Oh Calcutta!

Gunter Grass, the German postwar writer, in the course of his three seperate visits, had spent a significant amount of time in Calcutta, a city with which - in his own words – he has a 'love-hate relationship’. During the few hot summer months (in mid-eighties) when he stayed in Baruipur, a distant suburb of the city, he and his wife Ute Grass used to commute every day to city by the crowded local train as ordinary citizens, something which more priviledged 'post liberalization' mortals of the city (like my erstwhile Calcutta colleagues) can’t even dream of. In fact, I used to be an object of much curiosity in office since for four years I (an overpaid Management consultant) travelled in local trains (an experience which I much enjoyed and had resulted for me in a few genuinely enduring friendship with co-commuters). While Calcutta (and the local media) rejoiced when Grass got the Nobel Prize, Grass’ own experience of the city and the attitude of her people was not so admirable. Here are just a few of his observations (though these may appear as ‘another westerner’s view of Calcutta’, I personally found much truth in it).

Grass on Calcutta and her people (several comments):

I was shocked and stupefied by the indifference of the privileged to the misery and poverty all around. I asked myself: it is their own country, their city and their people; yet how can they be so composed and leave almost everything to a few foreign charitable organizations…?

I visited the grand and palatial Victoria Memorial symbolic of British domination, and there I hoped too find a museum where India, Bengal and Calcutta would be portrayed as they exist after independence. Yet what did I discover? – A Victorian junk-room filled with colonial paintings, presents from Lady Curzon to Queen Victoria, war sketches depicting British victories… and many people, students, teachers, villagers, looking at this false, irrelevant foreign collection in that lumber-room.

It was an absurd experience for me to see how Gandhi’s birthday was celebrated, and that too by leading politicians who seemed to be determined to take India into the twenty-first century with principles (or lack of it) which stay in absolute opposition to what Gandhi willed.

Only a miniscule will live in ultramodern luxury, a new techno-feudal class, small, indifferent, and exploitative to its core.       (How true!!)

How can you call a city the cultural centre of India (a term most Calcuttan loves to use)… when more than half of the city’s population is illiterate? Isn’t it shockingly ridiculous? I also wonder how after the disastrous flood which almost swept away Midnapore, you could begin your celebration with such fanfare: Durga puja, Kali puja, and so on… Music and light while nearby villages lay submerged in water? This swift and collective amnesia I find incomprehensible…

For those already preparing a defence in their mind, Grass (who had actively helped rebuilding his own country, literally from ashes) was not alone in his criticism. Almost a century back, in 1895, Rabindranath Tagore, whom all Bengalis (including I) hold dear, had this to say about the people of the city (the occasion was a memorial meeting for Vidyasagar who himself had endlessly scorned the ‘theoretical snobs’ of the city):

…day after day we begin but never finish; we make a show but do nothing concrete; we do not believe what we set out to do; what we believe we do not carry out; we can spin out words without end, but cannot make the smallest sacrifice; we feel pleased with ourselves by exhibiting our pride; but never think it necessary to be worthy; we depend on other for everything and yet rend the skies finding fault with them. We take pride in imitating others, we feel honoured to receive their favour, yet we try to throw dust in their eyes and call it politics; and the main object of our lives is to make clever speeches that fill us with intense self admiration. Vidyasagar had infinite contempt for this weak, mean, heartless, lazy, arrogant, argumentative race of men.

While it pains me tremendously (and hits my pride equally), the fact remains that in the last thirty years or so, we, as a city, has not been able to produce anything significant - in any discipline (with the possible exception of Sourav Ganguly in cricket). We still love to pat ourselves by talking (not without pride) about the sixties when Louis Bank used to play in the Trincas. Unfortunately, that’s where our pride – and knowledge of history - ends.

I sincerely apologise if I have not mentioned Sector V*...

                                                                               * Sector V in Salt Lake is where most of the IT companies of the city are located