Calcutta (56 page)

Nowhere do you feel the oppressiveness of Calcutta more than at one of those interminable, rallies on the Maidan organized by the CPI (M). They generally start about teatime, they rarely finish before nine o’clock, and some of the hours between can drag heavily when you do not understand Bengali: But they are masterly exhibitions of organization. An entrance has been created along the Red Road by lashing tall saplings together into a fence with an open gateway, and a corduroy path has been laid from this to the platform fifty yards away, so that the leaders shall not get their feet damp. The platform is high, so that
everyone
on it will be visible at a great distance, and it is large enough to accommodate twenty or thirty if they sit as close
together
as good comrades should. It is illuminated with
spotlights
, it flutters with red flags, and it has a huge red backcloth upon which Lenin is straining resolutely forward from a thicket of banners. Everything is perfectly under control. There is a posse of young party bloods guarding the gateway and two lines of them flanking the path to the platform. They are all
exceedingly
neat in khaki drill trousers, with white shirts and carefully rolled-up sleeves, with standard army webbing belts blancoed in
khaki green No. 3, and with the large red party roundel pinned on their chests – which makes them look a bit like a lot of very well disciplined football supporters. Some of them wear boots and many of them wear the kepi, as fashionably introduced by Fidel Castro. They look alert, tough and extremely supple. Every one of them bears a wrist watch. These boys are nowhere near the bottom of Calcutta’s pile. Not many people in the enormous crowd seem to be utterly poor either; at least, not the ones near the front. As they sit there upon the ground, row after attentive row of them, a brigade of young women to the fore, they seem mostly to be the clerks and the educated workers of the city
together
with many, many students. But, distantly across the Maidan, people have climbed trees and others are packed
standing
on top of the Esplanade tram shelters, and goodness knows where they come in the scale of things. There must be a hundred thousand here altogether. The most distant ones have their own background in glaring red; a neon sign at the top of Chowringhee with its message of ‘Life Insurance For Security’.

The leaders come through the guard of honour to the platform, men in white dhotis with their heads held high and not a party badge between them. Jyoti Basu speaks first and in the terms of Western oratory his would be an impassioned speech, but with the passion kept finely under control. Privately he thinks that there will be several more United Fronts here, broken by periods of President’s Rule, until one party comes out of an election with enough votes to rule alone; but he is not saying this to his
audience
. He is telling them to beware of revisionism, that their
enemies
must beware if there is to be no bloodshed, that all who are not with them are against them. And his audience follows him closely but quietly, punctuating his hour at the loudspeaker with occasional surges of handclapping. It is only when he has sat down, when Promode Dasgupta and Hare Krishna Konar are having their say, that you see why Bengalis think Basu at his worst in public speech. For theirs is the oratory that sends men delirious with dreams, that can set a rabble to a march of
destruction
. Basu has his rising moments and his dying falls, his left hand confidently on his hip while his right hand presents an
indisputable
point. But Dasgupta and Konar are magnetic.

They pace themselves as artfully as Billy Graham once did. They begin quietly, almost stealthily, and they will toss away a joke casually to play their people into humour. Gradually their pace quickens, their intonation rises, the crowd’s excitement mounting with it, until they shut everything off with a gesture. Silence. Then they start again, but not quite so far down the scale this time, and now they drive on until they are trembling with the passion of their speech, until their voices have risen to a new and more fervent pitch than ever before, until one hand is raised high with its fingers curved and outstretched as though it were about to bring a mighty chorus into a crashing paean of exultation. From start to finish they move this crowd as Jyoti Basu has never moved it for one instant. They have people
roaring
with laughter, with acclaim, with anger. They have men leaping to their feet and shaking their fists agreeably in return. They have everybody in that hundred thousand of followers
prepared
to follow them to the death. When the speeches are done, the leaders begin to sing the Internationale. At once, something happens that fixes the contradictory parts of this monstrous but marvellous city. All over that crowd, torches are swiftly lit and held high in flaring salute. There is something horribly
lyncheery
about that moment; but at the same time you know that this is a turning point in history perversely like those few blessed days in Prague, when the people went out on the streets and signed that manifesto to stiffen Alexander Dubcek and his
colleagues
against the browbeating of the Russian Politbureau at Cierna Nad Tisou.

These are not robots, although they can perhaps be made to behave as such. For four and a half long-winded hours, small boys were roaming through that crowd, selling sweets out of glass jars and tea out of kettles, giggling even with the rich European intruder as they went. While Dasgupta and Konar were invoking the most awful penalties against capitalism, a stout party member was threading his way through their
audience
, assiduously collecting money for the revolutionary funds. Twice he came past the rich European and asked him, comrade, to subscribe with everybody else. On his third circuit he
wonderfully 
forgot just where he was and where the pair of you
relatively
stood, and called you ‘Sahib’ instead.

To point out and enjoy these things is not to ignore the real horrors of this city, or in some obscure way to plead mitigation of them. The poverty of Calcutta is an affront to the dignity of mankind and a mocking tell-tale against the achievement of nations. We must be rid of it. But before we can start to do that we must come to terms with it; we must clear ourselves of the temptation to pass it by on the other side because it is too awful to behold. It is not. Yet there can now be very little time left
before
something which we may call disaster happens to this city. Perhaps it will be the disaster foreseen and feared by the town planners, in which case we can only guess at its course. Possibly this will begin with some plague on a medieval scale, for the water pipes which the heirs of Messrs Jessop and Co. laid a century ago have just passed their cast-iron expectation of life and they are surrounded by earth soaked in sewage, whose
moistures
will flow into the pipes when they finally burst with age. While some people are counting their rising piles of dead, others will have become so maddened by their loss and by their fury at the fates, that they will set out to destroy. They will rage through this city with torches, with knives, with bombs, with pistols, with axes and with bare hands. They will burn everything that can be put to the torch and they will smash everything that
cannot
be burned and they will kill and terribly mutilate anyone who gets in their way and even those who flee. The destruction will be such that Calcutta will cut itself off from the world outside as, in a small way, it has already twice cut itself off in recent times; the telephone lines will be severed, the roads will be blocked, the railway lines will be blown apart and, at Dum Dum, aircraft which come in to land will be set upon by swarming mobs and destroyed, their passengers massacred. Nothing will be heard from Calcutta for days and the world will wonder what has at last become of it. When the world finally lumbers down to the Hooghly, past the refugees who will be streaming away in
hundreds
of thousands and possibly millions, it will discover a city of smoking ruins with a handful of savages who are beginning to destry one another. And writers will struggle for the words to describe what has happened, as they struggled once before.

Perhaps there will be another kind of disaster before Calcutta is left to its plague, though this one threatens only the rich in their nightmares. In this haunting horror, the night comes when every poor man in the city rises from his pavement and his sqalid bustee and at last dispossesses the rich with crazy ferocity. The arsenals of the rich will be no protection against this onslaught in the close confinements of Calcutta, for there are so many millions of poor here and only a few thousand of rich, and life is very cheaply lived upon a pavement and in a bustee. The poor shadows will come quietly out of their deeper darkness and they will pick off the first few rich in small handfuls, hauling them out of their cars and butchering them on the spot; and when the rich reach for their defences they will be overwhelmed and buried by the numbers of the poor. There will be a signal for this
nightmare
to become reality and it will be given by the rickshaw men who have pulled so many rich people around Calcutta like
animals
all their lives. They will begin to pass it on when darkness falls, as the rich move away to their homes and their pleasures. All over the city and along the Hooghly there will be the sound of bells being tapped one after another against the shafts of motionless rickshaws or upon the sides of lamp posts. As any rich man walks the streets that night he will be followed wherever he goes, from one pool of light to the next, by this dull anvil ring of rickshaw bells. Tap-tap-tap, the signal will pursue him
mysteriously
down each street; and there will be no shaking it off. It will tell him that his time has come.

The time for compassion will be past.

THIS
covers all the books I have drawn on, but not the various reports, pamphlets, newspaper articles and other documentation I have made use of. These are referred to where relevant in the source notes. Anyone making a study of Calcutta is recommended to start by getting hold of two exhaustive bibliographies, which were
invaluable
to me. One of them,
Calcutta
1690–1900, was compiled by the National Library there in 1967. The other curiously appears in English in a book whose text is otherwise in Bengali,
Tin
Sataker Kolkaka
by Nakul Chaterji, who is himself on the staff of the National Library. It contains a list of relevant publications during the first half of this century.