Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

  The first days of the monsoon in June—smothering heat followed by pounding rain—are the optimum time to experience Kolkata’s two separate and unequal universes: the world with air-conditioning, and the one without. The world with air-conditioning is that of an upwardly mobile, international civilization, whereas the one without constitutes the miserable reality of the street, where 1.5 million Kolkatans live within a few feet of air-conditioning, which they will never experience in their lives. The door to this espresso bar or to that charming bookshop with those Penguin paperbacks constitutes a border as hard to cross as any drawn on a map.

  In north Kolkata the pavements are occupied by miles of tarpaulin and burlap lean-tos, inside which whole families live, with older siblings watching younger ones while the mothers work as maids and the fathers as construction workers. But as wrenching as the scene appears, if you wade through the street people, past this partially opened door, or under that chain, you will find another Kolkata: a maze of beautiful and derelict eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mansions built by former rajahs and merchants, with blackened weather-stained walls, intricate brickwork in Muslim, Hindu, and neoclassical styles, and colonnaded courtyards choked in vines and other greenery. The largest of these is the Marble Palace, in whose lightless rooms, which feel like a succession of grimy steam baths during the monsoon, are packed dusty Belgian mirrors, classical statuary, Chinese vases, crystal glass chandeliers, four paintings by Rubens, hookahs, and lithographs. Like this rambling palace in which everything seems to sweat, Kolkata is a rotting, eccentric jumble, of which the poverty is but the outer layer.

  Despite the distracting horror of pavement life, the real story of Kolkata is its transformation into a global city, with expatriates coming back from abroad, investing in malls and restaurants, and in the process enforcing standards of service that they learned in the West. In early 2008, a 900,000-square-foot mall, among the largest in India, was opened in the southern part of Kolkata, one of forty new large and small retail centers set to open in Greater Kolkata by 2011. This is in addition to twenty new multiplex cinemas as the city expands to the east. Then there are the luxury condominiums with names like Highland Park and Silver Spring going up closer to downtown. “If you think of the British Empire as the first go at globalization,” explained Santosh Ghosh, an urban planner, “then Kolkata, as the capital of British India, with its museums and botanical gardens, was a global city when Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were still villages. Now Kolkata is finally catching up again.”

  On a return visit in the winter, I saw the spirit of globalization captured by the gusto with which Christmas—another legacy of the British—is celebrated in this Hindu-Muslim city: with streets strung with colored lights, decorations on sale everywhere, and life-sized Santa Clauses made of mud and straw sculpted in the same workshops that produce the myriad Hindu gods. On Christmas Eve, thousands of Kolkatans of different religions converge on Saint Paul’s, the nineteenth-century Gothic cathedral built by the British, whose innumerable wall plaques commemorate the various campaigns and skirmishes waged in the course of several hundred years of imperial rule in the Indian Subcontinent. The secularization of Christmas, combined with a vague nostalgia for things British, has invested the holiday here with a cosmopolitan ambience.

  The pace of change in Kolkata still is not on the scale of China, but the city is headed in the same direction. There was always a middle class here, in addition to the ubiquitous poor. But the middle class is now more visually apparent because of its consumerist buying sprees. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company, discretionary spending by Indian consumers accounted for 52 percent of average household consumption in 2005 (up from 39 percent in 1995); by 2025, it may rise to 70 percent. Shikha Mukerjee, who directs a nongovernment organization and has lived her whole life in Kolkata, noted that the world of the leisurely wealthy with their live-in servants is gone, as the upper classes live a less secure, more frantic existence. Concomitantly, there is also a rise in family cars, leading to the most persistent traffic jams I have experienced anywhere in the developing world, as bad as Jakarta, and worse than Teheran, Bangkok, or Cairo.

  “It’s not the fancy malls, but the low-end centers that are the heart of the change,” Mukerjee went on, “the people who have created jobs for themselves by altering clothes, fixing appliances, and so on. I have a tailor who travels from an outlying slum area each day to occupy a particular place on the sidewalk with his sewing machine, where his clients come to him. He’s saving money, he told me. That’s what Kolkata is really about these days.” Indeed, there are the soup kitchens selling noodles and curry dishes on the pavements. Their very expansion in recent years signifies the rise of a lower middle class, up from abject poverty, that requires cheap meals during the workday.

  “Sealdah was my own private, childhood nightmare,” Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri told me, referring to the railway station that in the late 1940s, after the partition of India, housed thousands of Hindu refugees from Muslim East Bengal who had arrived in Kolkata destitute, with nowhere to go. Even today, Sealdah is unnerving: the terminus for all trains arriving from India’s underdeveloped northeast, with its armies of people disgorged onto the platforms, separating out amidst other armies squatting on the station floor with their suitcases.

  “But you know what?” the gray-haired English professor said. “Most of those people, with no help from the government, got settled somewhere. They didn’t just die or go begging. And the process continues today.” The Kolkata street, Professor Chaudhuri and others explained, is less a dead end than a way station to the working classes, the same way that shantytowns are in a country like Turkey. But since India is so much poorer than Turkey, the way station is that much harsher. “If you come back each decade,” noted Chaudhuri, “the poverty looks the same, so you think nothing has changed. But the individuals on the street are different. They come from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, and Bangladesh, with no place to live, because on the streets you can earn something, save something, and move on.” Opportunity, as much as poverty, creates slums. Indeed, if there is a trend in Kolkata’s slums, it is the fitful transition—gentrification in its own way—from kutcha (mud) and jhupri (burlap and cardboard) temporary housing to the more permanent pucca (cement and corrugated iron) housing. Whole areas are changing their appearance, as Kolkata begins to look less like some subcontinental Dickensian nightmare and more like just another dynamic city with great disparities of wealth.

  Yet I was still unsure and uncomfortable. It seemed to me too neat and easy to just dismiss the Kolkata street as a beneficial way station to the higher classes. I’m sure that in many cases it was so, but also in too many cases it was not. The street emblemized how India, while emerging as a great power or at least a regional power in its own right, was also a very troubled nation harboring stores of misery.

  To a degree Kolkata has always been like this: a place of harsh, unsentimental social interaction that my understandable Western fixation with the brutal visual effects of its poverty obscures. In Those Days, a detailed Proustian study of nineteenth-century Calcutta, Sunil Gangopadhyay writes:

  Houses, big, small and medium had mushroomed everywhere to accommodate the new generation of working babus, freshly migrated from villages. Weavers, barbers, washermen and oil crushers followed in their wake to minister to their needs. The Permanent Settlement had robbed many poor peasants of their land, not only in Bengal but in Orissa, Bihar and even distant Uttar Pradesh. These landless labourers flocked to the city’s environs in thousands, ready to pick up any kind of menial work.…11

  In a city where it has been impossible to avoid the poorest of the poor, urban balkanization—the stratification of the economic classes with the emergence of satellite towns and gated communities—finally makes it possible to do so. It is not so much the crime that these new, upwardly mobile classes wish to avoid, since Kolkata, despite its poverty, is a fairly safe city; it is something deeper. Whereas wealth used t
o be a secret here, the newly rich now want to flaunt it; and that, in turn, creates a security problem where one did not used to exist. Thus, the well-off need to escape into protected neighborhoods where they can exhibit their fortunes. Along with the birth of gated communities has come an explosion in the number of private security guards, who themselves bestow a sign of status for the new rich.

  There is, too, another motivation for these planned communities. As Professor Chaudhuri told me, “The new upper classes are afraid of seeing ugliness.” They want to “sanitize themselves” from the exhibition on the streets. They want to see only other well-off people. Wealthy Indians have always acted as if the poor were invisible, but now they have found a means to render them literally so.

  The Kolkata street that these new rich want to escape from seeing is a rendering of rural life in the midst of the metropolis. The women line up at the pavement pumps the way they do at the village well. In the village, domestic life is lived out of doors, without a notion of privacy, without bathrooms, so everything is done in public. And because of the heat much of the year, people who live on the street are often in a state of semi-nakedness, grooming themselves with no sense of embarrassment.

  In sum, as the new rich in Kolkata become diluted of their distinct Indianness, they have less and less toleration of Indian village life as it is displayed in the city streets. Yet as long as those forced to live on the street have the possibility of upward mobility, they will continue to stream in from the nearby poverty-wracked provinces of Bihar and Orissa, especially as the new construction here attracts cheap labor.

  However, by continuing to live on the street and in bustees (slums), the poor are getting in the way of government plans for new satellite towns, gated communities, and special economic zones intended to attract foreign investment from Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and Singapore. In power for three decades, the West Bengal administration constitutes the longest-serving democratically elected communist government in the world. Yet, in order to win over voters unhappy with its statist policies, the Bengali communists have been forced to follow the Chinese path of privatization with a vengeance. The expropriation of land for development projects elsewhere in West Bengal has led to violent protests in Kolkata. In one incident, in which vehicles were burned, windshields smashed, and stones hurled, the army was called out to patrol the streets—one of the rare times in years that the military has been needed to bring peace to a major Indian city.

  Of course, in China the land would have been more easily expropriated. In China, a communist regime can act in a rampantly capitalist manner and it is accepted as a matter of course; but not in democratic India, particularly not in Kolkata. Whereas Delhi had a long and grand history under the Mughal emperors, Calcutta was founded only in the late seventeenth century by the British in a tropical swamp as a trading outpost, and has been a place of social conflict ever since: a tendency exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, which began with a profusion of jute and textile factories and eventually led to West Bengal becoming the Ruhr of India, with most of the country’s iron and steel industry. Thus, in recent decades, Kolkata has been at the heart of Indian trade unionism and communism. “Continued exclusion of the poor in Kolkata will only result in outbreaks of riots and destructive violence,” V. Ramaswamy, a Kolkata-based business executive and grassroots organizer, told me. For all of Kolkata’s aspirations to become a global city, its history suggests that the transition will not be altogether peaceful. When West Bengal’s government tried to outlaw rickshaws in December 2006 as a “disgraceful practice,” for instance, the city’s eighteen thousand rickshaw pullers launched vigorous protests. Kolkata will likely remain a place of strife.

  In 2001, Calcutta’s name was officially changed to Kolkata, reflecting the native Bengali pronunciation. For generations reared on “Calcutta,” the new name is awkward. It carries no evocative association with either British rule or with the city’s infamous poverty. That might be for the better. Given that globalization has ironically led to invigorated localisms, “Kolkata” may yet catch on as a new global and Bengali entrepôt for eastern India, Bangladesh, Burma, and southwestern China. Ancient and medieval trade routes are reaffirming themselves and Kolkata is slowly regaining the hinterland it lost after the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent that created East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). In particular, as noted, southwestern China has no access to the Pacific Ocean. Its closest outlet is the Bay of Bengal. Whereas in the Middle Ages, tea, horses, and porcelain were traded along this ganglia of silk road offshoots, now Bangladesh and Burma have natural gas to export to China and India. India has iron ore to export to China. China has all kinds of manufactured goods to export to India. Despite the rising naval tensions between the two countries, on another level a natural gas alliance might arise to include India, China, Bangladesh, and Burma.

  “Kolkata could once again become the Indian gateway to Southeast Asia, and particularly to China,” Monideep Chattopadhyay, another urban planner, told me. It is the only city in India with a real Chinatown. In 2007 a Chinese consulate opened in the city. A new airport will allow Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to transit Kolkata en route to the holy site of Bodh Gaya in Bihar Province, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. These renewed links, particularly the land links, could finally open up insurgency-wracked northeastern India, whose violence and underdevelopment have played a significant role in Kolkata’s own poverty by robbing the city of a prosperous backcountry that retains its own inhabitants, rather than forcing many of them to migrate penniless to the nearest big city.

  “Kolkata could also be the Harvard of India,” said Kingshuk Chatterjee, a research fellow at the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, explaining that primary and secondary education in Kolkata is the finest in the country, and Bengalis fill many places at the best universities in Mumbai and Delhi. All that is needed, he said, is for the communist-left alliance that governs West Bengal to stop making appointments at local universities based on its own politics. The high level of education also makes it likely that Kolkata will evolve into another Indian hub for information technology. “Forget Mother Teresa, think IT and young people with disposable income,” one local journalist exclaimed about the city.

  The most extravagant visions are possible for Kolkata because, for the time being, the city has one thing that other Indian cities—and many in the developing world—dangerously lack: sufficient stores of fresh water. Like Dhaka, Kolkata lies astride the vast estuarial delta of Bengal. To know this abstractly is different from palpably experiencing it. Just as I once arrived in Kolkata by bus from Bangladesh, another time I left and returned to the city by boat on the Hooghly River, a principal tributary of the Ganges. Arriving anywhere by boat gives one a unique perspective about a place. This is particularly true in the case of Kolkata, whose very existence is supported by a river to which it turns its back. The ghats notwithstanding, there are no waterfront promenades here as in other river cities; no captivating and embracing smell of warm seas as there is in Mumbai, fronting the Arabian Sea. Yet without the Hooghly there would have been no Kolkata.

  For the equivalent of $340, with the help of Gautam Chakraborti, an expert on the river, I chartered a forty-seven-foot wooden boat with a small crew at the Outram docks near downtown. It was a trip back in time. Because Kolkata is 60 miles up a narrowing river from the Bay of Bengal, as the city grew and the Industrial Revolution took hold, the port had to move by stages closer to the sea, in search of deeper drafts to accommodate bigger and bigger cargoes. Thus, an aura of desertion now characterizes the city’s riverfront, whereas in previous epochs it used to bustle. The continuous tangled curtain of palms and banyan trees stands in sharp focus on both banks, obscuring the more distant and shadowy city skyline. Here at water level one can imagine the original trading post that Kolkata once was, when Bengal was the world’s greatest silk-producing area, ahead of Persia and China. Hundreds of masted ships, including schooners from A
merica and other boats from as far away as China used to ply the Hooghly at this spot. Here on this riverfront a great number of tall-masted, long-sparred opium clippers were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport opium brought from Patna and Benares up the Ganges, to the Canton River and Hong Kong via Singapore.12

  The first Portuguese vessels sailed up the Hooghly in 1530, doing business in cotton and cloth. Eventually there was a line of Portuguese settlements along the river, principally at the ports of Hooghly and Hijli. By 1628, as many as a hundred Portuguese ships sailed from these ports, carrying rice, butter, oil, and wax. The Portuguese enjoyed a tenuous hold over maritime Bengal, with an agency at the port of Chittagong on the eastern side of the province. Soon, to counter the Portuguese, the Dutch, Danes, Flemish, and French were receiving permission from the Mughal emperors in Delhi to trade along the Hooghly. Here the English enter the story, particularly in the person of Job Charnock, the senior agent of the British East India Company in the region, an old hand who had gone partially native, adopting Indian culture and marrying an Indian widow whom he had rescued from her husband’s funeral pyre moments before she was immolated in the traditional practice of sati.13 After a string of failures and frustrations up and down the river, in an attempt to establish a base for the company in Bengal that might one day be an equivalent of Madras or Bombay, in 1690 Charnock finally established a small trading post at a bend in the Hooghly where Kolkata now stands; on the eastern bank, on ground high enough to avoid flooding.

  Indeed, Kolkata remains a young start-up city: younger than the founding of European North America at Quebec, Jamestown, and Santa Fe. It is a commercial venture, pure and simple. It lacks those fortifying medieval centuries, whose very accumulation of architecture and other material culture gives not only cities in Europe, but also those in Asia and the Subcontinent a substantial, graceful demeanor. The very distortions of poverty and wealth in Kolkata have a raw, New World edge about them that one does not quite find in other large and older Indian cities.