Published: May 3, 2009
ON a rainy day in the late 17th century, an enterprising agent of the British East India Company named Job Charnock sailed along the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows from high in the Himalayas into the Bay of Bengal, and pitched a tent on its swampy banks. The company bought three riverside villages. Soon they would become a port — flowing with opium, muslin and jute — and then, as the capital of British India until 1912, draw conquerors, dreamers and hungry folk from all over the world.
Calcutta, India’s first modern city, was born.
Over the years, it acquired many names: City of Palaces, Black Hole, Graveyard of the British Empire. In 2001, it was christened Kolkata — slower, rounder, ostensibly more Bengali-sounding.
To me, it has always been the city of green shutters. They are a singular fixture of old Calcutta houses. They glow in the steamy heat of the afternoon. Trees sometimes sprout from moldy ledges.
I left Calcutta when I was small and promptly forgot what I knew, such is the thick velvet curtain the immigrant child draws over memory. Every few summers, when my family returned for holidays, I would be escorted from one relative’s house to another, scolded for being too thin, and force-fed heaps of sweets. On Park Street, I would be invariably accosted by a hungry, barefoot child. The only thing more confounding than going to Calcutta was coming home to suburban Southern California; how do you explain the city of dreadful night (Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, not mine) to friends who had spent the summer listening to Olivia Newton-John?
In the last four years, over several reporting trips there, the city has revealed itself to me slowly, opening one sleepy eye at a time. Calcutta today is as parochial as it is modern. It lives in the past as much as it lets its past decay. India’s first global city, it is littered with the remains of many worlds: the rickshaws that the Chinese brought; an Armenian cemetery; dollops of jazz left by Americans in the war years.
It is as much a walker’s city as a talker’s: It has great eavesdropping potential, even if you understand only English, and it is perfectly acceptable to start up a conversation with strangers, whether about the rain or Shakespeare.
Best of all, in Calcutta, you can eat the world. The royal chefs who decamped here from the Mughal court of north India brought a cardamom-laced mutton rezala stew. The British Raj offered a canapé of cheese and pineapple. From Baghdad, David Nahoum’s Jewish forefathers brought the cheese-filled sambusa to Calcutta’s New Market.
FOR the traveler with limited time, the best way to explore Calcutta is roughly to trace the route of the Hooghly, meandering on and off the main thoroughfares by foot, tram and subway, known here as the Metro. This is not a luxury destination. It is more a journey through the grimy layers of time. History is inscribed on every lane, like tattoos on an aging diva. Calcutta was once quite a diva.
You could start by boarding a tram at the Esplanade, just north of the Oberoi Grand Hotel, and head north on College Street, now renamed Bidhan Sarani. The last time I tried, the tram crawled through traffic and then stopped crawling entirely. The power had gone out. If you get out near College Street, as I did, make your way through the dense alleys of books (mostly used textbooks, but a careful hunt on Calcutta’s streets can turn up jewels, such as a Chinese Communist children’s book of manners, translated into English, which I once procured) to the Indian Coffee House. Built in the late 1800s as the Albert Hall to commemorate a visit of the prince consort, it eventually became the city’s most venerable institution of revolutionary chatter and flirt. There is still plenty of flirt.
The waiters don’t chatter. They scowl under their white caps, thick black dirt in the stiff creases. They complain that no one orders anything. A cashier told me last summer that the cafe had been posting losses for more than 25 years. I guiltily ordered the fritter-like vegetable pakoras.
Calcutta from the start has confronted some of the most acute debates of modernity. Over three centuries, the folly and ingenuity of global capitalism have left their mark on my city, and then, too, so have the Communists, who have been elected to power for an uninterrupted 31 years. Now New India pokes its finger into Calcutta’s languid belly. The old houses are making way for tall glass and steel, their Calcutta Deco details tossed away like fish-heads. Flury’s, once a classic European patisserie, serves American-style lasagna instead of the white bread cucumber sandwiches of my childhood. The hammer and sickle remains the refrain of Calcutta graffiti, interrupted now by posters for English classes, the hammer and sickle, you might say, of Indian aspiration today.
“Great cities get old and somehow renew themselves,” said Mani Sankar Mukherji, whose remarkable 1962 novel, “Chowringhee,” chronicled life inside a roaring midcentury Calcutta hotel. Calcutta, he confessed, cannot be called a great city.
Around the corner from the Coffee House on College Street stands Presidency College, founded by Indian philanthropists in 1817 as a center for the teaching of European thought. Around the College Square water tank are three buildings testifying to Calcutta’s melting pot heritage: the Baptist Mission, in the so-called Indo-Saracenic architectural style; the Mahabodi Buddhist temple, founded by a Sri Lankan monk; and the Bengal Theosophical Society, one of the world’s first esoteric East-meets-West religious movements.
A short tram ride north along College Street takes you to Bethune College, created in 1849 as the city’s first school for girls, a remarkable feat, considering that most privileged Indians secluded their women in purdah at the time. My own grandmother, a lawyer’s daughter, could study only until the age of 13.
On the south side of the college is the family-owned Girish Chandra Dey and Nakur Chandra Nandy, makers of nothing else but the celebrated Bengali shondesh. To its detractors, including me, the shondesh, made of sweetened slow-stirred cheese, resembles cement. To its fans, it is proof of divine love, eaten at any time of day, and always when there is something to celebrate.
Chitpur Road was the nerve center of Black Town. The mansions on and off this boulevard, now called Rabindra Sarani, are a whimsical mixture of West and East — introverted toward courtyards according to Indian architectural tradition and boasting fabulous Western facades with Corinthian pillars and nymphs on the pediments.
Black Town was built by those whom Krishna Dutta, in her book “Calcutta: A Literary and Cultural History,” calls the Bengali compradors, who “patronized Indian classical music and the European arts, held lavish feasts and paid court to the British.” They are lyrically skewered in Amitav Ghosh’s novel “Sea of Poppies.”
The mansions are in varying stages of ruin. The height of kitsch is the Marble Palace, open to the public with a pass from the government tourism office and stuffed with crystal chandeliers and stone lions. Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his book, “Calcutta: The City Revealed,” says it looks “as if they had been scavenged from job lots on the Portobello Road on a series of damp Saturday afternoons.”
The family home of Rabindranath Tagore is on Dwarkanath Tagore Lane. The unsung mansions sit on the smaller lanes, occupied by fragments of families. Old saris hang out to dry on the balconies and dogs snooze at the feet of faux-Venus statues.
Off Chitpur Road, a lane takes you to the potters’ colony, Kumartoli (ask directions to find your way), a unique open-air workshop where gods and goddesses are molded by hand, traditionally using dust from the thresholds of nearby brothels. The city’s powerful prostitutes union objects to this practice now. Kumartoli is busiest in fall, in the run-up to the Hindu festival season.
A variety of artisans hang on along Chitpur Road: makers of traditional perfumes, embroidered tunic sellers, purveyors of wigs, a row of musical instrument shops (at N. N. Mondal’s, Yehudi Menuhin got his violin repaired in 1952) and Chinese shoemakers.
These lanes were also where the city savaged itself in the summer of 1946, just as the British were preparing to leave and India was about to be partitioned. Hindus cut Muslim throats; Muslims cut Hindu throats; Gandhi rushed to the city and launched a hunger strike. Every family, mine included, bore witness to the carnage, or took part in it. Behind the green shutters, there are stories.
A good place to stop and ponder the past is the ground-floor bar of the Broadway Hotel, on Ganesh Chandra Avenue. The afternoon light pours in golden soft through the shutters. Across the street, above a gas station, is a hidden gem, called Eau Chew, where Joseph and Josephine Huang serve a fabulous fish in black bean sauce.
WHITE Town, or the center of British business and government, emerged around its own drinking-water tank and became known as Dalhousie Square. It has since been christened B.B.D. Bag, for the three young gunmen — Binoy, Badal and Dinesh — who stormed the British administrative office, the Writers Building, in 1930 and shot dead the British inspector of prisons. A black statue of the trio faces the Writers Building, now the headquarters of the Communist government of West Bengal state. Modernity continues to be debated. Protests erupted here against a plan to build the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, in a factory on the city outskirts. Peasants revolted, and the Nano is being built elsewhere.
Calcutta has another guerrilla hero: Subhas Chandra Bose, who broke away from Gandhi’s nonviolent movement to raise an army against the British. The central narrative of his erstwhile family mansion on Elgin Road, now a museum of Bose memorabilia, is his “great escape” from house arrest. Red footsteps on the balcony mark how he tiptoed out on a January night in 1941. The gray Wanderer in which he was driven away sits in the driveway. In one gallery is an extraordinary collection of photographs, including Netaji — “respected leader” as he is known — shaking hands with Hitler in 1942; apparently, he took help where he could get it.
Every guidebook will opine on the sights of Dalhousie Square, which the World Monuments Fund lists on its 100 most endangered heritage sites. I recommend a visit to the General Post Office and the adjacent Postal Museum, for their collection of old stamps and the brass buckles of the “dak” runners, or postmen, who carried letters on foot.
Calcutta’s first foreigners often died young, sometimes before they received mail from across the ocean. The Returned Letter Office housed the letters to the dead. It stands on the southeast corner of the square. Park Street Cemetery, a short taxi ride from Dalhousie Square, offers more proof of the pestilence that hovered over the imperialists. The museum inside the Victoria Memorial is an archive of imperial ambition. Across the river is another kind of archive: the Indian Botanic Garden, said to house trees from five continents but its collection is poorly marked, the benches are broken and it seems better suited for canoodlers than botanists.
Much of White Town is in sad shape. A mysterious fire claimed a significant portion of the headquarters of MacKinnon Mackenzie, a prominent managing agent for British industry in Calcutta. Bow Barracks, a red-brick row of onetime army barracks and home now to Chinese and biracials known here as Anglo-Indians, is due to be demolished. Groups like Public are goading the city to start saving its past. St. Andrew’s Church, built by Scots in 1818, has been illuminated as a means of drawing investment and tourists to the heart of the city. “No longer is there an anxiety that we have to be anticolonial,” the city’s municipal commissioner, Alapan Bandyopadhyay, gamely said.
South Calcutta has two attractions, and they are worth exploring by Metro. The Kalighat Temple is a tableau of faith, blood and hustle. Devotees prostrate themselves before the dark goddess, goats meet their death and touts, some in holy men’s garb, home in on tourists. The poor squat on the street at lunchtime, for a bowl of rice. It is hard to imagine a worse fate than to be poor in Calcutta. Hunger still stalks the city.
The Tollygunge Club is farther south. Built as a private Raj-era mansion, it housed the family of Tipu Sultan, another deposed Indian king from southern Mysore, and then became a whites-only club in 1895, with a racecourse as its main attraction. Indians broke the color bar in 1964 but soon came to be seen as class enemies. A Maoist guerrilla shot dead the club director in 1971. He was sitting in his second-floor office at the time, the windows of the Palladian mansion facing south, to catch the breeze. Today, it is primarily a golf club. Jackals have built their dens here. They seem to like to watch golf.
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