Calcutta (29 page)

The church itself, with its thick and almost Norman piers supporting faintly Mogul arcadings, and with its spotlessly white walls, could quite easily have been transported from
somewhere
much farther West than its real point of origin in Persia, though the solid cane-bottomed chairs rather give the game away from the start. There is a black-bearded priest, much coped and crowned, much attended by acolytes, much given to
disappearing
in small procession behind the altar with gongs
beating
, incense drifting and candles guttering. There is a small choir of boys in dapper grey suits and girls dressed like
Bohemian
peasants in billowy white muslin frocks with red bodices and red kerchiefs over their hair. They sing to the
accompaniment
of a lady in a smart pink two-piece suit, seated at a
harmonium
in the corner, and their chants are skirling and Slavonic. The people in the congregation cross themselves
repeatedly
and attend to their prayer-books, which are printed in yet another of Calcutta’s bewildering scripts. And when they leave, scarcely one goes home to Armenian Street, for that is in decaying North Calcutta. These are far from decaying people, for they have come in cars and taxis and in these they disperse
across the middle and southern parts of the city. One of them gets into her waiting taxi and is carried with many a lurch and plenty of honks to the vicinity of Park Street, to the private hotel which her late husband bequeathed her, still named Killar ney Lodge as he named it, still with a photograph of Balmoral Castle hanging outside one of its bedroom doors, precisely as he left it.

There is another people who once thrived round here and then moved off to better things, and they are the Marwaris. Their ancestral homeland lies at the other side of India, in the largely desert region of Rajasthan, which is so very arid that it is common to see nomadic shepherds mounted in long camel trains, driving huge mobs of sheep and goats in search of pastures as far away as the outskirts of Agra and even Delhi. Rajasthan before
Independence
was divided into several princely states based upon towns like Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikaner and Udaipur, and the Marwaris were traditionally the moneylenders attendant upon these courts and their surrounding society; they were also very often Jains, a sect which began as a monastic organization that parted
company
from Hindu Brahminism at about the same time as
Buddhism
, to become another religious development. They are pious people, who support fourteen schools in Calcutta alone, simply to train a priestly caste of men to serve as domestic chaplains in the Marwari households of the city. A handful of Marwaris settled in Calcutta a century ago; between 1890 and 1920 they increased their numbers here by 400 per cent, and since then they have never ceased to flow eastwards into the city, to fasten on to its commerce and to manipulate and multiply its wealth. For a start, they colonized this part of the city as moneylenders and traders, but then they began to move into the property market and after that into the highest levels of industrial management and ownership. They were shrewd enough and had capital enough to buy up land adjacent to the new roads that were being cut by the Calcutta Improvement Trust after the First World War and they were sometimes caught out in something more than shrewdness.

Marwaris were discovered at the profitable end of the great ghee scandal in 1917. Ghee is clarified butter, a basis of cooking
in every solvent Hindu household and, being a by-product of the sacred cow, a highly important element in religious practice and diet. In 1917 rumours began to circulate that Calcutta had
suddenly
become a great market for adulterated ghee, which in this land means something between a criminal act and a cultural disaster. Marwaris by then had almost a monopoly of the ghee trade and when samples were taken it was discovered that only seven out of sixty-seven test cases contained pure ghee; one sample consisted of only five per cent ghee, the rest of it being some unmentionable and untouchable fat; another sample didn’t have a drop of ghee in it. In the scandalized uproar which
followed
, the local Brahmins summoned learned priests from Benares to advise them what to do. After deliberating for a couple of days, these sages reported that anyone in the city who could possibly have been defiled by the adulterated ghee would have to purify himself by the Hooghly in a ceremony lasting four or five days, accompanied by scrupulous fasting. The
result
of this edict,’ the observing Governor of Bengal, Lord Ronaldshay, says, ‘was electrifying. Three thousand Brahmins gathered on the banks of the Hooghly forthwith … by the morning of 19 August there was a vast concourse of between four and five thousand undergoing purification.’ And the
Marwari
Association fined its shifty traders up to Rs 100,000 apiece.

That will be one reason why the Marwaris are at least
suspected
and more frequently detested by almost everyone else in Calcutta, particularly by Bengalis. There are others. Suspicion and distrust have only been increased by the perpetual refusal of Marwaris to lend themselves to any cause other than those of purely private and sectarian interest. They ostentatiously held themselves aloof from the swadeshi movement at the time of Curzon’s partition, boycotted the local boycott, and continued to trade in any commodity that might be profitable to them. They offended Muslims by their deeply Jain distaste for the slaughter of cows (curious in a people who were capable of adulterating ghee) and were so surrounded by hostility in the Burra Bazar part of the city, which they largely shared with the Muslim community at the time, that by 1918 they were
importing
armed guards from Rajasthan to defend their homes and their
warehouses; which only increased their offence. Yet their isolation was to become, ironically, even more profitable to them. For the British, struggling to contain local nationalism, were very ready to replace a stroppy Bengali who might be in some position of influence or substance with someone politically more reliable, whenever possible; and the most reliably apolitical Indians around Calcutta during the first three decades of the twentieth century were the Marwaris, even though they were carefully
cultivating
Mahatma Gandhi on the side from the moment it seeemed he might become a power in the land. So they prospered
exceedingly
in the last few years of the Raj.

When Independence came, and a lot of British investment was withdrawn, Marwari capital was swiftly popped into its place. When British managers decided, as they increasingly have
decided
over the past twenty years, that their current contract to work in Calcutta should be their last, Marwari managers have generally been found the most competent and the most accessible to take their jobs. And when British directors have bowed to the inevitable and relinquished their seats in the process of
Indianization
, almost always it has been a Marwari who has slipped into the boardroom behind them. An Indian has characterized them to an Englishman thus: ‘They do not, as you do, think of an ever-expanding market: they mark off an area, turn their
attention
on it in detail, set out to pick the bones absolutely clean’; which is a habit psychologically formed perhaps by an ancestry in the desert, where vultures are known to do the same thing. In Calcutta today, you will not find many Marwaris living in the confounding congestion of Burra Bazar or the Lower Chitpore Road. They are domiciled much more comfortably, more
frequently
, in Old Ballygunge, beyond Park Street, and down in deepest Alipore; which are places where the masters of this city have always lodged for preference. Their most conspicuous
success
story is that of the Birlas. Their most glittering monument is the Jain Temple, a shrine of filigree delicacy and sherbet sweetness built by a jeweller, with mirror-glass mosaic
smothering
its interior, with precious metals and stones inlaid upon its principal deity, and with very fat goldfish waiting to be fed in its adjacent pond.

ENCIRCLED
by this maze of migrants are the Bengalis, the only natives of this strangely beloved Kalkatar. These are the Basus, the Boses, the Mitras, the Sens, the Duttas, the Chowdhurys, the Chakrabartys, the Roys, the Majumders, the Banerjees, the Chatterjees and the Mukherjees of the city; or variations of these names, for there are thirty-one ways of rendering Chakrabarty, ranging from Chackerbutty to Chuckervertty, and there are fourteen forms of Mukherjee, eleven of Banerjee, eight of
Chatterjee
. The Bengalis have distinctive personal habits, like a
Bengali
way of sitting, which consists of resting on your left hip and left hand with one leg drawn up, unlike a Bihari, who simply crosses his legs and sits on his heels. They have their own New Year’s Day, which is 15 April, when their astrologers take counsel and advise that in 1377 (which is also 1970) life in Calcutta will be eventful and unpleasant because Saturn is in an unfavourable position. They have a Bengali way of
declaiming
, either in the theatre or in politics, a rhetorical style of pumping out words and phrases on a rising intonation to a final explosion, which mesmerizes in the theatre but which can make a Communist party meeting sound alarmingly like a Nuremburg rally. A more commonplace adaptation of the same trick has been beautifully described by a European who knows Bengalis better than most: ‘Whenever we ran into an acquaintance – that’s to say, every two hundreds yards or so – we would stop and my guide would launch into a long introduction: “This is Dr John Rosselli, he’s half-Italian, he has a wife and two sons in
England
, he’s from the University of Sussex, he teaches history, he’s studying Bengali, he learnt it in London at the School of
Oriental
and African Studies, he eats sitting on the floor in the Bengali posture” (beaming smiles all round) “he eats with his right hand, and oh yes, he’s eaten khichuri, and ilish mach – but of
course he has a bit of trouble with the bones – and he’s had paish” (a special sweet). “Ah, paish!” Paish everyone would say. It was like going about with one’s own herald extraordinary.’

There are probably more generalizations made about the Bengalis than about any other people in India. Some of them are demonstrable, but some are so far-fetched that you wonder how they could have originated. Considering the history of Bengal over the past hundred years, it is impossible to believe the legend of the Bengali as a gutless and pacific individual, an excellent fellow for talking but no good at all for action. Yet in the
nineteenth
century a British ruler, Mountstuart Elphinstone, was noting that while every Mahratta above the rank of messenger invariably sat in his presence, in Bengal there was scarcely a native allowed (or, by implication, daring) to; and in the
twentieth
century another representative of the Raj, Mr R. G. Casey, was remarking that ‘he is probably the cleverest and quickest of Indians but … practically no Bengalis serve in the fighting
services
’. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Charles Stewart even ventured to suggest that ‘should the English ever be driven from all the other parts of India, they may find in Bengal an asylum where no enemy will venture to follow them. They are secure from a foreign invader, they are equally safe from any insurrection of the natives, whose mildness of
disposition
and aversion to war are such that nothing short of the most atrocious cruelty or of religious persecution could induce them to draw swords against their present masters.’ Which is almost a comical misjudgement in view of all that was to follow. It is said that the Bengalis of Calcutta are particularly
soft-spoken
and courteous, though East Bengalis believe them to have honey on their lips and poison in their hearts; and this may be so, for we have the word of Bengal’s most distinguished living writer in English, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, for it. The most
celebrated
Bengali social scientist, N.K. Bose, has written that ‘The Bengalis seem to have a strong sense of local patriotism. The range of their social combinations also appears to be small. Small combinations take place easily among them for building up a library, a club for physical culture, a sports or a social service organization and the like … A Bengali seems to feel happier in
the company of those with whom he closely agrees, rather than in the company of others with whom he may have points of
difference
. Unities are not stressed; differences are not easily tolerated.’

There is a rampant fiction that the Bengalis have never soiled their hands with trade and commerce, preferring to dwell loftily upon a plane which is intellectually and spiritually higher than anyone else’s; it is usually repeated in Calcutta by someone who has just remarked caustically that Kalwars have cornered the local scrap-iron market. Yet when the Bengal Chamber of
Commerce
was founded in 1853, the good Bengali names of
Guru-charam
Sen, Harischandra Bose, Ramgopal Ghose, Rajendra Dutta, Kalidas Dutta and Shyamcharan Mitra were among those of the first members; the flourishing coal, shipping and banking combination of Carr, Tagore and Co. had belonged to the Calcutta Chamber which preceded it; and when India’s first jute mill was started at Rishra in 1855, it was a joint effort by George Auckland and Shyamsundar Sen. In the days when East India Company writers depended upon Indian banians to find them house, horse and enough money to get along with, there were quite as many Bengalis as anyone else waiting by the wharves along the Hooghly when the latest boat came in, to secure their share of young Englishmen and offer them the
benefits
of their agency. It was in this fashion that the Tagore clan began their rise to remarkable power and prestige in the city and abroad. In the second half of the eighteenth century there were millionaire Bengali banians like Hidaram Banerjee and Monhur Mukherjee, while the Bengali merchant and shipowner,
Ramdulal
Dey, was eventually so rich that American traders used to borrow from him.