Calcutta (12 page)

A few days ago, an elderly gentleman, at whose house my wife and I are invited periodically to lavish teas, phoned me about a column he writes for a local newspaper. He expresses his kind esteem of my work by checking out his sentences with me. “Tell me,” he said, “does this sound okay? ‘The cultural scene in the city has been disfigured by the huge presence of non-Bengalis.’ ” “What do you have in mind?” I asked, wondering if he thought the opinion too strong to commit to print. “Does the sentence sound portentous?” he said with concern. “And what about ‘cultural
scene’?” “You could change it to ‘cultural landscape,’ ” I said. He made the amendment at once. “Do you think you might offend those non-Bengalis you mentioned?” “I
want
to offend them,” he replied. “I have only a few years left to live, and there’s nothing I’d like better.”

*  *  *

The “non-Bengali,” here, is a euphemism for the Marwari; who is referred to slightingly in colloquial Bengali parlance as
Mero
. The Marwaris are from a province in Rajasthan called Marwar, migrants who moved to this city a century ago, and then, in the last twenty years, being naturally migratory, from the north of Calcutta to the smart bhadralok enclaves of the south. They’re often traders made good; they’re also from a community that has produced some of India’s great industrialist families. The Marwari is a mercantile type; much of the energy and activity in this wavering metropolis emanates from him. Although he now largely controls the economy of the city, he’s long been the object of satire in Bengali literature—often memorable satire. Rajshekhar Basu, who wrote under the pen name Parasuram, and was one of the great Bengali humorists and writers of the mid-twentieth century, has a Marwari businessman in conversation with two corrupt, pusillanimous Bengalis in an early story, “Sri Sri Siddheswari Limited.” The Marwari observes to his Bengali interlocutors, “As your Rabi Thakur said so well,
‘Vairagya sadhan mukti—so hamar naahi.’
 ” Parasuram is parodying many things here. Firstly, the Marwari’s Bengali—unrecognisable as Bengali and yet instantly recognisable as Marwari Bengali—a mixture of Bengali, Hindi, and even Maithili, the expansive North Indian vowels not only destroying the rounded modulations of the Bengali language (the product of post-Enlightenment politeness),
but killing a famous line from its most famous poet. The Marwari is (mis)quoting a Tagore poem: “
Bairagya sadhane mukti
,
sei path amaar noi
”—“Salvation through renunciation—that path’s not for me.” Tagore is making an important anti-romantic, anti-metaphysical statement:
I don’t wish to turn away from life. The physical, the earthly, are important. Desire, and the urge for life, are important
. Parasuram’s Marwari is, in his droll way, making an equally important point: that desire—albeit of a different kind; desire for material reward and well-being—is his chosen path and avowal. The businessman’s interest in Tagore, in Bengali culture, is insincere and even self-servingly creative; and the satire is particularly rich because Parasuram knows the laughter is two-sided—that he’s poking fun at the Marwari, and the Marwari is laughing at the Bengali; laughing, as the saying goes, all the way to the bank.

Grudging asides about Meros aren’t entirely taboo among Bengalis even today; although, increasingly, they make you nervous. However, in the changed scenario of the present, in the new “cultural landscape,” it’s safe to assume that Bengali jokes outnumber the Marwari ones. Yet even—perhaps particularly—genteel, educated Bengalis continue to sometimes make disparaging remarks about Marwaris. Paradoxically, there’s been no backlash against minorities in Calcutta since the violence of Partition; the long reign of the Left Front government has, probably, made Calcutta at once the most untenable and the least xenophobic of the major Indian cities—of, possibly, the major cities of the world.

*  *  *

A few years ago, around 2007–08, newspapers in Calcutta announced that Bengali was now spoken by only 37 per cent of the city’s inhabitants. People were shocked—or at least taken
aback—by the figure. Here, clearly, was proof that Calcutta was no longer a Bengali city. Besides, if ever a city—rather than a nation or state or province—had been synonymous with a language, it was Calcutta. Part of the reason for this was the significant decisions taken in the 1860s by writers—by the wayward (but great) poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt and the novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee—to abandon English early in their careers and turn to Bengali. To speak and write in Bengali from the late nineteenth century onward didn’t, where the bhadralok was concerned, exclude a knowledge of English; it implied it, irrefutably. Speaking Bengali in Calcutta seventy years ago was unlike speaking English in London at the time; that is, it was the tip of a multilingual iceberg, with Hindi, Urdu, and English almost as readily available as Bengali and its Eastern dialects, and the backdrop comprising Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Armenian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Tibetan, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Oriya, Marwari, Assamese. Of course, visitors who’ve spent a few months in Calcutta will begin to speak some Bengali, because in many ways it’s a language of the street and the offices and also of nooks, crannies, and recesses, of tea-tables covered with plastic, of friendships and confidences; and visitors, one imagines, gradually begin to make local friends, have conversations with neighbours, and exchange confidences. And yet, probably because it emerged from and was situated in a multilingual world, there has been no successful chauvinistic movement connected to the language. There was once a political party that called itself Amra Bangali (We Are Bengalis). They could’ve been something out of Parasuram: for his fictions can be at once dystopian and comical. The Amra Bangali gang went about in the early eighties blackening English-language signboards. Then, before they could mature from being a nuisance into a threat, they vanished.

Their job was actually accomplished in a more organised and far-reaching way by, paradoxically, the Left Front government. In 1983, under the CPI(M), English ceased to be taught at the primary level in Bengali-medium schools, for being an impediment to the progress of the less privileged who lived in a milieu that had little English. This ideological move, thirty years later, was seen to have been misled and not have benefited the disadvantaged classes and areas it was supposed to. It was reversed only in 2009. By then, the city had changed. It had entirely lost its aura of leadership (“What Bengal does today, India does tomorrow”: thus the famous but obsolete formula from the nationalist Gokhale, once frequently quoted by Bengalis, and today only invoked with bitterness). The ingenuous Rajiv Gandhi, visiting Calcutta in 1985 as prime minister, had inadvertently informed its inhabitants that it was a “dying city.” Out of the remnants of that city, and through a simple act of renaming, eventually arose a new one—without pedigree or history; large but provincial; inhabited but largely unknown—called “Kolkata.”

*  *  *

The Bengali language was at the centre of a moment of sudden self-consciousness in Calcutta in the nineteenth century, the stirring and arms-stretching of individualism, the “I” waking up from dormancy and sleep and speaking its name. What dreams this “I” had had in the meanwhile we can only guess at. The “I” also became the “eye,” open and looking at the world: and so, in Satyajit Ray’s film
Pather Panchali
, we’re first introduced to Apu, the boy, as an open eye. He’s pretending to sleep; his sister Durga shakes him; the eye opens; light floods in. That light is consciousness. It illumined, in nineteenth-century Calcutta, literature; the academic disciplines; the professions; science. And
the great names of that era contained radiance and illumination: Rabindranath—“lord of the sun”; his older brother, the idiosyncratic, gifted, elegant Jyotirindranath—“lord of light.” My own name, Amit, which means “endless,” has appended to it (by my father) a middle name I never use: “Prakash”—“light.” “Endless light.” Last month, as I write this, I met another Amit, much older than me, who too has a middle name, “Jyoti,” meaning exactly the same thing. “Amitava” is another name recruited for this purpose, a conjunction of two words, “amit” and “abha,” or radiance. The names of ordinary-looking middle-class men in Bengal were, for four or five generations, replete with illumination.

When I’d visit Calcutta from England in the late eighties and early nineties, soon after my parents moved there, I’d sense there was something amiss. Even from above, from the aeroplane window, it looked poorly lit at night, with large patches of dark, compared to the bright, intricate city I used to view from the sky as a child. If the plane was landing in the daytime, you noticed that the verdant fabric that surrounds the city, with epic watery inlets—West Bengal is very fertile—was now bereft of the poetry that used to excite me as a boy when I gazed downward. Even the low houses that came closer as the plane descended—entirely unremarkable, entirely mysterious—which once seemed to me as if there was everything going on inside them, now looked part of a location in which nothing happens.

What had changed? I think it’s to do with the decline and marginalisation of the Bengali language—through the disappearance of the bhadralok class; through the processes of globalisation—a language which, in its books, its poems, songs, stories, cinema, brought the city into being in the imagination. Calcutta is an imaginary city; it’s in that realm that it’s most visible and detailed and compelling. I remember the covers of my cousins’ Puja annuals
and of their collections of mystery stories, and the envy and inarticulate loss I’d feel upon studying them. But today? I turn to a snatch of conversation from the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s novel
Lanark
. “Glasgow is a magnificent city. Why do we hardly notice that?” asks a colleague at art school of the protagonist Duncan; who replies: “Because nobody imagines living here … if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

And this is largely true of this new, hazy, provincial metropolis, Kolkata, which came into being in 2001—and explains why we know so little about it.

*  *  *

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. Is this because we—cities and human beings—have contradictory lives that flow in and out of each other? To take away one or the other name is to deprive the city of a dimension that’s coterminous with it, that grew and rose and fell with it, whose meaning, deep in your heart, you know exactly.

In 1999, for a number of reasons, I moved to this city that would soon be without its name: though the official name-change hadn’t taken place. It was, to all purposes, already no longer Calcutta.

For one, I’d had enough of England—not just its weather, rain, and loneliness, but the things about it I’d grown to like: its television, newspapers, and bookshops. I’ve been discussing
names; and I can say that, in the new Britain of the nineties, many continued to carry old resonances, while they were actually being hollowed of meaning, emptied of what it was that made one thing—or name—distinct from the other. The most famous and striking example of this were the names of the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, or New Labour. They
sounded
like parties historically in opposition to each other; in reality, of course, they weren’t. The last great political war in Britain after the miners’ strike (which I’d watched agog for hours on television, as one of the first serially televised political upheavals) was the one between old Labour and New. The confrontations in the latter were less bloody; but its outcome was decisive. New Britain was a country of consensus. Names in the public domain that had meant different things now denoted shades of one thing. For instance, I recall a time when BBC 2 and Channel 4 had particular textures and shapes. A time came—I don’t know when, but it was in the late nineties—when I realised that, though those channels had the old, prickly names, the 2 and 4 always sticking out like a rebarbative angularity, they’d become no different from BBC 1 and ITV—which themselves had grown indistinguishable from each other, like heavyweight premier league football teams that always seem to be at war.

This happened also to English cities, towns, and villages—even to the distinctive connotations those generic appellations had. Once, on a coach from Oxford to Cambridge, half-nauseous because of the convoluted route, I noticed that every place we passed through (the coach doesn’t take the motorway as it winds through the midlands) had a Tesco’s in it and a Texaco outside it. This may seem too obvious today to mention, but then, in the mid-nineties, it was still a gradually unfolding realisation: that the idea of town, village, and city had become anachronistic. I felt, during that trip towards Cambridge, I had nothing left to
discover in England; not that discoveries were no longer possible there, but that I had little access to them. Around the mid-nineties, I went to a dinner at a ground-floor flat in Southern Avenue in Calcutta in the winter, and was struck by the paintings on the walls. The flat was Ruby Pal Chowdhury’s, of the Crafts Council, and her husband’s; among the things I noticed in its informal atmosphere was a beautiful clay bust of Mrs. Pal Chowdhury’s mother-in-law: very lifelike and singular, painted white. The elder, late Mrs. Pal Chowdhury seemed to have been, from the expression of the face, a remarkable person. “But it was made by an ordinary artisan from Krishnanagar—no one famous,” protested Ruby Pal Chowdhury. “And it’s clay … very vulnerable. A fall could break it, and a leak in the roof could destroy it.” She seemed suddenly protective, in the midst of that dinner, of the mother-in-law. She showed us a portrait done in oil by an English painter called Harris, who lived in this city for some years in the 1920s: it was unmistakably the mother-in-law again, a young woman, wearing a red sari, gazing into a book. In its stillness, it was less like a picture of a figure than of a vivid cosmological shape: of a new universe that had come into being—which, when you looked closer at it, became a young woman in a sari, reading. I remember thinking that, though Calcutta was now to all purposes dead, it possessed some secrets, and that there were discoveries for me to chance upon here amidst the deceptive nullity—which, for whatever reason, I could no longer in England.