The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

  ‘Why did they leave?’ I asked Pranab.

  ‘Who would stay? The jobs were gone, and there was no electricity or running water.’

  The roads in Taratala are long and uninterrupted by the alleys, gullies or lanes that exist everywhere else in Calcutta, unpunctuated by the street architecture of the city, of tea shops, cigarette vendors and pice hotels. Manoj had told me to hire a taxi for this journey and I saw why. It was the only part of the city where there were no buses on the road, no autos, no nothing. It was midday, midweek, and there were no people to be seen.

  At one time these streets used to be full of people, twenty-four hours a day, Pranab said, but seeing it now, I found it impossible to believe. In Calcutta, where every space is so layered and dense, Taratala was a lifeless shell. All that remained was what Pranab himself called ‘the rubble of the industrial belt’.

  On one corner was a field with cows, a meadow in the middle of an industrial zone. ‘That was where we had our sports events,’ Pranab told me. ‘Workers used to play football here.’

  He said it like an archaeologist explaining the habits of an extinct civilisation, as if we were wandering through Aztec ruins and had just come upon an imperial ball court. It produced the same reaction of wonder, at how a world so developed could have sprung from this soil and, as mysteriously, disappeared.

  Pranab had joined MMC in 1964. ‘Did you ever think it would end up like this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Does anyone imagine this?’

  We drove past godowns that had turned into jungles, down Karl Marx Sarani toward the Fancy and Five Star Markets of Kidderpur. In the days of a closed command economy, when foreign goods were rare, these were Calcutta’s smuggled-goods markets, where you could buy coveted foreign consumer goods like the Roos sneakers that we all thought were uber-cool when we were in school. Meanwhile, it provided a source of clandestine employment to Qutubuddin’s generation, the children of the dock workers. But now that Reebok and Adidas had stores in Calcutta and there were malls galore, who needed a smuggled-goods market any more? Even the smugglers of Kidderpur had fallen on hard times.

  The Communist Party office was at Kabitirtha More – or Poets’ Pilgrimage Crossing. It is so named because the homes of three legendary Bengali poets – Hemchandra, Rangalal and Michael – are all nearby.

  As Pranab left for the CITU office, he said, ‘On the right is Michael’s house,’ pointing to a one-storey colonial bungalow with white columns where the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt had once lived. Its facade was blocked by a line of hawkers who had taken over the gates. Along the fence they had hung their inventory of colourful T-shirts and skinny jeans, the visiting cards of today’s Indian working class.

  ***

  Manoj lived near Taratala at Old Dog Race Course, a compound with dozens of uniform low-rise apartment buildings that stretched for perhaps a quarter of a mile from the main road. Some of the buildings were freshly painted yellow; others were the collard-green colour that Calcutta flats tend to become after a few monsoons. It was like a Petri dish containing a sample of people who had once been homogeneously lower middle class. In the new economy, as time progressed, some flourished and others stagnated.

  Nothing of the race course remained but the name. Manoj moved to the Old Dog Race Course in 1984, though the housing complex had been built much earlier, in the sixties.

  ‘At one time, there were all kinds of athletic events for dogs held here, or so we’ve heard,’ said Manoj, his whole body shaking with amusement.

  His home resembled the flat I had lived in as a kid in Bagmari. The sitting room had an almirah, a chair and a single bed. An open door led onto a small caged veranda, where clothes dripped on lines. A calendar with a baby Krishna painting swung on the wall as the ceiling fan whirred above. Manoj was sitting on the chair next to the only window. The morning sun streamed in through the window and the veranda, obscuring his face.

  ‘Please, feel comfortable,’ he said, as I sat down on the printed cover pulled taut over the bed.

  It was mid-morning and the familiar whistle of the pressure cooker and the aroma of vegetables being fried filled the flat. His wife came in from the kitchen to bring me a tray with four rossogollas and a glass of water. She was neat and trim, her hair and her sari in place, even though she had been cooking. She was the one who had decided to buy this flat, she said. Manoj had lived near the factory most of his life, in Jadavpur. ‘His whole world is there,’ his wife said, ‘I mean, if you walk down the streets there you will find his mother, father, brother, some relative or other. He didn’t want to come here.’

  But they didn’t have a place to stay there, or the money to buy property in the area. ‘He was in the union,’ she said, by way of explanation for why Manoj had never made as much money as he could have.

  At Usha, Manoj had been a machine designer. His task was to draft designs by hand of machines that were to be built. He had learned machine design at a technical school. Among the working class, men like Manoj were elites, skilled workers in demand in a country whose industries ran on reverse engineering the technology of the West.

  In the 1980s, Manoj used to go the Brooke Bond factory in Taratala for some freelance work. Brooke Bond made tea bags that came in boxes of twelve. They had an Italian machine that used to package the dozen bags into boxes. At the time, in India’s command economy, foreign currency was scarce and buying Italian machines was a luxury most Indian corporations could ill afford.

  ‘They came to us at Jay Engineering and took a team of four of us,’ Manoj said. ‘They wanted us to see the machine and copy it.’ Manoj and his colleagues did a sketch of the machine, and when it was built, it worked on the first try.

  ‘The euphoria! They hugged us and shook our hands.’

  Now his work, much like that of the typesetters and designers I had once worked with at the Statesman, has been totally computerised, the skilled handiwork of a department reduced to the button pushing of one or two men, a victim of what Marx called the supersession by the machine.

  When Manoj started in the 1950s, there were 2,000 workers at the factory. In newly independent India, Usha had a practical monopoly on the sewing-machine business. At its peak, 25,000 sewing machines were being made each month as well as 50,000 ceiling fans, and thousands of new workers were needed to run the machines that made them. By the late 1960s, the labour force had risen to 5,000. In the unrest of those years, the Communists grew politically more powerful, wielding the weapon of militant trade unionism on the factory floors.

  Long before the Usha factory was shut down in 1998, there had been closure after closure. In 1964, there was a five-and-a-half-month closure, because the annual bonus had been reduced. ‘It was a very silly demand,’ Manoj said, thinking of it now.

  At the time, he had felt differently. Factories were the theatres for meetings, marches and militant trade unionism.

  When I first started at the Statesman, the corridors would periodically be festooned with red hammer-and-sickle pennants and posters calling the management ‘dogs’. Back then, CITU had a union room down the hall from the newsroom with life-size paintings of Marx and Engels. CITU’s reach was vast, from the boatmen on the Ganga to the jute mills, the docks, the port, the factories and the Statesman’s presses. In the epic war of capital and labour, the Communists used militant tactics like the gherao with abandon. Escalate crisis to show strength: that was the CITU tactic until well into the end of the twentieth century.

  By the early 1970s small factories in northern India started making ceiling fans. They were so small they didn’t have to follow the government’s stipulated wages for factory workers, so they paid their workers half of what was being paid in Calcutta. Meanwhile at Usha, the workers’ wages kept going up while sales kept going down. Initially, to reduce costs, the company decided to outsource – or ‘farm out’ – some aspects of production. The union protested that too.

  ‘We protested the farming-out system, the changing of various norms i
nside the factory.’ Manoj said, ‘A lot of the agitations were not right. They could have been avoided.’

  ‘Why was it done?’ I asked him.

  ‘Militant trade unionism!’ he said, his eyes twinkling, as if we were talking about highjinks from a misspent youth. ‘They were just about militancy. At the time I didn’t think so. Now I realise it.’

  ‘It was not.’ He paused. ‘A necessary development.’

  ‘So it is true, what people say, that the militant trade unionism killed the industries?’

  ‘All the industries were not closed by militancy. It was a natural crisis,’ he told me. ‘There was nothing management could do.’ By the 1990s, the production of sewing machines had stopped at Manoj’s factory. Fans were still being assembled, but the whole fan was being made elsewhere, and coming in only to get the Usha stamp. In 1998 the unit closed and remaining assembly operations moved to Bansdroni.

  ‘At the time they closed, we used to talk about how management stole money and how they needed to diversify. Probably they stole; all owners set aside more than they show. But that’s not why it closed. They were posting losses. We shouted a lot of slogans then. We shouted “diversification”. But is it so easy to start a new technology? It requires skilled manpower from outside, and it is risky.’

  When Manoj worked at Usha, a group of technicians came from Germany to demonstrate computerised design machines. ‘One man just presses a button and sits quietly,’ Manoj said. ‘That’s all the labour required. The computer is more accurate and more perfect. But you can’t stop it, no more than you can force people to travel by bullock carts, or ask that they take ships to America rather than fly there in a day. Car production has become totally computerised. There is still some manual production around, lathe machines and so on. Just as there are still some bullock carts.

  ‘As a worker I was privileged. Ours was one of the first offices to have air conditioning. It was a very sophisticated office.’ He said this with some relish, recalling his standing in the hierarchy of capitalism. When the union struck in ’68, the owners offered to keep him on salary. He says he refused. ‘We had respect. But I didn’t think of that. I wanted other things. I was doing a job to do a job. My mind was on social change. I had seen people starving in 1943, during the famine in our village.’

  Manoj was ten years old in 1943 at the time of the Bengal Famine. His father was a schoolteacher in their village in East Bengal. They were landed people, with a house on the banks of the broad Meghna river. They had food when many did not. ‘I remember I was home from school,’ Manoj said. ‘We had an open veranda and a man came asking for food. Oh, how he ate! We even gave him the food from our own plates.’

  Streams of people kept coming across the Meghna river in search of food. Many had walked overnight through jungles, and waded across the river to reach Manoj’s home. One day a Muslim boy named Moti was among those who came. He was about Manoj’s age. Moti had made it through the woods and across the river to Manoj’s house. But a jackal had bitten him on his knee along the way. Within hours of arriving, he was dead.

  Almost sixty years later, Manoj spoke of that boy, Moti, as if he could still see his emaciated face.

  It happened during wartime. Those were the days when the Victoria Memorial was covered in cow dung, the Empress sheathed in shit, for fear of Japan’s bombs. Buses were parked on the Maidan so the Japanese wouldn’t use it as a landing strip for their planes. Air-raid sirens went off regularly, and were regularly ignored. As kids, we all learned a ditty passed down through schoolyards from those days:

  Sa re ga ma pa dha ni

  Bomb pheleche Japani

  Bomber bhetor keute shaap

  Britain bole baap re baap.

  Do re mi fa so la ti

  Bombs dropped by the Japanese

  Bombs contain coiled cobra snakes

  ‘Oh dear, Oh dear!’ Great Britain quakes.

  The Japanese attacked Kidderpur Port. A few bombs fell. But their armies never came to Calcutta. No tanks rolled through. The Tommies and GIs stationed in the city lived the good life. The city was teeming with women being sold into prostitution to survive. Each day thousands of people were arriving on foot from the countryside, columns of emaciated bodies begging for food on Calcutta’s footpaths.

  ‘Phaan dao, Ma, Ma, phaan dao.’ There is not a person who lived through that time who does not remember this cry, of starving people begging, not for rice, but for the leftover water in which it was boiled. There was rice in the city, they had heard, the only place in Bengal where one could still be fed. They walked to Calcutta hoping to survive, and died by the thousands on its streets. There were literally piles of corpses accumulated in the streets all over the city. Calcutta had become a necropolis.

  Three million people starved to death, and the causes were man-made. The British diverted grain away from the countryside for their war. They cleaned out granaries from village after village and seized boats that transported grain across Bengal’s rivers. The only place where food could reliably be found was in the capital city. Calcutta, with its barracks full of soldiers, and its government buildings full of clerks, was fed in preparation for an Axis attack that never came. The Japanese never dropped their cobra snakes on Calcutta. The war against Bengal was waged by the British themselves.

  The moral order of society was broken by the famine. When that break occurred, those who had survived sought ways to make it whole. Why did we watch and do nothing? asked the liberals. Why didn’t the starving people rob, kill and revolt? asked the Communists. Why did they just wither away?

  Before the famine, Manoj’s family had supported the Congress. He joined the Communists. He wanted to be on the frontline of a revolutionary movement for social change.

  It was a very different party then, he said. ‘There was a member of the Party, Sailen Bose, who had a twelve-hundred-rupee-a-month job, who left it to take a sixty-rupee-a-month job as a Party full-timer. He contracted tuberculosis. Still he didn’t stop. He was in the Jadavpur CPI.

  ‘There was a major rail-union leader, later CITU vice president, Kanai Banerjee. His younger sister died of cancer. She had a son. The son was handicapped. There were rail quotas for the handicapped. He could have easily arranged for the boy to get a job in the railways. He didn’t arrange a job,’ he said. ‘He didn’t arrange a job!’

  ‘Where are such people today? I don’t see them now. Almost all Party leaders have put their brothers and their families into jobs, helped them into businesses.’

  The Calcutta district of CITU used to have 250,000 members, almost all of them factory workers. Now there were about 170,000 members. A majority were hawkers, auto drivers, private security guards – occupations that were mostly off the books, part of the vast sea of India’s so-called informal sector.

  The proletarian struggle that Manoj had joined was gone. It had failed to make the world anew.

  When we came to the end of our conversation, he said, ‘Don’t give my name.’ He was, after all, still the vice president of a CITU unit. Then he changed his mind. ‘Give it. Give it. I don’t care. What will happen? Most of the people I was with are dead.’

  Chitpur Nights

  One morning I awoke in a great funk. It was the sort of funk that would ordinarily have led to a shouting match in our house. ‘I’ll make you a cup of coffee,’ Durba said, ‘but today you need to decide what it is that you would like to do.’

  Before moving back, I had fantasised about long, leisurely afternoons with a house full of friends, two pots of food – one of rice, the other of meat – and adda. Sweet Sunday adda! For the first few months, it never happened. Perhaps it was that our life in those early months had simmered with discontent and flared up with frequent fights. It could be too, I thought, that sweet Sunday adda was just a memory, a habit that had been dropped by people who were busy with their children and careers, busy looking busy, tooling around on their cell phones just like the whole wide world. It used to be, a CPM leader said to
me, that you bragged about how little work you got away with doing. That showed how artfully you dodged the thumb of your capitalist boss. Now you bragged about how much you worked, as if the number of hours logged at the office and litany of emails in your inbox showed your worth as a human being. I missed the addas of my Statesman days, at Majestic bar on Madan Street, at the tea shop in Chowringhee Square, in Mike’s room after office hours or at Sunday lunches at Sumitro’s house.

  ‘What I want,’ I said to Durba when she returned with coffee, ‘is a Sunday adda.’ Durba acquiesced: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’ And so off I went to buy goat from Mejo Mama’s butcher near College Street and shrimp from one of the fishmongers at Maniktala Market. Durba made Kashmiri goat curry; I made camarao Mozambique. We cooked together late into Saturday night. For the first time since we’d moved to Calcutta, our friends came over for Sunday lunch.

  Sumitro and Nabamita arrived first. Imran and Ayesha came with their young son. Our friend Rajesh came too, while his wife, Beauty, dropped by en route to visit a relative who was in the hospital. So began a full day adda: beer, lunch, tea, more tea, and more tea. Some even stayed till dinner.

  How many addas had we had, just loitering on street corners, at the bus stand, or standing for hours in the corridors at the Statesman, among the Himalayas of discarded files?

  In those days we didn’t even need a place to sit. I remember one evening Sumitro, Imran and I kept talking in front of the tram stop at Esplanade until the hookers had propositioned us so many times that we had to move on just in order to keep talking.

  ‘Everything I know,’ the great Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali once wrote, ‘I have gathered from scraps collected at addas.’ Gajendra Kumar Mitra, his publisher at Mitra Ghosh – which hosted its own famed adda – wrote that he once ran into Mujtaba Ali in front of Basanta Cabin and four hours passed in adda before they had even made it inside.