The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (29 page)

FIVE

GENIUS IS CHAOTIC: CALCUTTA

“THE POSSIBILITY OF COINCIDENCE IS greater here than it is elsewhere.”

The words loiter in the heavy air, mingling with the sound of clinking glasses, the chortle of laughter coming from a nearby table, and the muted traffic of Sudder Street, before eventually lodging in my brain like an unwanted houseguest.
The possibility—of coincidence—greater here—than elsewhere.
Such nonsense, I think, and if I’ve learned anything in my travels, it is that one must take such nonsense seriously, for it might just be true.

The speaker of this possibly profound nonsense is a ruddy, cheerful, perpetually broke Irish photographer who goes by T.P. Calcutta is his second home. He keeps coming back, year after year, decade after decade. Calcutta is not an easy city, in any sense of the word, yet that doesn’t dissuade T.P. one bit. Coincidence is a precious thing. You take it where you can get it.

We are sitting in the beer garden of the Fairlawn Hotel, itself a product of happenstance. A British officer. An Armenian bride. A city perched
on the precipice of a dying empire. All these seemingly random facts converged to manifest the Fairlawn. It’s been around since the 1930s, and with the exception of spotty Wi-Fi and temperamental air-conditioning, hasn’t changed much since. It is unapologetically postcolonial—or, rather,
mid
colonial. As far as the Fairlawn is concerned, the Raj never ended. In the lobby—just a few wicker chairs and a table with crumpled newspapers splayed—visitors are greeted by photos of Prince William and Kate, along with other royal bric-a-brac. People don’t come here for the nostalgia, though. They come for the beer, and the sylvan garden where it is served. With its cheap plastic tables and pleasantly indifferent waiters, it offers a respite from the madness that lies a few yards away,
out there.

Like all great places, the Fairlawn is a crossroads, neutral territory where parallel worlds briefly converge: earnest volunteers from Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying, locals decompressing after a long day at the office, relatively well-heeled travelers slumming it, rupee-pinching backpackers on a splurge. Then there are the new arrivals, wide-eyed and tremulous, suffering from the sort of traveler’s trauma only India can inflict.

Calcutta, Kipling’s “city of dreadful night,” is a shock to the system, has always been. That holds true for people visiting India for the first time and for those, such as me, who have made the country a lifelong habit. From a personal and gastrointestinal point of view, these tremors are unfortunate, but for creativity, they are good. Creative breakthroughs almost always require a jolt of some kind, an outside force acting upon our bodies at rest.

Calcutta still manages to jolt T.P. after all these years, he tells me, nursing his Kingfisher and going on about this alleged
possibility of coincidence.
I listen politely but silently wonder if the premonsoon boil that is Calcutta this time of year (the “putrid months,” locals call it) is playing tricks with T.P.’s Celtic brain. Isn’t coincidence by definition random, and its possibility therefore no more, or less, likely in Calcutta than anywhere else?

When I diplomatically suggest that he might be off his Irish rocker, T.P. responds by showing me a few of his photographs: a dog balancing impossibly atop a stack of tin cans, a simple room where the symbols
of three of India’s major religions—Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—have miraculously aligned themselves, as if staged by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The photographer’s success hinges on his relationship with, and proximity to, coincidence. As I see in T.P.’s work, these unexpected juxtapositions, the way the moving parts of time and space momentarily click into place, imbue a photograph with significance, and with beauty.

The next evening, sitting at the Fairlawn, sipping another Kingfisher, I ponder the role of coincidence—and its close cousins, randomness and chaos—and what role they might play not only in photography but in all creative endeavors. Here I’ve been searching for a logical, empirical basis for creative places, a formula of sorts. Might I have overlooked one obvious ingredient: chance?

The English
chance
comes to us, via Old French, from the Latin
cadere
, which means “to fall,” and what is more natural than to fall, like an apple from a tree, to allow gravity to run its course? Are geniuses simply more attuned to this truth than the rest of us? Are they, and by extension the places they inhabit, simply luckier than the rest of us?

It’s not as absurd as it sounds. When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asked several hundred highly creative people, including several Nobel Prize winners, what explained their success, one of the most frequent answers was that they were lucky. “Being in the right place at the right time is an almost universal explanation,” concludes Csikszentmihalyi. I also recall what Dean Simonton had told me back in California. Geniuses, he said, are good at “exploiting chance.” At the time, this made about as much sense as T.P.’s possibilities of coincidence, but now I realize that, as usual, Simonton is onto something.

If any place can illuminate the relationship between chance and genius, it is this “monstrous, bewildering, teeming city,” as the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray called his beloved hometown. Calcutta, city of joy, city of lost causes and second chances, and, for a brief but glorious moment, city of genius.

I concede that these days the words
genius
and
Calcutta
are not often uttered in the same breath. If anything, the city is now shorthand for
heartbreaking poverty and inept governance. Third-world misery in a nutshell. Not that long ago, though, it was a very different story.

Between roughly 1840 and 1920, Calcutta was one of the world’s great intellectual capitals, the heart of a creative flourishing that spanned the arts, literature, science, and religion. The city gave the world a Nobel Prize winner (Asia’s first), an Academy Award winner, a prodigious body of literature neither Eastern nor Western (more books were published in Calcutta than anywhere else in the world, save London), and an entirely new way of conversing (called an
adda
). And that was only the beginning.

The bright lights of Calcutta’s golden age included writers such as Bankim Chattopadhyay, a clerk by day and novelist by night, who infused new life into an old culture, and Henry Derozio, who during his “appallingly brief life” not only wrote sublime poetry but also spearheaded an entire intellectual movement called Young Bengal. There was a mystic named Swami Vivekananda, who, in 1893, traveled to Chicago and introduced Americans to a wholly new spiritual tradition; and there was Jagadish Bose, a physicist who advanced the young field of radio technology and, in a remarkably varied career, showed us that the line between living and nonliving matter is not as sharply defined as we thought. There were women, too, such as Rassundari Devi; illiterate until her twenties, she went on to write the first autobiography in the Bengali language and inspire women everywhere.

At the time, people sensed they were living in a special time but didn’t have a name for it. Now we do: the Bengal Renaissance. Named after the main ethnic group in Calcutta, the Indian awakening, like its Italian cousin, rose unexpectedly from the embers of catastrophe: not the bubonic plague, but the British. Again. As you recall, Scotland also thrived shortly after the English barged into their country. Everywhere the English go, it seems, they bring nothing but trouble and genius. “Without the West this awakening would not have happened,” says Subrata Dasgupta, a Calcutta native and chronicler of his city’s glory days. “Without the West there would not have been a Renaissance.”

Which is not to say that the Bengal Renaissance was simply a
British export—like the Beatles or warm beer—and that Indians simply swallowed this swill wholesale. The Bengal Renaissance was much more than that. But as one Calcuttan scholar told me, using appropriately colorful language, the British “inseminated Indian thought with Western ideas,” and these ideas then took on a life of their own. Again, a jolt to the system. Only this time it was more than a jolt. It was an earthquake.

The fault lines of that quake run through a small, unremarkable church called Saint John’s. I arrive early. The gate isn’t yet open, so I wait, baking in the already fierce sun, until the
chowkidar
, the guard, takes pity on me and waves me inside. I walk down a narrow brick pathway, across the manicured grounds, and after about a hundred yards spot a white marble monument. It honors Job Charnock, a seventeenth-century English sea captain, and father of Calcutta. The original inseminator. Etched on the stone is
HE WAS A WANDERER, WHO AFTER SOJOURNING FOR A LONG TIME IN A LAND NOT HIS OWN, RETURNED TO HIS ETERNAL HOME
.

Touching, but only partially true. While this may have been a “land not his own,” Charnock made it so. He took an Indian wife (saving her from the now outlawed practice of suttee, in which Indian widows committed suicide by throwing themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyre) and fathered four children. He wore loose, baggy kurtas, smoked a hookah, or water pipe, and drank the local libation, a potent moonshine called arrack. Job Charnock, founder of Calcutta, son of English aristocrats, proud servant of the queen, went native.

That might come as a surprise given our image of the British and their attempts to rule India without interacting with India—witness the creation of Calcuttan neighborhoods called White Town and Black Town, and exclusive redoubts such as the Bengal Club where the only natives allowed were the ones who washed the dishes and served the tea. And while some, perhaps even most, of the British colonialists agreed with Lord Macaulay, a senior official in the Raj, who infamously said that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” there were exceptions. Some of the British recognized something old and wise in what others saw only as
backwardness; and, likewise, more than a few Indians saw wisdom in these pasty-skinned, uptight people with funny ideas about sex and God. These exceptional people, Indian and British, together planted the seeds of the Bengal Renaissance.

The British were not the first, only the latest, to think they could change India. Before them came the Buddhists and the Mughals, among others. The history of India is the history of acculturation without assimilation, of responding to a foreign influence by neither rejecting it nor blindly absorbing it, but, rather, “Indianizing” it. Indians performed this magic with everything from the Buddha (miraculously transforming him into an avatar of Lord Vishnu) to McDonald’s (the Maharaja Mac contains no beef, in keeping with Hindu custom). The resulting hybrid culture confounds many Westerners, like British economist Joan Robinson, who famously observed that “whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

We’ve already seen how places of genius occupy the center of various cultural currents. Recall the great sailing ships of ancient Athens, or the traveling merchants of Renaissance Florence. The creative cultures that emerged from this intermingling were necessarily hybrid, mongrel cultures. “There is nothing less pure than culture,” one Indian academic tells me, and I realize he’s right. I also realize that the term
pure genius
is an oxymoron. Nothing about genius is pure. The genius borrows and steals and, yes, adds his own ingredients to the mix, but at no point does purity enter the picture.

What distinguished Calcutta’s mélange is that it was not accidental. It sprang from “a marriage of folk genius and Western sensibility,” as one historian put it. An arranged marriage, no less, for Calcutta represents the world’s first (and possibly only) case of premeditated genius. “Nowhere else in the modern world has a new culture emerged from the deliberate intermingling of two older ones,” said Sudhin Datta, a poet who lived at the tail end of the Bengal Renaissance.

One day, I’m walking—in the hypervigilant state that India demands, eyes darting about, braced for menace, or coincidence—when I’m struck with a sharp pang of déjà vu, even though I’ve never visited Calcutta
before. Oh, no, I think, am I having one of those “India moments,” a past-life regression perhaps? It happens here, and more often than you’d think. People go off the rails and never get back on. Then I realize that, no, the reason Calcutta seems so familiar is that it looks an awful lot like London. The British “created a hotter version of home,” as one regular at the Fairlawn tells me.

As the capital of the Raj, Calcutta also served as a sort of laboratory, a proving ground for promising but untested ideas. The use of fingerprints in criminal investigations was first tested here, a product, as you recall, of our old friend Francis Galton. Calcutta had a sewage system and gas lamps before Manchester. The city has always had creativity coursing through its veins, even if it was, at first, an induced creativity.

The rains wreak blessed havoc on Calcutta. People welcome the relief from the heat, but it comes at a cost: streets flood, lights flicker, traffic snarls. That’s the case today, and that was the case one early June day in 1842. Water pooled in the streets, carriages kicked up mud, splattering passersby. The unpleasant conditions, though, didn’t deter a crowd of several hundred, mostly Indian, from attending a funeral. Heads bowed, hearts heavy, they walked alongside the casket of David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker turned educator and philanthropist. Emotions were raw. “People wept and sobbed for him like orphans after his death,” reported one witness. One speaker praised Hare as a “champion of the cause of modern education, a harbinger of the dawn of the ‘Age of Reason’ in a country floundering in the filthy swamp of superstitions, a valiant fighter for the cause of liberty, truth and justice . . . the friend of a friendless people.”

Like Job Charnock, David Hare died a long way from home. We don’t know why he left his native Scotland for the unknown, malarial shores of Calcutta. Back then, one embarked on such a journey knowing it was most likely one-way. Perhaps, like any good Scot, he was seeking adventure, or a chance to begin anew through the redemptive power of travel. Whatever the reason, once on Indian soil, Hare never looked back. He studied Bengali culture, but, with his being Scottish, the urge to tinker, to improve, soon took hold.