Calcutta (35 page)

Refugees were now streaming out of the city, through Howrah Station and by road; a week after the killings started, it was estimated that 110,000 had fled from Calcutta, that another 100,000 had been displaced within the city itself. And still the carnage continued when the ghastly weekend and the Monday of nominal bygones had passed. On Tuesday morning
The
Statesman
struggled to find words that would say what had happened to this city, in a leading article: ‘When we wrote two days ago, conditions in Calcutta were horrifying. They have passed beyond that since, whatever the appropriate adjective is … the fire brigade reports four hundred calls and four fires to each call, with a thousand calls that can’t be answered … This is not a riot. It needs a word found in medieval history, a fury …’ A week later, a paragraph of bold type surrounded by heavy black lines on the paper’s front page told almost all that it was necessary to add to that. ‘Information would be welcome about
those Indian members of
The
Statesman
staff in Calcutta who have not been in the office since 16 August. Would those whom recent events still preclude from returning to duty please send news of themselves?’

By then the mobs were sated; temporarily. There were now 45,000 troops in the city and they had managed to impose a kind of peace by 25 August. Frightened people were still forming vigilante patrols in their streets at night, their women were still keeping a lookout from the rooftops, with conch shells and trumpets which they blew if they saw the slightest suspicion of hostile movement below. Corpses were still being discovered where men had been cut down and shoved into sewers.
Sometimes
people were found there alive. Akbar Ali Molla was rescued almost dead from a sewer in Ballygunge nine days after he had been flung into it, bleeding from a knife wound in the side. As always in Calcutta, it was difficult to count the dead and the injured. By 27 August 3,468 bodies had certainly been accounted for, but it is likely that just as many had been thrown into the Hooghly by their murderers, that they had vanished beyond any identification. Maybe fifteen thousand had been injured.

And it was still not over. There were several days without a reported incident and on 2 September, the Stock Exchange reopened. But on 6 September a series of stabbings killed three and wounded a dozen. On 14 September, another eight people were stabbed in North Calcutta. On 24 September, nine people were killed and fifty-four were hurt in another riot. Twenty more had died by the morning of 29 September, when the turf correspondent of
The
Statesman
wrote ‘The present uneasiness in Calcutta was reflected in the poor attendance on the opening day of the Tollygunge Autumn Meeting. The racing was very
enjoyable
to some and those who lost heavily on such favourites as Playtime, Sweetheart, Pladda Light and Gypsy Moon, will look forward to better luck in the near future.’ Every few days the long casualty list was increased until the inevitable happened and the Mahatma came to see if there was anything he could do to staunch this apparently interminable flow of blood. He came on a day at the end of October which had spent another fourteen
lives, and got off his train a few miles outside Howrah, so that he could avoid the vast crowds that were waiting to welcome him. At his prayer meeting that night he said that he had come with a blank mind to do God’s will, that God would tell him what the next step should be. He met the Governor of Bengal, Sir
Frederick
Burrows, for a couple of hours and he had meetings with Mr Suhrawardy and other Indian leaders in the city. He was
suffering
from a bad cold and he spent most of the next few days
nursing
it. Then he left Calcutta for East Bengal, where peasants were now behaving with the savagery of the city.

For almost a year the small butchery of Calcutta continued. Occasionally a day or two would pass without a killing, then it would begin again, with two or three deaths on a Tuesday, followed by a dozen on a Wednesday, with another score on the Thursday, declining to eight on the Friday and peace again by Sunday, until two more men were stabbed to death on
Wednesday
… In Delhi, frightened politicians were now at least going through the motions of reconciliation, the British were
announcing
that they would be leaving Indians to their own devices within fifteen months, they were replacing their penultimate Viceroy with their last one and Lord Mountbatten was charming and pressing everyone in sight into a kind of civilized behaviour, but civil war was breaking out in the Punjab and Muhammad Ali Jinnah was getting his way, and the British were now
deciding
to shake the dust of this turbulent Empire from their feet by midnight on 14 August 1947. And Calcutta was still savaging itself.

On Saturday, 9 August, Gandhi returned to the city. He spent the whole of his first day there with the Indian ministers of
Bengal
and the British Governor. He told the people that night that he would gladly give his life if it would slake Calcutta’s furious thirst for blood. He had intended going on to Noakhali in East Bengal, where things had been so bad on his last visit, but now he would stay for a little while here instead. He stayed the weekend at an ashram at Sodepore, a few miles outside the city, and on Sunday thousands of people made their way there to see him. On Monday he toured the worst of Calcutta in a car which he never left, while people came up and told him their troubles and
the Mahatma quietly made notes. At one place so many
thousands
were pressed round the car, chanting ‘Jai Hind’ and ‘Gandhiji-ki-Jai’, that he plugged his ears with his fingers to shut out the noise. It was his day of silence. For Calcutta it was a day when nine people were murdered and fifty others were hurt. In one of the most devastated parts of the city, a patrol of British troops had been standing by; quietly, they slipped into position close to Gandhi’s car and stayed with him for the rest of the day. Next morning it was announced that the Mahatma and Mr
Suhrawardy
were going to live in a bustee together, in one of the badly mutilated areas. ‘Mr Gandhi,’ wrote the reporter, ‘said he had been warned that Mr Suhrawardy was not to be relied upon. The same thing was said about him also. He was described as the worst enemy of Islam. He was supposed to be a consummate hypocrite. God alone knew what was in men’s hearts. He would trust Mr Suhrawardy as he expected to be trusted. Both would live under the same roof and have no secrets from each other.’ The two didn’t exactly live in a bustee. They took up quarters in a large house standing in its own grounds in Beliaghata, the
property
of a Muslim businessman. But it was surrounded by
bustees
, mostly inhabited by Hindus where they hadn’t been
abandoned
in panic.

It was not entirely a popular move. As Gandhi’s car swung into the grounds of the house that Wednesday afternoon a couple of hundred people at the gates were shouting ‘Go back, Gandhi’ and they carried it on for hours in the rain while the British picket stood watchfully by. The Mahatma abandoned his usual prayer meeting and asked a score of the loudest demonstrators to step inside to talk; in the middle of the conversation they got up and walked out, and the crowd outside started to throw stones at the doors and windows. Gandhi looked upset and began to write letters. By eight p.m., with the military picket still standing by for real trouble, the demonstration died down and the people went away. On Thursday there was no hostility at all near the house. Instead, thousands of pilgrims came, and most of them were women. India would be Independent at midnight and the city was suddenly transformed by the prospect. On Friday it was consumed by another kind of madness, in which ‘almost
unbelievable 
scenes of fraternity and rejoicing were witnessed in some of the hitherto worst-affected areas – particularly
Chittaranjan
Avenue, Lower Chitpore Road, Zakaria Street, Harrison Road, Bowbazar Street and Dharamtala Street’. People were now wandering these places with shouts of ‘Hindu Muslim ek ho’ and ‘Jai Hind’ and ‘Inquilah Zindabad’. They were singing ‘Bande Mataram’. Suddenly, they had stopped hurting each other. On Sunday, 75,000 of them were to march on Gandhi’s prayer meeting to give thanks with him. But on Independence Day itself they left him rapt in a twenty-four fast at his spinning wheel and his prayers. Mr Suhrawardy fasted with him.

Calcutta began to enjoy a kind of freedom.

IT
is quite impossible to forget or ignore Calcutta’s imperial past, for the city has been pickled in its origins. The chances are, indeed, that the English-speaking visitor will bring with him one of the smaller but more enduring relics of the Raj. No better guide to India and the adjacent countries exists than Murray’s Handbook, which was first published in 1859 and which still, in its twenty-first edition of more than a century later, insists on taking travellers back to the great old days, even though in the city now ‘all the amenities of civilization such as air-conditioning are available’. Before ever it arrives at the hard stuff of the
gazetteer
, Murray is full of careful warnings that excessive bodily exertion and consequent fatigue should be avoided by all who are no longer young, and splendid reassurances that the
station-masters
in this part of the world are generally civil and obliging. It has advice for the hardy: ‘Those who intend to go into camp (as the British-Indian term runs) should be experienced, or have friends who will make arrangements for them …’ It has tips for the discriminating collector: ‘One must not forget the maxim
caveat
emptor
, and realize that in bargaining the final figure will always leave the smaller dealer with a margin of profit, which may be considerable.’ A man armed with his Murray is well equipped to take the imperial parts of Calcutta as they come.

They come from the moment his plane starts its approach to Dum Dum, with that first ridiculous glimpse of an English
village
church tower sticking up out of Bengal jungle. After that there is no getting away from the building styles of the British, with their own antecedents deeply embedded in everything from Greek Classical to French Gothic. On the way into the city from the airport you pass the factory of The India Hosiery Mills; the title is wrought upon the iron arch over the main gate, there is a gas lamp hanging from the centre of the curve, and if it were
not for the crowd of Indians swirling past that gateway and along the high brick factory wall, the whole composition might just as well be in Rochdale, where the local guardians of
industrial
archaeology would be wondering already what their chances were of preserving it for posterity in the face of those dreadful modernizers. The industrial parts of Calcutta, indeed, are
nothing
more nor less than deliberate replicas, grimy red brick upon grimy red brick, of their old competitors in the North of
England
, and they could quite easily have figured in some of Doré’s nineteenth century slumscapes if it were not for the people who go with them. There is even a thoroughfare in this city called Gas Street. Occasionally, these reproductions are so exact that they bring you to a halt with gaping astonishment. Just across the river at Shalimar, a road which has been lined with factories turns sharp right to avoid the goods shed of the South Eastern Railway. At once (give or take 50 degrees or so of heat) you are standing where this little cameo properly belongs – seven
thousand
miles away in the rundown Ardwick district of Manchester; for not only is that road bumpily surfaced with the same stone setts, but the lettering on the side of the goods shed has come from the same type-book and been cast in the same foundry moulds as the Manchester signs of the old London, Midland and Scottish Railway.

If you look along the outline of most street frontages in Calcutta, it is not at all unlike looking down the sides of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, such is the busy confusion of things one on top of the other – balconies, awnings, wires, washing, belvederes, stanchions, wooden blinds, indistinct projections and leaning people. But if you confront each building separately head-on, you often find yourself goggling at a perfect rhapsody of
architecture
. There will be a doorway set between Doric columns with ‘AD 1879’ carved into the pediment above. On either side of this, where there ought to be windows, there will be rooms open to the street instead, with trade going on inside; and pilasters will spring away above, to a wrought iron balcony on the first floor, which will be partly enclosed by Early English arcading and which will also be provided with wooden shutters that neither the early nor the late English ever needed in their climate. Above
this will come another storey, whose window openings have been carved in a faintly Mogul style; and to top it all off there will be a stone balustrade with Gothic ogees piercing it so that, from the other side of the street, you can even see the hoofs of the large stone horse that is galloping across the roof – or the hem of Aphrodite’s dress as she gracefully bends to pour the contents of her urn on to the pavement far below. The consistent Classicism of the Mullick’s Marble Palace, and several of its rivals, is really very unambitious when contrasted with a lot of what has been built in Calcutta. There is a tall and narrow house on Strand Bank Road, not far from the river, which rises through four floors and four building styles that have originated in four
separate
countries. There is a small thesis to be written by somebody on Calcutta’s rooftop monuments alone; not only horses and Aphrodites, but lions rampant, hawks stooping, and naked young ladies reclining rather brazenly as well. These reach their full height of imagination in the Bengal Baroque fantasy of Jhagra Kothi in Armenian Street, a building erected for commerce at the turn of the century which for some unrecorded reason started a communal riot in the district; possibly because the Muslims in the mosque opposite thought the architect was engaged in a parody of their faith rather than their building styles, but
conceivably
because they found it too much of a good thing when the collection of angels lining the roof was each provided with an electric lamp sticking out of his halo.