Calcutta

views updated

CALCUTTA

CALCUTTA Once the capital of British India and the second-largest city of the empire after London, Calcutta is completely a British creation. Calcutta is a city that defies description, overwhelming each visitor with kaleidoscopic images and scenes from its checkered history, its extremes of wealth and poverty, and its punishingly hot and humid climate. In fact, the British found Calcutta's climate so oppressive that for the better part of each year they shifted the official work of the Raj to Simla (Shimla), north of Delhi, the queen of India's hill stations. After ruling India from Calcutta for 150 years, the British permanently shifted their capital to New Delhi in 1912.

Rudyard Kipling called Calcutta the "City of Dreadful Night"; the Frenchman Dominiqie Lapierre named it the "City of Joy"; and the Indian novelist Anita Desai described it as the "graveyard of the British Empire." The early British administrators called it the "City of Palaces" because they believed that India could only be ruled from palaces and thus constructed monumental buildings. More recently, V. S. Naipaul declared, "All of [Calcutta's] suffering are sufferings of death. I know not of any other city whose plight is more hopeless."

Calcutta emerged from the union of three villages—Kalikata, Govindapur, and Sutanuti—the first of which housed the shrine of the Indian goddess Kali, hence the name Calcutta. In 1680 Job Charnock, a British agent and head of the English factory in Cassim Bazaar, received permission from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb to establish an English factory at Sutanuti. In 1698 the British East India Company bought the zamindari (rights for land revenue) of Kalikata, Govindpur, and Sutanuti from Subarana Chowdhury. Fort William (named after King William I) was completed in 1699, thus founding Calcutta as the bridgehead of the company's commercial and administrative operations in Bengal. As the Mughal empire started its decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the East India Company acquired duty-free trading rights in Bengal from the financially strapped Mughal Faruksiyar for the paltry sum of 3,000 rupees in 1717, much to the chagrin of the naw?bs (Muslim governors) of the region. By 1735 Calcutta had become an important port and a trading center, and its population burgeoned to over 100,000. Calcutta now rivaled Dhaka (traditional Dacca) and Murshidabad, the two historical capitals of Bengal.

Other Europeans had vied for a foothold in Bengal as well. As early as 1517, the Portuguese had set up a trading post in Chittagong (modern Bangladesh's principal port) and Saptagram. In 1580 the Portuguese secured permission from Emperor Akbar to set up Bandel de Hoogly on the Hoogly River, which was later demolished by Emperor Shah Jahan in 1632. The Dutch set up a factory at Chuncura in 1653, but in 1825 ceded it to the British in exchange for Bencoleen in Sumatra (Indonesia). In the early 1670s, the French established Chandannagar (old Chandernagore).

In an effort to bolster their position, the British intervened in wars of succession in Bengal, inviting the wrath of Siraj-ud-Dawla, who marched south to capture Fort William in June 1756, placing 145 Englishmen (and one woman) in the fort's lockup, called the "Black Hole," an airless room measuring 14 by 18 feet (4 × 5 m). By the next morning many of the prisoners had died from asphyxiation, an event that not only served to perpetually prejudice the British against the Indians but that also cast a lingering dark shadow over Calcutta.

Colonel Robert Clive and Admiral Charles Watson recaptured Fort William in January 1757. In June of the same year, Siraj-ud-Dawla was defeated in the Battle of Plassey, and Clive installed Mir Jaffar as the naw?b of Bengal in return for £234,000 and an annual salary of £30,000. In 1765 the British defeated an alliance of Shah Alam II and Mir Kasim, then naw?b of Bengal, at Buxur. The East India Company was then given the diwani (land revenue collection rights) of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar. To better fortify Calcutta, a new fort was completed in 1773; in the same year, Calcutta became the capital of the British Raj in India. Clive returned to England a rich man in 1767, but committed suicide in 1774.

British buildings in Calcutta, as in other presidency towns and later in New Delhi, celebrated the British triumph in India through monumentality. The British designs, however, appropriated several architectural languages, from Classicism to Baroque to Gothic to Indo-Saracenic. Calcutta's landmark buildings include the National Library of India, the Indian Museum (the oldest in Asia), Victoria Memorial, High Court, Writer's Building, Marble Palace, Ochterlony Monument (modern Shahid Minar), Kalighat, Government House (the residence of the governor of Bengal, inspired by Curzon's Kedleston Hall), Esplanade Mansion, Howrah Station, and the buildings around Calcutta's Maidan. Under the neonationalist movement, many of these buildings have acquired Indian names, just as Calcutta itself was renamed Kolkata in 2001. Nouveau riche Bengalis imitated Western architecture, even as they cultivated British customs and mastered the English language.

The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784 by Sir William Jones, the introduction of the printing press in 1799 by missionary William Carey, and English-language education produced a class of Bengali intellectuals (bhadralok) in Calcutta. The city itself became the center of the Bengal Renaissance that embodied English liberalism and indigenous revivalism, both of which contributed to social reform and political activism in the nineteenth century. The Bengali Brahman Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) was a pioneer of that Renaissance, promoting new ideas and syncretic cultural concepts that blossomed in the warrens of Calcutta. Roy's Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828, and in combination with English education, influenced generations of young Bengali intellectuals, from Rabindranath Tagore to Satyajit Ray to Arundhati Roy. Calcutta thus became an important center of both Hindu reform and the Indian nationalist movement.

Calcutta's dark side has always been in full view—its slums and overcrowded tenements, grinding poverty, and decaying infrastructure—producing popular political support for leftist political parties and the unionization of labor. It has also attracted humanitarians such as Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 to help abandoned children and the dying. For her care of the poorest of the poor, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

Those who despair over modern Calcutta's misery forget that British interests from the beginning in Bengal were primarily pecuniary. The plunder of Bengal and its complete mismanagement of the province led to a major famine in the early 1770s in which a third of the population died. Famine and drought became a running theme of Calcutta's history, producing widespread disaffection among the peasantry. As everywhere else in agricultural British India, the fundamental source of official finance was land revenue. The British were not prepared to surrender this vital source of income, and the peasants had to borrow at such exorbitant rates to fulfill their tax obligations that many became bankrupt. As a result, many were forced to flee to the city to eke out a living. These rural-urban migrations started early in the British period, and Calcutta's population soared to 200,000 by the late 1770s. Calcutta also became a principal port for the opium trade, from which the British East India Company reaped huge profits, exporting Indian opium to China.

Many of Calcutta's modern problems result from the fact that the city was originally planned by the British for a population of no more than 1 million, whereas by 2004 it supported a population of over 14 million, with over 30,000 people per .4 sq. mi. (square kilometer). Two-thirds of Calcutta's population live in unofficial slums, called bustees. A reported 2,000 people migrate daily to Calcutta in the hope of making a living there. The city's overburdened infrastructure dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, its sewerage system was established in 1859, filtered water was introduced in 1860, its telephone exchange was created in 1882, and the electricity supply was started in 1899.

Calcutta, with all its ills, remains one of the most intellectually vibrant cities in India. Bengalis, through their endless heated discussions and political activism, keep hope alive. This eternal optimism helped the city to survive its staggering refugee crisis, produced by the partition of India in 1947, and again when Bangladesh was created from East Pakistan in 1971. In its three-hundred-year history, Calcutta, or Kolkata, has offered endless possibilities to its millions, along with sorrow and disappointment for others. The dance of hope and despair, of possibilities and misery, continues. Calcutta has always recovered from its worst disasters, moving forward in the footsteps of Roy, Tagore, and Ray. The residents of Calcutta of the past and the present—from all classes—have never failed to take the full measure of their city.

Ravi Kalia