As I was set to anchor myself in Kolkata for the medium term, my first task was to find a place to stay. My first base in Kolkata was a South Western suburb called Behala. Though it was just 10 Km from the city centre, in those days travel was a herculean task. One had to choose between the snail-paced trams, mostly in an antiquated state, and the noisy, stuffy private buses with the cleaner-cum-helper screaming out the names of key stops on the way as if to remind the passengers about where to travel lest they forgot their destination. Then there were the minibuses, the newest contraption at that time. The ticket charges were segmented against a supposed benchmark of affordability, with the tram being the cheapest and minibuses the high-end counterpart.
I rented a small two-roomed house, which I located through the classified advertisement column in The Statesman. I still recall my first journey to the house. After alighting at Behala Tram Depot, I took a cycle-rikshaw through the narrow lanes for a kilometre and a half to reach the place. On the way I had to rub my eyes in disbelief, failing to convince myself that the rustic village was indeed an extension of one of India’s largest cities. There were hutments, old family houses, and ponds filled with weeds. The croaking of frogs rose in crescendo as the evening darkness thickened. Was I still in Kolkata or a remote village? Poverty seemed to have crawled in so close to the city eating into its boundaries.
Moving in from the leisure-paced Steel Township, Kolkata’s crowds, filth, inordinate traffic holdups and overall messiness were quite depressing. The common sight of a hefty man and his equally fat wife being pulled on a rickshaw by a lanky, hungry-looking man with sunken eyes was indeed a dehumanising experience. I never expected to see it in the mecca of revolutionary and socialist politics in India. While hand-pulled rikshaws disappeared from most of India post the Second World War, Kolkata remained a rikshaw city.
The same story for trams. Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur and Chennai had discontinued tram services, the snarling mode of transport that created more hurdles in urban mobility than easing it continues even to this date. By 1964, Kolkata remained the only tram city in India. The sight of passengers getting in and out at a leisurely pace unmindful of stops perplexed me. Soon I also mastered the art of boarding and deboarding the contraption of anachronism.
I remember mentioning to my Bengali friends the anachronism of retaining the rikshaw, a vestige of colonial subjugation. Pat came the reply, “You know, most of the rikshaw pullers are poor villagers from Bihar who have nothing but starvation and caste-based humiliation to face back home!” There was of course a load of truth in that statement though on the face of it, it sounded insensitive and cruel.
Kolkata had plenty of public places named gardens and squares, mostly occupied by shanties and unauthorised hutments. Poverty and deprivation were seen everywhere. The city had many dilapidated mansions and old zamindari houses, the lasting symbols of the city's feudal and caste-dominated legacy.
Years later when I spent a few months in London on a training program, I was struck by the similarity of London’s streets, lanes and alleys with Kolkata’s mesh of urban intricacies. The only difference was that Kolkata was the uglier, and a lot poorer replica of the Imperial Capital. After all, Kolkata was modelled on London and at the time of its making was meant to be the Crown Jewel of the East Indian empire!
On a lighter note, I was dumbstruck by the humongous variety of caste and sub-caste-based surnames in Bengal. If one ventured to list down all of them, volumes would be filled. The visible face of Bengali society was highly fragmented. The top layer was elitist – bhadralok as they were referred to in local narrative - the gentlemanly, cultured, anglicized, college-educated and irreverential breed.
College Street was the frequent hangout of many an intellectual-looking, bespectacled, ‘progressive’ Bengali in his typical white kurta and the customary shoulder bag. Another Kolkata, a distant one from the milling crowds on the overflowing streets, was cocooned in the comfort and snobbishness of the Golf Club and other traditional Clubs, still basking in colonial glory. With such a contrasting and diverse tapestry, no wonder that creative writers and cinema greats relished the goldmine that the city was.
Literature, art and painting, theatre and intellectual discourses were largely confined to the elite. Folk dance, handicrafts, music and football were more egalitarian. Playing football, drenched in rain, in the muddy grounds across the suburbs, most boys dreamed of one day appearing for one of the prestigious clubs on the legendary Eden Gardens maidan.
The society, after decades of Partition, was deeply fractured and the fissures were reflected even in the pecking order and adulation for the football clubs. East Bengal was predominantly home to the descendants of migrants from the East of the border, while Mohammedan Sporting was true to its name, steeped in conservative Muslim nostalgia. Mohun Bagan Club was the quintessential symbol of blue-blooded West Bengal pride! Over the years all three clubs have mainstreamed and secularised their memberships and player profiles.
Apart from the interclub rivalry of the football triumvirate, Kolkatans were passionate about Eden Gardens Cricket Ground, which they proudly referred to as the largest Cricket Stadium in the World.
It was unfortunate the Bengali psyche and society went through successive wounds and convulsions even after the partition, the seeds of which were laid by the British in the early 18th Century when Lord Curzon segregated the Hindu West and the predominantly Muslim East. In Kolkata, I listened to the melancholic nostalgia with which my Bengali friends with roots in East Bengal narrated the tales of savagery and loot that played out in the run-up to and during the partition days.
At times I wondered whether the proximity of Punjabi migrants to New Delhi and their cleverness in lobbying at the Capital created unequal patronage of the two critical refugee populations post-partition – the Punjabis and the Bengalis.
When my official duties took me to New Delhi subsequently, I noted the quick financial ascendency and the political clout of the immigrant communities from West Pakistan developed over the years since their movement across the border into the new India.
Of course, there was no comparison between the entrepreneurial and hardworking nature of the Punjabi migrants and the laidback and lethargic nature of most Bengali refugees.
The poor hinterlands of Bihar, Orissa and the North East drove many ordinary citizens, most of them unskilled, to take refuge in Kolkata’s sprawling landscapes. Probably many of them found the safety and anonymity of Kolkata’s pavements and slums a great relief from the caste-based and feudalistic subjugations in their homeland!
The dominance of left-leaning politics and burgeoning trade union militancy killed any prospects of industrial renewal in the post-partition Bengal.
By the latter half of the 1960s, across the border, the resistance movement under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was slowly building up. It escalated by the turn of the decade into a full-fledged freedom struggle to liberate East Bengal from the crushing cultural dominance of West Pakistan. The plight of the Bengali refugees pouring in through the porous borders of the East found instant resonance and deep emotional connection in West Bengal. The trickle of refugees grew rapidly to become a deluge, fanned by the massacre of innocent and unarmed people on the streets of Dacca and across East Bengal.
The refugee influx and the resultant socio-political pressures on civic life in West Bengal added to the legacy strains and burdens of the original partition, the fallout of which was still lingering.
As if providence had reserved all its curses to befall the land of the Ganges and Kali, the leftist agitations snowballed into a red insurgency. The violence unleashed by the cadres of the Naxalbari movement took a strong hold across rural Bengal and muddied the waters of the Hooghly beyond recovery.
In the emergency regime, Bengal was ruthlessly ruled by Sidharth Shankar Roy, a close confidant of Madam Gandhi. It was rumoured that he along with Mohan Kumara Mangalam were the advisors who pushed Indira to declare the National Emergency and crush democratic dissent.
In suburban Behala, most families had stories of emergency excesses, loss of jobs, and rounding up and detention of young Bengalis accused of leftist and revolutionary ideologies. Many of my neighbours told me bizarre stories of youth who disappeared when Sidharth Shankar Roy’s police took away young men and women, dubbed as Naxalites, many of whom never returned home. Nerve-chilling stories of custodial torture and extra-judicial killings made the rounds.
Electricity was terribly in short supply. Power outages running into hours and often unannounced were common. In sweltering heat, spending the night without power and under the constant fear of mosquito bites and the spread of infection was a nightmarish experience. But people were largely resigned to the situation which they accepted as normal.
Our office, located in a majestic colonial building, used to be pitch dark even at noon because it lacked any windows and was meant to be fully airconditioned. As soon as the power went out, most employees would walk out and loiter around on the pavements, eating mishti and munching moori, the fried rice preparation, and sipping strong tea served in small mud pots.
I recall the sight of an outlier employee, Gopal Chattopadhyay, who would remove his shirt to lighten perspiration, light a candle and keep working to finish his tasks unmindful of most of his colleagues having deserted the scene. On most days, electricity resumed after three to four hours. By then, it would already be closing time for the office. It did not make sense to talk about productivity, punctuality and work discipline in such circumstances.
Kolkata was a city of stark contradictions all the way. Nothing brought this out as distinctly as the proximity of the impoverished suburbs of Behala and beyond to the posh and opulent Alipore, the colonial island of elegance and privacy nestled amidst greenery. Manicured lawns, limousines lined up and prestigious nameplates announcing the Who’s Who of the richest businessmen. It was my hobby to take a stroll along the affluent streets of Alipore on Sunday morning, after breakfast and have a glimpse of the bungalows where many of the richest families in India lived.
I moved out from the impoverished suburbs to the more upbeat South Kolkata residential area of Gol Park. The moods and manners were vastly different from the earlier locality. South Kolkata, with a sizeable South Indian population – ‘Madrasi’s, as the locals would refer to – had plenty of southern eateries. There was the South India Club nearby. And SAIL Officers’ Club too was within walking distance.
1977 heralded a change in the National government. Also, the West Bengal elections saw the ascension to power of Jyoti Basu, the gentleman comrade, whose aristocratic and intellectual background probably appealed to middle-class Bengalis as much as his passion for revolutionary narratives, of the milder variety.
Like in all elections in India, the outcome was more a negative assertion against the ruling dispensation than a positive endorsement of the alternative.
Career-wise my Kolkata years from 1977 to 1979 were mostly a washout. I grew tired of the routine that offered neither opportunities nor challenges. Like a keyed-up watch, I went about my chores. I was disappointed and apprehensive about whether my future would be wasted in this rut of repetitiveness and meaningless rendezvous.
Things looked frustrating and I cursed the moment when I had agreed to the transfer from Bhilai to the city. Yet I hoped against hope that something would happen that would bring cheer and brighten my days.
Our lives most often ride on hope for something better around the corner.
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