India (47 page)

This Indian architecture, more disdainful of the people it serves than British Indian architecture ever was, now makes the most matter-of-fact Public Works Department bungalow of the British time seem like a complete architectural thought. And if one goes on from there, and considers the range of British building in India, the time span, the varied styles of those two centuries, the developing functions (railway stations, the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, the Gateway of India in Bombay, the legislative buildings of Lucknow and New Delhi), it becomes obvious that British Indian architecture – which can so easily be taken for granted – is the finest secular architecture in the sub-continent.

Calcutta, more than New Delhi, is the British-built city of India. It was one of the early centres of British India; it grew with British power, and was steadily embellished; it was the capital of British India until 1930. In the building of Calcutta, known first as the city of palaces, and later as the second city of the British Empire, the British worked with immense confidence, not adapting the styles of Indian rulers, but setting down in India adaptations of the European classical style as emblems of the conquering civilization. But the imperial city, over the 200 years of its development, also became an Indian city; and – being at once a port, a centre of administration and business, education and culture, British and Indian style – it became a city like no other in India. To me at the end of 1962, after some months of Indian small-town and district life, Calcutta gave an immediate feel of the metropolis, with all the visual excitement of a metropolis, and all its suggestions of adventure and profit and heightened human experience.

Twenty-six years later, the grandeur of the British-built city – the
wide avenues, the squares, the attractive use of the river and open spaces, the disposition of the palaces and the public buildings – could still be seen in a ghostly way at night, when the crowds of the day had retreated to their nooks and crannies, to rest for the restless vacuity and torment of the new Calcutta day: the broken roads and footpaths; the brown gasoline-and-kerosene haze adding an extra sting to the fierce sunlight, mixing with the street dust, and coating the skin with grit and grime; the day-long cicada-like screech, rising and falling, of the horns of the world’s shabbiest buses and motor-cars. The British-built city could still be seen, even in this ghostly way, because so little had been added since independence; so little had been added since 1962.

Energy and investment had gone to other parts of India. Calcutta had been bypassed, living off its entrails, and giving an illusion of life. Certain buildings in central Calcutta seemed to have received no touch of paint since 1962. On some walls and pillars – as on the walls and pillars of buildings awaiting demolition – old posters and glue had formed a tattered kind of papier-mâché crust; you felt that if you tried to scrape off that crust, you might pull away plaster or stucco. The famous colonial clubs – the Bengal Club, the Calcutta Club – were in decay, and Indians now moved in rooms once closed to them. Decay within, decay without: Calcutta in some places had a little of the feel of an abandoned Belgian settlement in central Africa in the 1960s, after Africans had moved in and camped. Camped: it was the word. At independence, with the partition of Bengal into Indian West Bengal and Pakistan East Bengal, there had been a very big movement of refugees from the east. They had camped where they could; they had clogged up large areas in and around the city. And since then the population of the city had doubled.

There was no room by day on the streets or in the large sunburnt parks. There was no place to go walking. You could drive very slowly along a dug-up road and through the crowds to the Tollygunge Club, and there you could go walking on the golf course. But the drive was exhausting; and the drive back, in the kerosene-and-gasoline fumes, undid the little good you might have done yourself. People told you that up to 15 years ago the streets of central Calcutta were washed every day. But I had heard that in 1962 as well. Even then, just 15 years after independence, 16 years
after the great Hindu-Muslim riots which had marked so many memories, people were looking back to a golden age of Calcutta.

The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. And – though the circumstances were fortuitous – when the British ceased to rule, the city began to die.

One of the people I met in Calcutta in 1962 was Chidananda Das Gupta. He worked at the time for the Imperial Tobacco Company, later known less provocatively as the ITC. Because he worked for such a grand British company, Chidananda was one of the select and envied group of Indians known as ‘boxwallahs’.

These boxwallahs represented in their own eyes a synthesis of Indian and European culture. They were admired and envied by Indians outside the group because their boxwallah jobs were secure, in addition to being, with the British connection, a badge of breeding. The salaries were very good, among the best in India; and – to add to the boxwallah superfluity – there were company cars and furnished company apartments. And the work was not hard. Any firm a boxwallah worked for more or less monopolized its particular field in India. All that was required of a boxwallah was that he should be a man of culture, and well connected, an elegant member of the team.

Chidananda had another interest. He loved the cinema, and was one of the founders of the Calcutta Film Society. It was at the Calcutta Film Society that I met him one evening. And 26 years later I was to be reminded – by Rajan, the secretary, who had told me his story in Bombay – that at the end of that evening Chidananda had entrusted me to him, asking him to see me safely back to the guest house of the drug company where I was staying. No memory had stayed with me of Rajan, to whom this easy intercourse with film people and Bengali men of culture at the Film Society had come as a joy, a glimpse of a Calcutta far sweeter than the one he knew. Of the society office I had the merest impression: a dim ceiling light in a small room full of old office furniture. Of Chidananda I carried away a boxwallah picture: a slender moustached man of forty in a grey suit.

Chidananda didn’t last at ITC. He became a film-maker and writer; that became his career, and it took him away from Calcutta. Twenty years or so later, as a semi-retired man, he had come back
to Calcutta. He worked for half the week as editor of the arts pages of
The Telegraph
newspaper. The rest of the week he lived at Shantiniketan, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and patron saint of Bengal.

Shantiniketan was two and a half hours away by train from Calcutta. Chidananda was building a house there, living in the house while it was being built around him. I went to see him there one Sunday.

What did I know of Shantiniketan? I thought of it as a poet-educationist’s version of Gandhi’s Phoenix Farm in South Africa: something connected with the independence movement, and at the same time a protest against too much mechanization: some idea of music, of open-air classes, of huts as lecture halls: something Arcadian and very fragile, depending on a suspension of disbelief and criticism, and something which – since I hadn’t heard about Shantiniketan for a long time – I thought had faded away.

I travelled up in the air-conditioned lounge car of the Shantiniketan Express. It was arranged like a drawing-room with sofas and arm-chairs. Its decorative motifs were Buddhist, and one railed-off part of the car might even have contained a shrine area: a reminder of the Buddhist faith in the regions to the north. I was the only passenger in the lounge car; this explained the fearful price the bell captain of the Calcutta hotel had paid on my behalf. But the effect of luxury was absent: the lounge car was used as a sleeping room by lower railway staff, and three of them were snoring away on sofas.

The land was rice land, the level, treeless land of a delta, with green and brown fields. The green fields were full of water, with rice plants in different stages of growth in different fields. In some fields seedlings stood in the water in bundles, like little stooks, before being planted out in rows. The fields that had been reaped were brown and dry; sometimes stubbled, sometimes cleared and ploughed; sometimes with spaced-out mounds of darker, new earth, to revive the soil, waiting to be ploughed in. Water was being lifted in many different places from field to field, sometimes by electric pumps, sometimes by means of a long, flexible sleeve, lowered by hand into a field with water, then lifted and poured into the other field. Every kind of activity connected with the growing of rice was to be seen on this wide, flat delta: this went on for mile after mile, and it was hard to understand how there could
ever have been famine here. But then, near Shantiniketan, the land began to dry out, began to look like flat desert, and unfriendly.

Chidananda was at the station to meet me. Twenty-six years on, we were like actors coming on in the third act of a play, exiting young at the end of act two, and reappearing with powder or flour on hair and eyebrows. He was in casual Indian clothes (and not in the grey boxwallah suit my memory had fixed him in), and he had an old Ambassador car. It was far cheaper to run here than in Delhi, he said; that was one consideration when he had decided to move to Shantiniketan.

The short lane leading out of the station was a tangle of cycle-rickshaws. The car was the intruder here, Chidananda said. There actually was a special railway stop for Shantiniketan, but the people of Bolpur, the stop before, insisted that everyone going to Shantiniketan should get off at Bolpur, to give their trade to the local bazaar.

We got out into the open after a little. There were trees. Many had been planted by the university, Chidananda said, and they had helped to increase the rainfall. The shade, too, was nice; but still it was dusty, very dusty. There were no university mud huts now, just ochre-washed concrete houses. We passed the Shantiniketan temple. It was a hall of pleasing proportions, self-consciously un-ecclesiastical. But it was of its period. It had pierced walls and panes of coloured glass, and from the road it looked Edwardian, and a little gaudy.

Chidananda showed some of the houses Tagore lived in when he was at Shantiniketan. Tagore, Chidananda said, became bored very quickly with a house, and liked to move from house to house: the poet’s privilege, the founder’s privilege, and perhaps also the self-indulgence of the Bengali aristocrat. I had some feeling as well of the great man licensed or at play in Shantiniketan: there were some university buildings that Tagore had designed himself, attempting a blend of Asian motifs, Hindu, Indian, Chinese. Strange to consider now, the romanticism and self-deception behind that pictorial idea; yet at the time there would have been passion mixed up with the play, the need – against the old and apparently enduring glory of the British Empire and Europe – to assert Asia.

Chidananda’s unfinished house was at the edge of the university area. The house, of brick, was to be on two floors. The ground floor was almost complete; about three months’ work remained to
be done on the upper floor. The land around the house was open on three sides. Chidananda had chosen the spot for the privacy and the silence and the fresh air, none of which could now be had in Indian cities. But the main reason why Chidananda had come to Shantiniketan was that – with all its changes: it was now a university like any other in India – it was connected with the special Bengali culture he had grown up in. The soil was sacred to him, as it was sacred, though in a different way, to the simple Indian tourists who came. These tourists came, not because they knew the poetry or the work of Rabindranath Tagore, but because they had heard of him as a holy man, and it was good to visit the shrines of such people.

Chidananda’s father had been a preacher for the Brahmo Samaj all his life. The Brahmo Samaj was a kind of purified or reformed Hinduism which the father of Rabindranath had elaborated in the 19th century. It was an attempt to synthesize the New Learning of Britain and Europe with the old speculative Hindu faith of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It was a direct development of the ideas of Raja Ram Mohun Roy of Bengal (1772–1833), the first modern Indian reformer and educationist. The quality of men like Roy and the elder Tagore cannot be easily appreciated today, when the goods and inventions of Europe and America have changed the world, and simple people everywhere have to make some accommodation to the civilization that encircles and attracts them. In the late 18th and early 19th century Europe, in India, was less a source of goods. In the static conditions of Indian civilization at the time – with all its pressures towards old ways, old virtues – it required exceptional intellectual power to recognize the new gifts of Europe.

Chidananda said, The Brahmo faith brings together the essence of the Upanishadic teaching and some Christian forms. Such as a form of service – a service on Sunday morning and Sunday evening. You would sit in pews in the larger churches, and there would be a pulpit. The service would alternate between spoken rituals and prayers, and hymns, many of which were written by Rabindranath Tagore, some by his father. It was Rabindranath’s father who devised the mode of the service. The Brahmo separated Upanishadic monotheism and the thought of a universal spirit, which was formless, from Puranic Hinduism – idolatry, many deities, mixed with animism, casteism. It believed in the education of
women and the ideals of democracy, and the abolition of the caste system.’

This was the faith that Chidananda’s father served all his life. The decision to do so came to him at an early age.

‘My grandfather used to take my father to the Sunday service of the Brahmo Samaj from the time he was ten years old. This was in the town of Chittagong, now in Bangladesh.’ Chittagong: now associated with the poverty and natural disasters of Bangladesh, but to the Portuguese poet Camoens 400 years ago one of the fairest cities of rich and fertile Bengal:
Chatigão, cidade das milhores de Bengala
.

‘At fourteen my father decided he wanted to become a Brahmo. My grandfather had never foreseen such an outcome, and he was outraged. My father left home one night. He literally walked and – to use a modern term – hitchhiked, on bullock carts and boats, to reach Shillong up in the hills, 500 miles away. In those days there was still quite a living tradition of wayside hospitality. My father told me he would walk or go by bullock cart all day, and at evening he would go to the nearest house and ask for shelter for the night, and it would be given.