Calcutta (2 page)

There have been other critical moments in the past decade or so. The political machinations of West Bengal have continued in the fashion of the sixties, always tortuously, often
incoherently
, sometimes violently. The period of president’s rule ended with a state election in 1971 which produced a coalition
government
of eight parties led by a Congress man. Twelve months later the Corporation of Calcutta was effectively suspended, its elected representatives removed, its functions henceforth
discharged
by the state government. In 1975 the political life of the whole country was thrown into turmoil as a result of the emergency powers adopted by Mrs Gandhi’s government in Delhi, and insurrection against those powers was as great in Calcutta as it was anywhere; likewise the Delhi government’s response to insurrection. The prisons of West Bengal became as crowded as ever they had been during the most repressive days of the British Raj. But when, in 1977, the Prime Minister submitted herself to general election (a democratic act which her adversaries, axe-grinding opportunists almost to a man, had insisted beforehand to be quite beyond her), she paid the price for her authoritarian regime in West Bengal as elsewhere in India. Not only did the state return its tally of her opponents to the New Delhi parliament; in its own domestic elections it handed power, with a colossal majority, to a Left Front
government
– yet another medley of parties, but one dominated by the CPI (M). And so Jyoti Basu, whom I had last seen as the power behind the throne on which sat a bewildered Ajoy Mukherjee, came into his own as Chief Minister of West Bengal.

It was his Calcutta, in most senses, to which I returned in the spring of 1981. I had flown down from Patna to a Dum Dum airport which was cut off from the city, with no buses or taxis plying for hire, because a strike had been incited by the Basu government in protest against a faction which had just been demonstrating roughly against its rule. Some citizens had been killed and, that weekend, a dozen tramcars were displayed on the Esplanade, to show what the enemies of the people were capable of in their resentment of the people’s willed
administration
. The smashed windows of the trams and the bodywork scorched by firebombs were testimony enough to the vicious course anybody’s resentment may take in Calcutta. To that extent, nothing had changed while I was away. Provocations, reprisals, politicians playing extravagantly to the gallery,
consequential
strikes and attendant uproar were still the order of the day. So, thank God, were all the things that have always redeemed the nasty facts of life in Calcutta. The warmth of people and their astonishing vitality were also as I remembered them.

As was their ability to charm the outsider with some
ididsyncrasy
of their own which can make him giggle and be moved at one and the same time. My old lodgings on Wood Street having disappeared in favour of some flats, I stayed at the Great Eastern Hotel – as Kipling stayed when he was in town – one of the great social landmarks of British rule. It has long since been transferred from private hands to those of the government of West Bengal; which means, at the moment, that it is run by Communists. I chose the Great Eastern not because of the imperial connection
per
se
, but because I have a taste for
bygones
which have survived unexpectedly in the modern world. There is much in the Great Eastern that qualifies for my custom in this respect, from the old-fashioned plumbing to the little mosque which Muslim members of the staff have created in an annexe to the boiler room. Above all, there is the
inscription
which decorates the window of a textile shop near the hotel’s reception desk. There, in gilded letters curving in
low-relief
above the imperial crown, are the words ‘By appointment to HM the King Emperor and HM the Queen Empress’, which the employees of communism were still polishing assiduously every day, thirty-four years after independence had been achieved. I beg the government of West Bengal never to
discontinue
this eccentric task. The act of preserving that fragment of history is much more their glory than ever the inscription itself referred to ours.

But, as I found out in the next few days, changes
had
been wrought to the Calcutta I had fondly but anxiously left in 1970. The entire length of Chowringhee was sorely disfigured by a deep trench, whose outcrops also made a mess of Park Street and other adjacent thoroughfares. This was the excavation for the underground railway which, one of these days, will run beneath the city all the way from Dum Dum to Tollygunge, the first thing of its kind on the sub-continent. Calcutta’s
desperate
need for better systems of transport had been tackled in other forms, too. Those poor old Leyland double-deckers, which in their rattletrap way may yet outlast the company that made them, had been reinforced in my absence by a fleet of
smart-looking
minibuses, splendid additions in every respect apart from the fact that tall passengers who must stand are obliged to do so in a prehensile stoop. On the Hooghly I found
diesel-engined
ferryboats rumbling back and forth where there had been nothing like them before. A mile or so below Howrah Bridge, what’s more, two concrete arcs were springing towards each other from either bank, due to join up in a magnificent new suspension bridge for road traffic in 1985.

A degree of salvation – and one dare not hope for an
improvement
of Calcutta by more than degrees across long periods of time – has come to the city by way of its river, which always was the key to its fortunes. In 1975 the great barrage at Farakka was completed, a few miles from the border with Bangladesh, in up-country Bengal. There have been periodic wrangles since about the proportion of Ganga water which shall be allowed to flow past Farakka into Bangladesh, and what may run down into the Indian Hooghly. But Calcutta has certainly been well served by the engineering up there, as the accumulated silt of half a century and more has been flushed downstream towards the Bay of Bengal by the increased flow. The depth of navigable water is greater now between Kidderpore Docks and the sea, though the Hooghly will always be a treacherous river for ocean-going ships. Nevertheless, in the twelve months before my latest visit, some 700 vessels had brought their trade right into the heart of the city, a figure that hadn’t been heard of for donkey’s years. And that is quite apart from the numbers which dock at Halida, fifty-six miles nearer the sea, where the new port would be flourishing at last if international commerce weren’t in such a bad way, for it can accommodate the largest merchantmen afloat. Not only has Farakka caused those who forecast the death of Calcutta as a port to brighten it up; it has also done its bit to improve (just a little) the local
drinking-water
supply. The pumping station at Palta was in a state of collapse when I first saw it, corroding under the high salinity of the Hooghly’s sluggish ebb and flow, but now it has been fettled, and fresher water is going through to the taps and
standpipes
of the city beyond.

It would be crass to assume that such advances as these mean that a great new dawn is coming Calcutta’s way. The plight of most of its millions remains much as it was when I tried to describe it in the pages that follow. The Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, which has evolved from the gallant CMPO, has tinkered with some bustee defects, but its resources are overstretched and a third of the population still live in
bustees
. Until these are gone, if ever they do go, there is no excuse for anyone to make a song and dance about the basic living conditions of Calcutta. But obviously the deepest pessimisms of 1970 have been lightened a shade or two by what has happened since. I myself underrated Calcutta’s enduring capacity for survival in the face of difficulties that might destroy the will to survive in a civilized fashion in any western community of size that I have known. This is a variation of the most common failing of the westerner when contemplating India, based on the assumption that what is valid in his part of the world is or ought to be equally true on the sub-continent. It infrequently is.

I should have known better. I rejoice that Calcutta persists in ways that make us, its devotees, grateful always to refresh ourselves at its sometimes stained fountains. I am glad I picked the right word to symbolize what I felt then, what I feel still. Again … Zindabad!

Gayle, 1983

No traveller from the West is completely prepared for his first experience of India. Whether he flies into the fiery dawn of Bombay or Delhi, as he frequently does, his senses will at once be shocked and stimulated and confused by the strangeness of his new landfall. He may have inklings of what to expect but he can never have more than that, for everything that is about to happen to him is on such a scale and of such magnitude as to defy and almost to dissolve all his careful anticipation. He may have been entranced once by the queer and exotic doings of snake charmers, fire eaters and gulli-gulli men at sundown in the great square of Marrakesh, which will have seemed a marvellous
spectacle
especially organized for the benefit of tourists. In India the traveller discovers that such things can be customary processes of living. He may believe that he has sighted the utmost poverty in the cave dwellings and hovels of Southern Italy or Spain. In India he realizes that this was not so, and mat something
infinitely
worse goes on and on, hopelessly and terribly. The traveller’s confusion and the sick feeling he begins to detect in the pit of his sensitive stomach is liable to be increased, moreover, if he happens to be British. For in all this confusion and this riveting strangeness he becomes aware of things as faintly
familiar
as an old coat of varnish, or a forgotten diary discovered one traumatic day under the dust in the box room. These consist of ways some people have of doing and saying things, of a sign manual casually observed upon a building, of a lingering and homely style inextricably mixed up with all the oddness. They make the traveller fairly blink with recollection as he struggles with some fresh encounter mat he suspects he has had some place before. And men one day, while he is still astonished by his landfall, he takes plane again and flies on to the East; for there, he has heard, lies the ultimate in this weird and marvellous and awful experience.

If he has disdained the services of Indian Airlines and boarded someone else’s Boeing, he finds that some of his reflexes have
disturbingly
changed. He spends much of the next three hours
pondering
the comforts of travel by international jet-propelled
aviation
. He toys with his glossified meal, complete with dainty salt and pepper shakers and real quill toothpicks wrapped in
cellophane
; and he catches himself wondering just how many
thousands
(possibly millions?) of dollars were spent in devising and developing the plastic sheet whose frictional surface is intended to stop his share of hors d’oeuvre sliding off the tray and into his neighbour’s lap. He relieves himself of a few uncomfortable thoughts in the lavatory aft, where Pan American have
thoughtfully
provided handcream and soap (both by Morny) and
aftershave
lotion (by Onyx); all done up in small attractive packages which invite the traveller to pocket them, for there are plenty more where they came from and he’s welcome. He chooses, perhaps, the mouth-wash instead, for a bitter little flavour has been
coming
on and he likes to make his landfalls nice and clean. Thus revitalized and refreshed, he takes his aerial passage across India, until the warning lights go on and the stewardess hopes he has enjoyed his flight and he knows he is coming to earth again.

As the Boeing flexes its wings in descent, the traveller begins to observe the details of a landscape which has changed
somewhat
since his taste of Bombay or Delhi. There the ground seemed barren and burnt from the sky but here it looks wonderfully fertile. The predominant colour is green, sometimes vivid and deep, sometimes nearly yellow, but always the promise of growth. And there is water: water in craters, water in canals, water in lakes and, just over there, a great gleaming swamp of saturated fields with what looks like chickweed floating on the top between the dykes. A city appears, enormous and sprawling around a wide brown river which has shaped itself in a dog-leg and which has ships hanging at anchor. Silver oil tanks sparkle in the piercing light but there is a haze of smoke over the city which renders a range of high dockside cranes as an indistinct thicket of industry and a vast row of factory roofs as a rusty sheet of
corrugated iron. It could almost be Liverpool on a sensational summer’s day. But as the Boeing cants over and skims even lower above the gleaming swamp and past the lunar grey of some gigantic reclamation from the waters, the traveller knows it is no such thing. For there are palm trees here and a brown man coaxing a black bullock along a straggling road and, gracious me, a dazzlingly white Early English church tower poking up from jungle. Then the plane is down, and as it bounds and sways along the runway, the traveller notices that he is about to
disembark
at a spanking international airport, as new as Prague’s, as inviting as Rome’s. He blinks yet again, and wonders whether rumour has lied once more. For he has come to Calcutta. And everything he has heard about it sounds quite remarkably
unpleasant
.

This, he has been told, is the problem city of the world, with problems that not only seem insoluble but which grow every day at a galloping and fantastic rate. This is where nearly eight million people exist, who will have become more than twelve millions by 1986 if the estimates of population experts are
correct
. Only Tokyo, London and New York contain more people man this and scarcely any of them have a conception of how things really are in the thirty-mile length of Greater Calcutta alongside the Hooghly River. Calcutta is merely said to be the place where thousands (or is it millions?) sleep on the streets at night. Where the poverty is so dreadful mat everyone who knows it throws up his hands in horror and turns his back on it. Where there is violence and anarchy and raging Maoist Communism. All this is true. It is also true that Calcutta is not only the largest city in India but commercially, industrially and intellectually the most important. It is the richest city in India. And,
paradoxically
, set in one of the most ancient cultures known to man, it is one of the youngest cities in the world. Henry Hudson had dropped anchor off Manhattan and begun the history of New York eighty-one years before Job Charnock pitched his tents on the East bank of the Hooghly and made a start on Calcutta; Maisonneuve founded Montreal half a century earlier. What the traveller finds there today is therefore the creation and the legacy of the British.