The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  “We also realized,” he continued, “that since oil was only six percent of our revenues and falling, we had to diversify. Tourism is the world’s biggest industry. And tourism itself is changing. A lot of our clients from places like Britain want to live here part of the year. Forgive me, but your climate—” He opened his hands wide, as if to suggest that Allah had not favored my race in that department.

  But where were the clients coming from?

  “From all over. The U.K. mostly. Then Hong Kong, India, Germany. Some from the U.S., but on the whole we find that Americans are terrified of the Middle East. It’s possible that Atlantis might change that.”

  Atlantis? Hamza’s eye turned black mischief. The ruthless South African entrepreneur Sol Kerzner was building a version of his Atlantis theme hotel and casino on one of the Palms. I said I had been to the one in the Bahamas—a megaresort devoted to the legends of the Lost City, complete with an invented hieroglyphic script and underwater restaurants.

  “Very magnificent, is it not? Atlantis will make people think of the Bahamas. And we are certainly going to overtake the Bahamas.”

  I looked around the opulent glass-and-steel “tent” and picked up a dozen languages in bits and pieces. The multilingual murmur rose and fell, a background noise sounding like an ur-language from the distant past. The word “multicultural” is on everyone’s lips in Dubai. Another project of Nakheel’s is International City, a complete miniature city rising in the Al Warsan district with whole districts themed by region and dominated by a thing called the Forbidden City—a 240,000-square-foot replica of the Beijing original.

  Hamza sat me down and had coffee poured into a cup so tiny I had to hold it with three fingers. He asked me how long I was going to be in Dubai.

  “And after?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

  “East. India, then eventually Papua New Guinea.”

  The urbane smile was a little chilling. “So you are quite the adventurer, are you not? I cannot think of any reason for going to Papua New Guinea, I must say. Did you know they are building an Islamic University in Papua? I have heard—perhaps I am mistaken—that the Saudis might be involved in financing it. In Wamena, I believe.”

  “It is amazing how large Islam is, isn’t it?”

  He looked over the models, where the Europeans were stroking their chins and thinking about their checkbooks.

  “Your trip is taking you from one end of Islam to the other,” he said. “But then I go shopping in London on the weekends. We have all the stores here, but I prefer to go to Savile Row myself.”

  I drank some of the burning coffee. Across the polished marble floors, incredibly beautiful women floated on stiletto heels, their heads garbed in black. Hamza pointed at the model of the World, and a forced sincerity entered his eye.

  “Our great sheikh has it all planned. The world will soon be traveling all the time, round the clock. And Dubai will be the center of it all. To go to Asia, Europeans will come here first. Like you did. And like you, they will stay a few days. Since you are here for a few days, I advise you to go to the Wafi Mall. It is sublime. Excellent wristwatches, too. And of course you should not miss the Burj Al Arab.”

  Returning down Sheikh Zayed Road, I had to admire the giant images of the sheikh’s face looming under spotlights, undulating on flags and pennants and billboards. The logos of his construction companies, Emaar and Nakheel, were posted like the propaganda banners of two rival political parties. The glass towers were straight out of Alphaville, evidence of a benevolent dictatorship whose aegis permits a planned multiplication of pleasures. For we have forgotten how far dictatorship and pleasure can go hand in hand—how often, in fact, they depend on each other. If a dictatorship could provide hedonistic outlets, while refraining from using electroshock therapy on its journalists, it would have a high chance of enjoying the gratitude, admiration, and perhaps even envy of most of the world, not to mention its own citizens. It is a recipe that has made Dubai and Singapore rich.

  Like a British lordling on the Grand Tour two hundred years ago, I went the following night to see the Venetian-themed Mercator Mall, which looks like a Renaissance train station filled with sheikhs carrying shopping bags. There are gallerie, arcaded streets with names like Via del Lago, squares with orange trees and frescoes of Venice in a style of imitation Canaletto. Then, instead of Cairo and the wonders of Giza, there is the Wafi Mall, with pharaonic statues guarding its gates and a pyramid of colored glass whose friezes are derived from the walls of Egyptian tombs. The following day I would be flying to Calcutta, the largest city ever built by Europeans in the tropics, and I wondered what version of “the East” it would offer in contrast to the one proffered here. For you could not find two cities more diametrically opposed within the tourist system than Dubai and Calcutta. The former was clean, much visited and admired, while the latter was seen as decrepit and shambolic, and was consequently hardly visited at all. How ironic it was that the British families whose ancestors built Calcutta never go there now, as if to underline the fact that the East is something one can take or leave. When it gets too chaotic, too Eastern, it is dropped from the tourist almanac altogether.

  Accordingly, only loners and Japanese businessmen go to Calcutta now. And yet what city resonates more deeply in the colonial psyche? What city is more out of our world and yet in it?

  SAD TROPICS

  A little potbellied man with a straying left eye, like a character out of The Pickwick Papers, showed up for breakfast at the Calcutta Oberoi Grand, the vastest and grandest of the city’s Raj-style hotel palaces. Manish Chakraborti squinted with his loopy eye, laughed as if with asthma, and plopped himself down into a paisley armchair. “I’m dying for a cigarette,” he gasped, “and I suppose we can not bloody smoke?” Manish is the city’s most impassioned architectural historian and the man most responsible for turning many of its listed buildings into UNESCO sites. As a sideline, he gives tours for the curious and the bored, the footloose and the indigently curious. For today’s Grand Tourists, in other words, who want to see Calcutta’s half-forgotten, half-ruined cultural sites. Manish himself is the perfect man for so quixotic and outmoded a form of tourism. Perfect English, vast erudition, a dim sadness behind the drifting eye: he dreams of resurrecting the decayed British city into a tourist mecca. It will probably never happen, but while it doesn’t happen Manish will show the city to the kind of traveler who responds to lifelong love. He will show it stone by stone.

  Calcutta’s decay enraged Manish precisely because it was so purposeful. Calcutta, and Bengal itself, have long been Communist principalities. Calcutta’s walls are the only ones I have seen outside of Italy that are relentlessly plastered with hammers and sickles, not to mention exhortations to the proletariat. In the taxi coming from the airport, I had passed statues of Marx and Engels on the Maidan, the sweeping central park laid out by the British. The Communists were the problem, according to Manish, as they were everywhere else. It was they who had let the city slide into phantasmagoric ruin. A city whose texture reminds you of the decalcomaniac surfaces of Max Ernst’s wartime paintings.

  “Shall we have breakfast?” I said.

  You can still see the Indian aristocracy’s love of hand-blown Belgian chandeliers in the Oberoi lobby, for there they are, stalactitic masses of tubular antique glass with fifty flames gathered at the end of what look like pendant palm trunks. The hotel is set back from the manic colonial boulevard known as Chowringhee, now a squatter camp–cum–street market, and its serene courtyard is protected by squads of guards in glistening white uniforms and peaked caps. I was curious about the Oberoi itself, and not surprisingly Manish had its history at his fingertips. It had been the private neoclassical mansion of a wealthy Anglo-Indian family of the 1840s. A strange period, he said. The British had founded Calcutta in the 1690s, but the Raj had not been the continent’s dominant power for very long when the two sides of Calcutta—British and Indian—began to merge at the higher echelons.

&
nbsp; The British were riddled with racial paranoias, as we all know, but they made a hierarchical distinction between the “high” cultures of the Middle East and Asia and, say, the unredeemed primitivity of Africa or the South Seas. Contempt for the Indians they actually dealt with coexisted with respect for the cultural India of the past. For that matter, the British had brought the same psychosis into their Italian tours. They often loathed the Italians of the eighteenth century—whom they saw as degenerate—while in virtually the same breath they lavished praise on this other Italy of Hadrian and Michelangelo. In India, the same drama played itself out.

  But with time, as in Italy, the cultural respect began to open other doors. In the 1770s, Governor-General Warren Hastings based in Calcutta had launched a campaign to revive Hindu learning (Calcutta had already produced the first English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, by Charles Wilkins); a few decades later, rich Indians began building amazing palaces in the reigning European styles, filled with statues of Napoleon and Meissen candlesticks. Cross-fertilization began to flower.

  It was this cross-fertilization that fascinated Manish. The mid-nineteenth century coincided with Calcutta’s heyday, when it was the biggest and richest city in Asia. Comparisons with the present were bound to induce nostalgia, and wasn’t nostalgia Calcutta’s preeminent mood, the mood of her own artists and poets?

  I looked through layers of glass doors and windows to the Oberoi pool, alive with hummingbirds in the early morning. Two blond girls swam lengths; they were members of a Thai Airways flight to Frankfurt that had been diverted to Calcutta because of a cracked windscreen. They looked extremely confused by their surroundings, as if Calcutta was only a swarm of little ideas: Mother Teresa, City of Joy, Patrick Swayze. And then rickshaws, leprosy, child prostitution, beggars. Hadn’t Woody Allen once declared that the city had a “hundred unlisted diseases”?

  “You see,” Manish said, “they are not here because they want to be.”

  The Calcutta of palaces was not for them. Like many middle-class Calcuttans, Manish hated the image the city has had fabricated around it, the Mother Teresa slum shtick. But had the vaunted Indian economic boom really reached Calcutta?

  “The number of street beggars is about half what it was,” he protested. Though he had to admit that the famous trickle down of wealth had not trickled down very much.

  “The owners of the historical palaces are all broke. Everyone is broke. Including me, I am broke.”

  Manish gave his tours for 350 rupees a head, about $9, but it was of course a loving participation for him—opening his city to others. It is an ideal form of tourism, a personal gift from one person to another. Perhaps you can find it only in a failed city. For what would Calcutta look like if it had succeeded? Most of the old buildings would have already been torn down and replaced with Hard Rock Cafés. The sadness of Calcutta was of something beautiful protected by failure.

  We went outside into the dawn. Manish got his cigarette and we climbed into a Hindustan Motors Ambassador with almost no brakes.

  Early in the morning, the city looks like an equatorial Saint Louis of the last century. At its heart, like the temple of a departed deity, the white palace of Viceroy Curzon, modeled on his English country estate Kedleston Hall, stands amid lavish gardens, too big for its present function as the seat of the governor of Bengal. A hundred years ago, Manish said, it was almost matched by the Great Eastern Hotel on Sutter Street, the “Jewel of the Orient.” We stopped there for a second. The Great Eastern was Calcutta’s equivalent of Shepheard’s, and it still takes up almost a whole block of Sutter. But the Great Eastern has been government run since 1975, and as every tourist knows, the terms “government” and “hotel” in India mix like oil and water. The lobby was dusty and decrepit; the once-elegant arcade was covered with billboards for sewing machines and ice-cream makers. Manish made a face.

  “Scandalous!”

  Like charioteers in Ben-Hur, we tore around the Maidan, where a dozen cricket games had started up as the mists cleared. We passed Engels and Marx again, and there was even a Ho Chi Minh Street. Was this compensation for colonial humiliation?

  “It’s stupidity.” Manish snorted. “Like changing the name of the city to Kolkata. Or is it Kalikata now? You might as well advertise straight out that you have an inferiority complex.”

  There is no city as confusing as Kalikata. The British layout has been overwhelmed, though in photographs a hundred years back it looks utopian enough. There are no traffic lights; drivers use both sides of the roads simultaneously. The air chokes with fumes and there are times when nothing moves except the bicycles. I remembered Louis Malle’s 1969 film about Calcutta, and what I recalled were Malle’s collages of misery, which he seemed to have inherited from the aforementioned writers. If there was no misery there would be nothing to describe, to shoot. Calcutta is misery—we’re all agreed on that. What does the tourist see, then?

  The streets, no longer so wretched perhaps, the Rajastani mansions along a long street on the way to North Calcutta with their beautiful carved terraces and shutters of sooted wood; if you are with Manish you feel the palimpsestic density, like parcels that have been wrapped with sheets of paper from a hundred different novels of different epochs. I noticed most of all the faces packed into the Ambassador taxis as we stopped at intersections. The men leaning out a bit and asking where I was from. “George Bush, crazy man!” Thumbs up, gold teeth, a whiff of garlic. The girls looking like boxes of candies sitting in the backseats with fake gold fans and delicately sweated foreheads. The men being shaved under baobab trees; the feeling of a million desultory clerks asleep behind mountains of paper or sleepwalking from office to canteen and back to their pointless offices, where they chased flies with quills. Bureaucracy, bookishness, and aristocracy—for Calcutta is the supreme city of all three in decay.

  The Manish Tour wends its way through the imperial heart of the city, taking in the British Gothica of Dalhousie Square and the Writers’ Building, and then heads north for the decaying and preposterous palaces of the babu. The babu were Calcutta’s original aristocratic families, few in number but adorned with gorgeous names. The Duttas of Hatkhola, the Tagores of Jorasanko, and the Debs of Sovabazar. They built their palaces under the British in the late eighteenth century, and thereafter they declined generation by generation, usually making a humble living as government clerks on their way down. They were, and are, remarkably bookish. Even during the Raj, however, “babu” was often a term of affectionate contempt, suggesting an Indian aping European fashions and manners, or else a poseur, a dandy … an intellectual. Manish opined that the Marxist government still wouldn’t fund the restoration of babu palaces for political reasons. And so they slide into ruin, though Calcuttan palaces make for ruins unique in the world, the spectral twilight zone caught so gently in Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room.

  At the end of the day we visited the dying palaces in the northern part of the city, especially the famous Marble Palace, built by the babu eccentric Rajendra Mullick, who died in 1887 but who began the building when he was only sixteen, in 1835. We drove up to a gray Palladian pile next to which stood a dozy fish pool lorded over by a pelican. Next door, a rowdy mosque blared away as if to spite the minor babus who still own the palace. Some of these were asleep on the steps next to their discarded sandals. In the heat of the afternoon, we wandered around this shadowed semiruin in bare feet, padding over undulating marble floors where it was rumored an infant boy had been buried for good luck.

  One wonders how these two cultures fantasized about each other in a mutual tourism of the mind. For the British, the fantasies of India were obvious and well known. But what of the other side? Indian fantasies of Europe are rarely glimpsed. The rooms of Mullick’s palace are crowded with the same florid chandeliers sported in the Oberoi. Shrouded pool tables stand in one room; in another, a towering rosewood statue of Queen Victoria presides, regarded with awe by the old men following us around. It must have been fifteen feet high
. In suffocating galleries, a Hercules crushing snakes by Reynolds and a scene of lusty Amazons by Rubens hung quietly degrading in the tropics. Around them swirled an orgy of Apollos, Neptunes, and scant-clad Venuses. One series of marble busts showed a young woman in progressive stages of marital fecundation: blushing virginity, prenuptial flirtation, wedding day, matronly maternity. The fierce sentiments of 1840. I pored over a statue of Napoleon and some blazingly tacky Meissen ceramics.

  Clearly, the wannabe babus had latched onto something interesting in the Western psyche, and most of all the British psyche on tour. You could call it the life-as-a-museum conceit. It is the idea that a culture is a static storehouse of delightful curios, a maze of galleries filled with artifacts and rituals. The museum is therefore felt to be a microcosm of a real place—which, of course, it is not. Yet this is the operating conceit of the tourist. The Marble Palace is an instinctive Indian response to the antiquity-chasing British traveler like Amelia Edwards. It’s almost as if they were saying, “You too can be hoarded, collected, touristified!”

  It was dusk when I got back to Chowringhee. The boulevard was swallowed up with hordes: cinema crowds, market touts, arcade stalls laid on plastic sheets selling hand-cut seals, scuba flippers, coffeemakers, Nehru suits. A bluish haze rose from the park, where the cricket games continued under arc lamps; around the Peerless Inn next door, a male host milled in six directions simultaneously, carrying rickshaws and bicycles with it, the faces sweating in the fiery orange light of the road.