Tag Archive for ‘Kolkata’ at Asian Window

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Tag Archive for 'Kolkata'

Amit Chaudhuri: ties that bind

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on March 1, 2010

in Books and India

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Amit Chaudhuri has earned acclaim for his novels about family and belonging. Helena Frith Powell visits him in his home base of Kolkata, the focus of his next work. From The National:

Amit Chaudhuri does not much like travelling. He finds the day before he is set to leave particularly difficult.

“I feel I am neither here nor there,” he says in an interview at the Kolkata home he shares with his wife, 11-year-old daughter and his octogenarian parents. “I am a soul in transit. You would think after 20 or 30 years of travelling it would get better, but it doesn’t.”

Chaudhuri, a youthful-looking 47-year-old with a charming, boyish smile, is the author of five novels, all of which have won literary prizes, a musician in the Indian classical tradition and an academic.

He has been based in Kolkata since 1999 after a childhood spent in Bombay (he refuses to call Indian cities by their new names, “Why should I call it Mumbai just because someone says it is called Mumbai? They might change it again next year”) and student years in London. More:

A way in the world

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on January 15, 2010

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In The National, a review of A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee:

The novel begins with a cremation. Ritwik, whose name means “priest who officiates at a fire sacrifice”, stands at the mouth of a furnace in a Calcutta crematorium, stripped naked to the waist, clutching a bundle of burning twigs. His mother’s body lies before him. When Ritwik’s father died, just 11 days before his mother, he had refused to perform the last rites Hinduism assigns to eldest sons. (“Endless abracadabra by the phoney priest, pour this on fire, pour that on fire,” he objected.) But he won’t take chances with his mother’s soul. He circles her body seven times, each time singeing her forehead with the twigs. Later, he sets a bowl containing her navel (or, he thinks, “whatever lump of rock or charcoal” the crematorium tout had thought sufficient) afloat on the “stagnant and stench-bound” Ganges.

Ritwik’s concession to ritual is especially self-effacing given the revelation, later in the book, that his mother once broke his ribs. She bruised him repeatedly throughout his childhood, misdirecting her rage at their choiceless coexistence in a cramped flat with a dysfunctional extended family. Her death frees him from having to assume his father’s role as sole provider for his family; the news of her cerebral stroke “burnt out a clearing in his head”, and through that clearing he flees to Oxford on scholarship, to read English literature. More:

Birds of a feather

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on January 11, 2010

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Gopalkrishna Gandhi in Hindustan Times. Gandhi was the Governor of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009.

My wife Tara is the birds-person in our family. I know next to nothing about the feathered kind. But about a couple of months before we left Kolkata after our five years’ stay in its leafy Raj Bhavan, I made friends with two mynahs.

Or rather, two mynahs flew into my life.

A verandah has edged the governor’s apartment overlooking the mansion’s spectacular south-western garden for as long as the building has stood, some 206 years. This verandah has been enclosed with a tight meshing in an ingenious design to keep the estate’s prolific pigeons out. No pigeon, or any other bird for that matter, could violate the governor’s privacy — nor anoint his person with the siftings of avian blessing.

But Tara and I longed for an unobstructed view of the garden and the trees around it. So we had the ‘cage’ opened through a series of windows. The delectably airy stretch on the first floor, a screen of blue sky and green earth, now became the site for our morning coffee, biscuits and newspapers.

One morning as I was taking in the bitter berry draught and breaking my biscuit in half to dip into the brew, a mynah darted in and stood on the window’s ledge directly in front of me, no more than two feet away. Bobbing his head, going ‘keek-keek-keek’, he made his interest clear. But would he acknowledge it? No way. He cocked his head sideways, upways, every conceivable way, as if looking for something he might have inadvertently left in this public space where his entitlements were no less than mine. More:

A passage in Kolkata

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on January 3, 2010

in Culture, Heritage and India

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Kolkata’s Park Street is the most iconic road in India. Jaideep Mazumdar in Open:

It is a road like no other. Its origins as ‘Road to Old Burial Grounds’, nearly 250 years ago, were ignoble indeed. Haunted by ‘thugs and rascals’ and used mainly by hearses and carriages carrying the bereaved, this road in Calcutta metamorphosed by the turn of the last century into South Asia’s prime ‘good life’ destination, before hitting turbulence in the late 1960s. Now, it is a ‘sarani’ (lane). Steeped in memories, Park Street’s plebeian present haunts it, and is something the street and its stakeholders desperately want to shake off. Few other streets in the world have perhaps changed character so dramatically over two-and-a-half centuries as Park Street-turned-Mother Teresa Sarani has. Neon signs are still aglow and an empty table would be scarce at all the 25-odd restaurants and pubs there on any evening, but Park Street is no longer the destination it was. It’s just a thoroughfare. Though, to be fair, one that still manages to entice, even if not as forcefully as it used to.

It is a road like no other: it is a corridor that connects British-era Calcutta—with its grand colonial structures—with the more recent and rundown Kolkata. Driving down Park Street from west to east is like witnessing the city’s transition from its magnificent past to its proletarian present: the glittering shop fronts in the grand old mansions slowly give way to smaller establishments in decrepit structures. The fine restaurants make way for pavement food stalls and biryani outlets and, ultimately, the road reaches Park Circus area in which are nestled unsightly slums. More:

Looking backward

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on December 11, 2009

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The Oberoi Grand, Kolkata. Image: Oberoi Hotels

The Oberoi Grand, Kolkata. Image: Oberoi Hotels

The works of the immensely popular Bengali author Sankar are finally starting to be translated into English. Neel Mukherjee reads his 1962 novel of day-to-day life in a storied Calcutta hotel. In the National: ["Chowringhee" by Sankar]

Few writers anywhere become a household name in their lifetimes to the extent Sankar (real name: Mani Shankar Mukherjee) has done in his native Bengal. The term “household name” is used advisedly: it would be difficult to find an educated family in Bengal that does not possess at least one of the 77-year-old author’s 70-plus books, which include 37 novels, five travelogues, children’s stories, essay collections, devotional works, even two books on Bengali food and gastronomy. Two of his novels Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (literally “A Forest of People”, translated as The Middleman) were made into acclaimed films by Satyajit Ray in the 1970s. Chowringhee, arguably his most popular book, published in Bengali in 1962, was his first to be translated into English, in 2007; this year it is available from British publishers for the first time.

Any reckoning with the novel should begin with its first-person narrator, “Shankar”. (In the Bengali original, the author and narrator’s names are spelt identically, allowing for play in the degrees of congruence between the two. The English translation attempts to preserve that somewhat by using variant spellings of what is effectively the same name.) Chowringhee opens with Shankar set adrift by the death of his boss, an unnamed English lawyer, to whom the narrator was clerk. He is rescued from penury by Byron, an Anglo-Indian private investigator, who finds him a job at the Shahjahan, one of Calcutta’s biggest, oldest and most renowned hotels. There Shankar becomes a staff member and an observer of the life that passes daily through (and behind) its doors. More:

India’s Scottish heritage remembered

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on November 8, 2009

in Heritage and India

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Victoria Memorial, Calcutta

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta

From the Telegraph, London:

Now, keen to underline its independence from London in foreign affairs, Scotland’s new nationalist government plans to reclaim that forgotten heritage in Calcutta, the capital of British India.

Its first target will be helping to restore the rubble-covered grand staircases and peeling walls of once-magnificent buildings like Duff College, named after Alexander Duff, a Scots missionary and pioneering educationalist who arrived in Calcutta in 1830 after being shipwrecked twice en route. But Holyrood also hopes to remind Indians of the role that Scots played in educating and inspiring some of the sub-continent’s leading independence campaigners.

Many of Calcutta’s most illustrious sons, including Subhas Chandra Bose, the controversial independence movement leader, were educated in Scottish colleges in Calcutta. A Scottish official in the Bengal Civil Service, Allan Octavian Hume, later founded the Indian National Congress which led the country to independence in 1947. More:

Yesterday once more at Trincas

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on August 23, 2009

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In its 50th year, Mint-Lounge revisits this Kolkata institution with Usha Uthup, who found flame here:

There are Park Street old-timers who maintain that Trincas existed as an unassuming corner deli before the 50 years that the restaurant is currently commemorating. But all agree that it is only in these five decades that Trincas-under the stewardship of two friends, Ellis Joshua and Om Prakash Puri (the Puris continue to run it)-became the original home of live pop music in India, only to fall from grace when the Naxalite movement, the exodus of corporate houses and the Anglo-Indian community from the city, a higher entertainment tax regime and changing cultural morality teamed up to dent its fortunes. “But we never stopped having live music here,” says Shashi Puri who, along with her husband Deepak and son Anand, runs Trincas these days. “Not even for a single day over all these years,” she reiterates.

“Molly was a black beauty from the Middle-East”, J.L. Wadehra, the 69-year-old general manager of Trincas, muses. “And when she sang, there used to be a queue outside the restaurant.” Since 1961, when Molly became Trincas’ first pop performer and its first star, the restaurant has seen a long list of bands and performers stopping by-somebody such as Biddu Appaiah, before he and Carl Douglas became famous with the international smash hit Kung Fu Fighting and much before Disco Deewane and Made In Indiahappened, even taking a cut on his professional fee to perform seven-eight months at Trincas, according to Wadehra. “Some years back, he came back with a troupe from the UK to film at Trincas, where he had started his career with the band Trojans and later as the Lone Trojan,” recalls Wadehra. More:

Filming the real Slumdog Millionaire

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on August 22, 2009

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Sourav Sarangi recently won eight international awards for his documentary film Bilal, which tells the story of a five-year-old boy who looks after his blind parents in a cramped hut in a poor district of Kolkata. The film-maker describes the journey he and the family have taken with the documentary (watch trailer below). From the Guardian:

I first met Bilal when he was only eight months old. His head was wrapped in bandages after an accident and he was lying on a cot next to my wife. His mother, who was blind, was clinging on to him. After attending to my wife, who had been hospitalised, I looked at the baby. He seemed to smile at me and seemed to nudge his mother as if, in a silent communion in a dark world, he was trying to tell her to talk to me. I was convinced about that. At that point in time, Bilal the film was born.

My friendship with the family grew. As I saw him grow up, what struck me about Bilal was his common sense. Even when he was three years old, the time when we launched the film, he was wise and that is the word I would like to use when describing this remarkable boy.

His Muslim father, Shamim, also blind, had married Jharna, a Hindu who changed her name to Humera Begum after the wedding. That in itself is quite unusual among the poorer communities in India – a Hindu woman marrying a Muslim man and then changing her religion.

Shamim himself is quite a man. He runs a portable phone call centre and, before this film was made, he used to carry a telephone to one of the busiest traffic intersections in Kolkata and sit on the pavement with a table. He has a photographic memory. Even now, he can rattle off 10-digit telephone numbers I told him six months back simply from memory. I am still amazed by this man. More:

See also: http://www.bilal.in/

My name was red

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on May 30, 2009

in Culture, India and Politics

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Calcutta in 1977 when the Communists came to power (32 years later, they are still in power) and Kolkata now. Shamik Bag, a U2-loving, bourgeois Kolkatan, born the same year Jyoti Basu was elected chief minister at the head of a Left Front government, looks back at the confusing, decadent years. From Mint-Lounge:

Five years after a stretch of it was renamed, Kolkata’s Park Street is yet to get used to being Mother Teresa Sarani. It’s early into Saturday evening and Park Street is playing true to form: Ladies in miniskirts, long-haired musicians, encyclopaedia sellers, drug pushers, well-fed happy families hand-held by paan-chewing patriarchs, pimps and prostitutes-all ready to mingle seamlessly into the night of food, alcohol, dance, music, money, sex. Park Street doesn’t seem to be in any urgent need of missionary charity yet.

As we turn the corner into Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, the Park Street cool metamorphoses-volubly and visibly-into chaos. Vehicles piled up behind a tram car that has stopped dead in its wrecked, wretched track; crowds on the road while hawkers rule the pavements, honking, shouting, screaming, jostling-urban paralysis. Luke Kenny, well known as a video jockey till he became better known with Rock On!!, is sitting next to me, I’m at the wheel, there’s Steely Dan playing and air conditioning too-comforts carried over from Park Street. Kenny is back in the city of his birth-we had got together incidentally-and sitting immobile amid the anarchy of the street, he opportunely lets one slip in: “You think the Communists have been good for Calcutta?” More:

A walk in Calcutta

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on May 2, 2009

in India and Travel

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Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

Calcutta Coffee House / Photo: lecercle

Calcutta Coffee House / Photo: lecercle

I left Calcutta when I was small and promptly forgot what I knew, such is the thick velvet curtain the immigrant child draws over memory. Every few summers, when my family returned for holidays, I would be escorted from one relative’s house to another, scolded for being too thin, and force-fed heaps of sweets. On Park Street, I would be invariably accosted by a hungry, barefoot child. The only thing more confounding than going to Calcutta was coming home to suburban Southern California; how do you explain the city of dreadful night (Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, not mine) to friends who had spent the summer listening to Olivia Newton-John?

In the last four years, over several reporting trips there, the city has revealed itself to me slowly, opening one sleepy eye at a time. Calcutta today is as parochial as it is modern. It lives in the past as much as it lets its past decay. India’s first global city, it is littered with the remains of many worlds: the rickshaws that the Chinese brought; an Armenian cemetery; dollops of jazz left by Americans in the war years.

It is as much a walker’s city as a talker’s: It has great eavesdropping potential, even if you understand only English, and it is perfectly acceptable to start up a conversation with strangers, whether about the rain or Shakespeare. More:

Satyajit Ray’s world

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on May 2, 2009

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On his 88th birth anniversary, a rare interview with the late Satyajit Ray by Shyam Benegal in Mint Lounge

He was not a radical artist who shocked or startled audiences into his world. Satyajit Ray’s greatest achievement was his celebration of the commonplace with lyricism and humanity. The pioneer of a new wave of realistic cinema in India, he is the most recognized Indian director in the world. In 1981, film-maker Shyam Benegal, an ardent fan of Ray, directed a memorable, now rare, documentary on the Oscar-winning director. In an extended interview, Ray talked in detail about his relationship with his mother, how he became a film-maker, and why he didn’t believe in gimmicks. To commemorate the auteur’s 88th birth anniversary, we reproduce excerpts from the interview :

What are some of the most vivid memories of growing up in Calcutta?

I was born in a place called Garpar Road in a huge building that housed a printing and block-making press, which my grandfather had started. I was born there in 1921 and I spent the first six years of my life in that place. I think the most favourite memory from that time is spending my afternoons at the press.
There used to be a compositing department where I used to walk in. They had a process camera which used to fascinate me a great deal. I would take little drawings with me, and doodles, and tell the block-making chaps to make a block of them for Sandesh, a children’s magazine which my grandfather edited. Another memory is the smell of turpentine in the press. Once, when I was in advertising, I had to go to a press, which also smelled just the same. Immediately, all the memories of Garpar came rushing back.

[Photo: www.satyajitray.org]

Clash of the titans

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on April 25, 2009

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In Tehelka, Shantanu Guha Ray looks at the deteriorating relationship between Shah Rukh Khan and Sourav Ganguly and says this is the reason why Shah Rukh dropped the word Kolkata from his Knight Riders’ team.

A FORTNIGHT AGO, as he stepped onto the tarmac of Mumbai airport after his meeting with Shah Rukh Khan, Sourav Ganguly picked up his Blackberry and whispered “I do not trust anyone, really, I do not trust anyone!” The former Indian skipper, on a high barely a month before because of his involvement in the selection of the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) team and the cheer leaders, had a premonition of what would happen once the team landed in Cape Town for the trial matches before the start of the second edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL). A week before the crucial meeting at Mannat, home of KKR owner and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, Ganguly had skirmished with coach John Buchanan over the latter’s multiple captaincy theory and had set Kolkata afire by first disagreeing with, and then agreeing to the format.

The city of extremes

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on January 24, 2009

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Edited by novelist Amit Chaudhuri, Memory’s Gold is a lavishly produced volume, an anthology from a wide range of writers. A review in Mint Lounge:

At last, an anthology of writings on Kolkata, and not a moment too soon. Edited by novelist Amit Chaudhuri, Memory’s Gold is a lavishly produced volume into which love and labour seem to have gone in equal measure. From the cover photograph of a rooftop under darkening skies to the elegant Venetian typeface, the look and feel of the book affords quiet pleasure. But with that also comes apprehension. It is so easy to get this kind of book wrong. Cities, and especially a city like Kolkata, are contrary beasts: they do not take kindly to being reduced to a set of exhibits. Then there is the added nuisance of your average Coffee House aantel (an intellectual) who can be counted upon to pounce on the slightest infraction of fact or judgement.

Happily, the collection strikes the right notes from the beginning. In his lucid and thoughtful introduction, Chaudhuri positions himself as an outsider who did not grow up or go to school in the city, and who therefore did not pass as “an authentic member of the community” of a city “that lives and writes through its friendships”. Perhaps it is this distance which allows Chaudhuri to anthologize from a wide range of writers and not favour any one coterie, always a danger in books of this kind. Of the 55 pieces in the book, roughly half were written originally in English, starting with the tongue-in-cheek Henry Meredith Parker on the Bengal Civil Service and ending with an Indlish novelist who debuted this year.

Along the banks of a river, the India of old

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on December 23, 2008

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A river cruise on the Hooghly, past Calcutta, reveals the country at its most rural, without a postcard or T-shirt in sight. From the New York Times:

Howrah Station in Calcutta was packed with travelers as I arrived to catch the 3:30 p.m. train to Jangipur. Passengers and porters charged in all directions, some carrying their suitcases or cloth bundles in their hands, some with their baggage on their heads. One man with a chair; another with a stepladder. At my feet, someone was charging his cellphone on the station’s electricity supply. Our train drew up, and the man next to me suddenly threw himself head first through an open window. With his feet waggling, he was stuck until a friend pushed him through. Luckily, I had reserved seats, so I was able to enter through the door and then settle in for the five-hour journey through eastern India.

A few weeks earlier, I had booked a river cruise on the Hooghly, a tributary of the Ganges that runs south through West Bengal, past Calcutta and out to the Bay of Bengal. I was one of 14 travelers – 13 Britons and one American – who had signed up with Assam Bengal Navigation with the hope of seeing India at its most rural. (I was there in late June, well before the recent attacks in Mumbai, a horrific event that should sadden anyone who loves India as I do.)

It was monsoon season, which promised drenching rains every afternoon, but none of us seemed to mind, and I had come prepared: a raincoat, an umbrella and waterproof shoes were all in my luggage. Plus, the Hooghly is navigable only when summer rains swell its banks.

Mumbai: The city I love

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on November 29, 2008

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The novelist Amit Chaudhuri finds it impossible to think about his childhood home without a quickening of excitement and pleasure. But this week’s terror attacks have highlighted the other side of Mumbai – a society riven by poverty and despair. From the Guardian:

David Levene

Children playing in the rubbish of a shanty town at Nariman Point, just down the beach from the city

My parents moved to Bombay from Calcutta in 1965, when I was an infant – they stayed at the Taj for two weeks while the company found them a flat. This was the beginning of Calcutta’s decline, companies and professionals fleeing labour trouble, and relocating at this optimistic seaside metropolis in western India. It was a charmed life – from at least two of the flats we lived in when my father was finance director and then chief executive of Britannia Biscuits, flats in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, the city’s two richest localities, you could see a skyline that, with its lissom, tall buildings (Bombay is the only Indian city to have had an obsessive romance with the vertical, the skyscraper), approximated Manhattan in some ways; in its sunniness, its palm trees, its disguised but obvious carnality, it echoed what we knew of California from films; and the gothic buildings were remnants of the old history that had first brought together these seven fishing islands.

From different windows and balconies in those two flats, at different points of my life until 1982, when my father retired, the dome of the Taj (the “old” Taj, as it came to be known after the arrival of its neighbour, the Taj Intercontinental) was visible, grey, as seemingly and deceptively stationary as a low cloud. Like Calcutta, and unlike Delhi, with its Moghul and Sultanate lineage, Bombay had no really great historical or religious monuments; its landmarks, in keeping with the fact that it was the progeny of an almost innocent-seeming colonial modernity, were secular ones – hotels; cinema halls, such as the Eros, the Regal, the Metro; grand, untidy railway stations such as the Victoria Terminus. To call the Taj the “old” Taj was to deliberately indulge in a flagrant misnomer, and a reminder of Bombay’s willingness to rewrite history in terms of the urban, the kitschy, the comic: it was as if the “real” Taj Mahal in Agra had never existed except in those most incredible of objects – school textbooks.

A pilgrimage to Calcutta recalls Armenian history

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on November 20, 2008

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More than 250 Armenians with Calcutta roots went to the Indian city for the 300th anniversary of the oldest church there. Leonard M. Apcar in International Herald Tribune:

Restored graves at Holy Trinity Chapel, an Armenian church and cemetery built in 1867, in the Tangra district of Calcutta. (Leonard M. Apcar/IHT)

Restored graves at Holy Trinity Chapel, an Armenian church and cemetery built in 1867, in the Tangra district of Calcutta. (Leonard M. Apcar/IHT)

Before there were call centers and Indian conglomerates, before the East India Co. or the British Raj, there were Armenians who made their way to India to trade and to escape religious persecution from the Turks and, later, Persians.

Entrepreneurial and devout Christians, but familiar with the Islamic ways of Mughal emperors, Armenians arrived in northeast India in the early 1600s, some 60 years before British adventurers became established traders here. They acquired gems, spices and silks, and brought them back to Armenian enclaves in Persia such as Isfahan.

Eventually, some Persian Armenians – including my ancestors – left and set up their own businesses and communities here, landing first on India’s western flank in Surat and nearby Bombay, the present-day Mumbai, and then moving to the river banks in northeast India that led to Calcutta’s founding as a sprawling manufacturing and port city.

The idea of cities

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on October 7, 2008

in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka

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In a cover story on urban areas around Southasia, Himal looks “at the idea of cities as an active collective impulse that is ever evolving.” Below, a sample:

Lahore: By Raza Rumi

I spent my early years in a Model Town colonial bungalow, which was originally the creation of a Hindu doctor who had to leave the city at Partition. This was an age when birds were an integral feature of Lahori skies, and the seasons played out their glory. As the name suggests, Model Town was an ‘ideal’ suburb, created during the Raj by the advanced citizenry on the idea of ‘cooperative urban life’. Established in 1922, Model Town was the fruition of advocate Diwan Khem Chand’s unshakeable belief in the values of self help, self responsibility and democracy, loosely the principles of cooperative societies. This was the reason why Model Town was established as, and still is, a ‘cooperative society’. What fewer people know is that these values of cooperation were first popularised by George Jacob Holyoake, a 19th-century English social reformer responsible for the cooperative movement. Incidentally, Holyoake was also infamous for the distinction of having invented the phrase ‘secularism’, for which he was the last citizen to be convicted for blasphemy in England.

Kabul: By Anne Feenstra

Kabul is a city of dramatic contrasts. In the streets, shiny black-windowed limousines drive immediately alongside scruffy pushcarts with wobbly wheels. On the sidewalks, one-legged beggars hold out hands to well-dressed business men in sharp, knitted suits and gleaming shoes. Perhaps little of this is particularly exceptional in urban areas around the world, including in Southasia. Perhaps more to the point in the Afghan context would be the contrast in the inner city between Western female diplomats being driven around in armoured vehicles, and the local ladies who are fully covered in azure burqas.

Galle: By Richard Boyle

Galle’s location at the southwestern tip of Sri Lanka, with only the Antarctic across more than 5000 miles of ocean, ensured the prominence of the port during the early history of navigation. Not surprisingly, it became the natural focal point at the southernmost part of the Silk Routes that connected Asia with the Mediterranean. Galle also provided a relatively equidistant location for Arab and Chinese ships to converge and trade, thus avoiding much longer voyages. It had a fine natural harbour protected to the southeast by an elevated headland and to the northwest by a flat peninsula, although there were submerged rocks and the harbour was not protected from the southwest monsoon.

Dhaka: By Zafar Sobhan

Dhaka today is utterly unrecognisable as the sleepy, charming, tranquil town it was even half a century ago. There is something thoroughly startling about this transmutation from a genteel and sedate town of tree-lined avenues, ponds, canals and spacious bungalows set amidst overgrown gardens – to this present incarnation as a dizzying metropolis of 12 million people, blaring automobiles and block after block of unpainted concrete apartments, as far as the eye can see. But the difference is more than merely in the physical transformation; it is also one of tone and feel. Dhaka today is a high-octane megacity, where life is fast and furious (except for the traffic, which remains slow and torpid), where anger and violence simmer beneath the surface.

In Calcutta, down memory lane

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on September 29, 2008

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In The New York Times, Somini Sengupta goes to Calcutta’s famous restaurant Mocambo:

My mother went to Mocambo to listen to Doris Day covers. I went to Mocambo for Fish à la Diana.

Mocambo opened its doors in 1956, a European oasis of glamour and jazz on Park Street, Calcutta’s famous cabaret row. Its second-generation owner, Nitin Kothari, called it independent India’s first nightclub, which is plausible, even if impossible to verify. There was a German architect, an Italian manager and, soon after its opening, a 17-year-old chanteuse named Pam Crain, who wore a French evening gown and sang standards with Anton Menezes’ six-piece band. “She had a good voice, she was very good-looking,” Mr. Kothari, 61, recalled. “Very glamorous.”

Talking of Mocambo and Pam Crain, here’s a story The Telegraph, Calcutta, ran last year on the singers and musicians who used to play in Calcutta in the 60s and 70s:

Carlton Kitto, one of the most popular jazz guitarists in the city, began his musical journey at Moulin Rouge in the early Seventies. “The restaurant was owned by a French lady called Delilah who would sing along with our band Carlton Kitto Jazz Ensemble. Cancan dancers would delight the guests later in the evening,” recollects Carlton.

After performing for two years at Moulin Rouge, Kitto moved a few blocks ahead to Mocambo, where Pam Crain, the queen of crooners, made her debut in the Sixties. The interiors of the place remain frozen in time with its red Rexine sofas and continental fare but the voices that drew an elite audience are gone. Even as Calcutta rock bands and Bangla bands take over Park Street, why is the blaring of a trumpet, or a blues note from a saxophone, still missing? Where are the Anglo-Indian and Goan musicians who made Park Street the capital of Indian nightclub music from the mid-Fifties to early Seventies?

Selling their scrolls

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on June 4, 2008

in Art

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For eight centuries the Patuas, a community of Bengali artists, have maintained a distinct storytelling tradition, painting scrolls and performing songs to illustrate history and myth. Then came television and the global art market. Samanth Subramanian in The National:

Every time it rains, the paths in the Indian village of Thekuachak turn slick and gray with loose mud. During the week of my last visit, the monsoon was particularly severe, and a haymaker of a rainstorm hit the state of West Bengal squarely on the nose. Kolkata was afloat, flights and trains were cancelled, and the highways were barely navigable. Walking in Thekuachak called for patience, vigilant eyes and nimble feet, and I looked up only occasionally, to see Mairun Chitrakar ahead of me, leading the way to his house.

Mairun, a short man with a wizened face, is a Patua, a member of a community of artists spread across the Medinipur and Birbhum districts in West Bengal. Since at least the 13th century, the Patuas have practiced a version of show-and-tell, wandering from village to village singing stories from the religious epics and unfurling painted scrolls to illustrate their tales – a form of static cinema long before cinema itself. Every Patua’s last name is Chitrakar – a word that means, quite literally, “artist.” Mairun, who is 57, is one of around 500 Patuas in Medinipur, and there have been artists in his family for more than 200 years.

Death comes ashore

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on May 21, 2008

in India and environment

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Amitav Ghosh on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, in the New York Times

THE word “cyclone” was coined in Calcutta (now called Kolkata) in the 1840s by an eccentric Englishman named Henry Piddington. Inspired by the great British meteorologist William Reid, Piddington became one of the earliest storm-chasers, besotted with a phenomenon that he once likened to a “beautiful meteorite.” His elegant coinage was originally intended as a generic name for all revolving weather events, but is now applied mainly to the storms of the Indian Ocean region like Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma with devastating effect last week.

Piddington was among the earliest to recognize that a cyclone wreaks most of its damage not through wind but through water, by means of the devastating wave that is known as a “storm surge.” In 1853, when the British colonial authorities were planning an elaborate new port on the outer edge of Bengal’s mangrove forests, he issued an unambiguous warning: “Everyone and everything must be prepared to see a day when, in the midst of the horrors of a hurricane, they will find a terrific mass of salt water rolling in …” His warning was neglected and Port Canning was built, only to be obliterated by a cyclonic surge in 1867.

Last days of the rickshaw

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on April 5, 2008

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Kolkata is bent on burnishing its modern image-and banning a potent symbol of India’s colonial past. From National Geographic:

The strategy of drivers in Kolkata-drivers of private cars and taxis and buses and the enclosed three-wheel scooters used as jitneys and even pedicabs-is simple: Forge ahead while honking. There are no stop signs to speak of. To a visitor, the signs that say, in large block letters, OBEY TRAFFIC RULES come across as a bit of black humor. During a recent stay in Kolkata, the method I devised for crossing major thoroughfares was to wait until I could attach myself to more pedestrians than I figured a taxi was willing to knock down. In the narrow side streets known as the lanes, loud honking is the signal that a taxi or even a small truck is about to round the corner and come barreling down a space not meant for anything wider than a bicycle. But occasionally, during a brief lull in the honking, I’d hear the tinkling of a bell behind me. An American who has watched too many Hallmark Christmas specials might turn around half expecting to see a pair of draft horses pulling a sleigh through snowy woods. But what came into view was a rickshaw. Instead of being pulled by a horse, it was being pulled by a man-usually a skinny, bedraggled, barefoot man who didn’t look quite up to the task. Hooked around his finger was a single bell that he shook continuously, producing what is surely the most benign sound to emanate from any vehicle in Kolkata.

Oh! Kolkata!

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on April 1, 2008

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Can Kolkata rise above its poverty to become the Bengali entrepot for the East asks Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic

When judging a new place, a traveler must first always reckon with his or her point of departure. Arriving in Calcutta by bus from Dhaka, the capital of next-door Bangladesh, is like arriving in West Berlin from East Berlin during the Cold War—a trip I made several times. Grayness is left behind. Instead of the rusted signs of Dhaka, giant, swanky billboards advertising global products glow in the night like back-lit computer screens. Traffic is dominated in Dhaka by creaky old bicycle rickshaws; in Calcutta, by late-model cars. There are, too, the sturdy yellow Ambassador taxis, zippy little Indian-produced Marutis loaded with families, and many luxury vehicles.

Yet the rickshaws that you also see in Calcutta provide a signature image of exploitation worse than almost anything you’ll see in Dhaka: one human being is transported by another, who is not merely furiously pedaling uphill, but actually running uphill on his bare feet, pulling the rickshaw like an animal.

Calcutta is, frankly, obscene.

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[Pic: Running out of time: New Laws are forcing rickshaws off Kolkata's streets. Atul Loke]

The reverse Raj: Indian businesses turn tables on imperial master

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on March 30, 2008

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Britain took commercial and cultural advantage of India as its imperial master. Now a new generation of wealthy Indians is reversing the roles. Dean Nelson in The Sunday Times, UK:

The assembled businessmen wore black ties and listened politely to a string quartet under crystal chandeliers in a magnificent ballroom. The room buzzed with talk of the old country, but more importantly with commercial speculation about their new domain. What was to be their next takeover target in the local economy?

It could have been a sepia print of the British East India Company, which effectively ruled India as a private colony for 100 years, but a closer look revealed a different kind of burra sahib. More Chandigarh than Cheam, the men gathered at the Grosvenor House hotel in Mayfair, central London, last year were the representatives of a new Indian raj, powerful men intent on buying up chunks of the homeland of their old imperial masters.

Is this the Indian century?

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian, UK:

Shishir Bajoria is meant to be talking about India’s rise and the world economy, but first he wants to raise the really big stuff. “Have you seen the cricket?” he asks, and launches into an unkind description of the Australian player he saw whingeing on telly this morning about the bullying Indian cricket board. “A white man – a white man! – complaining about racism.” And he throws up his palms as if to say, how upside down can you get?

That’s not the only topsy-turvy thing around here. Take our location: the Bengal Club, the leading social club in Calcutta, former capital of British India. There was a time when it wouldn’t have let the likes of Bajoria through the door. “In the Bengal Club, they don’t allow dogs or Indians,” reported Somerset Maugham in 1938, “but in the Yacht Club in Bombay they don’t mind dogs; it’s only Indians they don’t allow.”

That Bengali baggage

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on March 8, 2008

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In Lounge Mint, Namita Bhandare reviews Neel Mukherjee’s Past Continuous, a promising debut about growing up in Kolkata in the early 1900s:

At the age of 22, Ritwik Ghosh gets a chance that’s hard to come by: the chance to break with the past and start life anew. A scholarship to study literature in the UK is Ritwik’s ticket to escape the “possibility of never escaping” from the poverty of his life in Kolkata and the never-ending exploitation by relatives.

The chance to begin a fresh life is bolstered by the death of his parents, within a fortnight of each other. Their death brings for Ritwik a sense of freedom; a release from that “enormous burden of responsibility”. In any case, his own relationship with his mother has been tortured, even abusive (though it’s only in England that he becomes aware of the extent of the abuse).

But when the past is more than just a sequence of physical events and when the past is a series of experiences, it’s never quite that easy to escape it. And so, Ritwik’s sense of isolation and alienation as he hurtles ahead can only have disastrous consequences. To escape from his loneliness, Ritwik begins to write a book. Set at the turn of the 20th century in India, during Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal, his book is about Maud Gilby, an Englishwoman who lives in India with the aim of “enlightening native women”. By this time, Ritwik has taken up lodgings with an incontinent, decrepit and seemingly senile Englishwoman named Anne Cameron.

Night train

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on March 4, 2008

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Thirty years ago, Ian Jack fell in love with riding the rails in India. When he returned this winter to board the famed Delhi to Kolkata Express, would he find the same romance? In The Guardian, UK:

On the night train from Delhi to Kolkata, trying to persuade myself to sleep, I started to count the Indian railway journeys I’d made. I reached 100 or so and then gave up. So many journeys, so many early-morning cigarettes smoked over tea drunk from those disposable clay vessels called kulhads – the platform littered with their smashed fragments – as I got down at a junction and waited for a change of locomotive: dawn the best time of day in India, Gold Flake the best cigarette, steam the best smell, an engine whistle the best noise, tea the best drink. Also remembered: so many conversations with my fellow travellers, salesmen who would tender cards with telegraphic addresses (“CHEMCO, KANPUR”), amateur and professional astrologers, army officers going home on leave, conversations that happened bunk-to-bunk after the conversationalists had unpacked their bed-rolls and spread out their sheets – one-night friendships, often surprisingly intimate (“Tell me, do you love your wife?”), their only souvenir a business card found years later, tucked in a notebook.