Coming back to Kolkata
Returning home always feels special. I am back in Kolkata nee Calcutta after almost a year. But I feel like a stranger in my own city. I am staying in a city hotel this time with my colleagues instead of the family home. It feels very strange.
I grew up in this much reviled city. once told his mother that he was glad to have seen Calcutta "for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon - namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again". Rough justice given that Calcutta was the first capital of the British empire. The muggy weather did not help - found the climate humid and hot "enough to make a brass doorknob mushy." , who spent time in the city, wrote about the "great bloody mess that was dropped by God and called Calcutta". Much later it was hyped as a - I never quite understood what it meant; I am not sure whether Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre did either. Then it was derided as a "dying city" by a former Indian premier. Kolkata has had to live with flak for as long as anyone can remember.
In many ways, Kolkata has been a cursed city. It had been rocked by religious riots and its people decimated by famine - three million people starved to death in the city in the early 1940s. The partition in 1947 dealt a further blow to the city with thousands of refugees pouring in from its eastern borders. They set up homes in shantytowns which sprung up everywhere; the pathos of post-partition life was mirrored best in Bengali auteur movies. They were also the most neglected refugees: the per capita government spending on a refugee in Bengal was a tenth of the spending on his counterpart in Indian Punjab, which bore the brunt of a post-partition influx.
The war for the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 truly broke the city's back - another wave of refugees arrived. It earned the infamy of a pestilential and putrefying metropolis, full of hungry and dying people on the sidewalks. "In a sense, Calcutta is a definition of obscenity," wrote in his well-known book on the city.
Half a century ago, in the fifties, the city made a brief revival as a destination for business and a robust nightlife. Nightclubs on the city's high street which is called (there are no parks on the street apart from a tiny, unkempt apology of one) with fashionable names like Magnolia and Trincas hosted cabarets and live music. The city was best known for its crooners who sang a mean Billie Holiday and jazz bands which played Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington (Take The "A" Train, was a hot favourite).
I was a child of Kolkata's decaying days. I lived with my parents in Delhi when the Maoist violence swept the city in the early 1970s as idealist, bright young men signed up to a quixotic revolution that never was. It was a naïve, botched and bloody campaign where strange class enemies were targeted - a poor policeman here, a university professor there. It died a swift death as the government cracked down on it ruthlessly. Many of the bright Maoists fled the city for safer climes abroad. They went on to teach in top universities, among other things. I have known many such fire-spitting Maoists turned sedate champagne socialists.
I faintly remember the Communists sweeping to power in the late 1970s as the people voted against the Congress misrule of the state of West Bengal, of which Kolkata is the capital. The Communists have ruled ever since, uninterruptedly for over three decades. Many now quip that the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the rule of a new lumpen proletariat in the city where there are simply not enough jobs.
I did my school and college and watched the city go to pieces in the 1980s: studying in candle light as night-long power outages crippled the city, and strikes at the drop of the hat regularly brought it to a halt. Examinations were always delayed and question papers were leaked. In the last decade or so, Kolkata has picked up its pieces and got some of its groove back. To be true, it is a city of faded grandeur, still looking back to its glory days. But it has always taken the punches gamely and held out a promise of better things to come. That is why I keep coming back to Kolkata.
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