In the wake of Pam Crain’s death, we remember Calcutta as a swinging city of endless partying. But memory can play tricks with the best of minds and the depiction of the city as the Beirut of India is a gross exaggeration
The eloquent tributes to Pam Crain that appeared in a variety of newspapers ranging from broadsheets to tabloids —the most informed article was published in Mumbai-based Mid Day — when India’s most gifted jazz singer died on August 14 had little to do with the popularity of jazz in this country. They were as much a tribute to the diva who mesmerised jazz aficionados with her magical stage presence as self-indulgent recollection of memories of an era long gone by. Pam Crain crooned the nights away in hip and happening restaurants in cities that no longer exist as we knew them: Calcutta and Bombay.
It is only natural that the memories that were jolted out of the dark corners of the mind where they had come to rest should be tinged with romanticism — when we look back fondly at our past, fact and fiction tend to get entwined. Memory can play tricks with the best of minds; it can also be cruelly partial, blotting out other realities lest they overshadow and overwhelm that which you recall fondly. And so it was while recollecting the time when Pam Crain would set the night on fire, night after night, during the swinging 1960s and 1970s when Calcutta was the mecca of all that was swish and posh, the Beirut of India where life was an endless party.
Or so we who relived our memories of the fun decades in the wake of Pam Crain’s death would like to believe, and would want those who came of age much later to believe. I would hold comment on Mumbai, a city of which I know little, but surely the depiction of Calcutta as a swinging city in the 1960s and 1970s is a gross exaggeration. Park Street, where twinkling fairy lights seductively beckoned revellers to step into exotically named restaurants like Mocambo, Moulin Rouge, Blue Fox and Trinca’s, pierced through the heart of Calcutta, throbbing with extraordinary, adrenalin-pumping energy, but it was by no means symbolic of the city.
Park Street, where fiery Pam Crain crooned at Mocambo (and later at Blue Fox) and feisty Usha Uthup had everybody stomping on the dance floor at Trinca’s, was Calcutta, but Calcutta was more than Park Street. The City of Joy, a description Dominique lapierre was to borrow later as the title of his eminently forgettable book, never quite existed beyond the imagination of boxwallahs pitilessly caricatured by Satyajit Ray in his film Seemabaddha (Company limited), its geographical limits extending from Park Hotel to the cemetery where notables of the Raj lie interred in crumbling tombs stripped of their marble finery.
To the north of Park Street and to its south existed the other Calcutta, a city where its multitudes waged a daily struggle of survival, caught in a tornado of violent politics, crumbling social structures, unemployment and economic ruination. The boxwallahs lived in chummeries in Chowringhee or the plush quarters of Dunlop colony; south of Park Street was Ballygunge where the nouveau riche rubbed shoulders with moneyed families. Beyond that lay the refugee colonies of Jadavpur and Garia. In the north, families were coming to terms with penury, the last of the nautch girls having milked their patrons of the little they had inherited.
Calcutta of the 1960s cannot be separated from Calcutta, or make that West Bengal, of the 1950s, a decade of political upheavals and mass discontent —the food agitation, the teachers agitation and the students agitation had laid the foundation for the left’s rise and and subsequent dominance in the 1970s. The intervening decade of 1960s was no less turbulent with the United Front regimes initiating the process of West Bengal’s de-industrialisation whose consequences shaped the lives of an entire generation of Bengalis. A State disinherited by an uncaring Centre was further pauperised as boxwallah companies prepared to pack up and leave. The asset-stripping that followed, and the flight of capital, left Bengal and Bengalis in a hopeless situation; Revolution was an antidote and Naxalbari in 1967 served as a trigger, unleashing the pent up fury of Calcutta’s youth.
As Pam Crain crooned late into the night at Park Street, the façade of its imposing buildings shimmering in bright neon lights, young men and women set themselves to the task of making bombs and fighting brutal battles in the dimly lit streets of south and north Calcutta, hemmed in by damp walls plastered with slogans extolling Chairman Mao. Elsewhere in Calcutta, Mother Teresa and her nuns went about tending to the sick and the dying, harvesting souls from filthy pavements infested with rats, piled high with festering garbage and splattered with human excreta.
The 1970s saw the emergence of a new political order, with Siddhartha Shankar Ray establishing his rule through the violent use of force. It was also the decade when young Bengalis began fleeing the city that was their home, seeking refuge in distant lands, many of them catching the British Overseas Airways Corporation flights that still took off from Calcutta airport every morning. Others just disappeared, never to be seen again. By the time the left came to power in 1977, Calcutta was a dying city. It was a decade of loss, a decade of grief, a decade of mind-numbing impoverishment.
Millions of refugees poured into West Bengal during the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971; tens of thousands of them made their way to Calcutta and its suburbs: There was nothing joyous about watching famished men and women and rickety children scavenging for food along with street dogs in rubbish bins. One of my lasting childhood memories is of women clad in rags with children in tow going from house to house under the midday sun, begging for ‘fan’, the starchy water that is drained out after boiling rice. There was nothing swinging about this Calcutta.
Yet we choose to remember Park Street alone and recall the swinging 1960s and 1970s when Calcutta would party through the night. There is something selective, and self-defeating, about this partial recollection. It’s almost as if we are desperate to disown our lived past lest it shame us. That we fail to tell the full story to the next generation of Bengalis does not seem to bother us. Memory, as I said, can play tricks with the best of minds.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)
