Calcutta

by Amit Chaudhuri

  About a week later, a young, distraught maid who’d just taken up work confessed to us of her own volition that Lakkhi had persuaded her to place a plastic bag with pieces of fish from the freezer behind the fire extinguisher near the lift, half an hour before her departure to Subhasgram, and had, since then, been asking her to do it again. We were gripped by a sense of disbelief at Lakkhi’s ingenuity and by a surge of vengefulness. But we knew we needed to strategise—besides, there was a man in the house who was pretty old and had special dietary needs. So we said nothing and only marvelled when Lakkhi came in. But she had her informants and found out she’d been snitched on. Her mood deteriorated. Without the fish being openly discussed, Lakkhi stopped coming, except once, dourly, like one betrayed (as she had been), to collect her dues.

  Getting a substitute wouldn’t be easy, but we took up the challenge.

  NINE

  A Visit

  Twice a year, I’d think, with a start, that I hadn’t been to see Mini mashi for months. It was like an email I had to reply to—the memory of it jolted me at the wrong moments: say, after I was in bed, and had switched off the lights. When I woke up, the thought was gone. Then, when there was a lull in the monsoons of 2011, my mother got a phone call saying Mini mashi had had her third stroke, and, increasingly stingy with time though I’ve become, I knew the journey couldn’t be postponed.

  These strokes occurred at astrological intervals, every few years. Each time, they took from Mini mashi’s learned vocabulary in Bengali a few more words. They were tectonic and decisive, making their presence felt indisputably in her and Shanti mashi’s small flat, like a supernatural being. The strokes weren’t silent and insidious, like the ones that pursued my father, leaving his face and features unchanged, transforming him from within.

  She’d been shifted to the intensive care unit of a nursing home in Shobhabazar, and my mother and I decided we must set out in time to catch the visiting hours. She was my mother’s oldest living friend—they had been thick with each other in Sylhet—and they were also very, very distantly related: technically, she did qualify as my maternal aunt—or mashi.

  Shobhabazar is in North Calcutta; so is the narrow lane in which Mini mashi and her elder sister lived doggedly in a government flat, a five-minute walk from the Tagores’ house in Jorasanko, two minutes from Mallickbari or the Marble Palace, and not far at all from Mahajati Sadan, the playhouse; an area as littered with the relics of history as Shobhabazar is thriving (besides still being home to the obscure mansions of erstwhile rajas and landlords) with stalls selling wedding cards, saris, dress material—but predominantly wedding cards.

  North Calcutta is not just a geographical location; it is, in fact, the other Calcutta. That is, it’s approximately what’s left of the old or “black” town—which was, with the exception of a few areas in the south, the great city of the nineteenth century—the environs in which all the cultural innovations of the Bengal Renaissance took place. When people refer to “Calcutta” or “Kolkata” today, though, they mean the south, and have meant it for some decades, as urban life flowed and shifted in that direction, and, from the mid-nineties, the merciless property boom extended deeper and deeper southward. No wonder it took me years to visit Mini mashi, on what turned out to be just a few days prior to her death; it wasn’t so much the distance, which, by the standards of contemporary cities and their suburbs, is moderate to small (a forty-five minutes to an hour’s drive in the traffic). It may have had to do with this sense of having to push in the opposite direction, of bracing myself to travel against the current.

  * * *

  You say, What’s this Renaissance you’ve kept mentioning? Is it true Bengal had a Renaissance—if that’s so, what was its nature? Where are its monuments, its landmarks, its cathedrals? Does it have a Sistine Chapel?

  Reformists like Keshab Chandra Sen, nationalists such as Bipin Chandra Pal, and the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda had begun by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to speak of the naba jagaran or “new awakening” that had occurred in Bengal, and call it, in English, the “Renaissance.” But the person who probably gave the term its admittedly short-lived academic aura was the Marxist historian Susobhan Sarkar, in his brief tract from 1946, Notes on the Bengal Renaissance, where its provenance, characteristics, and canonical moments were duly recorded.

  Conventionally, the beginnings of this putative Renaissance might be fixed either at 1814, when Raja Rammohun Roy founded the Atmiyan Sabha with reform in mind, especially on behalf of Hindu widows, who couldn’t, at the time, remarry; or in 1828, when he founded the Brahmo Samaj, a unitarian sect that refuted Hinduism’s polytheism, turning instead towards an immanent, formless—nirakaar—divinity apparently first intuited by humans in the Upanishads and Vedas. But the full-blown effects of this turn would only become palpable from the 1860s onward. It’s clear, then, that the Bengalis, in their transition into self-consciousness, went down routes opened up for them by now relatively obscure Orientalist scholars, like the Welshman William Jones, translator of, among other writers and texts, the fourth-century court poet Kalidasa, and the Frenchman Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, translator of the Upanishads. For these Europeans, the unusual ferment of the time—the late eighteenth century—that brought them into contact with Indian Brahmins and, through them, Indian antiquity had a particular significance: with these hoary, beautiful texts they established the extraordinary lineage of the East, and also proved that the story of humanism—authored by the European Enlightenment—had an ancient and important setting in India, and not just, as had been presumed, in Greece and Rome. For Indians like Roy and Tagore, though, these texts didn’t only represent the glory of the Indian past (which they did), or the Indian’s place in the larger world (which they did too); they pointed out a way to what India, and they themselves, would be in the foreseeable future. Roy could have been content with the wonder and prestige of Indian antiquity; his great innovation, whether he knew it or not, was to make the Upanishadic heritage a basis and pillar of the secularism we’ve come to take for granted, to read it, in effect, as a contemporary resource that showed Indians how to be modern. Tagore began to perform a similar innovation with the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, and with that same Upanishadic tradition, from the 1890s onward: to regard them not just as “our great tradition,” as dead heritage, but as essential to fashioning the modern poem and literature.

  We’ve lost our way. Where exactly is Shobhabazar? We’re in Shyambazar, lurching forward steadily in the congestion—Dada, in which direction is the Naba Jiban Nursing Home? And, excuse me, Dada, did the Bengal Renaissance really happen? Could you point out its signs?

  By the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist critics in Calcutta were ferociously, scathingly, disputing the notion of the Renaissance in Bengal. It was hardly a genuine renaissance, they said; to call it one would be an act of hubris. Their main quarrel was with its bhadralok context: its exclusion of the poor and the minorities—a charge that couldn’t be ignored. As a consequence, the idea of the Bengal Renaissance—and the bhadralok himself—has been much reviled: most often by the bhadralok, in an act of expiation.

  The English, anyway, had never noticed its existence, though it happened under their noses. For the Englishman, both Indian modernity and the Indian modern were invisible. In a sense, then, Calcutta, to him, was invisible. Kipling, writing in the midst of the Renaissance, populates his magical stories of India with talking wolves, tigers, cheetahs, and orphan Indian children who have no trouble communicating with animals. No one would know, reading Kipling, that Bagheera, Sher Khan, and Mowgli are neighbours and contemporaries of the novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee and the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. In Kipling’s universe—and, to a considerable extent, in Britain’s—the Renaissance, and Bengali and Indian modernity, might as well have never happened in India’s uninterrupted, fabulous time.

  This was not a renaissance overseen and funded by potentates, as the Italian Renaissance was. It had n
o Lorenzo de’ Medici. It burgeoned, incongruously, in the time of Empire, when the imperial view of culture—when there was one at all—was busy with other things. Which is why it has no monuments; which is why, when I go northward, to Mini mashi’s flat, or elsewhere, or, as we did that afternoon, in search of the Naba Jiban Nursing Home (naba jiban, “new life,” itself unwittingly echoing the resurgent naba jagaran), the only really grand official buildings are the lapsed colonial institutions on Central Avenue—such as the School of Tropical Medicine—still extant, and symbolic. When, on those journeys, you look for that so-called Renaissance’s great buildings, you, of course, see none.

  When people visit me in Calcutta, I take them not to see landmarks, but people’s houses. These might be the ones found in charming clusters in Bakul Bagan, Paddapukur, or Bhowanipore, built in the twenties, thirties, and forties; or near the Hooghly, in marginal Kidderpore; or up north, where the ancestral mansions are, and which even I haven’t properly explored. Each house differs from the other, but there’s a family resemblance: the green French windows with slats, the intricate cornices on the balconies, the red stone floors, the stairs rising to the wide terrace where clothes are hung to dry and children hover, and, if the house came up after Independence, the wavy or floral grilles, the flecked tiles, the art-deco-type windows with frosted panes. There are no other monuments in Calcutta. When I look at these houses, I feel excited, as I might when rereading one of James Joyce’s stories; the pleasure of being surprised, even after repeated encounters, by the new. And the modern is perennially new, no matter what state it’s in, and even when it’s being dismantled—as many of these houses are, by property scamsters called “promoters.”

  This renaissance wasn’t the renaissance of an empire, but of a home-grown bourgeoisie largely unacknowledged by the imperial sovereign; so its theme and subject isn’t grandeur, as often seems to be the case in the European Renaissance, in the resplendent, glowing paintings of Titian, in Michelangelo’s gigantic, looming, perfectly buttocked David, but the everyday and the desultory, such as you see in the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray. This renaissance is, in many ways, a refutation of that earlier, better-known one, with its epic pretensions. Its protagonist isn’t the soldier on horseback, or the gods, or the regent in the hall or garden; it is really the loiterer. Jean Renoir sensed this on his visit to this city in 1949, when he remarked, when describing Calcutta, that “all great civilisations are based on loitering.”

  In the Jewish Museum in Hallesches Tör in Berlin, I realised, on the second floor, that modern man, twentieth-century man—in all his or her unimpressiveness and unintended comedy, in his or her preoccupation with shopping, the arts, the stock market, keeping diaries, borrowing books, going to the cinema, reading newspapers—might be the subject of a memorial, and have these enthusiasms recorded and collections and possessions displayed. That museum, of course, commemorated the sudden, enforced passing of a culture; it paid tribute, on the second floor, to an abortive but, in the end, ordinary world. I was accustomed, in museums, to reluctantly examining the vestiges of great civilisations—portraits of dukes and princes, pictures of dead pheasants in the kitchen, a comb that belonged to an empress, a stone from a palace, a bust of the Buddha or of Zeus. I say “reluctantly” because I’d never actually been that interested in the crumbling of bygone panoramas, or in the historical or canonical; and it was in the Jewish Museum, on the second floor, that I understood that it was the banality of modern man that gave me most pleasure and most moved me. This explains, to a certain extent maybe, why I introduce visiting friends to neighbourhoods in Calcutta when they ask to see the city. It’s here that the particular history I’m speaking of resided, and still persists in an afterlife, and where it will—as is already evident (and probably to the relief of all concerned)—eventually vanish.

  * * *

  The Bengal Renaissance’s largely unnoticed state of existence—where the larger world and India’s colonial rulers were concerned—might explain its cherishing of secrecy, of looking, and spying, and its air of surreptitious playfulness—its very illegitimacy. And it may also be why, especially, the afternoon was a time of enchantment in Calcutta, pregnant with meaning for the Bengali child, when the adult, the figure of authority, had withdrawn, and the child was granted solitary freedom within a fixed ambit.

  Charulata, in Satyajit Ray’s eponymous film, diverts herself in the afternoon in an immense nineteenth-century mansion in North Calcutta by opening the slats of the windows and spying on passers-by through binoculars. To be unseen, to look out at the world: for the artist, this is a prized privilege, and, in the late nineteenth century, Calcutta began to feel those possibilities—of being at once known and invisible—precipitously. This was the mood of that anomalous renaissance: the atmosphere—captured in Charulata’s opening frames—of afternoon and concealment. “Freedom consists in not having to make the laws,” said Tolstoy. So with the Bengalis in that age. Isn’t that why Tagore constantly mentions chhuti (holidays), khela (play), and the relief of kaaj nai (having no work to do) in his songs—because the colonial world has granted him an odd kind of liberation?

  Is that the reason, too, why Calcutta was associated in my mind with play and freedom; or was it because I came here for my holidays? Exactly what kind of experience is a holiday?

  A holiday is an interruption. It isn’t a narrative with a denouement—that’s what ordinary life is. A holiday is a break from “ordinary life.” Part of its enchantment, surely, is that it doesn’t follow the rules of narrative that “ordinary life” does; it’s a period of time that’s static, unmoving, without the on-and-on progression that our lives generally have—but a period, nevertheless, in which a transformation occurs. A holiday doesn’t so much entail a journey to a foreign place as a certain change in mood that causes familiar and everyday things to become foreign. It’s this transformation that Calcutta once represented for me.

  If I were to rehearse this in generic terms, I suppose what I’m describing is the difference between the poetic and the narrative. For me, the poem is neither rhyme, metre, nor beautiful words strung together, but a period of time in which nothing seems to happen in the conventional sense, but which we’re still changed by: a duration in which we’re altered. Unlike the novel, the transformation isn’t actually dependent on us having come to know a great deal more by the time we’ve finished reading the poem. Yet we’re aware, when we’ve reached the end of the poem, of a change having taken place.

  My holidays in Calcutta were similar to my account of inhabiting a poem, in that I didn’t come to know a great deal more during them; in fact, Calcutta, being a break from school, was, for me, a break from knowing.

  When I look at my novels, I see that they’re mostly—without my having consciously planned them in that way—structured around journeys and visits, rather than stories and plot. My stories aren’t about day-to-day life, but breaks and interruptions in the business of living, often caused by a change of venue. The changed venue may or may not cause a transformation (depending on how successful the novel is in its workings, and what its intentions are), but this transformation, if it occurs, probably plays the same role in my novels that plot does in others’. It’s an idea of storytelling based—I see now more clearly—on the holiday, rather than on narrative. It must carry with it some residue of the strange, disorienting excitement I felt, as a child, in Calcutta.

  * * *

  My first novel was, in fact, about two trips undertaken by a child to Calcutta: a boy very much like me, who is not, however, at the centre of the novel. At the novel’s centre is not even Calcutta, but the holiday itself, which on some level becomes indistinguishable, for the boy, from the city; and for me, the writer, from the novel.

  Afternoon Raag, my second novel, was about student life in Oxford: but I see that it treats student life not as something with a proper beginning and end, but as a break from ordinary life; the contrast to ordinary life, with its canonical ambitio
ns and disappointments, seems to be student life’s principal definition. Even Oxford, a foreign location for the narrator, is full of foreign locations, like East Oxford, and a mere journey to these brings into effect, in the narrator’s mind, a metamorphosis.

  In Freedom Song, I returned to Calcutta, to explore a number of metamorphoses—political and economic—that had made the city subtly different from itself: fifteen years of Left Front rule, and the departure of industry; the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the ushering in of the free market; the demolition, by right-wing hooligans of the Sangh Parivar, of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Responding to all of this was a young man, Bhaskar, who, instead of taking up a job, had, to the consternation of his family, joined the Communist Party and was doing street-theatre. I wanted to make Bhaskar a Quixote-like figure, in that he’d embrace the codes and tenets of Marxism and be fired by them in a world in which they’d been rendered obsolete, just as Quixote had taken up the dead chivalric codes of the romance novels in all earnestness, unmindful of their complete irrelevance. Perhaps I failed, but my intention was to show that politics and play were inseparable for Bhaskar, just as saving the world, chivalry, and fantasy were for Quixote: and I wished to offer the reader not Bhaskar’s life-story, but that charged interruption in the winter in which this confusion occurs.

  Freedom Song itself is structured around a trip, or a visit. For it has another story besides Bhaskar’s. Two elderly unmarried sisters, Shanti and Mini, schoolteachers, live in North Calcutta. The younger of them, Mini, is troubled by arthritis. Her childhood friend, Khuku, who now lives in South Calcutta, in an apartment in Ballygunge, urges Mini to take a break, and to spend some time with her till her pain subsides. This idea of a change of venue excited not only Mini and Khuku, but primarily myself. It seemed to hold out more promise than plot did. As with Bhaskar, I wouldn’t give the reader Mini’s life-story, but simply record her stay as if I were recording a change, a transformation. The genre of the novel, for me, wasn’t a story; it was created around a visit.