Calcutta (16 page)

There is a typical bustee out near Calcutta’s second university at Jadavpore. It starts on the edge of upstanding middle-class houses and it trails off into the railway lines; so many bustees do. The huts are made of wattle, they have tiled roofs, they have mud floors. They are so congested that there is nowhere more than an arm’s span in the dirt-track lanes that separate one row from another. And open drains run down the middle of each lane, so that you tend to walk them at the straddle. People sit in these lanes chopping wood, cooking at open fires, even buying and selling at tiny stalls. As many as seven or eight sleep in one room of a shanty, for which they pay Rs 10 to 15 a month to their thika tenant. There is no electricity, which means that there are no fans; and the fan in Calcutta is a minimal necessity of life for any European, no luxury for any Indian. There is a
standpipe
providing water for 125 people. There is also the khatal.
The khatal is the rich man’s method of stabling his cattle upon the premises of the poor. Every bustee contains them; it is one way of acquiring a minute income from the rich man, and there is also the consideration of dung which can be collected, shaped into small pats, placed upon the baked earth for drying in the sun, and then used as fuel for the fires. The people have to put up with the filth of these dozen beasts, sitting there tethered under a shady roof in the middle of their homes, and they also have to find vegetation for the wretched animals to eat. In
exchange
they are allowed to milk them, as long as the cows are not dry. The rich man expects to be paid for the milk, of course; he comes down to the bustee once a month to settle his financial transactions with the people.

There are other forms of slum in Calcutta. Up at Baranagar, which is almost within sight of the Howrah Bridge, there is a jute mill which was built and profitably maintained for nearly a century by Scotsmen. Eventually it passed into the hands of Indians, who run it now, almost a model of its kind. It is
circumscribed
by a high brick wall and in spite of the purely Indian setting – the long row of cooped-up stalls across the street, their owners cross-legged on the counter, the bicycle rickshaws being pedalled laboriously, with much ringing of bells, over the cobbles – in spite of all this, the essence of the mill and its vicinity is still ridiculously British. That raw red brick with its patina of dirt, that gateway with a wrought-iron arch curving above it, those factory attendants in khaki dungarees checking people in and out, those workmen wheeling their bicycles away after a shift, are all part of an industrial landscape which originated half way across the earth and which can still be seen in a
thousand
examples from Dundee to Bolton and back again. The street curves downhill slightly, alongside the high wall, towards the river, where the mill has its private pier for barges come to collect its gunny sacks and its other makings of jute. And at the bottom, on the bank of the river, those Scotsmen built some homes for their workers; for their Indian foremen, to be precise.

They stand in terrace rows and they are made of the same glazed brick as the factory, a couple of storeys high. They
contain
a total of 630 rooms and 1,500 people inhabit them. One
room on the ground floor is 10ft by 6ft and three men share it; there is space inside for nothing but them, a string from one wall to the other with clothes hanging from it, half a dozen metal cooking vessels and a few religious pictures tacked into the brickwork. But they have themselves added a short bamboo porch to give them a little extra space for a kitchen of sorts, a small angular horseshoe shape two bricks high; an open drain runs within two feet of it. The men live here by themselves
because
, like so many men in Calcutta, they find that ends can be made to meet more often if the wife and children stay behind in the village, which may be somewhere in the back of Bengal or even farther afield. Once a year these three men return to their families for two months allotted leave, a fortnight of it paid. Each collects Rs 200 a month for a forty-eight hour week and absolutely no chance of overtime. He has six per cent of his wages deducted for an unemployment benefit scheme. He spends Rs 70 a month on keeping himself alive. The rest he sends home to his family. These three men have lived like this since they came to Calcutta in 1956. By the norms of the city, they are not too badly off, even though the pumps of unfiltered water
supplied
by the company work out at one for every hundred people, even though the solitary latrine for the whole colony of 1,500 is so foul that most people instead take to the Hooghly.

There is also a little electricity here, not in the rooms of course, which don’t even have ventilation, but enough to provide two or three lamp standards along the end of the terrace rows. And at night, in the pools of light these create, this colony of company slums can be seen as a haunting throwback to a distant age in a distant place. People sit upon their haunches in the lamplight and gamble with cards; they lean and gossip beside small stalls which are set up even in here, with shelves bearing spices in jars, tobacco in boxes and garish glassy beads threaded into necklaces and bangles on string. On the outer rim of the light, where the thick shadows fade and the deep blackness begins, grey figures steal back and forth, quarrel by one of the pumps, sit very still with their backs to a wall and squat upon their heels to piss in a gutter. There are flickering lights from oil lamps inside some of the buildings. There is iron-blue smoke from fires drifting in
small clouds just above head height. There are mangy dogs, their coats almost bald with disease and undernourishment, scavenging listlessly in corners. It will have been something like this in the stews of Whitechapel early in the nineteenth century.

The sewerage of Calcutta is from the same era, as the city approaches the last quarter of the twentieth century. Along the whole thirty-mile length of Greater Calcutta there is not much of even remotely modern sewerage, and modern in this context means anything up to a hundred years old. Instead there is what they call the service privy. This is a small brick shed with a
platform
above a large earthenware bowl to receive the shit; it is usually fully exposed and unprotected from flies. It is supposed to be emptied daily by Calcutta Corporation, but things do not happen that way in Calcutta. It is sometimes weeks before the Corporation sweepers arrive. Even with the service at its best, the bowl has usually long since overflowed across the
surrounding
ground. Howrah, with a population of half a million,
contains
nothing but service privies. Apart from Howrah and the city proper, there are 126,000 of them in Greater Calcutta. The city itself has another 42,000. Its bustees alone contain 17,000. Unutterably nasty as the service privy is for those who must use it, its implications are much more awful than mere squalor. It represents the beginnings of cholera, of every other gastro-
intestinal
disease in creation, with smallpox and tuberculosis thrown in as well. For the stinking mess around the bustee’s privy is washed straight into the ponds and tanks of water in which the people clean themselves and their clothes and their cooking
utensils
. Every year, when the monsoon falls, the incidence of cholera in Calcutta rises from its service privies. It is endemic and
sometimes
it is epidemic; in 1958 there were 4,900 cases and 1,765 deaths in Calcutta City alone. And this place is not much equipped for the medical care and attention of its poor people. In the whole of West Bengal there is not even one hospital bed for every thousand people. It occasionally happens that an
ambulance
takes a sick man to hospital, where the doctors refuse to treat him, whereupon he is returned by ambulance whence he came; which, as often as not, is to the pavement.

It is just possible for the Western mind, contemplating
Calcutta 
from a safe distance, to grasp some of the incidence of its poverty. It is almost impossible, except from personal experience, to understand how congested the poverty is. But some
comparative
figures can give an inkling. Calcutta is obviously one of the most overcrowded places on earth. In fact, the last time anyone made a count (between 1961 and 1963), it was found that the city contained 102, 010 people per square mile. Even by Indian standards this was an enormous density. Calcutta’s nearest rival at the time was Ahmedabad, with 56,540 people per square mile; in Delhi the figure was 41,280, in Bangalore it was 49,220. In 1963, the city the Western world laments as the most shockingly overcrowded it knows, New York, contained 27,900 people per square mile. The average figure for twenty-two cities in the Central United States was 13,500; Los Angeles rated an
agoraphobic
7,870. Figures do not diminish in Calcutta; the density will be appreciably greater by now. In 1961 the average dwelling along the Hooghly consisted of 1.55 rooms, with three people living in each room. But in 1957 it was calculated that
seventy-seven
per cent of all the families in Calcutta had less than forty square feet of living space per person.

Life is squalid, it is claustrophobic and it somehow continues on a pittance. A man earning Rs 200 a month by tending a loom in a jute mill at Baranagar is a princeling among such people. He is, for a start, at least semi-skilled, which means that he will have had some education in a city where sixty-four per cent of the adults are illiterate. And he is comparatively secure in his employment. So, in a smaller way, is a man like Bheddari
Poshman
, who at the age of sixty-five pulls a rickshaw through the pouring traffic of Calcutta. It is not his own rickshaw, of course; the middleman flourishes in India as he flourishes nowhere else; the rickshaw man rents his vehicle for one rupee a day from a fellow who owns forty of them. He then runs and trots and jogs anything between ten and twenty miles a day to make a living. He charges his customers anything between an equivalent of ½p and 1p a mile, which means that he earns Rs 3 to Rs 7 a day, with takings on the higher side on Saturday and Sundays; for he keeps going seven days in the week. Poshman manages to do this, in spite of his sixty-five years, on a diet which one would have
thought insufficient even to keep him standing on his legs
without
support. At the start of the day there is eight ounces of rice or a similar amount of the cereal called chhatu, mixed with some chili and onion for flavour; there is some tea around noon, and chappatis in the evening. Nothing else. Nevertheless, this is still living on a slightly higher income than the infinite number who are employed as servants in Calcutta.

In 1965 the American Woman’s Club of the city compiled an instructive booklet for the guidance of new members recently arrived from the States. It included prevailing wage rates for servants, and it should be borne in mind that in many cases the terms of engagement probably meant that the employee ate at his employer’s expense on top of his wage, and his lodging in a shed at the back of the house; though whether this also allowed him to carry food away to his immediate relations would depend upon individual American or European generosity. The
instructions
to the new hirer of servants went as follows:

Bearer
– Rs 90 to Rs 120 or more a month. The higher paid bearers act as butler-bearers, combining the duties of serving man with those of major domo.
Cook
– Rs 90 to Rs no a month. Does marketing and cooking.
Cook-bearer
– Rs 100 to Rs 125 a month. Acts as cook and bearer usually for a single person or for a couple. Occasionally may be employed by a larger family
Sweeper
– Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Does cleaning and heavy work.
Ayah
or
nanny
– Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Takes care of children. The ayah usually doesn’t live in. The nanny is usually a more experienced person, lives in and receives higher pay.
Personal
ayah
– Rs 35 to Rs 75 a month, depending upon whether the service is full or part-time. Acts as lady’s maid, washes, irons and mends women’s clothing, etc. Single women with jobs find a part-time ayah a great help. In homes with pre-teen or teenage girls it is suggested that an ayah be hired as a personal
maidservant
for the women of the family.
Driver
– Rs 130 to Rs 165 a month. Drives and takes care of the car.
Mali
(gardener) – Rs 60 to Rs 75 a month. Takes care of the garden.
Durwan
(guard) – Rs 60 to Rs 80 a month. Acts as watchman and
gatekeeper
.
Dhobi
(laundryman) – Rs 45 to Rs 50 a month. For a part-time employee who washes, irons all linens and clothing,
including the servants’ uniforms two or three times a week. Rs 70 to Rs 80 or more for a full-time employee for large families who require daily service. He may live in. Rs 30 or more for ironing only, for families who have their own washing machines.

Living in, it should be explained, means the shed at the back of the premises. It does not mean having a room in a household of Westerners. The servants, as likely as not, dwell in the nearest bustee.

The strains of life at this level are sometimes quite alien to the experience of the Western world, and at the most there will be merely suggestions of them in the slums of Southern Europe and the poor men’s ghettoes of North America. They could only be guessed at in Calcutta until a year or two ago. But towards the end of 1968 the Anthropological Survey of India, whose
headquarters
stand just off Chowringhee, began eight months’ study of life in one bustee which has been sunk just beyond the glow of neon lights near Rashbehari Avenue, in the South of the city. There are sixty-one hutments here, almost all of one storey on a couple of acres, with mud or brick walls, with tin or tiled roofs. Each of them contains anything from eight to forty families. There are 2,451 people altogether, mostly Bengalis, seasoned with immigrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Nepal. They represent something like forty different castes between them. The vast majority of them have come to Calcutta from the villages of Eastern India but the next largest group are some of the refugees who have been flowing into the city from East Pakistan ever since Partition in 1947; after them come a handful whose life began in some other Calcutta slum, and there is a sprinkling of people who once knew something a bit better than this in some other Indian city. They are labourers and ayahs, masons and lathe-operatives, tram conductors and office peons, and they pay monthly rents between Rs 9 and Rs 35 for each room. For this there is a service privy and an open bathing space to each hut. There are seven tubewells and two taps of water for the entire bustee. Right alongside this is the kothabari, the middle-class land of bricks and mortar rising to a couple of storeys (homes are mostly no higher than that in Calcutta), of commercial hoardings and street lights of neon which glare so
fiercely at night that the bustee seems to be a place of total blackness with half a dozen guttering candles to mark that it is there at all. It requires some courage for an outsider to step alone into such a place after dusk.