Calcutta (55 page)

Next morning, the Governor of West Bengal advised New Delhi that there had been a breakdown of the Constitutional machinery in his state and suspended the Assembly. That
afternon
, long convoys of military began to roll down Chowringhee to take up positions around the city. The sight of them lightened many hearts but, in truth, they meant only that the darkness of Calcutta was gathering more thickly still.

THE
bickering, of course, did not end with the dissolution. A few weeks later it was Lenin’s birthday again, and for this hundredth anniversary Calcutta mounted a perfect cameo of the more attractive side to its political life. There stood the great god figure, bronzed and flatfooted upon his plinth, dominating what had been Curzon Park until he moved in and caused it to become Lenin Square. There was Governor Dhavan to unveil him, with Ajoy Mukherjee and Jyoti Basu and many other old comrades to applaud him, and there was the Russian Consul-General
trying
to look paternal and filial at one and the same time. Naxalites were preparing to march somewhere in the vicinity, for it was their birthday too. The Governor declared that Lenin had been a great friend to India and for his pains was told, five minutes later by a speaker from the CPI (M), that he represented the class of which Lenin was the sworn enemy. Ajoy Mukherjee narrated the whole of Lenin’s life, from birth to death, and when he had at last run out of breath was told by Jyoti Basu that he and his cohorts had better abandon their fruitless attempts to destroy Marxist Communism. A Mr Gupta of the CPI aired his views on the CPI (M)’s disruptive influence, and was asked why he was taking part in a function at which capitalists were trying to create confusion in the people’s minds at the expense of Lenin. The Russian Consul-General was told by someone else that he had no business to be there either, representing as he did the forces of revisionism. Everyone spared a slanderous thought for the Naxalites, who were just then mustering by the Birla
Planetarium
.

There wasn’t much else to laugh about in Calcutta. The day President’s Rule was declared, the city was once more quiet and empty with the menace of a total strike. Within a fortnight, an attempt was made on Jyoti Basu’s life in Patna, the bullet
killing the man next to him as he was being greeted by local party workers on the railway station. Had it hit Basu, there is little doubt that Calcutta would have been visited by another medieval fury of retribution, for party passions were then at their highest, their internecine animosities inflamed even more by the bitterness of lost power. As it was, the customary violence merely continued for months, after a short breathing space
imposed
by the presence of troops in the city, who were withdrawn as soon as Delhi felt that the first hot wave of resentment against outside control had passed. In November, the Indian Parliament was told that there had been 313 murders in West Bengal in the previous quarter alone, of which more than half were reckoned to be political; and since the United Front collapsed there had been 526 attacks on policemen, with fatalities increasing at an unprecedented rate. The police had begun to respond in kind. The Naxalites threatened everyone more than ever before and their strategy changed to bombing and killing in the city rather than in the country. Their student mobs became particularly vicious in their antipathy to Gandhi, to Tagore and to anything connected with those two gentle ghosts. They attacked the Gandhi Study Centre at Jadavpore one day and burned all its literature; and things became so impossible at the university that in May it was closed indefinitely.

A few days later, a young teacher from Essex called Mary Taylor was captured with a band of Naxalites in the jungle near Jamshedpur, which seemed to astonish people much more than it should have done; what the Naxalites are fighting for is, after all, not substantially different from what students on campuses across Europe and the United States have been demonstrating and rioting for in the past year or two. And in India, as
elsewhere
, forces even more sinister were being marshalled ready to strike back and smash when the opportunity occurred. General Cariappa, sometime Indian High Commissioner in Australasia and former Commander-in-chief of the Army, could be heard advocating President’s Rule for the entire nation. The powerful men of Jana Sangh and Shiv Sena, purveyors of religious and racial bigotry, were beginning to press their policies ever more closely upon Mrs Gandhi, when she was already hemmed in by
a cordon of Congressmen including Morarji Desai and Atulya Ghosh, who had divided the party and stood off to the Right.

The gheraos went on, and the most mindless gheraos of all were now being conducted against the Commissioner of Calcutta Corporation, M. G. Kutty. He had been Director of the CMPO until the United Front persuaded him to use his considerable and incorruptible skills upon that organism in the city which stood most in need of them. By the time the monsoon came he had been knocked about so often, he had been so frequently abused by mobs as he sat at his desk and tried to work, that he was almost broken upon the wheel of Calcutta’s poverty-stricken and uncomprehending rage. Yet gheraos were not even the worst of what had happened there, any more than the violence was. The worst of it was the sixty-five factories which had closed in the state during January and February after factories had been closing one after the other for a year, and the seventeen state undertakings that were running at a loss both before and after the United Front, and the capital investment that had dropped from Rs 209 millions in 1966–7 to Rs 90 millions in 1968–9 with the end not yet in sight.

It is the easiest thing in the world to come close to despair in Calcutta. Every statistic that you tear out of the place reeks of doom. Every half mile can produce something that is guaranteed to turn a newcomer’s stomach with fear or disgust or a sense of hopelessness. It must be a generation at least since anyone stayed here for more than a day or two unless he was obliged to, or had a phenomenal sense of vocation, or a pathological degree of curiosity. Yet for anyone with the wilful staying power to remain through that first awful week when Calcutta is driving him away with shock and nausea, with resentment and with plain
gut-rotting
funk, a splendid truth about this city slowly dawns upon his perceptions and his understanding. It is that although he will surely never before have encountered so much that is deadly in any one place, he has never been confronted with so much life, either. It pulsates and churns around him wherever he goes, it swirls in every direction. Though it marches angrily and viciously, it also laughs idiotically and infectiously. While it is staggering miserably it is also wandering thoughtfully. It is
reproducing 
itself minute by minute, it is thriving and proudly brandishing itself. It dominates.

Bruegel would have been at home here. He would have settled down at the top of Chowringhee, on the corner of Lenin’s new Sarani, where the unhappy policeman is battling with the traffic before another bout with the citizenry, or he would have opened his sketchbook at the bottom of Chitpore Road, where it swerves off in such palpitating confusion towards the high pink bastion of the Nakhoda Mosque; and there, unless some fool hove a couple of bricks at him because he was about to record
something
that local pride preferred to keep uncomfortably to itself, he would have started to draw for his life. He would eventually have produced one of his peasant masterpieces crammed with people. Not (let us hope)
The
Triumph
of
Death
,
but maybe something like
The
Battle
Between
Carnival
and
Lent.
He would have found that the mutilations and the beggary of indigence had not changed a bit across four centuries. The mosque would have done for his church, with people praying and thieving,
without
much distinction between the two, right under its eaves. That pot-bellied babu would go well astride a carnival hogshead, and the sadhu with his holy mud and his trident could preach him lenten mortifications. The buildings here might not have slops emptied from their upper windows (though you can be sure of little in this city) but they would make up for that with the garbage in their gutters. There might not be children here, each flailing at a top with a whip in his hand, but there would be many small boys possibly carrying other weapons of offence. And everywhere the artist looked, he would see people
negotiating
the business of small trade, just as they were conducting it in 1559, down to the seasonal preponderance of fish; for the Hooghly is just down the road and it is a-swarm with hilsa.

Even when Calcutta is at its most alarming and its most
distasteful
, it can warm you with some vivid expression of its humanity if you can shed your inhibitions, or at least move them aside for an instant, enough to take this in. The city is now decorated from one end to the other with the slogans and the symbols of what promises to be a brutal revolution if it breaks out properly. Exhortations to action and representations of Mao
Tse Tung are now splattered across half the walls standing between Bansberia in the North and Budge Budge in the South. Some of this is poetry. There are commonplace lines of prose by the hundred, parrotted from the chapbooks of Peking, like ‘Make the seventies the decade of liberation’ and ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. But then, one day, you turn a corner in Ballygunge and find yourself face to face with ‘Awaken from your slumber, ye sons of Bengal, and give out a Leonine roar’ alongside a most engaging stencilled portrait of Mao in delicate light blue wash, as carefully and fondly drawn as the work of the most dedicated pavement artist who is out to secure your appreciation as much as your money.

Or slip into National and Grindlay’s Bank on Chowringhee, to change some of the money that has made this place what it has terribly become. Just round the corner in Park Street, a gang of men have been marching behind a red banner, shouting
Zindabad
‘for the long life of some cause or person, or ‘Biplab’ for the revolution that will shorten many lives. Outside the bank a row of beggars squats and leans against the wall, not beseeching fiercely as so many beggars in Calcutta do, but each man and woman merely holding one arm out, gazing vacantly at the Maidan across the road, taking not the slightest notice of one another, petrified by the wasting inertia of their situation; for begging outside a bank is the emptiest beggary of all. Inside, all is crisply air-conditioned security. Two or three men in khaki lounge or stroll watchfully with rifles at the sloppy trail. Peons queue listlessly at counters, awaiting the disbursement of their employers’ funds, which suggests either shocking arrogance or a superb faith in human nature on someone’s part, for these men are not very much better off than the beggars outside. Visiting Europeans sit with glossy magazines in plastic leather easy chairs, nervously eyeing the rifles while they await the call of solvency. Local businessmen pad away to the glass doors and the street, pausing on the threshold to tuck briefcases even more firmly under their arms, for many hazards now await the rich man in this city when he leaves the protection of his stockades.
Otherwise
, the atmosphere of National and Grindlay’s on
Chowringhee
is simply invested with all the calculated balance between
service and self-interest that has put the bankers of London and the gnomes of Zürich so firmly in their place. It is equally
depressing
. But it lightens wonderfully when you actually transact your modest business in travellers ‘cheques. For the clerk sits you in a cane chair by his side while he flicks through his variety of triplicated forms and tots up his columns of numbers with the same mannered absorption of his distant colleagues in Cornhill. He offers you a glass of water while you wait. He exchanges polite simplicities about the weather. He hands you a little brass disc which you must carry to the counter over there to recover your money. And when you ask him if you might please have your cash in so many ten-rupee notes, so many fivers and so many singles, he at once transforms National and Grindlay’s into something bigger and better than an institution with his
reply
.’ Ah, yes, yes’, he says, scarcely looking up from his accounts, ‘if you’ll just wait till I have finished this and then go over there with this, you shall have everything you need exactly in
accordance
with all your own sweet wishes.’