Calcutta (21 page)

FOR
this is a very wealthy city as well as a squalidly poor one and the two elements live so close together, they present such grotesque contrasts, the one has so frequently begotten the other, that anger is the most natural and the healthiest response in the world. In a sense, Calcutta is a definition of obscenity.

It has little in the way of exotic wealth. There are parts of India where a town or a village is still dominated by the
presence
of a local prince, whose patronage extends through hovel, market place and temple. He may be physically withdrawn, and he will certainly be taxed to the marrow by the State, but he is still there and his influence and his employment still count. A few miles upstream of the ghats at Benares there is a great white palace on the South bank of the Ganga. Part of it has become a museum and the visitor may inspect a romantic collection of objects; a shed full of palanquins and broughams, and coaches to be drawn by four horses; another packed with howdahs chased in silver, tasselled with silk and emblazoned with heraldry, in which majesty would sit and sway on top of elephants; a long gallery full of muskets and pikes and wicked swords like the one whose curved blade has ball-bearings racing up and down a channel in the middle, the more easily to decapitate a victim. But much of the palace is still a very private place, where a Maharajah and his family sit and control the considerable
remnant
of a king’s ransom, and from which they still carry weight in the affairs of Benares. Calcutta is not like that. It is not by any means devoid of nobility. It accommodates the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, the Maharajah of Cossimbazar, the Maharajah of Mayurbhanj, the Maharajah Ruler of Sonepur State, the Maharajah of Nattore and the lady Maharani Bahadura of Nadia. It is home for the even more exalted Maharajadhiraja Bahadur of Burdwan, Sir Uday Chand Mahtab. Yet while these people
still dwell in palaces of a kind, they are distinctly suburban palaces. While Burdwan still takes the platform of the British Indian Association chiefly to lament the fact that zamindars have fallen upon evil days and to suggest that the land-holding
community
has been denied justice, Cossimbazar avoids publicity and keeps his feet sticking firmly to the ground in a collection of china clay mines.

And there or thereabouts lies the wealth of Calcutta. This is the wealth of the warehouse and the foundry, of the dockside and the bank, of the metropolis and the
entrepôt
, of the stocklist and the showroom and the ringing tradesman’s till. It depends hugely upon a peasantry toiling over the earth under the eyes of a landlord and his men, but these are hidden from its sight behind the smoke of its factories, beyond the rumble of its
overpowering
traffic. Calcutta is by far the richest city in India, even though its various problems have started to turn this richness into a collapsing wealth. It is possibly the richest city anywhere between Rome and Tokyo in terms of the money that is
accumulated
and represented here.

To get rid of a few measurements, this is where, between 1956–7 and 1966–7, 46.9 per cent of India’s exports left the country and where 30.4 per cent of the imports arrived. It is where, in 1964, 15 per cent of India’s manufacturing industry was based, where 30 per cent of the nation’s bank transactions occurred, where 30 per cent of the national tax revenue was produced. And just behind Calcutta is a hinterland that has always swollen its wealth, that in the first place provided the excuse for Calcutta being here at all. The Mogul rulers of India knew Bengal as their Paradise on earth, and this certainly wasn’t because it was comfortable to live in. The British soon came to the same conclusion and Charles Stewart had decided by 1813 that ‘The province of Bengal is one of the most valuable
acquisitions
that was ever made by any nation.’ It has always been the source of profit. In 1963, West Bengal was producing 95 per cent of India’s jute, 92 per cent of its razor blades, 87 per cent of its electric fans, 80 per cent of its sewing machines, 78 per cent of its railway wagons, 74 per cent of its rubber shoes, 70 per cent of its enamelware, 56 per cent of its electric lamps, over
50 per cent of its crockery, 49 per cent of its paint and varnish, 31 per cent of its radio sets and its soap, 30 per cent of its finished steel, 29 per cent of its coal, 25 per cent of its tea and 21.5 per cent of its paper and paper boards.

Add to West Bengal a strip of southern Bihar, a slice of northern Orissa, a fragment of western Assam, and you have what has justifiably been called the Ruhr of modern India. Within less than 300 miles of Calcutta, which is not very far in Asia, almost the whole of the republic’s iron and steel industry is concentrated today in townships cleared out of jungle to make room for blast furnaces, coke ovens and rolling mills. Durgapur, Jamshedpur and Asansol may suggest elephants, bullock carts and the most exotic Orientalism to the Western mind, but they are chiefly the tropical cousins of Middlesbrough, Pittsburgh and Essen. There is a network of similar towns in this hinterland, each with its special development of industry. There are more iron and steel works at Rourkela and Kulti, engineering at Midnapore and Ranchi, textiles at Cuttack,
locomotive
works at Chittaranjan, an oil refinery at Barauni, a great mixture of factories at Patna and Siliguri. The industry is based upon an endless supply of manpower and a vast
accumulation
of natural resources. For this hinterland conceals beneath its jungle, in the firmer ground outside the delta, not only iron and steel and petroleum, but limestone and copper, manganese and dolomite, china clay and asbestos, bauxite and graphite, titanium and mica, fire clay and kaolin, chromium, kyanite, talc and potash. There is also much timber and there is tea in the hill country even farther to the North. And all of it gradually being plundered from the earth and sent up and down in some shape or form, by railway, by truck, by lighter and sometimes still by bullock cart, to Calcutta.

It would not have been so if there had not been a mighty river here, wide and deep enough to let the biggest sailing ships that man could make come tacking into the middle of this
Paradise
; they once used to voyage from Europe as far as Patna, which took them well over a month beyond Kalikata. The river’s origins are far away across a sub-continent of sweltering earth. It has started in the foothills of the Himalyas to the West
and it has come tumbling in a cascade of sky-blue water past Rishikesh, where the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once received the Beatles in an air-conditioned bungalow built on the proceeds of Western adulation, and where there is a township totally given to spirituality and alms, vividly decorated with green and red cast-ironwork, dominated by a Victorian clock-tower, looking and feeling like a cross between Blackpool and Lourdes. Much later the river has rolled powerfully past Benares, a deep
sea-green
now, past the four miles of ghats and the buildings
bearing
signs advocating birth control and the piles of timber with people waiting their turn to incinerate their dead; and in the dawn, ghostly figures have started to creep down the ghats in dozens, in scores, in hundreds and then in thousands to bathe in its sacred waters, while birds have meditated on this humanity and perhaps taken thought for their own souls, perched upon rails which have been staked out in mid-stream especially for this purpose. All this time the river has been called the Ganga, though people have called it by other names as well at different places along its course. They have known it as Daughter of the Lord of Himalaya, Born from the Lotuslike foot of Vishnu, Dwelling in the Matted Locks of Siva, Taking Pride in the Broken Egg of Brahma, Triple-braided Stimulator and Cow That Gives Much Milk. But always, and above all else, they have known it as the blessed Ganga, Mother of the World.

Eventually the river has reached Bengal, and there it has been unable to contain itself in a single headlong rush for the sea. It has become divided into so many channels that it is doubtful whether anyone has ever counted them all. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the mainstream swept confidently past Calcutta in the guise of the Hooghly, but then it began to edge its current towards the Padma and each year since then, more and more of the true Ganga has taken this way to the South, through the East Bengal of what is now Pakistan, with no great Indian city to use it on the rest of its way to the sea. There are gloomy men who call the Hooghly a dying river, though it
certainly
doesn’t look it yet. It pours in a khaki torrent, a third of a mile across, between the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah so fiercely that there is always a foaming bone in the teeth of the
merchantmen pulling anxiously at their anchor cables and their buoys. It is still so full of life that even its pilots have to take a daily briefing on its latest wayward movements, for it is one of the most treacherous rivers in the world. There are 125 miles of it between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal and they are
punctuated
by sixteen sandbanks which are never quite the same shape and depth from one sailing to the next. The most dangerous one of all, the James and Mary, a shoal three miles long and 600 yards wide in the middle of the estuary, was troubling Streynsham Master and Thomas Bowrey in the seventeenth century just as it has troubled mariners ever since. So were the Hooghly’s tidal bores, which now come rushing up to Calcutta on 144 days in every year and even at that distance from their start they are usually six feet or more in height. The newspapers give warning that they are due so that merchantmen can warp themselves into the safety of the Kidderpore Docks, while the country boats can prepare to ride them hazardously in
mid-stream
, and people – if they can read – can crowd for their lives on the very topmost steps of the ghats. There are sudden squalls to beware of, that can turn a laden barge over in an instant, or an overladen motor launch on its way up from Diamond
Harbour
to Kalighat full of pilgrims who will drown in the
twinkling
of an eye. And there is always the lurking possibility of a cyclone which can devastate the city, wreck thirty-six large vessels and throw steamships high, dry and smashed to bits upon the land, as one did in 1864.

The Hooghly exposes Calcutta in cross-section like the rings of a sawn-off log. Scarcely a mile above the city centre it proceeds past palm trees which only half conceal temples and the steadily decaying palaces of old zamindars and Nabobs, together with the worst slums in creation. There are crocodiles here, just as there are leopards around Dum Dum and the other boundaries of the city, and while both sometimes snatch a human being, the
crocodiles
at least are occasionally caught and put on stuffed display in some ambitious motor-showroom along Chowringhee. Then, quite suddenly, there is all the activity of a great cosmopolitan port. On the right is Howrah, which in 1848 was called the Wapping of Calcutta and which does big business in the way of
docking and shipbuilding, where oxy-acetylene flashes burst out of deep and cavernous shadows. On the left is Calcutta proper, and close to the river are high buildings in which most of this tremendous commerce is manipulated. They appear much
smaller
than they really are, though, for the sky here is full of the Howrah Bridge; and there never was a bridge which dominated a landscape as much and in so ungainly a fashion as this one. From any distance it looks as though it was trying to crush the life out of everything beneath, for it is a graceless thing, a great fretworked grid of steel built only to bear footpaths and roads and tramtracks and certainly not to beautify a skyline. There are many bridges in the world constructed upon similar principles and they usually seem to leap across an intervening space with a spring of their own; even Sydney’s metal coathanger manages a pleasing arch across the harbour. But here, it is as if the Howrah Bridge had merely been clamped down over the city, or dropped across the river, and it looks every ounce of its 27,000 tons.