The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  Dowdy Victoria sits on her giant armchair, surveying the hanky-panky all around. Behind her stands the building that bears her name. Built in the early 1900s, it is a specimen of the so-called Indo-Saracenic style popular with British architects in India at the time. The idea was to blend colonial styles with medieval Indian aesthetics. It sounds appealing in theory, but the results often look like imperial hubris in stone. If the Taj Mahal is a paean to eternal love, then the Memorial is an elegy to Calcutta’s Victorianism.

  Victoria was the first English monarch to rule India. By the time she became Empress, the British had already been running the place for a hundred years through a corporation called the East India Company. Calcutta, its capital, had ballooned into the largest city in Asia and the continent’s most important centre of global trade. But the Victorian era brought more polish to the colonial enterprise. It dressed up naked moneymaking with a higher mission. For the first time, large numbers of British women arrived in India, which produced British families and British neighbourhoods – a racially separate world of bridge at the European club, civil lines and white towns. Most importantly, it produced a white supremacist idea of ‘Britishness’ as an exemplar of culture, as a bearer of something beyond guns and hunger called ‘civilisation’.

  The British left India in 1947. The Europeans who had lived in the old White Town had died or left, leaving an entirely brown metropolis. Park Street, the heart of that caramelised White Town, was lined with the best restaurants of the city. Legend had it that cabarets, with chanteuses and high kicks, used to take place on Park Street until the 1960s. That was all long ago, before the Communist years, before I was born. When I worked in Calcutta, the scene was somnolent. The menus and prices of most of the relic restaurants were still pleasantly congealed in a time warp, much like their decor.

  In the years after I left, the new Sector Five money had awoken Park Street. On weekends, crowds swelled on the footpath outside Peter Cat, everyone speaking English all at once to get in through the door. I once took Durba to legendary Mocambo in our Umbrella Park days, before we were married. We slid into a couple of low armchairs like characters in a Graham Greene novel. We ordered beef steak accompanied by boiled vegetables and bhetki Filipino. The fish was prepared just as Imelda Marcos liked it, the menu said. The red fabric lampshades dangling above each table spread a warm vibe across the dining room, as if it were the twilight of a golden age.

  ***

  Jayanti, my neighbour, had lent me a tattered copy of one of her favourite novels, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It was a book about white society in colonial Rhodesia, which is modern-day Zimbabwe. Among white Rhodesians it was a taken as a matter of pride that each Englishman who arrived in the African colony armed with highfalutin liberal principles would soon succumb to the colonials’ racist worldview. It provided them with justification for their way of life. There was no other way to treat the natives really. A white person simply had no choice.

  I was telling Durba about the Lessing novel after we had ordered our food at the Punjabi Dhaba. The Dhaba was in Phoolbagan, where we had once waited for Toton the fishmonger and his motley crew of associates during our flat hunt. The naans there were hot and the chicken curries hearty. The head waiter was always happy to see us, a middle-class couple in a place frequented by cabbies and chauffeurs.

  We had ordered chicken dopiaza and naans, and a Coke for Durba. By mistake, the busboy brought us two Cokes. He was truly a boy, prepubescent, ten at most. But the smiling head waiter noticed and the yelling commenced.

  ‘Imagine if the Ethicist column in the New York Times were set in Calcutta,’ said Durba. ‘Instead of “Do I have to purchase a gift from an overpriced registry for my cousin’s wedding even if I don’t like her?” or whatever, it would be “Should I stop going to my favorite Dhaba because it employs child labour?”’

  ‘Would we come here if they employed slaves?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I guess that’s our answer.’

  ‘Will you stop going to street-corner tea shops, which all employ kids? Would you stop going to the houses of people who have children working as live-in maids?’

  ‘Child labour is illegal,’ she said. ‘We could report them.’

  ‘Slavery is illegal too,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t stop people from keeping children in their homes whom they feed and clothe but do not pay.’

  Durba knew a woman who had raised a child from the age of eight to do her household chores. The woman would always say of the child: ‘She is a daughter to me.’ But the ‘daughter’, Durba explained, was never to marry, never have children, never leave. Instead she was to be a captive to her ‘mother’, insurance for her employers’ old age, to care for the woman when her own children had left for more lucrative shores in Europe and America.

  ‘I thought that form of subjection was uniquely Indian,’ I said, ‘until I discovered it recently in Edward P. Jones’s novel The Known World, among slave owners in the antebellum South.’

  One of our first arguments in Calcutta had been over servants. Every middle-class family in Calcutta has servants who come twice a day, seven days a week to scrub floors, do dishes and wash clothes. We both disliked the awkward dealings between ‘master’ and ‘servant’, the everyday enactment of domination and exploitation. I did not want to hire a servant. I did not want someone sweeping my floors and washing my boxers. Durba believed I was being impractical. Worse, she accused me of being a misogynist, for when servants were scarce, the work typically fell to the woman of the house.

  There is a scene that appears early in the film Gandhi, when young Mohandas is cleaning latrines. It is from his early days in South Africa, where Gandhi went from being an unpromising lawyer to an exceptional activist. At his utopian ashram, Phoenix Farms, Gandhi had insisted on cleaning toilets, a caste-bound task that was considered the chore of ‘Untouchables’. His wife refused to follow him, to which Gandhi reacted with righteous outrage. In the movie, we see a leader who is in turns idealistic and tyrannical, and ultimately contrite.

  I struck a deal with Durba that I would sweep the floors and wipe them clean each day, and that she need not help. For a while, I squatted down with broom, rag and bucket. The idea of a middle-class man getting down on his haunches and scrubbing the kitchen floor was unthinkable. None would literally stoop to do such work.

  My floor-washing embarrassed Durba, made her feel guilty, as if my sweeping and scrubbing were part of a strategy to show her up. I had not asked her to take on any household chores, but even while I cleaned the house, the arguments escalated.

  Eventually I gave in; I wanted our fights to end. Durba hired Babita, a reed-thin woman who scrubbed our floors, cleaned our clothes and washed our dishes seven days a week for less than $20 a month.

  When I read Lessing’s descriptions of colonials in Rhodesia, I said to Durba that I felt I was reading about my society. I knew the mentalities of those colonists. Nothing about them shocked me or felt alien. Nor was I surprised by the ease with which outsiders fell into the local ways of being, of determining who is human and who is not. I could see it happening to myself.

  ‘If we had been the whites there, we would have left.’ Durba said. ‘Why have you voluntarily come back?’

  ***

  Moving to Calcutta was not like buying a summer house in Provence. It was not one of those fantasies that couples in America nurture together while folding the week’s laundry or watching Netflix. In fact, only one half of our couple had wanted to move at all. Durba had arrived reluctantly and, as time wore on, her frustration with the city, and with me, only grew.

  Bipedal movement, which can be optional when dating a woman in America, becomes essential in a city where there is ostensibly nowhere to go and nothing to do. You have to keep moving. In the mornings, Durba and I began to walk.

  A bhaar of tea from the para shop, and we were off. Maniktala, Beadon Street, Hatibagan, Sovabazar – the North was all our own. One morning we
stopped where Gray Street meets Central Avenue in Sovabazar to have breakfast at Mitra Café. Like the Coffee House or Basanta Cabin, Mitra Café was an institution, famed equally for its cutlets and its adda. The place was tight, about five wooden tables forged together. We sat on two chairs facing the road with a view of the open gutter and ordered toast, omelettes and tea, the traditional Bengali café breakfast.

  Baskets of potatoes arrived from the morning bazaar and squatting workers began to peel them right in front of the gutter.

  The man who sat across from us fished a hair out of his omelette. ‘For the second day in a row,’ he said, observing the specimen.

  We ate quickly and left.

  ‘That place was disgusting,’ Durba said, as we walked through the morning bazaar.

  I mumbled reluctantly that the tea was tepid, and the omelette could have been better.

  ‘How is it,’ Durba said, ‘that back at Yale there were places where you refused to eat because the waiters didn’t wear clean shirts. But here, you will happily dine on hair-stuffed omelettes in front of an open gutter?’

  We turned right onto Chitpur Road. Hillocks of garbage lined the lanes. In gully after gully, we saw street dogs, public taps and one-bench tea shops with old men in thick glasses. Durba had spent a summer in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and these neighbourhoods, she said, looked worse than a Dar slum.

  ‘You can understand at some level the desire of elites to secede,’ she said. ‘They are surrounded by this.’

  Through one lane and another, following my intuition, we reached the railroad tracks. I found a breach in the fence and slipped across to the river. The Ganga was the colour of milky tea. There was no promenade but a few concrete benches. Down below, the morning bathers were washing themselves in peace. It was still early, and while we walked, street cleaners arrived with their wheelbarrows and brooms to sweep the garbage away.

  ***

  A stack of parked rickshaws greeted us as we turned into a side street from broad Central Avenue. Muktaram Babu Street was narrow, lined with paan shops, sari shops, sweet shops, and a warehouse. None of these precursors prepared Durba for the first sight of Marble Palace. From the gate, you saw a garden, white columns among palm trees, a fountain, alabaster lions, wrought-iron verandas and statues of Europeans. The Palladian facade of Marble Palace was set back from the street so you could enjoy a panoramic view. It was a sight unlike any other in Calcutta.

  ‘We would like to go inside,’ I said to the guard at the gate.

  ‘You need a permit,’ the guard said.

  ‘We haven’t got it.’

  ‘Then you can’t get in.’

  ‘Surely there is another way,’ I suggested. ‘I’ve been here before.’

  The guard became suddenly bashful, as if I had asked him to belt out his favourite Bollywood tune. ‘OK. Have a look inside,’ he said, ‘but don’t forget us afterwards.’

  There was a time when you could buy tickets at a counter outside. The counter is gone. Now you needed to acquire a permit twenty-four hours in advance from a government office in Dalhousie. The first time I bribed the guard, I did my best imitation of a drug buy on American TV, surreptitiously sliding the folded note into the guard’s palm as I looked away and walked off. I had seen motorists bribe Calcutta traffic police my entire life. But I had never done it myself. Much like the first time I scalped tickets outside a ball game in America, I vastly overstated the gravity of my actions. The second time I bribed the guard at Marble Palace, I was more relaxed. I felt more guilty too but also strangely proud that I now knew how to work the system. By the third time, I felt more resentful than guilty. Had I been paying the guard more than the going rate? Why did these lazy fellows deserve a bribe anyway?

  Bribing the guard was one small ethical compromise among a dozen others we made each day. Who wants to stand in line in a government office in God knows where, that, too, the day beforehand? The crooked path was easier and more efficient. After the third time around, it hardly felt wrong at all.

  A portion of the Mullick family, who own the palace, still lives in the rear quarters of the compound, but the Marble Palace was never intended for habitation. It was built for show. When Rajendralal Mullick built it in 1835, he wanted to create a spectacle, a mini-Versailles on Muktaram Babu Street. At the side entrance to the palace, another guard was appointed as a guide. We took off our shoes as we would to enter a private house as he led us past the moose heads and the billiards tables with cue sticks as long as javelins, to start the tour in the corner room. The central attraction of the corner room was a wooden statue of the young Victoria, at least 12 feet high and made of a single piece of wood, with a face so pointy that she might have been Pinocchio’s sister.

  Mullick was roughly a contemporary of Queen Victoria. In the late 1700s, a group of villages were consolidated by the new rulers, the British, and transformed into a metropolis, forged by the forces of colonial power and global capital. In the 1770s, a third of the population of Bengal was wiped out by famine soon after the British began their rule. Farmland turned into jungle, as a society was decimated and turned upside down. Our experience of colonial contact was comparable to what had happened in the New World, in Hispaniola and Tenochtitlan. But those who were well poised for this transformation became rich beyond compare. The Mullicks have been in Calcutta since before the British. Like the Tagores, the Mullicks had owned a lot of the land that became Calcutta. They became one of the key trading families in the Company days. In his nineteenth-century life, Rajendralal Mullick amassed a collection of the bric-a-brac of Europe. The Music Room features Italian marble flooring that looks like a Persian rug, and marble statues of various sizes of Juno, Jupiter and Napoleon, as well as a Chinese incense holder the size of a wood stove. In the courtyard are alabaster statues representing each continent, and live tropical birds. The courtyard altar is used for prayers to Hindu goddesses, but the background panel features Diana the huntress, flanked by a plaster of Paris pantheon of Apollo, Sita and Ram. The guide led us across the courtyard and up the staircase. Every inch of wall space was covered with paintings from Europe, save the portrait of the palace’s creator, Rajendralal Mullick, portly and moustached and wearing Indian clothes, at the top of the stairs.

  On the second floor, 20-foot high Belgian glass mirrors bracketed both ends of the Ballroom. Beneath thirteen chandeliers were statues of Jesus, Mary, Galileo and Christopher Columbus. Around the balcony overlooking the courtyard were more statues, of Venus, gorillas, Autumn, an Orphan, ‘Early Sorrow’ and a four-person hookah larger than myself. Everything there had once been shipped, the guide said, piece by piece from Europe.

  ‘Her eyes follow you,’ he said as he switched on the lights of the Painting Room, and pointed to a life-size painting of a gypsy girl. Among the more valuable pieces in that room was a Murillo and also an original Rubens, The Marriage of Saint Catherine. The last Rubens on auction at Sotheby’s in London had sold for $76.7 million.

  Outside, pelicans strode the grounds, occasionally dipping into the giant fountains or fluttering their massive wings ominously to ward off international art thieves. The grounds included an aviary and what became the first zoo in India. Not much was left of it now, save the pelicans, some peacocks, monkeys and deer, surrounded by concrete buildings and old mansions, unpainted for several monsoons and now the colour of muck. These were the houses of traders allied with what was once the world’s most powerful corporation.

  At the corner of the Mullicks’ property was the family temple to the god Jagannath, the reigning deity of the Rath chariot festival. The temple predates the palace and the aviary. Rumour has it that once 4,000 people were fed at the temple daily. Rajendralal’s will stipulated that the daily feeding of the poor must go on. Even today, 400 destitutes are fed each afternoon. Among Hindus, feeding the destitute is a part of various religious events, a way for those blessed with wealth to rack up good karma.

  ‘Whenever anyone needs paupers they come here,’ sai
d the guard, as I bribed him on the way out.

  When I worked at the Statesman, I had visited the palace grounds with Sumitro during Rath, when the gardens and aviary were opened to the public and turned into a fairground. The para’s rickshaw-pullers and street vendors milled about with their families, bought wind-up toys, rode ferris wheels and took aim with BB guns at balloons. As in the villages, a big man’s power counted in feudal and not capitalist terms. Money was not the main measure. When traders and landlords moved from villages to Calcutta to form the Bengali elite, they had brought with them entire entourages of servants, guards, punkah-pullers, cooks, nurses, weavers, potters, shoemakers, jewellers, and so on. The retainers settled around the big man’s house, in mini urban villages which today we call ‘slums’. The more people you had around at your behest, the more servants, peons and underlings, the more prosperous you were considered to be. Power was defined by the capricious use of kindness and cruelty upon the many.

  How different it was from Paris or Versailles, where the Marble Palace would otherwise not be out of place. Rajendralal’s wondrous collection may have seemed a shameless exercise in mimicry of Europe. Yet this motherlode of all things European resembled no place in Europe. It was a phenomenon possible only in nineteenth-century Calcutta. When Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris in the mid nineteenth century, and in so doing producing the template of the modern city, he widened the boulevards and opened up vistas to the grand monuments, and moved the slums to the urban fringe, out of sight. To create a picturesque city, the rich were sifted from the poor, the filth removed from the gates of mansions. In Paris, even today, the housing projects on its urban fringe are full of immigrants from the former colonies, unseen and unvisited by other Parisians unless they riot and appear on television screens.