An Australian Bengali boy’s view of 1980s Calcutta

I was born and raised in Australia, but my childhood visits to Kolkata were frequent enough to be routine; my memory of them is a khichuri of images, smells, faces and voices that has always stayed with me. From the moment I stepped out of the plane my novice mind would begin its work, taking in impressions both strange and familiar and reconfiguring my conceptions of people and place. One particular uncle would always greet us at the airport, having braved the hour long journey from my father’s ancestral home. He would cut short my bumbling attempt at a pranam and bundle us into a waiting taxi for the ride home. The journey was arduous, inching through North Kolkata in thick traffic. I would peer out through the black fumes that surrounded us and strain to see the activity at the shoulder of the highway, where hulks of abandoned lorries lay in various postures; the phantoms that scurried amongst them were gaunt shadows, clothed only in loincloths; now and then one would stand up in the gloom and scurry away with a piece of scavenged metal. To a child brought up on the television news this was a familiar scene, reminiscent as it was of the streets of Kabul or Beirut. I knew there was no war here, but as we approached home I could see the city decaying in front of us. Turning off the main road, we found open drains choked with discarded plastic and slime, people defecating in the open and garbage burning on every corner. With a child’s innocent affection for animals, I remember feeling very sorry for the black buffaloes that crossed our path; even at that age I had an understanding of just how great was their separation from their natural environment. 

My family’s means were adequate without being spectacular in any way, and we had a large house on a large plot of land in Belghoria; our stay was comfortable there. The distance between the comfort and order of the family domain and the squalor outside seemed incomprehensible to me. I had no experience of such a sharp boundary between public and private space; and having seen no comparable example back home, it had never occurred to me that the commons of an urban landscape might be allowed to degenerate to such an extent that those who could afford it would lock themselves away.

My parents were no doubt aware of the physical difficulties a child of the First World might have in adjusting to life in the North Calcutta of the 80s. Little boys find all kind of things fascinating or amusing, even things that might turn the stomach of an adult; but the fetid air and inky swarms of mosquitoes ceased to be interesting as soon as the first welts appeared on my body. My entire extended family treated me with kid gloves. I was foreign-born, and the assumption seemed to be that I was precious, naive and easily damaged. Curiosity on my part was actively discouraged, as was my interest in street food, which might make me ill. I usually stayed inside the family compound, and I was frequently reminded by my mother that the local children would “eat me alive”, as they were street-smart to the point of ruthlessness. 

My impressions of Kolkata, then, were very one-dimensional – to my mind it was a filthy, impoverished, grim place; a place that needed great private effort to make inhabitable; in which the warmth of my relatives towards me was all the more poignant for the degraded state of the environment in which they lived. No doubt there are many who might yet agree with that characterisation now, but it was certainly far truer of the North Calcutta of twenty-five years ago. I was used to the clipped gardens and ordered streets of suburban Melbourne, and the contrast was stark to my developing Western mind, accustomed as I was to judging the value of things primarily by appearance.

But I was lacking one thing: an explanation for what I saw. Here was a city of many millions, filled with Bengali people who I assumed were just like my own parents – capable, intelligent people – and yet it was a city that was broken in so many ways. How did it become like that? Why was it so different to Sydney or Melbourne or the other places that we visited around the world? My parents never gave me an answer. Yet they themselves were acutely aware of the dire state of the city. Family reunions were peppered with discussions about traffic and hawkers and pollution; sighs and regrets over what Kolkata “had become”; and, most often, exclamations about the utter uselessness of Bengalis in all things practical and related to economic affairs.

It was this constant, cynical refrain that most affected me. As far as I could tell, Bengalis were acutely sensitive people trapped in a world that was cruelly indifferent to their higher abilities, but instead punished their lack of commercial sense by transforming their own city into a garbage-infested backwater. Bangali-der kicchu hobe na (“Bengalis will never amount to anything”) – that was a phrase that I heard from many lips in many drawing rooms. Children take things literally, and such brutal cynicism, such a blanket condemnation of one’s own race was quite a shock. Any attempts at a dissenting view were always feeble and easily cut short by the majority view. There was no room for debate on the matter. Kolkata was ruined, dying, gone, a debased shadow of its former self; all that remained was to apply our famed Bengali eloquence to writing its eulogy.  

With time, I began to understand this cynicism and where it came from. It was, first of all, a political statement and an expression of disgust with the ruling class of the time. A child could hardly have been expected to comprehend the conflict between ideology and governance, but it was the outcome of that battle in the context of Bengal that had created the anarchy that I saw around me. What exactly the Left did to everyday urban life in those decades is best laid out by those who lived with it; but as I took my own baby steps into the world of ideas, it was clear to me that it had been enough to embitter many of my father’s generation. 

And yet I soon realised that there were contradictory feelings at work. Bangali-der kicchu hobe na was not an expression to be taken literally; it was a subtle form of code. What it really meant was that Bengalis would never be Gujaratis - we could never be expected to excel in the world of business or to take advantage of circumstance to make ourselves rich; we lacked that spirit of enterprise. To the neo-liberal ear that sounds like a denunciation; but it was actually quite the opposite. Bengalis weren’t made for commerce, but more importantly, commerce was not made for us; our natural inclination was towards worthier pursuits than grubbing for money. As a collective excuse for the material decline of our city, this explanation was both simple and gratifying. Here was a kind of perverse vanity that worked like magic: it transformed the festering vats of garbage that encircled our homes into symbols of virtue. It was a narrative that also had the advantage of being useful to the individual case. The romantic ideal of the poet has always included poverty in its noblest form, and it was an easy sleight-of-hand to reverse the equation. The absence of material success was now the marker of Art, regardless of any evidence to support that conclusion. We were not doers, we told ourselves; we must, it followed, be artists and thinkers. 

It was only in this specific context, then, that it ever occurred to me that I might be proud to be a Bengali. I was a born a second generation emigrant, yet even so I was steeped in the mythology of Tagore from a young age - it took me almost a decade to realize that he was a man and not a deity. Tagore loomed so large over the psyche of expatriate Bengalis that he was almost the only acceptable and universal outlet for nationalistic pride. Tagore was my birthright, even at such a distance in space and time. To look backwards as a Bengali was to meet his gaze, and one could hold one’s head high. But to look forwards with the same posture was not encouraged; rather it was to be a rank optimist, and even a fool, for there was no Tagore there and no one like him. The world of Bengali culture was presented to me as a fait accompli and a product entirely of the past; and I got the idea that it was under assault as much as the city of Kolkata itself. The best that one could hope for in the future was to preserve what was precious against the polluting effects of modernity and cultural invasion.

Here they were then, the Kolkata bourgeouis in the eyes of a someone who lived at its fringes: an entire generation enclosed in dusty rooms, knowing the same pleasures over and over – Tagore and Roy, tea and sweets mixed with fatalism and nostalgia; and I, the skinny bideshi boy, was allowed to glimpse the scene every year or two and take back of it what I would. They were my people, and I loved them, but the first and last impression that I had of every trip was this: that they had made their own stereotype, and now they were trapped in it, and that if I was to ever stay back I would be trapped in it too.

I am older now, and much changed, and so is Kolkata. Buffaloes roam a much smaller range, and little by little areas of the city are being churned in new directions by new forces. Multiplexes and malls are a decidedly poor marker of a city’s progress, and are at best imported spaces; but I can still feel at home with the younger generation that populates them, for they have an optimism and an energy that previous generations found hard to employ. Maybe it is money and mobility, or maybe it is because they care less about ideals; maybe it is because they are impatient with the abstract. Circumstances change, and so do attitudes, and it is often hard to discern which it was that came first. Cynicism is still a widespread and very natural response for a Kolkatan; and it is still very much needed, as there is much to be cynical about. The brown haze that strangles the city daily is proof enough how little the political class has changed in its indifference towards people’s lives. But cynicism, like all drugs, has its dose. To over-indulge is to forget something simple: that Bengalis, like any other people, have the potential to achieve anything to which they might apply themselves. It has taken me well into adulthood to really believe that. I have some hope that the people of Kolkata are finally ready to do the same.