Delhi and Mumbai long ago overtook Kolkata in size as well as prosperity, but this is a city that takes pride in hanging on to its singular culture
Sometimes in India you find yourself mourning a country that vanished with the economic boom, then you can find yourself in that country again, bemused at the thought of your missing it. In Kolkata this week, I stayed at the Calcutta Club ? the club's refusal to modernise its name shows a pleasant addiction to history. In my bathroom, a tiny square of pink soap lay at the edge of the sink. The shower ran cold. The bed was hard. The press of a thousand fingers had smeared the switches for the lights and the ceiling fans. One switch summoned the servants, who sat on a bench at the end of the corridor, and would sometimes appear at the door in their worn white tunics, turbans and cummerbunds, even if the switch had not been pressed.
None were young and all were Muslim. Nearly every club servant in Kolkata is Muslim, a tradition that started when the colonial British preferred them as khansamas ? or house stewards ? because they had fewer food taboos than Hindus. Jobs have been handed down from father to son. Wage rates are better than in domestic service ? where in Kolkata 2,500 rupees (about �35) a month is generous pay ? and unionisation and job security means that a club servant can afford to be brusque. In India's grand hotels, young women in gilt saris press their hands together in a cliche of welcome, and the implication that your every whim will be met. Club servants are more to the point; they are the least servile of servants. A tap on the door: "You want dinner?"
"No. Laundry ? dhobi. I'd like to wash some things."
"Today not possible. Today Sunday."
Everything was complicated and needed multiple chits and signatures. And so at the club this week, I lived in an older India, the version I first came to 35 years ago, where austerity, regulation and economic failure kept consumerism at bay, and luxury more or less in check.
In Kolkata in those days, the West was evident everywhere, but it was the old, British edition: jute mills, tramcars, tea dealers and big merchant companies. The British themselves had almost entirely vanished ? as late as the 1960s they could be counted in thousands ? but their imprint could be found in restaurants that sold steaks cut from cows (rather than the unsacred buffalo), and at business lunches where sherry was served with the soup. Everyone agreed that it was a city in decline. The rot started when it lost its role as India's capital in 1912, and events since then had done nothing to change its luck. Famine struck Bengal in 1943. When India was partitioned four years later, Kolkata lost its eastern hinterland. Then came the industrial strikes and Marxist insurrections of the 1960s, and the tide of refugees from the war in what was then East Pakistan. By the mid 1970s, no international flights other than the hops to Dhaka used its airport, and to most people abroad, its name meant two words: Mother Teresa.
Today, that history is receding. Flyovers now cast their shadows over Victorian streets, the tram network has shrunk, the poor are less visible, and many fine old villas and mansion flats have been replaced by tower blocks. Money walks the ruined pavements towards new shopping malls, though where the money comes from is a mystery. Still, Kolkata is the least changed of India's three biggest cities. Delhi and Mumbai long ago overtook it in size as well as prosperity, and have all the familiar features ? new expressways, would-be iconic architecture ? of the outward-looking, international metropolis. In Kolkata, the most ubiquitous car remains the Hindustan Ambassador, modelled on the Morris Oxford, and unchanged in shape since 1958. Bicycle rickshaws throng the suburbs.
Many people who live here are happy to describe the city as "provincial", which isn't a pejorative word when it means (as it does in Kolkata) a place that has preserved its singular culture. If you stay here long enough, you can tire of hearing the last word, because Bengalis often exaggerate and sentimentalise their intellectual and artistic gifts: "We are the French of India," would be a typical view. But the historical achievement is substantial ? Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray ? and the truth is that artistic expression is valued here more than in Mumbai, Delhi or London.
Last Sunday, the writer Amit Chaudhuri invited me on an visit to Alipore jail, built by the British administration in 1906, which holds nearly 2,000 prisoners. He didn't quite know why he'd been asked ? perhaps to talk to prisoner-writers ? but when we got there we were led to a big, bare room where about 200 inmates sat cross-legged on blankets, facing a stage filled with plastic chairs. It was an official occasion: the prison's new literary magazine was to be launched. The chairs filled with honoured guests, who included the minister for jails, the inspector-general of jails, and several well-known Bengali writers and artists, as well as Amit and me. Roses were given to each of us, a prisoner came to the microphone to sing a Tagore song, and another two read poems. Our side returned the compliment with readings, songs and speeches (I counted 16 in all). As all this was in Bengali, I understood only 11 words in two hours. The first two were my name. The next four came when the inspector general spoke of the prison problems that needed to be remedied: "lack of transparency" and "corruption". The last five occurred in the speech by the most distinguished guest, the poet Sunil Gangopadhyay. They were "Jean Genet" and "Jean Paul Sartre".
The prisoners sat respectfully on the floor throughout. They applauded every speech, and joined in a famous 19th-century song, a celebration of Bengal composed by DL Roy. But it would be a mistake to paint a utopian picture of Kolkata prison life ? one man made an impassioned speech against the long wait to face trial, and the habit of imprisonment stretching beyond the court's sentence. But how hard it is to imagine Wormwood Scrubs ringing to the words of A Wandering Minstrel I.
Like the unoiled straightforwardness of the Calcutta Club's servants, which I eventually came to appreciate, the Alipore event suggested a world that the riptide of modern aspiration has passed by. Its seclusion won't last forever. When the time came, I was as divided as always about leaving it behind.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/05/ian-jack-kolkata
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