Calcutta (14 page)

One by one, in the next few days, the newspaper reporters picked up the grudges and the smarting calculations of the British man in the street. ‘It is the European community that will suffer and every member of that community will have to bear the burden,’ said one gentleman under interview. ‘It is quite likely that, Delhi being a great distributing place, goods that now come to Calcutta will go to Bombay and Karachi.’ Another entrepreneur, who had invested a lot of money in developing estates and building houses and blocks of flats, was very
despondent
. ‘Calcutta is done,’ he said, ‘and men like myself, who have tried to cope with the demand for places of residence, have lost our money.’ The head of one of the biggest firms in the city,
deciding
that he spoke for tradespeople generally, said that ‘we have spent a very great deal of money in recent years in order to cope with the business which the influx of the Government
officials
and cold-weather visitors has brought us. Now it seems to
me that there will be no cold-weather season in Calcutta and we need not have extended at all, for our premises for the most part were quite big enough for the ordinary population of
Calcutta
. We are the people who will suffer …’ A man wise in the ways of influence remarked that ‘As everyone who has had
dealings
with the Government knows, little satisfaction is to be obtained by writing and it is only by personal contact and
personal
explanation that we can make Government officials realize our needs.’

For weeks now, the correspondence columns of the local press were to be filled with letters which the sub-editors thoughtfully presented under the generic headline ‘The degradation of Calcutta’. The correspondents never put their names and addresses to these communications; they signed them Civis, A Liberal Disgusted, Ichabod, Patria Cara, An old Anglo-Indian and Cricket. Their general flavour was perfectly reproduced in one of the leading articles
The
Statesman
was publishing at the time: ‘It is upon the Government of India and in particular upon Lord Hardinge that the responsibility rests for what can only be described as an insult to the people of Bengal and to the people of India, rulers and ruled alike … The Viceroy and his Council decided the matter without consulting a single prominent man in the Province, whether official or unofficial, and then they turn round and plead for a generous view from the people they have insulted. Our answer is that before Bengal can look at the
question
on its merits, the men chiefly responsible for this utter disregard for the principles of constitutional government must go. Lord Hardinge has made use of his high office to mislead the King

Within a few months Lord Crewe, briefing the first Governor of the reformed Bengal, was to characterize these people thus: ‘The Calcutta English … community includes, I am sure, a number of honest, capable and likeable people; but I am not less sure that they are spoilt children in many respects, full of their historical and social importance, anti-Indian
au
fond
,
and keen to scent out ‘disloyalty’ in any independent expression of opinion, hidebound too in class prejudices.’ And, indeed, only
The
Statesman’s
turf correspondent appears to have viewed the
disaster philosophically. ‘Would a change of capital from
London
to the ancient capital, Winchester‚’ he asked his readers one morning, ‘have any effect upon racing at Epsom, Newmarket, Ascot or Doncaster?’

Calcutta was not, of course,
done
, as the property developer had feared. There were still two or three decades left in which an Englishman could turn his fortune out of it The essentials of its life continued, bereft only of the opportunity for some to have a pointed word in the most useful ears, stripped merely of the most glittering social functions that were patronized with a sigh periodically by the latest Viceregal tenant of Government House. Nothing but these most superior benefits of Empire was to be missing from the lives of the British citizens for more than a generation to come. Yet a line
had
now been broken, which stretched back vividly and firmly at least to Warren Hastings and, in a way, even beyond to Job Charnock himself. For this was the first time the Raj had retreated before its subject people. This was symbolically the beginning of an end, not only for the British of Calcutta but for the alien rulers of India as a whole. There were even a few men, mostly in London, who could see it as such. And maybe they allowed themselves a wry grin when they realized that the moment in 1912 when it was appointed that Calcutta should cease to be capital of India, was none other than April Fool’s Day.

WHEN
the international and jet-propelled traveller disembarks at Dum Dum he finds, if he has come by the right airline, that a highly polished limousine awaits his pleasure. It will be 6.30 or thereabouts in the morning, and the atmosphere will already be faintly sticky with heat and so unmistakably sweetened with a compound of mainly vegetable odours mat the visitor can
almost
taste it. He need fear no discomfort at this stage, however, for he is to be transported into the city in air-conditioned
splendour
behind delicately tinted windows. From this smooth and relaxing position he can begin to observe how the other half of humanity lives. From the outset he notices some things which are reassuringly familiar. Along the first mile of this wide and tarmacadamed airport road are spaced the very same collection of gaudy hoardings that signal the way in and out of Heathrow or J. F. Kennedy or Fiumicino; ‘Try a Little VC-Ioderness’, says one – and some untidy idiot seems to have thrown up a
collection
of chicken coops in the shade of BOAC. Beside these homely reference points, however, the peculiarities of India are to be seen. The road is bordered by ditches and ponds, all brimming with water, in which women even at this hour are flogging garments clean, in which men are taking the first bath of the day. Beyond the spindle-elegant sodium lights, with
buzzards
and vultures perched on top, stand thickets of
bamboo-and
-thatch huts among avenues of palm. Along a canal, a large black barge top-heavy with hay is being poled inches at a time through a mass of pretty but choking mauve water hyacinth. And in the distance, lurking on the horizon, a range of tall factory chimneys is beginning to smoke.

Calcutta is announced with a pothole or two. Then a bus is overtaken, such a vehicle as the traveller has never seen before; its bodywork is battered with a thousand dents, as though an
army of commuters had once tried to kick it to bits, and it is not only crammed with people, it has a score or so hanging off the platform and around the back like a cluster of grapes. It is lumbering and steaming into a suburban wasteland, stippled with blocks of dilapidated flats; and maybe Bishop Heber’s imagery was not so far-fetched after all, for these are not at all unlike some of the homes for the workers you can see in Moscow today, though there they are not coloured pink and they certainly haven’t been decorated with the hammer and sickle in crude whitewash on the walls. Swiftly, the outer Calcutta of these revolutionary symbols now coagulates into the inner Calcutta which is unlike anywhere else on earth. The limousine now lurches and rolls, for there are too many potholes to avoid. It rocks down cobblestoned roads lined with high factory walls which have an air of South Lancashire about them. It begins to thread its way through traffic along thoroughfares that have something of Bishopsgate or Holborn in their buildings.

It is the traffic that makes it all unique. A traffic in trams grinding round corners, a traffic in approximately London buses whose radiators seem ready to burst, in gypsy-green lorries with ‘Ta-ta and By-by’ and other slogans painted on the back, in taxis swerving all over the road with much blowing of horns, in rickshaws springing unexpectedly out of sidestreets, in bullock carts swaying ponderously along to the impediment of everyone, in sacred Brahmani cows and bulls nonchalantly strolling down the middle of the tram-tracks munching breakfast as they go. A traffic, too, in people who are hanging on to all forms of
public
transport, who are squatting cross-legged upon the counters of their shops, who are darting in and out of the roadways
between
the vehicles, who are staggering under enormous loads, who are walking briskly with briefcases, who are lying like dead things on the pavements, who are drenching themselves with muddy water in the gutters, who are arguing, laughing,
gesticulating
, defecating, and who are sometimes just standing still as though wondering what to do. There never were so many people in a city at seven o’clock in the morning. Patiently the driver of the limousine steers his passage between and around them, while they pause in mid-stride to let him through, or leap to get
out of his way, or stare at him blankly, or curse him roundly, or occasionally spit in the path of his highly polished Cadillac. Presently, and quite remarkably, he comes to the end of the journey without collision and deposits the traveller and his luggage upon the pavement in front of an hotel. And here, the traveller has his first encounter with a beggar. He had better make the best of it, for beggary is to be with him until the end of his days in Calcutta.