Struggling to make ourselves understood in a modest convenience store in the small Sicilian township of Nicolosi on the way to Mount Etna, my wife and I were relieved to be rescued by a woman who not only spoke English but had heard of Kolkata. That was gratifying. The context in which she knew the city was less gratifying. “Ah, Mother Teresa!” she exclaimed before translating for us.
The recognition point used to be the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’. Now it’s Mother Teresa. What concerns me more is how none of this reputation ever percolates into the smugness of Kolkata life. The Bengali conviction that Lenin predicted the road to world revolution lay through Kolkata — which isn’t corroborated anywhere! — was part of the self-important myth-building. Disregarding Bengali impoverishment, our politicians indulge in flights of rhetoric about the supposed spiritual and cultural supremacy of a State that now probably lags behind Mr Nitish Kumar’s Bihar.
Thirty-four years of Left Front rule saw all decision-making authority transferred from Bengali hands so long as traders from outside kept the Marxists in funds. Cut off from exposure to world trends and developments, Bengali poets and writers eulogise the city, and painters endlessly capture its street scenes. Singers who warble about Kolkata’s 300 years as if that is an ancient heritage don’t realise that it’s very small change so far as cities go. We don’t have to venture as far as London, Paris and Athens. Our own Varanasi, Madurai or Agra boast much longer lineages.
On a discussion panel once with the film director, Mrinal Sen, I heard for the nth time the stale old story of how a local constable engaged some famous French cinema director — perhaps Jean Renoir who created The River — in a long intellectual conversation. The story is repeated ad nauseam because of our pleasure in impressing a European — that complex is about the only point on which I would agree with the Press Council chairman’s latest inanities. But constables of the era in which the interaction is said to have taken place were by and large muscular villagers of very little education from Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, ‘Hindustanis’ in colloquial Bengali.
If an educated young Bengali capable of discussing French cinema did join the police force, it was because of the State’s dire employment situation. It is still dire. Absorption in the past, in Rabindranath Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose, and savouring what Bal Gangadhar Tilak said about Bengal, doesn’t create modern economic progress.
A few educated Bengalis in another town in Sicily, Modica, with historic churches, flights of steep stone stairs and expensive rows of shops, mingle with Bangladeshi hawkers. The latter are illegals who have trickled into Sicily by way of north Africa, Greece and Cyprus; the former are ‘sponsored’ domestic servants.
I responded to Mrinal Sen by quoting the German Nobel laureate, Gunther Grass, who spent six months in Kolkata in the 1980s and wrote “Why not write a poem about a bloody great mess that was dropped by god and called Calcutta. About how it throngs, smells and lives and gets ever bigger.” A more blunt Grass quotation I read was that god shat and the shit was Kolkata, god shat bricks and the shit was Frankfurt.
The British who created Kolkata were no less scathing. Robert Clive regarded it as the most corrupt place in the world. It was Rudyard Kipling’s “city of dreadful night”. Winston Churchill wrote to his mother when he was a young soldier that he was glad he had visited Kolkata for he would never have to do so again. VS Naipaul describes it as a city without a future. “All of its suffering are sufferings of death. I know not of any other city whose plight is more hopeless.”
His brother, Shiva, a gifted writer who died before his talent fully unfolded, was furious with Kolkata’s reverence for Mother Teresa. She had made the city a metaphor for destitution and degradation, he stormed, and Bengalis enjoyed wallowing in that notoriety. That was Shiva Naipaul’s last evening in the city and he spent it with us, angry with India for craving Western attention at any cost, angry with himself for being Indian and not Indian. His taxi driver on the way to Patna the previous day had threatened to throw him out in the middle of nowhere unless he made what was then an enormous payment. That wasn’t about Kolkata but it compounded his rage.
No point is served by describing the visual evidence of misery in a city with population density of 30,000 per square kilometre where two-thirds of the people live in bustees. What is distressing is that none of this even excites comment, leave alone a commitment to change. The late Jyoti Basu could blandly say there were no power cuts and no potholes because he led a pampered existence but even he could not have missed the slums lining the road on his way to and from the airport. Kolkata remains mired in misery because no one notices, no one has the will to rise above misery.
People would not otherwise have risen in such righteous anger when Rajiv Gandhi called Kolkata a dying city. A well-known academic remarked then that Rajiv was always a little slow: He hadn’t noticed Kolkata was already dead. Bengalis in Britain and the US, who would not dream of putting up with the inconveniences of life in Kolkata except on short nostalgic visits, were loudest and angriest in protesting at this insult to the beloved city for which they do nothing.
Neither do its leaders. Ms Mamata Banerjee recalls two other women politicians who also started out as frumps — Tarkeshwari Sinha in Bihar and Odisha’s Nandini Satpathy. Ostentatiously ‘plain living and high thinking’ (read hypocritical) Indians mocked their personal and sartorial transformation — the well-groomed hair and elegant sarees. They should have been admired instead for recognising the difference between plain and pretty, dumpy and stylish, and setting the latter as their goal.
What you don’t aspire to in personal life can’t be achieved in public life. Lacking any interest in physical power, a Mahatma Gandhi would never have propelled India into the nuclear age. If Ms Banerjee bears that in mind when she talks of ‘Parivartan’, Kolkata might one day shed its humiliating image.
