by Mark Tully
I was born in Calcutta and spent the first nine years of my life either there or in a boarding-school in Darjeeling. Whenever I go back, I am struck by how much of the life my parents used to live still survives. The Bengal Club, which my father told me with pride was reserved for ‘burra sahibs of reputable firms’, has lost its Corinthian-pillared frontage but it is still a fine and well-maintained building. The membership has changed, but it's still a very exclusive club. I was taken to lunch there by M. J. Akbar, the pioneer of Indian investigative journalism, who had just published a biography of Nehru. I'm not sure that my father would have approved of journalists in his club, but he certainly would have approved of my old friend Pearson Surita, who was drinking beer from a silver tankard. He was complaining that All India Radio no longer allowed him to do cricket commentaries because his English was too pukka. AIR apparently claimed that modern Indian English-speakers could no longer understand the language of the burra sahibs. At the Calcutta Club, I was robbed of dinner because a member of our party was improperly dressed – he wasn't wearing a tie.
The Tollygunge Club where I used to be taken by my English nanny to play on the swings and see-saws has lost a little land to the Calcutta underground railway but still has spacious and immaculately kept grounds. The swimming-pool brings back memories of my father pushing me off the high diving-board, and the lawn in front of the golf-course recalls ‘chokras’, or boys, waving flags tied on bamboo poles to keep the kites from swooping down and removing our sandwiches. Tolly, as it is known, was being managed by Bob Wright – one of the last Englishmen still staying on in Calcutta. He is a handsome man – a broader version of the late David Niven – admirably set off by his petite and beautiful wife Anne. I sometimes feel sorry for them, since their status as the most prominent stayers-on inevitably makes them objects of curiosity – a must for every foreign visitor to Calcutta, and sometimes the butt of snide comments by foreign journalists writing predictable stories about the contrast between the survival of the raj and the dismal poverty of Calcutta.
When I was in Calcutta, the British high commissioner and his wife were the guests of Bob and Anne Wright at Tolly. One of the high commissioner's duties was to address members of the English Speaking Union. A scholarly and mild-mannered man, he complained gently about the perversion of his language in many countries. He went on to say, ‘In India, too, though some try to preserve true English, there are many examples of adventurous use of the language – even in newspapers.’
The event which had brought the high commissioner to Calcutta was the annual race for the Queen Elizabeth II Cup at the Calcutta racecourse. The Queen had once presented the cup herself. The owner of the winning horse that year was the proprietor of the Great Eastern Hotel, always known as ‘Maila’ or ‘Darling’ Billimoria because he addressed all his guests by that adorative. Tradition has it that, when the Queen presented the hotelier with the cup, he replied, ‘Thank you very much, darling.’ Tradition, as far as I could find out, does not relate the royal reaction. The Queen has never been back to the Calcutta races.
In spite of the communists, the races are still run by the Royal Calcutta Turf Club – a club which blackballed my father when he applied for membership. A former chief steward of the club told me that that was nothing to be ashamed of. He said the club still limited its membership very strictly by operating what he called a ‘six-to-one blackball’. That apparently means that six members have to vote for a member to wipe out one contra vote. Blackballed applicants are further humiliated by having their names posted on the club notice-board.
The Queen Elizabeth II Cup proved a disappointment, with a field of only three and the odds-on favourite romping home, but there was a card of seven races and the atmosphere of an oriental Ascot to enjoy. In the paddock, the ladies wore summer hats and the men wore suits or natty sports jackets. Some elderly gentlemen wore dhotis, one end tucked into the pocket of their shirts. These were acceptable because the dhoti is Bengali. The north-Indian kurta and pajamas – the uniform of politicians in Delhi – was not accepted. English as the high commissioner would like to hear it spoken was the language used in the shade of the ancient, sprawling banyan tree that still spread its tentacles over the paddock. In front of the stand, the band of the Gurkhas, clad in olive-green uniforms and pillbox hats, played music for all comers. For those with a Western taste in martial music there was ‘Old Comrades’, for those with an Eastern taste there was the stirring march ‘Sare Jahan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara’ – ‘Our India is the Best Place in the World’. For the bright young things there were hits from the Bombay movies, including ‘Life is a Game of Love’. ‘Game of Chance’ would have been more appropriate at the Calcutta races, where the bookies looked as prosperous as they do the world over. Club servants wearing white pagris or turbans and olive-green cummerbunds padded around the dining-room at the top of the stands. They insisted on serving all three courses of the traditional lunch, although I protested that it was a little heavy for me. They showed me with pride the portrait signed by Edward, Prince of Wales – later Edward VIII – when he visited Calcutta on his ill-fated tour of India in 1921.
It would be wrong to give the impression that the races are only for the nabobs of Calcutta: they attract a large and volatile crowd in the cheaper stands who can turn very nasty if the stewards ignore their shouts of ‘Objection, objection!’ The stewards are obliged to give a written explanation of their decisions in the next day's racecard. On Queen Elizabeth II Cup day the punters were told that the previous week Royal Cormorant had ‘received tender handling from his jockey’ – presumably a polite way of saying the horse had been pulled. The jockey and trainer were fined. The Calcutta racecrowd may not exactly be the raw material of a Marxist revolution, but they are quite capable of demanding their democratic right to be informed.
The racecourse is at the southern end of the Maidan, the park which is the heart – or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say the lungs – of Calcutta. From the stands, the racegoer gets an impression of the splendour which was Calcutta, the capital of the British Indian Empire. To the left the racegoer can just see the Hooghly, the river on whose banks Job Charnock founded his city. In the foreground is the Gothic St Paul's Cathedral, with its tower modelled on that of the mother church of Anglican Christianity, Canterbury Cathedral. The Anglicans in India have outdone the rest of the Church by showing that ecumenicalism is not just a lot of theological hot air: they have merged with the other major non-Roman-Catholic denominations to form the Churches of North and South India. I was delighted to find that, in Calcutta Cathedral, High Anglican worship has survived the transformation.
Next to the cathedral stands the white marble Victoria Memorial, described by Geoffrey Moorhouse in his splendid book Calcutta as ‘a sort of St Pancras by the Hooghly, but Classical not Gothic’. It dominates the Maidan. Queen Victoria still sits in state outside, making sure that her memorial is looked after. Unfortunately she has not been so successful in preserving the pictures inside. When the daughter of that most imperious of viceroys, Lord Curzon, visited Calcutta recently, she complained to the governor of West Bengal about the condition of some of the pictures in the Victoria Memorial. She had a certain right to do so, because her father's contribution to the preservation of India's heritage is acknowledged by all Indian scholars, no matter how anti-imperialist they may be.
In the distance, racegoers can see the tall tower erected in memory of Sir David Ochterlony, who defeated the Gurkha king of Nepal. The monument is now dedicated to Bengali martyrs.
Wide boulevards – remarkably free of traffic – cut across the Maidan. The Red Road, which was the route that imperial processions used to take, leads to the gates of the former viceregal palace. It lost that status in 1911, thirty-six years before independence, when the capital of India was moved to Delhi. Lord Curzon had never felt really comfortable in that palace, even though, by some strange quirk of history, when it had been built 100 years earlier the architect had
taken Kedelston Hall, the family home of the Curzons, as his model. Sir Fredrick Burroughs, the last Englishman to live there, came from far more humble origins: he was a former railway man appointed by the Labour government in London to be the governor of West Bengal. Sir Fredrick used to boast, ‘I am not a hunting and shooting man – I am a shunting and hooting man.’
Clubs, races, sung Eucharist in the cathedral, Queen Victoria – all these are signs that a past which most communist regimes would have eliminated is still alive in Calcutta. They should not, however, be taken as signs that Calcutta is still a British city. A visit to what used to be called Clive Street, at one time the commercial capital and trading centre of the second city of the empire, reminded me that the British were gone. Clive Street had been what Calcutta was really all about: it was the headquarters of the managing agencies which used to run British investments in India. The iron gates with their round shields embossed with the heads of lions still stood at the entrance to Gillanders House, the headquarters of the firm my father belonged to, but tattered tarpaulins leant against its semicircular frontage and spilled over the pavement. A road runs through the middle of the building, and I am sure my father would have approved of the notice ordering ‘No horning’. But most of the office space was occupied by other companies. Gillanders is but a pale shadow of its former self. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the narrow-gauge steam tramway Gillanders used to run, is now part of the nationalized Indian Railways. The coal mines and the life assurance and insurance companies Gillanders used to manage have been nationalized too. Jute is in decline, and Gillanders has lost many of its tea gardens, the only traditional industry of Calcutta which still flourishes.
The other managing agents have not fared any better. It was difficult to tell whether the headquarters of Jardine Henderson, another of the managing agencies, was falling or being pulled down. Andrew Yule's House was in much better shape, but that agency has been nationalized lock, stock and barrel. The communists had nothing to do with all this nationalization: it was the work of the central government. What remains of the managing agencies has fallen into the hands of the Marwaris – a vigorous Indian business community once known more for their skills as moneylenders, traders and investors than for their managerial ability. They certainly have no sympathy for communism.
In Calcutta, the generally accepted reason for the decline of the British presence in Clive Street is laziness. A financial journalist said to me, ‘The burra sahibs did not realize that the days of chota hazari [light breakfast], burra hazari [main breakfast], lunch and then the club had gone.’ But that is at the best a very partial truth. My father was one of the hardest-working men I ever knew, and he and many of his colleagues from Calcutta became very successful industrialists when they returned to Britain. Independent India did make life much harder for the managing agencies – what with nationalization, high taxation, restrictions on the remittance of profits, work permits for foreigners and, above all, the stifling bureaucracy of a planned economy – nevertheless, I can't help feeling that the British accepted defeat too easily. Clive Street and its environs are now shabby, down-at-heel, overcrowded and ill-kempt, but it is still possible to sense – and indeed see – that it was once a great trading centre. It saddens me to think of the progress made by Hong Kong and Singapore and to compare them with Clive Street. But then India faced very different problems – particularly the problem of large-scale poverty, and Nehru chose socialism and a protected economy to deal with that – so Calcutta's trading activities were inevitably curtailed.
When the communists came to power in 1977, they found that industry in West Bengal had entered a serious decline. The old jute-mills and engineering factories had not been modernized and there had been no new investment. Many companies had moved out of the state. The communists were themselves partly to blame for this. In the sixties they had enjoyed two brief spells in power as members of unstable coalitions. They created industrial anarchy. The gherao – a particularly uncomfortable form of industrial action from management's point of view was employed on the slightest of pretexts. ‘Gherao’ means ‘surrounding’, and that is exactly what the workers did. They surrounded the management in their offices, their factories or their yards – wherever they happened to be – and menaced them until they surrendered. The police had orders not to intervene. Then came the Naxalites, a splinter group of communists who still believed in violent revolution. They terrorized the citizens of Calcutta until the second coalition of the Marxists and other leftist parties collapsed. The Naxalites were then put down with considerable brutality by the man Indira Gandhi sent to restore order in West Bengal.
Gheraos and Naxalites did not exactly encourage investors. However, the Marxists also have a point when they blame the central government for the start of West Bengal's decline as an industrial state. The state used to enjoy a considerable geographical advantage because it was near India's coal belt, and also its iron ore and other minerals. That advantage was lost when the central government declared that raw materials for industry would be available at the same price throughout India, irrespective of freight charges.
The Marxists were sobered by their earlier experiences of power and by the years in the opposition which followed. They lost valuable cadre members in clashes with the Naxalites and in the police campaign which put them down. They had seen the Congress Party blatantly rig an election to the state assembly. Their leaders had been arrested in Indira Gandhi's state of emergency in 1975–7, and they feared that if she were ever returned to power she would end democracy in India once and for all. That is one reason for the remarkably pragmatic way in which they set about restoring West Bengal to its position as one of India's leading industrial states. The unions were told to behave themselves and to cooperate with management – even with management in the private sector. Strenuous efforts were made to persuade industrialists to invest in the state. Talks were even held with the vanguard of capitalism, the multinationals. Nationalization became a dirty word. Even the company which generates electricity for Calcutta was left in the hands of its shareholders, since the Marxists realized that it was doing a better job than the nationalized power stations.
One of the few concerns which the Marxists did nationalize was ‘Darling’ Billimoria's Great Eastern Hotel, but there was now talk of pulling down that historic building and putting up a modern five-star hotel with the help of Japanese capital and expertise. Not that Calcutta needs Japanese technology to run five-star hotels – the Grand on Chowringhee shows that Indians can do it perfectly well. This was the foundation of the fortune of Mohan Singh Oberoi, the father of modern hoteliery in India, who got the hotel on the cheap shortly before the Second World War because it had been closed for a year after six guests died of typhoid. Oberoi soon got to the bottom of the problem – a dead cat in the water-tank. During the war, the allied high command wanted to requisition the Grand to accommodate army officers. The army calculated it would cost twelve rupees a day to feed an officer. To retain control of his hotel, Oberoi offered to do it for ten. He calculated that he would make more than enough profit on the bar, and he proved to be right. Mohan Singh Oberoi is still alive, and I am sure he could revive the Great Eastern too.
The private sector was also introduced into public transport. Members of the Marxist Party were encouraged to become entrepreneurs by being given licences to operate buses in Calcutta. Standing in Dalhousie square, or BBD Bagh as it is now known, I watched the young drivers of these buses revving their engines to amuse themselves while their conductors yelled the destinations in a bid to attract passengers. When the buses were full they roared off to contribute more than their bit to the chaos of Calcutta's traffic, and to the noise and air pollution of a city which, while I was there, the Botanical Survey of India warned could turn into a gas chamber by the turn of the century. I contrasted those noisy, dirty buses with the trams of the nationalized Calcutta Tramways Corporation passing through the square, which is one of the two main junctions
of the tram system. The trams did not pollute, and they made no noise except for the clanging of pedal-operated bells that still serve as horns. It might be an overstatement to describe the bells as musical, but they are certainly a lot more euphonious than horns.
The trams carry more than 180 million passengers a year. They are slower that the buses but are preferred by many people because their staff are comparatively polite and disciplined and the tickets are cheaper. The Marxists, in collaboration with the World Bank, have put money into the tramways, but the young managing director of the tramways felt that much more should have been done. He told me, ‘Our technology is still the technology of 1900. Experts are now realizing again that trams are a very useful form of transport. They call them “light railways”. I hope that we will eventually be able to upgrade Calcutta's trams to light railway.’ A notice-board in his office showed that improvements were indeed necessary. The day before there had been fifteen derailments, three breakages in the overhead wires, one mechanical failure, three cases of other vehicles getting stuck on the tramlines and seven miscellaneous hold-ups. The total running time lost was nineteen hours five minutes. That apparently was not too bad a day.
There has been some progress in public transport in Calcutta. The underground, or Metro, has at last been opened – or at least half of it has: the five miles of line from outside the Tolly Club in south Calcutta to Esplanade at the northern end of the Maidan. It would be churlish to complain of the incomplete Metro, because the line to Tolly is one of the few success stories of Calcutta: it is quick, clean and punctual. Standing at Esplanade, I rather wished the service was a little less punctual because I had to tear myself away from a Laurel and Hardy film showing on the platform's television monitors. There is no question of subjecting travellers to Marxist indoctrination – but then the Metro is run by Indian Railways, a department of the central government.
