Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  At the height of its glory in the nineteenth century, Calcutta was called the second city of the British Empire, rivaling London in its riches and social refinement. No surprise, then, that in Asia, Calcutta was regarded as the center of learning for everyone from Peshawar to Hong Kong. What does surprise many people outside India is that, in its own collective mind, Calcutta undoubtedly still holds this position.

  It’s commonly claimed (although I don’t know how these things can be measured) that Calcutta has more poets than Paris and Rome combined; more literary magazines than either New York or London; more theater companies and art galleries than anywhere else in Asia; and undoubtedly more publishers, however small. It’s the only city in India where movie theaters have “House Full” signs outside their doors from lunchtime onward. Poetry readings are major events, sometimes drawing more than a thousand people.

  Why this hunger for culture? One prominent poet thinks many in the audience at poetry readings are there just to be seen. Filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who admitted he couldn’t really explain why so many Calcuttans pack theaters, cinemas, and concert halls, suggested that cultural events are a great way for young people to meet and have a chance “to be alone together for some time, maybe holding hands while the lights are down.” Bob Wright, who runs the Tollygunge Club, one of Calcutta’s leading social and athletic gathering places, offers a more convincing explanation. “The Bengali,” he says, “has always set himself up to think that God put him on this Earth to be a poet or a writer, and other races to do the dirty work.”

  Satyajit Ray died in 1992. Just before he died he was awarded an honorary Oscar in America for lifetime achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  —JO’R and LH

  “Always” is a word that goes back a long way in India. In the Calcutta area, there have been village settlements of fishermen, weavers and priests for at least a thousand years, while Calcutta itself is a mere three hundred years old—young by Indian standards. Established by the British East India Company in 1690 to serve as a trading post, the city is attached like a human ear to the banks of the Hooghly River. The inner ear is the “White Town,” the former European city of spacious homes and broad avenues, built around a vast green core of field and wood—the Maidan—Calcutta’s answer to Central Park. Beyond that, encompassing the three villages that predate the British settlement, lies the native section, or “Black Town,” of narrow lanes, innumerable slums, bazaars, temples, mansions and godowns (warehouses). The oldest part of the Black Town is the top of the ear: North Calcutta. This is where Rabindranath Tagore’s family lived.

  Into this city flowed the influence of Western art forms—the novel, the short story, painting, popular and classical music, theater, and, later, cinema—primarily from Great Britain, but also from other Western countries. Calcuttans took these alien cultural forms and ran with them. In so doing they reinvented and reinvigorated Sanskritic and Bengali culture. One of the pioneers was the early nineteenth-century social reformer Raja Rammohun Roy, usually called the father of the “Bengal Renaissance.” Roy believed fervently that Bengal’s future lay in producing a synthesis of the best of East and West.

  The Tagore family was in the vanguard of this movement. The family included brilliant artists and writers, but all their talents were recombined in Rabindranath. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The effect in Calcutta was electrifying, confirming for Calcuttans their self-appointed role as the intellectuals of India. It’s hard to escape Tagore’s influence in Calcutta, especially that of his songs. He wrote more than two thousand, many in the minor key, most of them about God, nature, and love. You hear them on the radio, in homes, on the train, in schools, and in slums like Rabindranagar.

  Every year, Calcuttans celebrate Tagore’s birthday with a month-long festival of his poetry, plays, music, and dance dramas, which usually deal with Indian mythology. They also show films made by Satyajit Ray of Tagore’s short stories and novels.

  Calcutta is, above all, a city of scribblers. It seems that all Calcuttans feel that they have a right to see their opinions and prejudices in print.“There are two things you will find in the middle-class Bengali character,” claims Nirmalya Acharya above the din of ceiling fans and animated conversation in his favorite haunt, the coffeehouse on Bankim Chatterjee Street just off College Street.“They try to write poetry—every Bengali considers himself a poet—and they try to bring out one little magazine.”

  Nirmalya should know. Along with some other university friends he started a literary magazine in 1961 here in the coffeehouse. With Satyajit Ray’s help, they came up with the name Ekshan, which means “Now” or “Present Day.” “We never thought the magazine would last more than a few issues,” says Nirmalya. “It’s thirty years now. I think the time was right!”

  Nirmalya takes me to the office of a fellow publisher, down a narrow side alley off Mahatma Gandhi Road. In one room, a man in a dhoti and a rag of an undershirt is cranking brightly colored magazine covers through an ancient and blackened handpress, something more appropriate to Dickensian London than to the era of desktop publishing. Isn’t it perhaps a myth that Calcutta is still the midwife of the small literary magazine?

  C alcutta is like Dickens’s aging Miss Havisham, forever the jilted bride. What the white ants don’t make off with, the mold ravishes. Buildings blackened with age, yellowed by the sun, and pockmarked by damp sprout trees and crumble, as if trying to return this urban morass back into the swamp it once was. Sagging Georgian mansions, derelict shells too far gone for habitation, still evoke colonial grandeur. England’s industrial revolution is reincarnated in the huge jute mills along the riverbanks, no different from the cotton mills of Dickens’s time. To walk through Calcutta’s steamy streets of Victorian buildings is to know London in the 1800s, a twilight world of cheerless alleys and fetid gutters; of formal, tattered parks, tear-jerking melodramas, and tearooms stirred by debate; of literary outpourings and experimental art; and of the very rich and the very, very poor.

  —Mary Orr, “India Sketches”

  “There are probably two thousand small magazines published here,” Nirmalya says. “But it is becoming very difficult these days. Paper costs fifteen times as much as it did when we started Ekshan, and printing costs have increased tenfold. My friend here is thinking of winding up this press. It’s just not viable anymore.”

  Only a short distance from Nirmalya’s home, up Mahatma Gandhi Road and down Tamer Lane, is the home of Sandip Dutt. Sandip is a schoolteacher, but he’s also the proprietor of the Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, twelve thousand volumes stacked right up to the ceiling, occupying every inch of wall space on the first floor of his home.

  “I started this in 1978 because no one looks after the small and obscure magazines,” Sandip tells me. “It is my love and duty to look after these little magazines and make them available to the people.” Four afternoons a week, after he returns from work, Sandip opens his doors and allows students and researchers for an annual fee of 50 cents to come and ferret through his treasures. Sandip shows me magazines printed on banana leaves, rolled in cigarettes and stuffed into matchboxes. With real pride he brings out a rare first edition of Bangadarshan from 1872, and a copy of a short-lived magazine published and edited by a domestic worker in the late 1960s.

  “Have you ever published a magazine?” I ask, somewhat naively. “Oh yes! I publish three magazines for my public.” Sandip continues the tour. “I started this collection with fifteen hundred magazines. Now I receive four or five new ones every day. The problem is space. There’s some left in that room,” he says, leading me into a third room, christened Poetry Books Library. “What happens when that’s full?” I ask. Sandip rolls his eyes upward. “It’s going to move up to the next floor, isn’t it?” Another roll of the eyes. “I have a duty to these magazines.”

  As I leave the Little Magazine Library, Sandip takes my arm. “Remember,” he tel
ls me earnestly, “Bengalis want to express their ideas. They’re not so much interested in material things. They’re much happier pursuing intellectual ideas.”

  None more so than my friend Raja Chatterjee. Raja never seems to have held a steady job. But he has a profession—being a Bengali intellectual. Raja looks the part, clad in a white dhoti and top, and carrying a cloth shoulder bag jammed with books, notebooks and pencils. Somehow he finds work, at the film studios, or helping to mount an experimental translation of Anouilh or Brecht or Durrenmatt at one of the city’s innumerable small theaters. He’s just finished helping his friend Malay produce a series of half-hour television programs of Bengali short stories. Each episode cost three thousand dollars to make, impossibly cheap for any Western producer but a fortune for Malay and his wife, who have put all their savings into the series.

  Raja lives in South Calcutta, near the famous Kali Temple, with his wife, Runu, and daughter, Sonali, and Runu’s widowed mother, who spent several years in the former Soviet Union as an interpreter. She speaks and reads Russian, Bengali, Hindi and English. The house is full of books—Tagore, of course, Maxim Gorky, Byron and Shelley, lots of Shakespeare—and an upright piano. Runu has been going blind for several years now but still teaches piano at a private school. “Come round to dinner tonight. We will prepare a special Bengali fish curry for you,” she tells me.“My daughter also wants you to hear her play the piano.”

  A dhoti

  That evening, twelve-year-old Sonali plays short pieces by Mozart and Grieg. Then Runu plays the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and a Strauss waltz. Runu apologizes profusely for the sound of the piano: “It must be tuned. But when is the tuner coming?” Raja promises to get the tuner tomorrow.

  But I doubt he can make much of a difference now. The constant humidity has badly altered the sound. Imagine Beethoven played on a barroom piano in the Wild West. The effect is surreal and very Calcutta.

  After supper, Raja wants me to meet his friends Dakoo and Kumar at the coffeehouse off College Street, a half-mile of book-shops and bookstalls spilling over onto the pavement, carrying first editions, pamphlets, paperbacks in every Indian language, with more than a fair smattering of books in and out of print from France, Germany, Russia, and England.

  Dakoo is a cartoonist. He’s drawn a small book of cartoons on Calcutta’s three hundredth birthday for me. Sometimes, one of the daily papers publishes his work. The rest of the time he just draws and waits. Kumar works in one of the city’s luxury hotels, supervising room service. But every morning he writes a poem. Kumar and Raja both write naturally in English. English is as much a language of Calcutta as Bengali. Kumar has never sought a publisher; he wants to know my reactions to his poems. Raja also writes poetry and has had no problem finding someone to publish five hundred copies of sixty-odd pages of his poetry in hardback.

  Raja, Kumar, and Dakoo may never be famous, but they are pursuing the right of every Calcuttan and every Bengali to be an intellectual or an artist. No one snickers. Driving through Calcutta one day, Raja suddenly blurts out: “Chief! What about this Jack Kerouac? You know him? I am very much liking this man.” Raja has read Kerouac in Bengali. Romantic images of a foot-loose Kerouac obviously appeal to the Bengali psyche.

  At times this obsession with culture seems so self-conscious that one wonders if it isn’t really motivated by something else: a fear that Bengali culture will be diluted by the presence of so many non-Bengalis in Calcutta. And also by the Calcuttans’ need to reassure themselves that their city still counts on the world cultural stage, when so many in the West and India have written it off as a provincial backwater and worse.

  One of Calcutta’s most famous indigenous folk forms is an endangered species. Kalighat, or “bazaar,” paintings are usually water-colors—very colorful, often strongly satirical, sometimes bawdy. They were sold as cheap souvenirs to the pilgrims who came to the Kali Temple in South Calcutta. But then postcards and mass reproduction spelled their demise. “You want to see Kalighat paintings? No problem! There are some in the Metro. Let’s go, Chief!” And Raja whisks me out the door of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. It’s raining. Raja shouts a command in Bengali and two rickshaw-wallahs at a nearby stand pick up their rickshaws and wade through brown water two feet deep to the doorstep.

  Avoid Calcutta’s un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown.

  —Mary Orr, “India Sketches”

  We cross Chowringhee to what looks like a small ventilation shaft, where we climb out of our rickshaws. Raja leads me down some steps into the world of the Calcutta subway, known as Metro, the city’s pride and joy. Each station is decorated with paintings and sculptures. When we reach the Kalighat station, sure enough, reproductions of Kalighat paintings hang on the walls. Other stations display reproductions of paintings by Tagore or early scenes of European Calcutta. Many Calcuttans, says Raja, ride Metro just to see the artwork. There’s another attraction, too: each station has several color television sets, which show popular films or cricket matches.

  On Monday morning the Maidan is deserted. Raja and I go back into North Calcutta, to Kumartuli, a former red-light district but also home to the image makers of Calcutta. The easiest way to get there is by taxi. Throughout all the years I’ve been coming to Calcutta I’ve been driven by Tivari, a Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, who lives here with his father and brother. I think my Western habits must have shocked Tivari when I first met him. Highly literate and a devoted follower of Rama, the legendary God-King of Ayodhya and hero of The Ramayana, Tivari determined to educate me. On my second visit he had acquired a tape deck in his taxi. He would endlessly play bhajans, popular devotional hymns to the greater glory of Rama and Krishna, sung by a popular “playback” singer.

  In the end Tivari won. I needed a tape of bhajans for a radio program. Tivari promptly obliged. In return he asked for cassettes of my programs. Now his customers have a choice: bhajans or National Public Radio, although the speed is seriously off on his machine, and I can scarcely recognize my own voice.

  Kumartuli is a rabbit warren of sheds, workshops and alleys where some four thousand potters shape bamboo, straw and clay into life-size reproductions of gods and goddesses. Since Calcutta’s unofficial patron is the Mother Goddess, major festivals, or pujas, are held each year to celebrate her various aspects. The potters make images for these festivals, including Durga, who rides a lion and destroys demons. She is worshipped for four days, usually in early October. Kali, a more terrifying form of the goddess, with her protruding tongue and garland of skulls, is celebrated a month later.

  During our visit, many of the potters are preparing for the upcoming Durga Puja. We watch as one of them, hard at work, smooths gray clay onto a large straw-and-bamboo frame. He learned how to make images from his father; for most of the potters, image making is a caste profession going back several generations.

  Others, such as Aloke Sen, a former art student, use images as tools of social criticism. His images of Saraswati, goddess of learning, depict her in chains. “I want to show the slavery of today’s education, where children are just stuffed with facts,” he says.

  Sen’s Durga images have become famous because of their ambiguity. Sen refuses the crude depiction of the demons that Durga slays as the epitome of evil. He sculpts them with the faces of ordinary men and women. “They represent the evils in the hearts of every man—lust, anger, vanity, infatuation, jealousy,
and greed,” he asserts. His tableaus, which show Durga mounted on a lion and slaying a demon, will fetch him about 20,000 dollars. They will grace four of the largest neighborhood stages set up by street committees. For four days and nights of the Durga Puja, people will flock to see these works of art. On the fourth night, each neighborhood committee will take down its Durga images, place them on bamboo stretchers and carry them to the banks of the Hooghly.

  Five years ago, Raja decided I must experience my first Durga Puja from the vantage point of the ordinary Calcuttan. He instructed Tivari to drop us off en route to the river, right in the middle of several hundred Bengali musicians. Together we marched through the night to the tune of something I still believe was meant to be “Scotland the Brave,” played by Bengali bagpipers clad only in dhotis. Once at the water’s edge all hell broke loose. Each team bearing a Durga image maneuvered down the muddy embankment and then heaved it into the water, where it would dissolve back into clay, straw and bamboo on its way to the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal.

  Durga Puja is Aloke Sen’s personal vindication as an artist. But it is also his nightmare: “These images are my creation. They are like my sons and daughters. Now the studio is full. But soon it will be empty, and the suffering will begin. It is unbearable for me to watch them putting my images, my children, into the Ganga!”