Calcutta is a city of 17 million people — twice the size of New York — without a single skyscraper. Although the second biggest city in India, Calcutta is a perpetual also-ran in the country’s mad scramble for business, tourism, and prestige, long ago surpassed by IT powerhouses like Bangalore and Chennai, the political clout of New Delhi, and the glamour of Mumbai. Once the crown jewel of the British Raj and the epicenter of Indian culture, the metropolis looks like a shadow of its imperial past, an effect heightened during a recent visit by the mixture of mist and smog that had settled across the city, shrouding the buildings in a gray fog.
Unlike Delhi, which has a long history, Calcutta was a purely English invention, created virtually ex nihilo by the East India Company to serve as the capital of their metastasising empire. As the center of administration, all the plundered wealth of India flowed into Calcutta, paving its streets, erecting its neo-classical architecture, and producing a London-on-the-Ganges complete with an imitation Hyde Park and a towering, white-washed cathedral. No sooner had the paint dried on the cathedral, however, when the British, fearful of the nascent Bengali independence movement, shifted their capital (in both senses of the word) to New Delhi.
In consequence, Calcutta today looks like a ghost town surrounded and nearly swallowed by a vast urban landscape spreading out of sight in every direction. Hundreds if not thousands of colonial buildings have survived and are now used as apartment blocks or office buildings, although many are in such disrepair that you can hardly believe they’re inhabited at all. With crumbling masonry, yellowing walls, and plants frequently sprouting through the roofs, the buildings appear to have been abandoned to nature after the British retreat. In a bit of delicious irony, many of these colonial palaces are now rent-controlled flats occupied by working-class families who the British, in their time, would never have allowed past the front door.
Like a city-sized memento mori, these dead relics of a lost empire are inhabited, re-used, and re-cycled by the thronging crowds who push their way through the city’s broad, tree-lined avenues. In what used to be the grand entrance to a stately town house you might find a fruit seller or a motorcycle repair shop or a McDonalds. On the roads, taxis, auto-rickshaws, and human-drawn rickshaws jostle for space with the occasional Tata or Toyota. Almost a third of all cars, and all of the taxis, are 1960s-era Ambassadors — those oversized, underachieving symbols of Indian automotive independence. Like Cuba, Calcutta has become a world leader in auto repair, keeping its ancient fleet of vehicles on the road long after a wealthier city would have sold them for scrap. Many of the taxis survive only as metal hulks, having lost every other human amenity and comfort.
Calcutta’s sidewalks are a world unto themselves. Unlike most Western cities, Calcutta has not criminalised poverty, so it’s impossible to pretend, as you can in New York or Paris, that the poor don’t exist. Indeed, you can hardly walk a block, even in the most fashionable areas of town, without passing the makeshift home of one or another destitute family, who, seemingly oblivious of passersby, continue to bathe, cook, argue, or work in full view of all humanity. Children play hide and seek, men play cards around a small fire, women wash and hang clothes, and life proceeds, on a smaller scale and in more straightened circumstances, much as it does all over the world. Everything these families need is close at hand: food from nearby vendors, water from the free city taps, even haircuts from the local barber, who can be seen at every street corner, lathering up some man’s face for a shave.
Of course, there are still rich people and expensive shops aplenty in Calcutta, although they’re never far enough away from the poor for the city’s plutocrats to be entirely self-satisfied — or at least one hopes so. Young boys and girls beg for change at the entrance to every hotel and restaurant, and the view from all the chic new coffee bars is of the same old sidewalk-dwellers in their same old indigence. Calcutta’s politicians haven’t yet managed the trick of segregating the very wealthy and the very poor, although one suspects they’re working hard on it. As I boarded my train for New Delhi, I gave thanks that there is at least one great city in the world where the poor are not treated like toxic waste, where the civic debate is not over how to dispose of them but how to live with them — and how to allow them to live with us.
