Calcutta (30 page)

Where the Bengalis did not dirty their hands was when they were upper-caste landowners, refusing to till the soil in person. Unlike most men of their status and position throughout India, they maintained that manual labour was degrading. They had usually obtained their land after long service and good conduct as some kind of officer (a khan, maybe, or a chowdhury or a sarker or a mazumdar) working for the Mogul Emperor. One of the biggest such landowning families were the Subarna Roy Chowdhurys, the leaseholders who sold the first three villages
of Calcutta to the Company for Rs 1,300 current coin of that time; it was they who in 1809 replaced the original temple at Kalighat with a new one and it was Subarna Roy Chowdhurys again who gave old Loll Diggy its name in Tank Square by pouring red dye into the water (and thus making it Lai Dighi) as an act of gracious patronage during the colourful Holi festivities. People such as this were the original bhadralok of Bengal, who became so respectably refined in the changing times of India, carefully avoiding the dialect and coarse speech of the lower castes while embracing eagerly the best of Western culture as it was made available to them, that they became even more
alienated
from their own people. They would boast, eventually, that their activities in the nineteenth century were as much as
anything
destroying the class structure of traditional Hindu society and they would then await the applause they felt this claim deserved. In fact, apart from making things hot for the British, they had merely achieved some demolition of the barriers
separating
the upper three castes of Bengal. By the time the British removed their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, it was not not only men of the ICS who regarded this Bengali
élite
as headmen in ‘a despotism of caste, tempered by matriculation’. It was a
Bengali
periodical which wrote one day ‘These irreligious,
luxury-loving
beggars are the creation of English education. The
country
and society have nothing to do with them. The mass do not know them, neither do they care for the mass. By virtue of their begging through the Congress they secure high posts, start
subsidized
papers and try to win fame and respect in the country.’

Education (and its by-products) has been prized in Bengal more obviously than in other parts of India. Calcutta University has recently been described as the world’s largest degree-granting factory, which it probably is; at the same time it is almost
certainly
headquarters for the most aggressive student population on earth, and the principals of Berkeley, the Sorbonne or the London School of Economics, who doubtless feel they have a hard time from undergraduates these days, can count themselves lucky not to sit where a succession of Bengali Vice-Chancellors have been for the past few years. Yet the university symbolizes something more (and conceivably even more extensive) than
revolutionary anger and mass-produced qualifications. If you go up College Street you find yourself in what might well be the biggest second-hand book market in the world. It is not just College Street itself which contains one shop after another full of literature, for perhaps half a mile, together with stalls full of books and pamphlets on the pavements over the same distance; the same goes for ten or a dozen streets round about. Much of it is printed in Bengali or other Indian scripts but, at the very least, half of this treasure comes in Western typefaces. Nor is it all by any means examination fodder. You can poke around many of these shops and find one genuine and purely pleasurable old edition after another; and the bookseller will be well content with your company and your chatter about books long after he has realized that this time he is not going to make a sale. He and his fellows are perhaps the only tradesmen in town who will leave you alone if that’s how you prefer to be. They are part of a climate that is as inseparable from Calcutta as the monsoon.

There are far more poets in this city than there are novelists in Dublin, and a much bigger difference is that in Calcutta the writers have usually at least put pen to paper. You can see a lot of them every weekend on the Maidan, generally in groups of twenty or thirty, holding a Mukta Mela, which is a kind of
cultural
jamboree in which poets recite their verses to each other, composers sing the ballad they have just finished, artists discuss their most recent brushwork and lots of people simply roll up to listen, for the whole thing is entirely informal. On any night of the week there will be much music in the city; an East German ensemble sweating their way through Schubert in the Max Muller Bhavan for the wealthy, perhaps, but in many places there will be recitals on sitar and tabla, at which office clerks will sit rapt and intoxicated with understanding while someone
thrillingly
executes the major raga Jayjayanti (and if his thumri has some nice alamkarik combinations, so much the better). There will be extravagantly-staged Bengali theatre, depending upon symbolic gesture almost as much as Peking opera. There will be much cinema. This is the city of Satyajit Ray, after all, though it probably values him less than do Western connoisseurs and has lately taken to heaving bricks at his cameras whenever he tries
to film on location in Calcutta; for there is much professional jealousy in the film world and here politics enter everything and Ray, like the Frenchman Louis Malle, has been unacceptably realistic in his artistic responses to Calcutta. Nevertheless, it esteems the cinema and produces much film, even though more often than not this provokes the local critics to begin their
newspaper
columns; ‘So it goes on: one incompetent Bengali film after another that is neither minimal art nor more than minimal box office.’ But creation is everything here.

This urge has produced more publishers in Calcutta, it is said, than in all the rest of India. They sometimes operate from small back rooms which probably accommodate half a dozen members of the family at a time, as well as the man of literature. And so great is the clamour of other men of literature to get their thoughts and observations into print, that such a publisher
sometimes
makes quite a modest living from launching books of 28 pages and 1,500 words (complete with source notes) on serious topics at two or three rupees per copy. No author of a thumping bestseller in the West ever put more of himself into these small classics. One of them begins with the dedication ‘To the Memory of my Beloved Cousin Chirantan Bhattacharya, a Sergeant of Calcutta Police Knocked Down Dead by a Fleeing Lorry on 28 October 1965’, and there is a verse to go with it. Then there is a foreword. Then comes a preface; ‘In 1958, on request of my friend Sitangsu Chatterjee, I contributed a series of articles on DeRozio to the
Radical
Humanist
. Since then many a friend of mine has been urging upon me to bring them out in the form of a booklet. I have been in search of a publisher for all these years and at last find him here … My publisher looked through the manuscript by chance and practically snatched it away from me for publication. Words can hardly express my gratitude to him.’ Then comes the book proper.

This great local pressure to execute and create for yourself, in whatever way you can, perhaps accounts for the fact that even the very best artists in Calcutta, like Jamini Roy with his delicate linear paintings, and Meera Mukherjee with her metal sculpture rooted in ancient traditions which she is gradually restoring to her people, find it difficult to sell their works in a place which is
not always stuck – even inside the plaintive Bengali community – for the odd rupee; that and the fact that most of the rich in Calcutta do not often wish to know about Bengali culture. Yet the Bengalis are so proud of this side of themselves that they will quite solemnly assure you, and believe it to be true, that one of their scholars had translated Moliere into their tongue before ever the English heard him in theirs. Nor do they fail to point out that the three Nobel prizes so far associated with India were each awarded for work done in Calcutta. The most cherished, naturally, is the one Rabindranath Tagore won for his verse epic
Gitanjali
in 1913, for that was Bengali through and through. But the city’s first honour from the Nobel committee came with Sir Ronald Ross’s medical prize in 1902 for making that
breakthrough
in malaria, up at the Presidency Hospital with his
servant
Mahomed Bux. And though C. V. Raman was a Madrassi, he collected the physics prize in 1930 for discovering some
important
thing about the diffusion of light while he was occupying a professorial chair at the university here. These are scarcely coincidences. Calcutta has always been better provided with intellectual facilities than anywhere else in the country. Above all, it has evolved an atmosphere for perpetual cerebration, even if much of its thinking has often been wildly and extravagantly impractical.

It has been persuasively argued that the Mutiny failed in
Bengal
as it did nowhere else in Northern India because not only had local nationalism (which has frequently taken precedence here over Indian nationalism) not at that stage focussed on a political objective, but because the natural leadership in Bengal was obsessed with acquiring whatever advantages the British could give them; that whereas in Delhi people thought of
expelling
the foreigner and establishing Indian government, in
Calcutta
the educated were content with assuming equality and sharing in administration. One Bengali poet, Iswarchandra Gupta, even went so far as to celebrate in verse the victory and the retribution of the British when they recaptured Cawnpore from the mutineers. The tide turned against the British in
Bengal
very largely because of the appalling behaviour of these badly-frightened foreigners in Calcutta and elsewhere after 1857;
and because the education which the Bengali
élite
acquired and sought from their Western teachers was bound to promote a fervent desire for freedom, being based as it was precisely on those values. The first effective thing the educational apparatus of
nineteenth
century Calcutta did for the Hindu Bengalis (from whom the bhadralok exclusively came) was to draw them far ahead of the Bengali Muslims in power and influence. The Muslims,
having
been dethroned in India by Westerners, were not inclined to embrace Western values until their pride had started to heal again by the beginning of the twentieth century. Significantly, of 2,738 college students in Bengal in 1881–2, only 106 were Muslims; only 8.7 per cent of the 44,000 high school students were Muslims in that year; while in 1871, the Bengal
Government
service was officered by 60 per cent Europeans,30 per cent Hindus and only 4.5 per cent Muslims.

The Bengali’s pantheon, therefore, is stocked with Hindu figures who were invariably Westernized to some degree, who were usually wealthy or landed or both (these being caste marks of the bhadralok), who spoke passionately of freedom from the beginning, who did not at first speak against the British with great hostility, but who progressively can be seen in more
rebellious
attitudes until they are out for downright revolution against the Raj. Education was not totally monopolized by the
bhadralok
; mere was, for example, the low-caste blacksmith Panchanan who was employed by the printer Ward at Serampore, where he became skilled in making typefaces, though not as skilled as his son-in-law, who eventually cut type for fifteen oriental languages, including a Chinese fount with 43,000 characters in it; and there was Ram Camul Sen, a village boy who became a clerk’s assistant in the Magistrate’s Court and then rose on his native brightness and his friendship with Horace Wilson to a managing post in the Hindoostanee Press and a fortune of Rs 1 million. But the prototype godling of Bengalis remains Rammohan Roy, who came from a bankrupt zamindari past, who made his own
fortune
, who unfashionably denounced suttee, who was so
enamoured
of freedom-fighters that he broke his leg while rushing up on deck to catch his first sight of a French tricolour in
Cape-town
Harbour when he was sailing to England in 1830, and who
– Hindu that he was of sorts – was eventually buried amidst Graeco-Doric monuments at the Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol.

Not many of these men were as besottedly Anglicized as the poet and playwright Michael Madhusudan Datta, a quaint and overwrought figure who crammed most of his output into a couple of years towards the end of the Young Bengal period and the start of the real renaissance. He based most of his work on Hindu mythology, though he became a Christian at one stage and he composed both in Bengali and in English. But while he used his native traditions he gloried in something more distant. He would claim that two thirds of his work derived from Greek artistic inspirations; he hailed Milton as divine and he once wrote to a friend; ‘Here you are, old boy, a Tragedy, a volume of Odes, and one half of a real Epic poem! … If I deserve credit for nothing else, you must allow that I am, at least, an industrious dog …’ Today, in Calcutta, where men of letters and culture talk, they still refer to him as ‘Michael’; or, rather more often, as ‘poor Michael’. But they give Keshub Chandra Sen his full name, for he still demands a very full respect. He went to
England
, like many other Bengalis of that age, and there he told them that Tou cannot hold India for the interest of Manchester, nor for the welfare of any other community here … If England seeks to crush down two hundred millions of people in this glorious country, to destroy their nationality, to extinguish the fire of noble antiquity and the thrill of ancient patriotism and if England’s object of governing the people of India is simply to make money, then I say, perish British Rule this moment.’ That was in 1870, and the English were so impressed by his style and competence if not by his sentiments, that they devised a small test for Keshub Chandra Sen one day, requiring him without any warning to lecture to them upon the subject of ‘O’; which he promptly did for the following hour.