Calcutta: The City of Joy

Market Near Howrah Bridge, Kolkata

Dear family and friends,

Calcutta. Kolkata. Once called ‘The Jewel in the Crown' of the British Raj, whatever it is called, this city is a seething mass of 14 million people; an unimaginable 33,000 people per square kilometre in the city center, the overwhelming numbers of whom are struggling just to live. I suspect there is nothing that could prepare one for the first onslaught of sights, smells, and sounds of Calcutta. Even by the standards of other cities in India, the realities of Calcutta are guaranteed to take your breath away. I know that having been to India before did not quite prepare me. The squalor, the smells, the poverty, the misery, people by the hundreds sleeping in the streets, beggars, noise, and chaos are like no other place I have been. My first thoughts are 'What the hell am I doing here'? But surprisingly the initial horror is soon replaced by a kind of fascination about how all this works.



For 140 years, from 1772 to 1912, Calcutta was the capital of British India. Unlike New Delhi, which is an ancient city in India, Calcutta was a creation of the British East India Company. At the end of the 17th century an agent for the company purchased three small villages on the Hooghly River, an arm of the Ganges, as a site for a settlement from which to govern their extensive commercial activities. One of those villages was named Kalikata, hence the Bengali name Kolkata, from which the British got Calcutta, a name consigned to the dust heap in 2001. Sitting, as it is, on the upper reaches of the Ganges delta, the low, swampy, hot and humid site, a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes, is not particularly hospitable for habitation and in my view cannot have been the best choice.

The largest city in India, Kolkata is now the Capital of the State of West Bengal. And an enigma. It prides itself on being cosmopolitan, progressive, and the cultural capital of the country. Yet once impressive buildings, relics of the Raj era, sag, fade and deteriorate. Dented Yellow Ambassador Cabs ply the streets by the hundreds, dilapidated buses spew black smoke, horns honk, and rickshaw men shout for fares. The infrastructure is generally primitive, barely maintained, and always overtaxed; ferries, buses, trams, and the metro are squished full of people, the streets are jammed with pedestrians, goats, cows, and every manner of vehicle weaving, bumping, and honking as they crunch their way through. On the other hand, in the midst of this miasmic anarchy, the people are indefatigably friendly, alive and optimistic, a situation totally inexplicable to me, but apparently no contradiction to them.

Many people might know of Kolkata as the home of Mother Teresa, who from 1948 until her death in 1997, operated a school in the slums for the poorest of the poor, and founded an order of nuns, called the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, dedicated to serving the poor. For her selfless work Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and she is now on a path to Sainthood, while countless idealistic volunteers stream to Kolkata to carry on her work.

I arrived in Calcutta shortly after midnight on a flight from Bangkok. I hooked up with a young British couple to share a taxi to Hotel Astoria on Sudder Street, the main center for backpackers and travelers here in Calcutta. One might think that Sudder Street would be a bit gentrified having accommodated hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of travelers over the years. Not so. The street is quite narrow and seems particularly dirty with litter, garbage, sewage, and debris everywhere. Attempts are made to clean up the garbage, but at best they only make a small dent in the problem.

The Astoria Hotel looked okay on the net when I booked it, and it was represented as midrange. Not so. My room is a bunker, the furniture old and sparse, the bath is basic. It does have air conditioning and a TV but they are likewise old, and in the case of the air conditioning, noisy. At 2:00AM, the Astoria Hotel barely squeaked over my accommodation hurdle of 'clean and quiet'. As I was only staying two nights before I was to leave the city, I did not move, but I was sore tempted. (After my first two days, I left Kolkata for points onward. When I returned, I stayed three nights at the Tollygunge Club, a leftover from the days of the British Raj. The Club occupies 100 acres in the area called Tollygunge, not far from the seething center of the city. Dating from 1895, Tollygunge was initially a private club for the British. It remains a private club, but with many fewer British members, and it now also offers, at reasonable rates, really great accommodation; with an 18-hole golf course, many tennis and squash courts, billiards room, and two swimming pools, it is a wonderful respite from the heat and turmoil outside its walls.)

Tollygunge Clubhouse

Swimming Pool at the Tollygunge

One does not visit Kolkata to view historical ruins of past civilizations, religious shrines, or other typical tourist lures. Oh sure, it has a number of interesting attractions, chief among them the India Museum and the ostentatious Victoria Memorial, erected to commemorate the British Empire at its height, and named after Queen Victoria, Empress of India, a monarch who never once visited. (Dramatic as it is, I could not help but wonder how many children could have been educated, how many houses built, or how many sick healed, had the money spent on the monument been otherwise employed.)

Morning Wash Up

But Kolkata is really about seeing life lived, life as lived by those for whom every day is a struggle. And there is a weirdness, a madness, about the city that is simply fascinating. The best way to see it, of course, is to walk, or take local transport, rickshaws, buses, trams. And that is what I mostly did for the five days of my visit.

Countless people live on the street, they can be seen getting a shave, defecating, sleeping, worshipping, and playing. In the morning, they crowd around the many water pumps along the sidewalk, whole families pumping water, splashing and washing themselves.

Calcutta Family In The Street

Garbage Collection in Calcutta

Sleeping In The Street

Kolkata is the last city in the world to have man-powered rickshaws. Although the Civic government is trying to eliminate those that are remaining, arguing they impede other traffic, so far they have only succeeded in restricting them from using major streets. But frankly, rickshaws, both man-powered and pedal-powered, remain my first choice for short distance travel, as they make good time zipping down back lanes and around stalled cars and buses. And for sure, no one more honestly earns their money than the whippet lean guys who pull you around.

All streets are lined with food stalls selling the basic India chaat, usually vegetarian, spicy, pungent, tasty, and dirt cheap, many dishes can be had for 10 to 20 cents, tea for 5. I will not pretend that I eat a lot on the street, but the smells can be quite wonderful, as are the smells that waft out of spice shops or flower stalls. On the other hand, one will frequently, and without warning, walk past some spots where the pungent reek of urine is so over powering it can make you swoon.

In my view, any visit to Kolkata should include a walk over Howrah Bridge. Built in 1943 and nearly a kilometre long, aside from the endless string of vehicles, over 100,000 pedestrians stream back and forth across this span, said to be, and surely is, the busiest bridge in the world. It is an extraordinary experience to mingle with the crowd, most carrying huge bales or bundles on their heads, as they struggle across. The bridge leads to the massive Howrah Train Station, which is surrounded by what are some of the grittiest of Kolkata’s slums. I really do not know if they are ‘Anand Nagar’, or, ‘The City of Joy’, Calcutta's most devastating slums as featured in Jacques Lapierre’s novel of that name, but they might well be.

At one end of Howrah Bridge is just one of the many flower markets one might see in Kolkata. Very near the other end of the bridge is a vegetable market, not particularly large but judging from the quantities being sold, it appeared to be a wholesale rather than a retail market. Apart from the large heaps of fruits and vegetables, and the animated, bustling atmosphere, notable were the many ‘hijras’, Indian transsexuals, toiling away carrying huge loads. Hijras are apparently the modern outcome for what once were the eunuchs that guarded harems. These unfortunate individuals live on the fringe, but I was told they still have a role to play in society; their services are often sought in choosing the best name for a newborn son. The ones I saw in the vegetable market (and elsewhere) were usually quite large, and often quite masculine; but all were beautifully dressed, wearing the most colourful saris. It was very difficult not to notice them.

Another ‘must walk’, very close to Sudder Street, is a browse through New Market. Originally called Sir Stuart Hogg Market when established by the British in the 1800s, today over one thousand shops in New Market sell everything imaginable, and some things not. No trip to Kolkata would be complete without a visit to New Market and a wander through the maze of shops. Only the most resolute visitor will be able to avoid the services of one of the dozens of men who loiter at the entrances, carry-all-basket in hand, determined to lead you through the maze to whatever type of shop you may be interested in. Ignoring all my protests, I was assured over and over “It’s my job”; and only by being absolutely emphatic was I eventually allowed to wander on my own.

So, that was my rather brief visit to Kolkata. This city is hardly on the standard tourist route, but it is memorable for sure, never to be forgotten. What is extraordinary to me, however, is how quickly those scenes that shocked me when I arrived, the filth, the beggars, the misery, seem to recede and just become part of the wallpaper. Sometimes I think regular visits to a city like Kolkata should be mandatory for us all, just to remind us how lucky we are.

I hope the [photos can be seen] and I hope you are all well.

Merv.

Victoria Memorial