Calcutta (44 page)

When the 1921 census was taken, the author of the official report on Calcutta’s progress in the previous decade remarked that ‘The city may have lost a few officials from the changes that
have been made’ (with the shift of capital) ‘but otherwise it has been little affected.’ He also spoke of ‘the crying need for better communications, whether by tram, tube, electric railway or other means between the business quarters of the city and its immediate suburbs’. He further remarked that ‘In the localities of Barabazar, Bowbazar, Bentinck Street and Dharamtala, the Marwari community, the Chinese, Anglo-Indians and others live under conditions of overcrowding unimaginable until they have been witnessed, and are rack-rented to an extent far exceeding that to which the Bengali population or the better-class
European
population is obliged to submit.’ No. 10 Gas Street, he noticed, was a bustee with several hundred huts pitched behind its street front and a population of three thousand. Nor was this by any means unique. ‘It may be taken as a fact … that the accommodation offered in Calcutta to its population is about 1.8 rooms per family.’ At almost the same time a committee on the increasing industrial unrest in Bengal was reporting that between June 1920 and March 1921 there had been 137 strikes in and around the city; 74 of them totally concerned with
grievances
about pay, another 36 pressing for higher wages and other things simultaneously. In 1930, a report on the standard of living among jute mill workers in Calcutta showed that, judging by samples taken from six mills, 76 per cent of the working families were in debt by an average of more than two and a half times their monthly income, even though labourers were putting in a sixty-hour week.

By the time the penultimate British Governor of Bengal
arrived
in Calcutta in 1944, both province and city were in chaos. There was, of course, a war on, though Calcutta curiously missed any direct enemy action apart from a few light air raids which did little damage. On top of this, the famine had only just
receded
, and there had been half a century of civil disorder. But these events did not explain everything that Mr R. G. (later Lord) Casey found when he reached the city and was welcomed by leading articles which wondered whether the Bengalis had now become a colony of Australia. Anyone as close as he had been to the ultimately Sir Robert Menzies in an administration run from Canberra, was perfectly capable of caricaturing British
ruling attitudes in some respects; but at least he had the gift of bluntness and didn’t much mind whose feet he trod on below the level of sovereign. Casey found that he had inherited a machine that ‘was bankrupt, as far as any government can be said to be bankrupt … For the last fifty years the Government of Bengal had been starved of money. The policy had been to keep taxation down to the minimum, with the result that the
provincial
revenue was wholly inadequate.’ The administration of the province and city, moreover, had evolved without any apparent design over a century or so. It had been originated to administer law, to maintain the public peace, to collect land revenue. ‘Bits and pieces had been tacked on to the system from time to time to keep pace with the increasing functions of government, but
frequently
the new bits had been attached to the wrong parts. Thus I found one department administering the strange alliance of Forestry and Excise under a secretary who had a full-time job in another department; another department dealt simultaneously with Education and Land Registration, also under a secretary with preoccupations in another department.’

Casey, unlike most men in his position before him, toured the bustee areas of the city and was appalled, as perhaps only an Australian (or a Swiss, or a Scandinavian) could be appalled by slum dwellings. He told an entourage of newspapermen ‘I have seen something of the way in which hundreds of thousands of the citizens of Calcutta are obliged to live. Human beings cannot allow other human beings to exist under these conditions … My only interest is that these conditions should be improved, and neither politics nor vested interests should be allowed to stand in the way. The people of Calcutta have the right to ask in six months time what has been done about it.’ What Casey himself did was to write a memorandum to Lord Wavell, such a
document
of candour as Viceroys had rarely been accustomed to receiving. ‘At some time in the past‚’ it said‚’ the British
administration
evidently decided that Bengal should be run on the
minimum
possible expenditure of public monies, very low taxation, and no expediture of loan monies for development purposes … Quite apart from any specific war-time burdens which have been thrown on the Bengal administration, there is the fact that the
functions of government have changed very rapidly in recent years. In Bengal, the administration for generations has
traditionally
been concerned with law and order and revenue. It is only recently, and relatively suddenly, that they have been called upon to adjust themselves to coping with the full range of matters that concern a modern government, for which their
previous
training and tradition have ill-fitted them. In consequence, they are making rather a poor fist of things. This last criticism, I believe, applies perhaps with special force to the European members of the ICS on whom, in my opinion, the major
responsibility
for the administration of Bengal still rests … the risk is that if things go on as they are going on at present, we may well see the situation degenerate into something quite unpleasant, which we shall all regret … as near a breakdown as no matter.’

Just below this ramshackle apparatus of the Raj, and of
necessity
beholden to it at all times, was the even more suspect
appliance
of Calcutta Corporation, which by now was completely officered by Indians, even though a proportion of its councillors remained British. Six months after Independence was
proclaimed
, the new Government of West Bengal’s Biswas
Commission
began to investigate the Corporation and its workings, and eventually produced a report that was so damning to almost everyone who had come under scrutiny that it was never actually published. It had discovered, among many other things, that ‘the powers of delegation varied from time to time according to the whims and caprices of the Councillors, and reduced the Chief Executive Officer to a position of complete subservience, so much so that even in matters in which the Chief Executive Officer had statutory powers, individual Councillors had their way’. It
outlined
the history of Calcutta’s water supply, which even E. P. Richards had thought a matter of pride, but which was now a potential source of disaster and typical of every part of the
municipal
machine. Until 1820, British Calcutta had received its water from the bags of its bheesties, who had drawn from the Great Tank, Loll Diggy, in what was eventually named
Dalhousie
Square. The native community, of course, then fended for itself in the Hooghly or wherever else it might find water. But in 1820 Messrs Jessop and Co. had installed a small pumping plant
at Chandpal Ghat, for lifting water from the river and into aqueducts which would serve the British quarter for seven hours a day, eight months in the year; in the remaining four months the Europeans, like everyone else, collected much safer rainwater. Filtered water was supplied from 1870, along cast-iron main pipes with a life expectation of a hundred years, and at the
beginning
it was designed to provide six million gallons a day for a population of 400,000; which was considerably larger than the European population of the city, substantially less than the total number of people there when it was installed. Twice this filtered supply had been extended or improved, in 1903 and again in 1923. The last extension had been made with an expectation of 1,300,000 people living in Calcutta by 1941; in fact, by then 2,100,000 were in the city and twelve months later the figure had risen to 3,000,000.

For what, only six months previously, had been the second city of the British Empire, this was not, therefore, a particularly well provided place. Nor was it a particularly luminous place, with only 9,000 electric lights, 19,000 gas lamps and 350 oil lamps. It was not a particularly wholesome place, with 4,371 bustees inhabited by more than one million people. It was not a very promising place, either, for the Biswas inquiry was to reveal about the Corporation more or less what R. G. Casey had discovered only four years earlier about provincial government, that ‘the finances are in a bad state and the administration full of abuses due to neglect of duty, corruption and wilful
violations
of the law. It would not be an exaggeration to say that financially the Corporation is heading for a disaster, and is
unable
to meet its necessary expenses. This inability is largely, though not entirely, due to maladministration …’ In spite of its vast built-in wealth, Calcutta was not – one way and another – the most splendid bequest the British might have made to their residuary legatees by the Hooghly.

*

It is all much worse now, twenty-five years later. Things are so bad in almost every respect that it is not at all uncommon in Calcutta today to encounter an Indian, by no means a wealthy man, who affectionately remembers the years when the British
were here, when the city was not quite such a frightful place and when some things appeared to work with a modicum of efficiency. He is not being quite just to his own administrators when he takes this charming view of old imperial relations, however, for part of this crumbling structure is the result of events over which they have had no control. The largest of these is the flow of refugees from East Pakistan, which began at Partition and which has continued with intermittent pauses ever since. Just over four million refugees came into the country in the first decade and threequarters of them came to West Bengal, perhaps a million to Calcutta itself, which is only thirty-five miles from the border. The city was so totally unprepared to receive this inundation on top of its already swamping mass of people that until 1956 there were nearly five hundred refugee families permanently encamped upon the platforms of Sealdah Station in the middle of the city; 244 of them were then shifted into some unemployed film studios in Tollygunge, another 217 into the godown of a disused jute mill at Cossipore – and there they all remained for another decade. Another horde at once turned four of the city’s mosques into massive and communal doss houses. The flow was reduced to a trickle until a second great wave came from the East during the Indo-Pakistani war, and since then an average of 300 refugees a day have crossed into West Bengal, with occasionally larger numbers as some slight imbalance in Pakistani politics or religious sensitivity tipped more than usual on the road to Calcutta. In the middle of 1970 for a while there were up to a couple of thousand a day coming over, and it is possible that 60,000 entered West Bengal in the first five months of the year. Most of them came on foot, some poled themselves by boat down the Ichamati River, one of the larger watercourses in that muddy, swampy endlessness of the Ganga delta. A great number camped exhausted at Hasnabad in the 24 Parganas, where the railway platform, like the one in the city, has perpetually been lined with makeshift shelters to protect these people from the sun.

The Government in Delhi has committed itself to helping them by giving a small dole of money as soon as they have crossed its borders, by providing three blankets for each family, by
finding 
milk for the children and the sick, by eventually producing a grant of cash so that the new citizens can rehabilitate themselves. But there has never been enough of anything to go properly round. Early in 1969 there were 1,300,000 refugees in West Bengal still waiting for their rehabilitation grants. For those who were still coming, the ones who survived the periodic outbreaks of cholera in the places where they first encamped on Indian soil, the ones who didn’t quietly die of exhaustion or lack of food in the same spots, there was very often nothing better to look forward to than the beggary of Calcutta’s already overpopulated streets. So many refugees have now come to this city from East Pakistan that students of Bengali have observed that the standard provincial argot of the streets has been slightly modified by their presence, with a fresh word here, a new phrase there, a subtle change in pronunciation throughout the vocabulary. Being Bengalis themselves, they have inevitably brought poets with them and one of these, Samsher Anwar, has written his own epitaph to the years of precarious sanctuary:

Always there has been the prospect of more refugees flowing in one direction from East to West; for nothing like the exchange of Muslims and Hindus across the boundaries of the Punjab and West Pakistan at the time of Partition, which virtually cancelled each other out, ever happened here to any significant degree. And apart from the refugees, there has been the steady migration of those other hordes enticed by the basilisk wealth of Calcutta – in the ten years up to 1961 there were 24,000 of
these from Western India alone, 5,000 from Assam, 16,000 from South India, 33,000 from Orissa, 71,000 from Uttar Pradesh, 183,000 from Bihar, 168,000 from elsewhere in West Bengal. Even if none of these people had reproduced themselves several times over, Calcutta would by now be in an awful mess. As it is, the city faces catastrophe partly because of their deadly lack of birth control.