Calcutta is full of hotels without guests and restaurants without diners—the backwardness of a ‘globalization without real resources.’
By Isaac Chotiner
In “The Mill on the Floss,” George Eliot created “one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature . . . a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot.” Such a legacy, for the residents, is alternately romantic and daunting, appealing as it does to our innate nostalgia but also ensuring that the past is never quite forgotten or surpassed.
The novelist Amit Chaudhuri’s lovely account of his native Calcutta makes the same point about a place that is as different from Eliot’s St. Ogg’s as it is possible to be. If Calcutta “today suffers in comparison,” he writes, “it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathizing with, the city today.”
Calcutta, officially Kolkata after a well-publicized 2001 name-change in accordance with Bengali pronunciation, was founded in 1690 as a trading post of the East India Co. and by the 19th century was the cultural and intellectual center of Indian life. It was the home of Thomas Macaulay, the statesman who did the most to introduce the English language to India; of Mother Teresa, who solidified the city’s reputation as a den of poverty and misery; of the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray; and of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the economist Amartya Sen and the novelist Vikram Seth. Until the second decade of the 20th century, it was India’s capital. Today it has nearly 15 million people and is the third-largest city in the country.
Mr. Chaudhuri, although raised in Bombay, was born in Calcutta in 1962 and moved back in 1999 after spending many years in England. “Calcutta” is a strange, impressionistic book without a clear focus; those wishing for a straight narrative, or a comprehensive approach to historical events, will find themselves frustrated. (The years he is writing about don’t really start until a decade into his return.) But the strength of Mr. Chaudhuri’s prose and the acuity of his observations make up for any occasional drift.
The general tone of Mr. Chaudhuri’s book, however, is one of sadness, or at least wistfulness. As a child, he writes, “I felt, to the Bengalis who lived here—that they were at once in the midst of the modern and the ancestral and fabular.” But, he adds, “I realised slowly that it had ceased being any kind of centre” and says, of its current residents, “I had no illusions about the present-day inhabitants of the city having any interest in [its] history.” Bombay and New Delhi, today India’s financial and political capitals, are the new focal points of the country. Mr. Chaudhuri seems to blame the downgrading of Calcutta on globalization, which he defines as having led to the creation of glossy buildings as surely as it has meant the destruction of leisurely paced social activities and “monastic contemplation” more broadly.
But Mr. Chaudhuri isn’t really convincing here, largely because he eschews making much of a coherent argument about India’s economic boom, jumping from one anecdote to another. He does notice how some modern developments in India seem particularly pointless and even soulless: the empty, garishly lighted restaurants that have replaced older businesses and the occasionally grotesque tall buildings. He comes up with a nice phrase for some of these changes—”a globalization without real resources”—and writes, “Calcutta was changing, was going to change, and the hotels would be there, prepared to participate and contribute when the change came,” which nicely gets at the backwardness of certain Indian development schemes.
Intriguingly, he also places the blame for Calcutta’s supposed downfall on the “marginalization” of the Bengali tongue, which through art and culture, in his phrase, “brought the city into being in the imagination.” Although this stands in contrast to the conventional wisdom that the rise of English has been a huge boon to India, it doesn’t quite explain why other places, including in India, have seen cultural flourishing coexist with growing use of English. As usual, he doesn’t really even attempt to dispute this (intuitively sensible) take, preferring instead to celebrate what has been lost without examining whether most Indians are better off than they were 40 years ago.
Still, despite the occasional misstep (do we really need to hear him complain about reviews of his previous books?), Mr. Chaudhuri’s very personal story is a welcome contribution to the literature of the city. It also recalls another author who first set foot in Calcutta in 1962: V.S. Naipaul. Looking back on that moment nearly 30 years later in “India: A Million Mutinies Now” (1990), Mr. Naipaul said that in 1962 he had “the feeling of being in a true metropolis,” one that was now dying. Mr. Chaudhuri has none of Mr. Naipaul’s malice, but he seems equally disappointed with the path Calcutta has taken. Whether or not this opinion is warranted, it’s hard to imagine Calcutta ever living up to the place that exists in his head.
Mr. Chotiner is a senior editor at the New Republic.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
