Calcutta (42 page)

A handful of mankind from the world outside became
involved
. Some went to Calcutta to see what could be done, they usually returned and they heightened the sense of impending catastrophe by what they had to tell. A typical excursion was that of Professor Colin Buchanan and eight other Anglo-
American
town planners, who in 1967 reported: ‘A city in a state of crisis. We have not seen human degradation on a comparable scale in any other city in the world. This is one of the greatest urban concentrations in existence rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in its economy, housing, sanitation, transport and
the essential humanities of life. If the final breakdown were to take place it would be a disaster for mankind of a more sinister sort than any disaster of flood or famine.’ Which stimulated more journalists and television crews to fly into Dum Dum to collect more copy and more film. Meanwhile, the great cities of the West, New York in particular, began to have faint and uneasy intimations that what they were hearing about Calcutta might indeed be in store for them one day. The metropolitans of Europe and the United States are now quite frantically certain that it is possible for a city to strangle itself in its own traffic, to poison itself with its own pollutions, to tear itself to pieces by the hand of its own people; and they no longer need the example of Calcutta to convince them that this is so. So they struggle with themselves and, spasmodically, they cast a glance over their shoulders to see how the forthcoming disaster is proceeding in the first city in the world scheduled to perish of its private
misfortunes
. They continue to send their emissaries from time to time, with their notebooks and their cameras, and Calcutta has become so weary of these visitations, which have brought little but expressions of sympathy so far, that a man with a camera is now very likely to have it smashed in anger and resentment, and a man who flaps his notebook too obviously may swiftly be
surrounded
by a mob who will not question him gently.

A city does not suddenly break down. A metropolitan collapse has not yet happened in the modern world, but if Calcutta should provide the first example then the ultimate civic disaster is clearly preceded by a long and gradual process of neglect and decay which undermines the city’s foundations to a point at which a very small push will send the whole structure tumbling into ruins. This process can take just as long as the process of a city’s growth to maturity and supremacy. The two can even be seen, passing the years in tandem, one of the city’s parts thriving and becoming grand while the other becomes increasingly wasted and diseased. This is manifestly so in Calcutta’s case. Almost from the moment there was something more than a collection of straggling mud huts by the Hooghly here, proud and imperial voices have proclaimed the glories of this city, and they have been well heard in the heart of Empire and beyond. Yet every time
boasts were made, there was someone pointing out other things that were nothing to boast about. Just occasionally, someone cried shame in the same tongue and with the same breeding as the boasters; and, generally, he seems to have gone quite unheard by his fellows, his message lost maybe in the historically
well-known
difficulties of communication.

Lord Valentia, an early tourist, was one of the best-known scrutineers of Calcutta in its early period of magnificence. He came just ten years after Sir John Shore was appointed
Governor
-General with that ringing and Biblical assurance of service to every native of India, whatever his situation might be. Lord Valentia seems to have been the first man to remark on the palatial grandeur of the city, particularly of Chowringhee. He also took the trouble to investigate the native quarters and was honest enough to report that ‘The Black Town is as complete a contrast to this as can well be conceived. Its streets are narrow and dirty; the houses, of two storeys, occasionally of brick, but generally mud and thatched, perfectly resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland.’ In 1803, no literate Englishman could be expected to imagine greater human wretchedness than that. Throughout the nineteenth century the developing picture is one of a burgeoning European city, accommodating a small proportion of acceptably wealthy natives, surrounded by a
swelling
cantonment of helots; and while the first progressively equips itself with all the amenities of civilization as they become available to it, the second is more or less left to its own resources, or at best provided with one or two spare parts of urban
equipment
long after the needs of the masters have been attended to. In 1836, the Chief Magistrate, Mr Farran, was noting that ‘The only broad streets in the native part of the town are Amherst Street and the Central Road, the former unfinished and neither of them considered thoroughfares. The Chitpore Road is the great thoroughfare, but it is narrow, winding, dirty and
encroached
upon, while the cross-ways are all lanes, very narrow, very filthy and bounded generally by deep open ditches.’ Sixteen years before that, the British had started metalling the roads of
their
Calcutta.

It was the perpetually watchful and usually caustic Girish
Chandra Ghosh who remarked on another disparity between the two communities a couple of decades later, almost on the eve of the Mutiny. ‘Calcutta is flatly getting too rich for poor people to abide in it … as we see from the last meeting of the Legislative Council in the debate on the report of the select committee on the proposition for lighting the St James portion of Calcutta with gas … The Gas Company is not a philanthropic body whose mission to India owes its origins to a Christian desire of rescuing the people of the country from eternal night and
blessing
them with a light equal in radiance to that of the God of day – free of charge! … we are obtuse enough not to perceive how the comfort and convenience of men who inhabit hovels and breathe the contaminated air of cess pools can be augmented by their European neighbours revelling in a light which is seventeen times more bright than candlelight …’ It was Mr Strachey, the sanitary commissioner for Bengal, who in 1864 pointed out a hazard to local health that not even the British could have escaped very easily, unless they took the most stringent domestic
precautions
. ‘More than 5,000 corpses have been thrown from
Calcutta
into the river,’ he wrote, ‘which supplies the greatest part of its inhabitants with water for all domestic purposes and which for several miles is covered as thickly with shipping as almost anywhere in the world. One thousand five hundred corpses have actually been thrown into the river in one year from the General Hospital alone.’

At about this time, Florence Nightingale was writing from England to Sir Bartle Frere, who had served in Calcutta and had then become Governor of Bombay. That city, she remarked, ‘has a lower death-rate on the last two years than London, the
healthiest
city in Europe. This is entirely your doing. If we do not take care, Bombay will outstrip us in the sanitary race. People will be ordered for the benefit of their health to Bombay …’ This was not a thing that anyone could ever have said of Calcutta. There was another difference between the two cities and Girish Chandra Ghosh had inevitably picked it up. The same debate that had produced the gas-lighting proposals had produced a reference to the taxation of wheel-and-horse traffic. ‘These taxes exist in Bombay,’ wrote Ghosh, ‘and it was a great mistake to have
withdrawn 
them after Calcutta had begun to be accustomed to the new imposition. The horse and carriage tax is a tax on luxury and its operation is not therefore grievously felt by those who come under it, whereas a general tax to the benefit of particular classes is a never-ending source of discontent. ‘The tax had been withdrawn in Calcutta, as many other things unwelcome to the British community there were frequently altered to suit them, because they had the Imperial Government cornered where they wanted it, and could press it into an acceptable shape.’ In India‚’ wrote Ghosh in 1863, ‘there are two interests. There is firstly the government interest, which rightly employed is identical with the interest of justice and native interests … and secondly, there is the non-official English interest, claiming special immunities and consideration by right of conquest, superior intelligence, energy and power of consideration. This gives birth to an
antagonism
by no means unnatural … It is injurious only to the interest which assumes that India is a family preserve of the fifth-rate men of England – not even of the classes which supply the Civil Service – which claims the privilege of obtaining land under conditions only slightly removed from those of an absolute gift, which clamours for a contract law calculated to enslave the native population, and demands immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the established courts of the country.’

A few months later, he logged his own progress report on the physical state of Calcutta. ‘The Imperial city in the middle of the rains is a sight worth the enthusiasm of the tourist. Perhaps no other chief city in the world presents variations of road scenery so great or so interesting. The traveller who lands at Chandpal Ghat, fresh from the atmosphere of European civilization, is regaled with the view of a splendid metropolis, with church steeples reaching up to the clouds, rows of palaces on each hand, streets smooth as bowling greens – wide, dustless and dry – the very perfection of macadamization. He drives into Chowringhee through all its by-lanes and larger thoroughfares, and his heart cannot wish for higher displays of municipal talent and
conservancy
genius and activity than those before him. Everything except Dhurmtollah Bazar is neat, clean and tidy; even the lamp posts wear an appearance suggestive of the idea of being weekly
varnished … But should business or curiosity call him to the native town … he will see or rather feel by the jolt of his
carriage
, streets than which the natural paths of the forest are better fitted for travelling. He will have his nose assailed by the stench of drains which have not felt the ministering hand of man ever since the last rains, his affrighted horse will obstinately back from pits in the thoroughfares wide enough to bury all the rubbish in the adjoining houses, his carriage wheels will stick resolutely into ruts from which release is possible only by the aid of half a dozen men and as many bamboo poles … After a heavy shower of rain he will in some places deem it more pleasant and
advantageous
to hire a boat than swim his horse.’

By the time Kipling came to Calcutta, twenty years later, it was notorious in some circles as the City of Stinks as well as palaces. This was at the bottom of his abiding dislike of it and ‘in spite of that stink, they allow, they even encourage natives to look after the place! The damp, drainage-soaked soil is sick with the teeming life of a hundred years, and the Municipal Board list is choked with the names of natives – men of the breed born in and raised off this surfeited muck-heap.’ He took the view that an efficient municipal government in England would have made short work of Calcutta’s obnoxious problems; they wanted shovels, not sentiments, in this part of the world. Which was slightly beside the point, even though Indians by then had a loud voice in municipal affairs. In 1876 the Bengal Government had created Calcutta Corporation largely, though by no means
completely
, on an electoral basis. Its Bengali councillors could not have been much encouraged by the condescending patronage of their masters in the provincial government, let alone that of the even more superior beings of the imperial ruling body. When the Entally drainage system was opened in 1896, the
Lieutenant-Governor
of Bengal, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, told them what he thought of their struggling efforts in self-administration in the roundest terms. ‘You have, gentlemen, no doubt‚’ he said, ‘been hampered in the task of improving Calcutta by many things, and perhaps by nothing so much as by your own constitution. The marvel is that with such an impracticable organization so much good work should have been done. You have a constitution
borrowed
en
bloc
from the most advanced models in England, and without any reference to the utterly different circumstances of an Oriental city, and a very mixed community. It seems to have been supposed that because Birmingham, for instance (which I know well), is admirably managed by an elected Council of 72, Calcutta could be equally well managed by a council of 75, of whom 50 are elected. But in Birmingham, to begin with, the population is homogeneous and accustomed for generations to managing its own affairs on lines as to which all parties are agreed. The council there is composed entirely of shrewd, capable men of business, manufacturers, merchants, tradesmen and the like, whose one object is to treat every question before them not as an opportunity for speech-making, but as a matter to be settled as promptly as may be in the most practical way … Now I think everybody in Calcutta outside the Corporation, and a good many people inside it, will admit that there is here far too much speaking for the sake of speech …’

A great deal of Calcutta’s problems, clearly, arose from the enormous migration of Indians to the city, which had occurred almost from the moment of Charnock’s first settlement. At the time of the Black Hole the population was estimated at 400,000 or so, and no more than a couple of thousand could have been Europeans then. By Kipling’s day there was something
approaching
a million people here. They had not been driven to Calcutta to provide some kind of slave labour for European masters (although the
Bengal
Chronicle
in 1831 was remarking on a slave market in the city then, and the practice throughout India was not effectively outlawed until 1845) even if the conditions of their employment might sometimes be indistinguishable from those of slavery. They had poured down the Hooghly in search of wealth, just as the Englishmen had sailed up it for the same
purpose
, and they had been incited to do this, as likely as not, by their own people. In 1823, Bhabanicharan Bannerji had written a book called
Kalikata
Kamalaylay
, which can be translated as ‘Calcutta; dwelling place of the goddess of fortune’, which
described
the city as a ‘bottomless ocean of wealth’ and which was intended as a guide to countrymen arriving in the metropolis for the first time.