go on as they are going on at present, we may well see the situation degenerate into something quite unpleasant, which we shall all regret … as near a breakdown as no matter.’
Just below this ramshackle apparatus of the Raj, and of necessity beholden to it at all times, was the even more suspect appliance of Calcutta Corporation, which by now was completely officered by Indians, even though a proportion of its councillors remained British. Six months after Independence was proclaimed, the new Government of West Bengal’s Biswas Commission began to investigate the Corporation and its workings, and eventually produced a report that was so damning to almost everyone who had come under scrutiny that it was never actually published. It had discovered, among many other things, that ‘the powers of delegation varied from time to time according to the whims and caprices of the Councillors, and reduced the Chief Executive Officer to a position of complete subservience, so much so that even in matters in which the Chief Executive Officer had statutory powers, individual Councillors had their way’. It outlined the history of Calcutta’s water supply, which even E. P. Richards had thought a matter of pride, but which was now a potential source of disaster and typical of every part of the municipal machine. Until 1820, British Calcutta had received its water from the bags of its bheesties, who had drawn from the Great Tank, Loll Diggy, in what was eventually named Dalhousie Square. The native community, of course, then fended for itself in the Hooghly or wherever else it might find water. But in 1820 Messrs Jessop and Co. had installed a small pumping plant at Chandpal Ghat, for lifting water from the river and into aqueducts which would serve the British quarter for seven hours a day, eight months in the year; in the remaining four months the Europeans, like everyone else, collected much safer rainwater. Filtered water was supplied from 1870, along cast-iron main pipes with a life expectation of a hundred years, and at the beginning it was designed to provide six million gallons a day for a population of 400,000; which was considerably larger than the European population of the city, substantially less than the total number of people there when it was installed. Twice this filtered supply had been extended or improved, in 1903 and again in 1923. The last extension had been made with an expectation of 1,300,000 people living in Calcutta by 1941; in fact, by then 2,100,000 were in the city and twelve months later the figure had risen to 3,000,000.
For what, only six months previously, had been the second city of the British Empire, this was not, therefore, a particularly well provided place. Nor was it a particularly luminous place, with only 9,000 electric lights, 19,000 gas lamps and 350 oil lamps. It was not a particularly wholesome place, with 4,371 bustees inhabited by more than one million people. It was not a very promising place, either, for the Biswas inquiry was to reveal about the Corporation more or less what R. G. Casey had discovered only four years earlier about provincial government, that ‘the finances are in a bad state and the administration full of abuses due to neglect of duty, corruption and wilful violations of the law. It would not be an exaggeration to say that financially the Corporation is heading for a disaster, and is unable to meet its necessary expenses. This inability is largely, though not entirely, due to maladministration …’ In spite of its vast built-in wealth, Calcutta was not – one way and another – the most splendid bequest the British might have made to their residuary legatees by the Hooghly.
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It is all much worse now, twenty-five years later. Things are so bad in almost every respect that it is not at all uncommon in Calcutta today to encounter an Indian, by no means a wealthy man, who affectionately remembers the years when the British were here, when the city was not quite such a frightful place and when some things appeared to work with a modicum of efficiency. He is not being quite just to his own administrators when he takes this charming view of old imperial relations, however, for part of this crumbling structure is the result of events over which they have had no control. The largest of these is the flow of refugees from East Pakistan, which began at Partition and which has continued with intermittent pauses ever since. Just over four million refugees came into the country in the first decade and threequarters of them came to West Bengal, perhaps a million to Calcutta itself, which is only thirty-five miles from the border. The city was so totally unprepared to receive this inundation on top of its already swamping mass of people that until 1956 there were nearly five hundred refugee families permanently encamped upon the platforms of Sealdah Station in the middle of the city; 244 of them were then shifted into some unemployed film studios in Tollygunge, another 217 into the godown of a disuse
d jute mill at Cossipore – and there they all remained for another decade. Another horde at once turned four of the city’s mosques into massive and communal doss houses. The flow was reduced to a trickle until a second great wave came from the East during the Indo-Pakistani war, and since then an average of 300 refugees a day have crossed into West Bengal, with occasionally larger numbers as some slight imbalance in Pakistani politics or religious sensitivity tipped more than usual on the road to Calcutta. In the middle of 1970 for a while there were up to a couple of thousand a day coming over, and it is possible that 60,000 entered West Bengal in the first five months of the year. Most of them came on foot, some poled themselves by boat down the Ichamati River, one of the larger watercourses in that muddy, swampy endlessness of the Ganga delta. A great number camped exhausted at Hasnabad in the 24 Parganas, where the railway platform, like the one in the city, has perpetually been lined with makeshift shelters to protect these people from the sun.
The Government in Delhi has committed itself to helping them by giving a small dole of money as soon as they have crossed its borders, by providing three blankets for each family, by finding milk for the children and the sick, by eventually producing a grant of cash so that the new citizens can rehabilitate themselves. But there has never been enough of anything to go properly round. Early in 1969 there were 1,300,000 refugees in West Bengal still waiting for their rehabilitation grants. For those who were still coming, the ones who survived the periodic outbreaks of cholera in the places where they first encamped on Indian soil, the ones who didn’t quietly die of exhaustion or lack of food in the same spots, there was very often nothing better to look forward to than the beggary of Calcutta’s already overpopulated streets. So many refugees have now come to this city from East Pakistan that students of Bengali have observed that the standard provincial argot of the streets has been slightly modified by their presence, with a fresh word here, a new phrase there, a subtle change in pronunciation throughout the vocabulary. Being Bengalis themselves, they have inevitably brought poets with them and one of these, Samsher Anwar, has written his own epitaph to the years of precarious sanctuary:
Under the frost-bitten, rain-marred lamp-post
I have stood here, deserted, for the last twenty years of my life,
Looking slantingly I have been watching the criss-cross game of sorrow.
I fear, having stood thus for such a long time, one day I will be murdered while asleep.
If one calls this fated picture History, then I accept History.
The creation and civilization that has grown beyond my existence has no meaning for me at all.
If I ever attach any meaning to a truth then it is
This Calcutta and my lonely bed.
Always there has been the prospect of more refugees flowing in one direction from East to West; for nothing like the exchange of Muslims and Hindus across the boundaries of the Punjab and West Pakistan at the time of Partition, which virtually cancelled each other out, ever happened here to any significant degree. And apart from the refugees, there has been the steady migration of those other hordes enticed by the basilisk wealth of Calcutta – in the ten years up to 1961 there were 24,000 of these from Western India alone, 5,000 from Assam, 16,000 from South India, 33,000 from Orissa, 71,000 from Uttar Pradesh, 183,000 from Bihar, 168,000 from elsewhere in West Bengal. Even if none of these people had reproduced themselves several times over, Calcutta would by now be in an awful mess. As it is, the city faces catastrophe partly because of their deadly lack of birth control.
The Indian Government over the past few years has invested enormous sums in its birth control programme, and there are calculating men in Delhi who will assure you that at last it is beginning to have an appreciable effect. There has been an engaging campaign of propaganda throughout the republic to persuade people that two children are respectable but that three are a menace. Elephants have paraded with the message. It has been displayed on the backs of buses. All over the country, the inverted red triangle and its beaming family of four has symbolized moderation even to the illiterate; you see this sign in gigantic poster form above the ghats at Benares, and half the trees in Orissa have been placarded with it. All forms of control have been advocated from time to time, so that a commuter with a civic conscience has been able to drop in for a vasectomy at a clinic on Bombay railway station en route to the office, while a pair of newly-weds in Kerala have been liable to receive the nation’s gift parcel of 144 condoms neatly packed among all their other presents. In West Bengal, it is said that 433,000 men were sterilised in a couple of years recently. Yet it is typical of Calcutta’s awful capacity for wasting its resources that, although the red triangle may well be displayed on some of its walls, the symbol’s most noticeable appearance is on the back of the local telephone directory, where it can only engage the attention of those least in need of its message. A gloomy man might well think that even at its most effective the birth control programme, which didn’t start until 1967, has come far too late to save Calcutta from itself and its people. The city’s population had already trebled between 1921 and 1961 and nothing that a state pledging itself to democracy can do is going to prevent more people arriving, even if they don’t reproduce when they settle here. The lack of homes was bad enough in 1952 for judges to be tut-tutting when they had to pick their way between the five hundred or so employees who by then were permanently living in the corridors and upon the verandahs of the High Court, with their belongings scattered all round that Gothic monument. Even at that stage, two decades ago, they could have hoped for nothing better.
Any one of those five hundred men would presumably have been glad to occupy something in the area which ‘consists of two rows of houses with a street seven yards wide between them; each row consists of what are styled back and front houses – that is, two houses placed back to back. There are no yards or out-conveniences; the privies are in the centre of each row, about a yard wide; over them there is part of a sleeping room; there is no ventilation in the bedrooms; each house contains two rooms, viz. a living place and a sleeping room above; each room is about three yards wide and four feet long. In one of these houses there are nine persons belonging to one family and the mother on the eve of her confinement. There are forty-four houses in the two rows … in the centre of which is the common gutter, or more properly sink, into which all sorts of refuse is thrown; it is a foot in depth. Thus there is always a quantity of putrefying matter contaminating the air.’
The first sentence betrays the origin of that description, which is far removed from Calcutta. It comes from the pen of William Rayner, medical officer for Heaton Norris, Stockport, and it is part of Edwin Chad wick’s report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring population of Great Britain, which was presented to Parliament in 1842. From start to finish, if it is stripped of purely local terminology like references to 'back and front houses’, Chadwick’s report can be. read as a document on the living conditions of the labouring population of Calcutta and district in 1970. Consider, for example, Mr Howell on the London parish of St Giles in 1842: '… upon passing through the passage of the first house, I found the yard covered with night-soil, from the overflowing of the privy, to the depth of nearly six inches, and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dry-shod; in addition to this, there was an accumulation of filth piled up against the walls, of the most objectionable nature; the interior of the house partook something of the same character, and discovering, upon examination, that the other houses were nearly similar, I found a detailed survey impracticable, and was obliged to content myself with making general observations … I am constantly shocked beyond all endurance at the filth and misery in which a large part of our population are permitted to drag on a diseased and miserable existence. I consider a large portion, if not the whole, of this accumulation of dirt and filth is caused by the bad and insufficient sewerage of the metropolis.’ All that might have been said with almost perfect accuracy of Howrah today, with its pop
ulation of half a million and not a sewer between them.
Nor is the menace of the bustees, and the disease that comes from them, a threat only to Calcutta and its people. When experts from the World Health Organization were here in 1959, after a particularly bad outbreak of cholera, they discovered that although only just over a quarter of the population lived in bustees, something approaching half the cases of cholera in the city occurred in these slums. When they wrote their report they went on to remark that 'the Calcutta area still forms the starting point for a long-distance spread of cholera. In the central part of this area (situated along the banks of the Hooghly River and the two canals arising from it) are located the terminals of the two principal railway systems which connect Calcutta with the rest of the country, and it is along their routes that the spread of the infection appears to occur … In India, the region of endemic cholera falls within the State of West Bengal with its nucleus in Greater Calcutta and dominantly in the bustee population, ill provided with even elementary sanitary facilities. The cholera situation has great significance not only to West Bengal and all of India, but to the world at large.’
The Hooghly itself bedevils Calcutta here, almost as much as the city’s primitive sanitation. The WHO report pointed out how alarmingly it had declined over the years as a source of water that was both drinkable and safe. The earliest pumping station at Chandpal Ghat was supplemented forty years later by a larger plant at Palta further upstream. At approximately the same time, the Ganga began its notorious change of current towards the River Padma and the sea, and a by-product of this was the gradual creation of a sandbank between the mainstream and the River Bhagirathi, which itself flows into the Hooghly. It meant, eventually, that fresh water from the Ganga slopped over the top of the sandbank and downstream towards Calcutta only for the four monsoon months of the year when all the watercourses of Bengal were swollen with rains. It has effectively reduced the Hooghly almost to the condition of a long trench, blocked at one end by the sandbank, open at the other to the sea, with its contents merely sloshing backwards and forwards for two thirds of the year. The result is that sea water is gradually creeping higher and higher up the river. By 1940 the salt content of the water pumped out of the Hooghly at Palta had risen to 380 parts per million of chlorides (the generally acceptable level for drinking water being 250 parts per million). By 1959 it had gone far beyond the tolerable limit for human consumption, to 2,480 parts per million. This was not a consistent level; it depended upon the state of tides. But even when they were juggling with tidetables and pumping plant, the engineers at Palta in 1959 were unable to supply Calcutta with water at any time containing less than 800 parts of salt.