Calcutta (37 page)

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 no 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 ambitions 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.

I’d based the characters in
Freedom Song
on people I knew and was even related to; I decided to keep three names unchanged. Khuku, my mother’s pet name; and Shanti and Mini. To refer to and in a sense address them by their first names gave me a specific, private joy.

One reason for doing so was the generation these three belonged to, and the kind of women they were. Although they were unlike one another, they shared certain characteristics, such as an immense breadth of knowledge of Bengali literature, of its classic names, like Bankimchandra and Saratchandra and Bibhutibhushan (all referred to with easy familiarity by their first names—as is the Bengali convention), and also its slightly less canonical ones, like Manoj Basu and Premankur Aturthi. They also had a fair knowledge of classical heritage, especially Shanti mashi, who could speak of the
Mahabharata
as if it were a text by Shakespeare, in terms of character, psychology, and conflict. Mini mashi and my mother in particular had a tendency towards laughter; although Mini mashi, having been a schoolteacher, was slightly pedantic, while my mother, never having fared well at school, was less reverent. But they could also be perverse and stubborn; and they were, I think (even Mini mashi, despite her affiliation to a school run by the Sister Nivedita order), completely irreligious, with, shockingly, no regard for any kind of religion or god (this is particularly true of my mother) whatsoever. All in all, they were like some kind of new genre that had emerged in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century—like a film by Ghatak or Renoir, or a painting by Paul Klee, or a poem by Jibanananda
Das, or a song by Cole Porter or Himangshu Dutta. They were perennially new. So it felt right to keep, and refer to them by, their first names in the novel, in order to hint at the paradox, in these ageing women, of that youthfulness and surprise. Can the modern ever grow old, and less appealing? For this reason, too, I found it easy to be friends with them in real life—with my mother, with Mini mashi and Shanti mashi—because, once I saw it, I was attracted to that newness in them, that dimension of the strange and delightful, as I was drawn, when I found it, to it in
Mrs. Dalloway
and “At the Bay” and “Banalata Sen.” They so belonged to the new kind of writing they’d admired while growing up, which had burgeoned in Bengal and other parts of the world, that it was almost logical for me to rediscover them in fiction, in my own writing.