Kolkata, 2011
Book Details
Amit Chaudhuri
CALCUTTA
Two years in the city
307pp. Union Books. £16.99.
978 1 908526 17 5
Decay, disrepair and other forms of dying that stand between an old city and its future
SIDDHARTHA DEB
It is quite possible these days, while travelling along the back streets of the capital city of West Bengal, to hear a succession of political speakers, each addressing a small audience from a small podium, referring to "Didi", or "Big Sister" . Omnipresent, perhaps even omnipotent, Big Sister appears on billboards all along the roads connecting the new airport to the city, wearing glasses and looking nerdy when she's promoting information technology, displaying a soft smile and holding a flower when referring to the environment and, in a gesture copied from the quasi-leftist government she dethroned in 2011, pointing sternly at the sky when inviting people to join her at a political rally.
This is Mamata Banerjee, the current chief minister of West Bengal, though the city she is presiding over seems to have almost no antecedents in what existed before. When she took over from the Left Front government (which had until then won every election in the state for thirty-three years), Calcutta had already, in the kind of blowback chauvinism common in globalized India, been renamed Kolkata. But Banerjee's rise confirmed not only the arrival of the new urban space called Kolkata, but also a definitive end to the city that had existed prior to it. As Amit Chaudhuri writes in his first fully fledged work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two years in the city: "This city – Kolkata – is neither a shadow of Calcutta, nor a reinvention of it, nor even the same city",
Nor does it bear anything more than an outward resemblance to its namesake, Kolkata: the city as it's always been referred to in Bengali. I myself can't stand calling it any other name but "Calcutta" when speaking in English; just as I'll always call it "Kolkata" in Bengali conversation.
Chaudhuri's reservations about the new city might seem surprising. Growing up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spending much of his youth in England, he moved to West Bengal only in the late 1990s, when the transformation of Calcutta into Kolkata was already under way. Yet it is his refusal to embrace the change as well as his considered nostalgia for aspects of the old city that gives his book its subject as well as its particular shape and texture. Initially unwilling to write about Kolkata, especially since he has captured the old Calcutta – or its genteel, upper-class environments – in his fiction, Chaudhuri conducts an elliptical investigation of the city's transformation through a series of loosely linked essays. The earlier essays in the book are narratives, or reportage, as Chaudhuri sets out to learn how the other half – actually, the vast majority – lives. By the end, this journalistic impulse has given way to the anecdotal, memoiristic mode that Chaudhuri prefers. The strongest moments in the book are when his eclectic, free-ranging critical sensibility and taste for personal reflection meet elements in the city that reward the oblique approach rather than a direct inquiry.
"The Calcutta I'd encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity", Chaudhuri writes, contrasting the city favourably with the Bombay he grew up in, and finding in Calcutta "whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful". The green slatted French windows to be seen in old buildings in the city, a design imported in the late seventeenth century when the French were as much a contending colonial power in the region as the British, are emblematic for Chaudhuri of Calcutta's modernity. They became widespread over the centuries, he tells us, appearing as backdrops in oil paintings and to the urban life of the modern Bengali bourgeois, the bhadralok. It was the bhadralok too, with their absorption of different, oppositional cultures – the Indic and the Western as well as the Bengali and the English – who helped create the distinctive urban texture that made Calcutta feel both immensely Bengali and incredibly cosmopolitan.
Still, the rise of the bhadralok did not mean that the process of amalgamating Eastern and Western ways was without friction. At one end of the spectrum, just before the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, there is the poet Ishwar Gupta writing about the imported ritual of the English New Year. Gupta's verse ("Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté . . . ), with its freely borrowed English words, can't be compared, Chaudhuri writes, to "the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class". It has an edge to it, a ribald mocking tone. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Ingabanga, the tennis-playing, knife-and-fork wielding aspirants to Englishness such as the Mukherjees, an elderly couple to whom Chaudhuri devotes a chapter, in which he describes their ritual of high tea as they and most of their kind decline in a city that seems to care nothing for their imported, outdated refinements.
By the end, the Mukherjees, described with nuance and empathy by Chaudhuri, are seen selling off their jewellery and furniture. They belong to the past, much like the pair of green French windows Chaudhuri purchases from an old building about to be demolished. When he can find no place for the windows in his modern flat, they end up on a wall, windows leading nowhere. And as go the Ingabanga and green French windows, so does Calcutta, its project of modernity turning out to be a dead-end, displaced by this new thing called Kolkata, a city without a past and, perhaps, without even a future, uninterested in the promise of modernity and settling instead for its position as an outpost of provincializing globalization, a waystation between Dubai and Bangkok.
Chaudhuri is keenly aware that part of the promise of modernity in Calcutta was that it allowed you to walk down the city's streets aware of the overlapping of the past and present and to be invigorated by their different vantage points. "By the early eighties", however, "the death knell of modernity was being sounded everywhere. Calcutta was one of the great casualties of that passing . . . . Without the transformative effect of the imagination, decay is just decay, disrepair plain disrepair." It is a kind of dying that Chaudhuri observed in England of the 1980s and 90s, where "the idea of the town, village, and city had become anachronistic", and that, with globalization, would become a phenomenon all over the world, the sheen of glass replacing the light and shade of shuttered windows.
But it was not just the co-existence of past and present that gave the modern city that alluring, quickening quality observed by thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Marshall Berman. The appeal was in past and present in conjunction with the future, which involved politics and was always potentially (and sometimes actually) transformative. It is no accident that the most appreciative interpreters of modernity in the Western world have tended to be heterodox Jewish Marxists. It was this presence of politics, Benjamin reminded us, that produced, along with the poet and the flâneur, the detective, the police spy and the revolutionary in the city streets.
Chaudhuri makes an effort to engage with politics early on in the book, noting Calcutta's origins in colonial plunder as well as the postcolonial turmoil that gave birth, in the late 1960s, to the ultra-left movement called Naxalism. But this engagement is scattered and uneasy, manifesting itself most strongly in attempts to understand the electoral defeat of the Left Front by Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool ("Grassroots") Congress. His visits to far-flung electoral stations or his interview with a Left Front minister on the eve of elections don't develop into an understanding of what these things might have to do with modernity, unless it is in the idea that the betterment of the rural poor was by its very nature antithetical to modernity, and that the Left Front, in its half-hearted commitment to the villages, destroyed Calcutta and, eventually, itself. Writing of Jyoti Basu, the Left Front Chief Minister from 1977 to 2000, Chaudhuri seems to reiterate precisely such an idea, noting that under Basu, "agrarian, rural Bengal finally, and astonishingly, received justice in the late seventies and early eighties, as peasants and sharecroppers were empowered . . . under him, Calcutta became an abandoned and unimportant city".
The idea that Calcutta's decline is to be blamed on the empowerment of the rural poor and militant unionization among the urban working classes had become widespread among the city's bhadralok even in the late 80s, a time when the Left Front appeared to be unassailably in power. More than two decades later, this interpretation has been absorbed into the larger narrative of neoliberalism popular among both Indian and Western elites, resulting in a kind of rote repetition of how communism in West Bengal – and socialism in India – known for nothing but violence, inefficiency and corruption, were replaced by the liberating power of the free market.
But this simple before-and-after narrative obscures many facts. Although the Left Front was indeed thuggish, especially in its later years, this is true of the Congress government that preceded it and of the Trinamool Congress one that has taken its place. Violence has been endemic in Calcutta from the time of its foundation, when the fiat of the East India Company empowered loutish young men from Britain to go about forcibly collecting taxes from the peasantry, all the way to the twentieth century, when the famine of the 1940s killed between 3 and 4 million people, followed by the upheavals of Partition, Naxalism and the liberation war in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Given this catalogue of violence, it is not surprising that the shape of Calcutta's evolution was always a highly contested matter. For a while, it was known (and indeed, admired around India, if not among the elites) for its culture of public protest, which included arson as well as demonstrations, and which expressed, along with the disturbing propensity for violence, a demand from the streets to be taken seriously by the exploitative, predatory hierarchy being nurtured in the city and in the nation at large. This dual characteristic, the easy recourse to violence but also the emancipatory energy of radical politics, especially Naxalism, was clearly visible to those writing about the city into the 90s. It is strongly discernible in Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta: The city revealed, 1971 (surprisingly, the last major work of non-fiction in English on the city until Chaudhuri's book). Even V. S. Naipaul, far less sympathetic to popular movements, shows a degree of engagement with the idealism of radical Calcutta in his chapter on a former Naxalite in India: A million mutinies now (1990).
Many of the reviews of Chaudhuri's book have taken him to task for not making more of a point about the depredations of the Left Front and the wonders of the new Kolkata, where housing developments and malls sited on old factories indicate the final liberation of the city from the barbarians formerly at its gates. But the idea that Calcutta failed because of the prevalence of leftist politics in the city ignores how inbred and insular the bhadralok had become, and how, like the larger Indian elite to which it belonged, it had begun to turn its back on questions of social justice. By the 80s, its ideas of modernity had become a pallid mimicry of Western consumerism, in sharp contrast to the multitudes swirling in and around the city, many of whom came from the same rural areas and provincial towns in which Naxalism had grown up.
We can see the lingering traces of that transformative potential in the encounters Chaudhuri has with marginal figures, especially at the beginning of the book, where his own privilege and their precariousness collide. The people he meets are mostly migrant workers, some of them children, many of whom sleep on the city's broken pavements. Others live on its outskirts, like Baby Misra, whom Chaudhuri meets begging with her son Jitender and whom he takes to a pharmacy to buy medicine and to treat Jitender to a meal. In allowing himself to engage with these characters, and in acknowledging that they are characters, Chaudhuri unleashes a process that he cannot entirely control and that contrasts powerfully with later sections where, when discussing domestic help, itinerant hostesses and sushi chefs, he appears too comfortably settled for his social critique to have any bite.
In restaurants, or in his home, or even in his car, Chaudhuri is hemmed in by his bourgeois status, caught up in the logic of a transaction. But when meeting the migrants on the street, on his own, open to the chance encounter, he becomes the flâneur, both powerful and vulnerable, subject to the modernity that he loves so much. The process forces on Chaudhuri a sudden reconfiguration, where instead of the wife and daughter he usually lives with, he has acquired quite a different family, as do Baby and Jitender, whose labourer husband and father is back in his village, a place whose name Chaudhuri confesses he cannot quite make out.
A moment of promise and heartbreak, this encounter is of course made possible by the remnants of the old city in the new, by the presence of its narrow streets and footpaths and its still unregulated flow of people. The dominant fantasy of Kolkata, however, is to be more like Dubai or New York or New Delhi, the underclass pushed to faraway, isolated clusters, from where they will come in to work on buses and on the subway. Old buildings and neighbourhoods will have to be torn down, the streets widened into multi-lane roads no human being can cross on foot, while the middle class will retreat into apartment complexes and the rich to villas patrolled by armed security guards. But it may be that this fantasy, too, has run its course, especially in a world caught up in one financial crisis after another. Kolkata, whose awful tropical weather is being given a new dimension by the vagaries of climate change, may never become a favoured urban centre for world oligarchs. It may be condemned to remain a second-rate provincial city, populated by a parvenu bhadralok class and some version or other of Didi. Yet it is also possible that some other constellation of urbanity and modernity may emerge there, drawing from its emancipatory, radical past as well as from its uncertain future.
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