Calcutta (33 page)

THE
time to enjoy the claustrophobic sensations of the most crowded place on earth is during a religious festival. On any day of the week you will encounter more people than you think you can possibly have met before if you go down to Kalighat. It is a hazardous business driving a car along the last few streets before you get there, for they are generally choked with pilgrims, with beggars, with sadhus and with people whose business is to attend to the dozens of slatternly hotels and restaurants that surround the shrine; for there is money attached to religion in India, just as these things go hand in hand anywhere else in the world. In Calcutta, not only are twenty-five new temples illicitly created each year to provide persons unknown with a substantial
competence
in beggary and alms (according to a Corporation which prefers to licence such places and collect a revenue itself) but at Kalighat there regularly appears a particularly awe-inspiring figure on the mercenary landscape; he puts the better-looking class of pilgrim into a trance under the guise of spiritual exercises, obtains their address and their keys while they are thus
preoccupied
, and rifles their premises while they are communing with the goddess.

The shrine itself is as intimidating as Kali. This is possibly the only Hindu temple in the city a non-Hindu would never dream of trying to enter. So you stand by the railings and watch the pilgrims climb the steps beneath the brightly painted eaves, brushing past the garlands of marigolds and the strings of
tinkling
bells as they go, bearing their small gifts of sweetmeats and spices upon fresh green leaves for Kali, gently encircled by the drifting smoke of incense. Then you observe the block in the courtyard, at which each day a goat or a sheep is beheaded in blood sacrifice; and you remember that just occasionally Kali still accepts a human sacrifice – fourteen throughout India since the
beginning of 1967, that are officially recorded, though none of them, as it happens, was in West Bengal. So you turn away with a shiver and watch more pilgrims splashing merrily and ducking themselves with religious rhythm in the sand-coloured waters of Tolly’s Nullah.

Something like that is going on all the time, at every temple across the city. And all the concentrated fervour, all the press of people, all the spectacular and colourful strangeness of it, all the beggary and the bickering that goes with worship, is magnified by many multitudes on a festival day. West Bengal is very strong on such occasions. There are twenty full public holidays here, ranging from Netaji’s birthday in January to the annual closing of bank accounts at the end of December, and on top of them come days when employers must release religious minorities, like Christians and Buddhists, for ceremonies of their own. There are communal occasions like Holi, when people slosh coloured water over each other and hurl bags of coloured powder around the streets and Calcutta becomes very giddy with delight. There is a day when everyone takes time off to celebrate the birth of Guru Nanak, who founded the Sikhs. On Bengali New Year’s Day, as many as possible make for the Dakhineswar temple, a rambling shrine set among palm trees by the riverside a mile or so above the Howrah Bridge; and there, businessmen and
shopkeepers
in particular take their new account books and their little images of Ganesh, who looks after their interests as well as those of writers. There are three days in January when pilgrims from all over India come into the city and sail by steamer for Sagar Island, a few miles beyond Kedgeree, where the Hooghly is fifteen miles wide and rushing into the sea; infants used to be thrown to sharks here, to propitiate the gods, but now there is mass bathing by up to half a million instead, and nothing more terrible man the occasional capsized boat and half a hundred drowned.

Yet none of these festivities compares to the four days each October of the Durga Puja. Durga is Kali’s alter ego, a
matriarchal
figure rather than a terrible one. She had always been there, of course, lurking in the shadows behind the fearsome Kali, she had always been celebrated, but she was not invoked as
the object of Bengal’s most powerful cult until the composer of
Bande
Mataram
, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, represented her as the image of Motherland at the start of the twentieth century. At almost the same time the Swami Vivekenanda and his closest disciple, Sister Nivedita (who was Irish and known to her family as Margaret Noble), were urging Bengalis to consider the lessons of Kali in a contemporary setting; both were invoked for nationalism, but whereas Durga was for pure symbolism, Kali was for destruction. Kali is by no means a back-number in
Calcutta
now, but she has been far outstripped by Durga in popular esteem.

All year hundreds of men at Kumartuli have been preparing for Durga Puja in their sheds and workshops. Here, in a few streets alongside the river in North Calcutta, is the district of the idol-makers; there must be many thousands of images in
preparation
at any time, to Lakshmi, to Ganesh, to Kali and even (unless your eyes deceive you) just here and there among the more homely stuff, to Father Christmas. But by far the biggest
quantity
is always in the smiling image of Durga; no more than a bundle of straw tightly packed into shape to start with, but men with projections of lath and cane, and then with grey clay added and smoothed most delicately and thickly along the manifold arms and legs. The whole thing is painted in the brightest colours when finished and nothing exhibited at the Blackpool
Illuminations
or along Regent Street at Christmas was ever half as
magnificent
as some of Durga’s images that come, larger than life could possibly be, from the ramshackle sheds of Kumartuli. People compete to produce the biggest and the most dazzling idol in their part of town, in their street, in their block of flats, so they do not flinch from the cost of bartering with the craftsmen.

As Puja approaches, the shopkeepers of Calcutta go dotty with offers of ten per cent discounts on all purchases, while some people prepare to leave town for a holiday. But most stay, while the Corporation workmen string fairy lights along the outlines of public buildings, illuminate a couple of trams, and make ready to put out the fires when people accidentally set their Durga stalls alight. For the next three days and nights people rush about in funny hats, inspect the Durgas one after another, listen to
drummers thumping their way along the exhibits, spend a handful of paise to watch an indigent student sit in a
whitewashed
garage with twenty-five king cobras, pick each other’s pockets, knock each other about when discovered, and generally fall around laughing. There are prizes for the committee which has produced the most sumptuous pandal, with Durga
surrounded
by other god-figures, perhaps, in which even her consort Siva is consigned to a secondary and admiring role. And while Puja is on, Calcutta will not seem such a desperate place after all, there will be renewal in the fairy-lit air, and the promise of hope and better things to come.

But on Dasami, the fourth day, something perfectly terrible happens. With evening well on its way, it seems as if the entire city has gone down to the river, standing so thickly along Strand Road and upon the ghats that anyone arriving just before dusk will be lucky to catch a glimpse of water. Lorries begin to appear, bringing Durgas from all parts of Calcutta, together with the people who have worked and saved to make their Puja as find and spectacular as the last. Each of these groups take their Durgas down to the water very gently and with reverence, bobbing her smiling face up and down on their shoulders as they go, making her marigold garlands swing and sway in the lamplight. They put her into the Hooghly and give her a push and soon the river is teeming with scores of gaudy goddesses, floating and
foundering
in the direction of the sea. Eventually the crowds turn away from the Hooghly and this time they are not so gay. The days of rejoicing are over for another year, leaving behind them images of perfection which have been cast away with the everlasting prodigality of India.

Yet however much is colossally wasted in this land, in this city in particular, it is always replenished. However many people die here, there are always many more to take their place. It is said that the very biggest crowd to assemble with a sense of
purpose
in Calcutta, did so in 1955 when the Russian leaders
Bulganin
and Khrushchev visited the city. Mr Nehru, the Prime Minister, (an uneasy man that day, for he had a political
tightrope
to walk between East and West, and Russian technicians in Delhi were coincidentally and ostentatiously offering to build
India a brace of coveted atomic reactors) said that he believed the meeting of welcome on the Maidan was the biggest ever held in the country. The newspapers talked of two million people, and it may have been so. Apart from congregating on the Maidan, they thickly lined a route from Dum Dum to the Raj Bhavan which had been decorated with twenty-four massive ceremonial arches, one every quarter of a mile. Lamp posts had been painted silver, and when the Russians finally reached the city centre they found that every Government building had been freshly colour washed, that the towering Ochterlony Monument had been
festooned
with lights. They very nearly didn’t arrive because of the crowds. Their car was stopped several times after leaving the
airport
because people were pressing too close, and the enthusiasm was so great that at one stage there were fifteen extra and strictly unofficial passengers aboard. Finally, the long-suffering vehicle broke down under weight of numbers (as many a local bus has done since) and the Russians completed their triumphal entry into Calcutta quite hidden from view inside a police van. After they had taken pan from the Governor, after they had doffed their straw hats to the people once more, and after five hundred pigeons had been released across the Maidan, the rest of the day’s programme had to be abandoned, simply because of Calcutta’s impossible enthusiasm and its even more impossible numbers.

Its crowds can be much more alarming than that, even when they are infinitely smaller. These are the people who refined Gandhi’s technique of passive resistance by numbers beyond a crafty weapon of offence into an instrument of wicked, torture called the gherao. The gherao began as a form of industrial action when labour relations had become strained. It meant that if an employer refused to submit to the normal pressures of workmen for the improvement of their wages or conditions they would, quite literally, surround him. Whether he was in his office,
walking
down a corridor, crossing the factory yard or simply
preparing
to drive home in his car, a mass of men would appear and stand round him; they might or they might not jeer at him, but they would not touch him; the thing that mattered was that the employer could not budge without their permission or until police could be summoned to get him out of that intimidating
mob. The gherao was so effective in obtaining results that it has been extended to cover every situation where one man can yield anything imaginably required of him by a number of men; teachers have been gheraoed by their students, tax collectors by their debtors, bus drivers by their passengers; even a judge has been gheraoed by witnesses at a judicial committee of inquiry. Men have collapsed half-dead from exhaustion and dehydration in Calcutta after being gheraoed in the blazing sun for the best part of a day by perpetually fresh mobs operating a shift system.