Calcutta (66 page)

1 Calcutta 1971 – A crossing along Chowringhee, always congested and always with an armed guard for the policeman on point duty; for this is a perpetually violent city.

2 Two of the most impressive monuments to British rule. Lord Curzon was responsible for building the domed Victoria Memorial. An officer of the Bengal Engineers copied the Bell Harry Tower of Canterbury Cathedral when he designed St Paul’s Cathedral (in the foreground).
Two men who have helped to make Calcutta what it is,

3 Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prizewinner and most glittering member of a highly talented and influential Bengali family.

4 Jyoti Basu, leader of the CPI(M), and the most powerful communist in India.

5 The lawn – and patient service – at the Tollygunge Club. A focal point of the enormous wealth that has been accumulated in Calcutta.

6 Ochterlony Monument on the edge of the Maidan; focal point of political rallies.

7 Visiting wealth is likely to spend the night in the Great Eastern Hotel. On the pavement outside, a handful of the thousands who have to make do with something less comfortable.

8 A slum of makeshift shanties by a suburban railway line. A commonplace of Calcutta today. Some of the one million refugees who have come to the city from East Pakistan since 1947 have been living in conditions like these ever since.

9 Poverty does not necessarily mean filth. Wherever you go in the city you see people washing all day long – as often as not at broken stand pipes in the gutters.

10 Park Street Cemetery, the ultimate mausoleum to the Raj. Thackeray’s father is buried here, along with Walter Bagehot’s father-in-law, Fanny Burney’s half-brother, a son of Charles Dickens, and scores of other Empire builders.

11 The ultimate poverty. Some people cannot even afford to burn their dead, so they slip the body into the Hooghly and, a few days later, dogs are seen chewing over a floppy, almost rubberized thing, which by some mysterious chemistry has been bleached almost totally white from head to toe.

12 The voice – and the mood – of Calcutta in 1971. From one end of the city to the other walls are now covered with slogans like these.