Calcutta (3 page)

Very few people have ever said anything nice about Calcutta, unless they were Bengali. Writing in 1863, Sir George Trevelyan was asking us to ‘find, if you can, a more uninviting spot than Calcutta … it unites every condition of a perfectly unhealthy situation … The place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse; but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously.’ Rudyard Kipling, who was there only for a short visit as a newspaper correspondent down from the Punjab, loathed the place and composed a rambling series of essays about it which he called
The
City
of
Dreadful
Night
(a title he also bestowed upon a verse epic about Lahore, for he was a repetitive man). A century and more before that, Robert Clive decided that it was ‘the most wicked place in the Universe’ though, admittedly, he had only England and Madras to
compare
it with. All these were stock responses of a kind Calcutta has generated from the start. There have been exceptions, though. A junior contemporary of Trevelyan was bowled over by the city when he came to it as a new recruit to the Indian Civil Service. ‘Imagine,’ William Hunter wrote home to his fiancée, ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with all that is beautiful in architecture, and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’ He was, of course, in love and he’d just arrived from Peckham. But William Bentinck, who was much more sophisticated, and who was to rule India from Government House there, had decided in 1805 as soon as he
discovered
it that Calcutta was the richest city he had seen after London and ‘the spectacle is altogether the most curious and magnificent I have met with’. At the other end of the nineteenth century Winston Churchill told his mother that ‘I shall always be glad to have seen it – for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon – namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again’. But he granted that it was a very great city and then made an unexpected comparison for ‘at night, with a grey fog and cold wind, it almost allows one to imagine that it is London’. It put Reginald Heber, the second Bishop of Calcutta, in mind of Moscow. It put Mark Twain, who lectured there in 1896, in mind of very little but a vivid metaphor; he thought the weather of Calcutta ‘enough to make a brass
doorknob 
mushy’, stayed only a day or two, and recalled the city years later merely as the place where he met an old girl friend, with whom he had a conversation which centred on the
peculiarity
of dried herring. But the most memorable observation of all was made by some anonymous fellow in a sentence which is usually, but incorrectly, attributed to Lenin. The road to world revolution,’ wrote this unknown epigrammist one day, lies through Peking, Shanghai and Calcutta.’

The truth is that almost everything popularly associated with Calcutta is highly unpleasant and sometimes very nasty indeed. It is bracketed in the Western mind with distant rumours of appalling disaster, riot and degradation. The one incident in its history with which every schoolchild has always been familiar has been called the Black Hole of Calcutta, and nobody who knows the place can ever have been surprised to learn that one of the most vicious weapons ever devised by man, the Dum Dum bullet, was invented and first produced in a small arms factory within a rifle shot of that splendid new airport.

The very name of Calcutta is derived from a symbol of fear and evil. There is no religion in the world richer than Hinduism in the number and variety of its gods. It enshrines a bewildering pantheon of figures who together are venerated for every
conceivable
reflex and incident in the human condition and
philosophy
. There are gods as jolly-looking as Ganesh, sitting
comfortably
with his elephant’s head, who is invoked by writers to bring them success. There are goddesses as elegant as Sarasvati, riding upon her gorgeous peacock, patron of music and inventor of Sanskrit And there are scores of godlings with more
unfortunate
connotations like Manasa, who is worshipped in Bengal as an antidote to snake bites, and Sitala, who is particularly idolized by people along the Hooghly during outbreaks of smallpox. There is no one at all more respected and feared than the
goddess
Kali who, like every other Hindu divine, has other names and forms as well; in Bengal she is more commonly known as Durga, in South India they sometimes call her Bhawani. All the representations of Kali are designed to frighten an illiterate and superstitious mind more thoroughly than anything else in creation. She appears with devilish eyes, or with a tongue
dripping 
blood, with snakes entwined round her neck, or with a
garland
of skulls. She is Kali the Terrible and she is propitiated with daily sacrifice, as well as with flowers. When the Thugs strangled a traveller, they knotted in one corner of the
handkerchief
a silver coin consecrated to Kali, to give them a better grip.

Kali, says the mythology, was the wife of Siva the Destroyer; and Siva, together with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver, stands in a divine triumvirate at the head of the Hindu religion. When Kali died, Siva was both grief-stricken and angry. He placed her corpse on his shoulders and went stamping round the world in a dervish dance of mourning which became more furious the longer it lasted. The other gods realized that unless Siva was stopped the whole world would be destroyed by his rage, which was unlikely to end as long as he had his wife’s body on his shoulders. So Vishnu took up a knife and flung it at the corpse, dismembering it into fifty-two pieces which were scattered across the face of the earth. By the side of a great river in Bengal the little toe of the right foot landed, and a temple was built there, with an attendant village, and the people called this place Kalikata.

Calcutta, indeed, is a mighty terrible and frightening place
today
. But there is another side to it, almost unheard of, rarely figuring in its reputation, sorely neglected by travellers from other parts of India as well as from farther afield, who dash in and transact their business, observe the miseries, then turn tail and run for it before they are totally overcome by violent
claustrophobia
. They go home and cry woe unto the city, take its taste out of their mouths with a gin and tonic or a Pepsi, and recall it thereafter only as an emblem of experience, to show that they now know the worst that Life has to offer. Yet to balance (just a little) this conventional rumour of Calcutta, the traveller can do no better than to spare himself a couple of hours from the commercial and social horrors of the city and take himself down to the Marble Palace. This, indisputably, is the richest, the quaintest, the eeriest, the most haphazard and the most ridiculous, the most astonishing and the most lovable and almost the saddest relic in what, by about the start of the nineteenth
century, was beginning to be called the City of Palaces. You trace it – with some difficulty, no doubt, for the taxi-drivers of
Calcutta
are not very strong on navigation – down a side street among the pullulating alleys off Chittaranjan Avenue. The air reeks down here, like so many of the central thoroughfares, of worn-out engine fumes mixed up with half a dozen varieties of decay. The pushing and shoving and sidestepping past rickshaws and cows and people is almost as concentrated as anywhere. The noise is Calcutta’s usual symphony of honks and clatters and clangs and rumbles and shouts, with transistored obligates on the sitar. It feels and looks and is just about as unsavoury as its past; for this area was once called Chor Bagan, or the thieves’ garden. But in the middle of this towering mess you find, unbelievably, a real garden of maybe an acre with a Palladian mansion set square in the centre. This could easily be a luxurious pocket in Rome, not Calcutta, and there is a fountain in the garden that would not be out of place in the Piazza Navona or at the bottom of the Spanish Steps; it has Neptune figures
brandishing
conch shells, with indeterminate water beasts gaping at them from the surrounding pool and four nubile naiads
upholding
a classical urn on top of the central column. The adjacent paths are bordered with a galaxy of busts that never quite add up to a rhythmic theme – a Caesar here, a Chinaman there, a Redskin over by the shrubbery – as though someone with a bent for sculpture couldn’t make up his mind whether he was also a student of history or phrenology.

There are greater surprises inside the house. You enter a
courtyard
first, which is topped by a high gallery. The floor is
patterned
with diamond-shapes and lozenges of multi-coloured marble, the white walls are embellished with swagging in
Wedgwood
blue, there are wonderfully cool-looking maidens and men cut in stone, wrapped in togas and standing high on plinths. There are a couple of urns with a variety of aspidistra growing from the bowls. And there is a menagerie. Out in the garden, pelicans and peacocks, mallard and teal have been poking and prodding at the lawns or ducking and dozing in the pool. In this courtyard there are scarlet macaws from Burma tethered to perches, albino mynahs from the back of Bihar whistling in
cages, and pinioned parakeets from Northern Australia making a mess on the statues.

Beyond lie apartments and galleries, and in these the Marble Palace becomes a fantasy brought to earth. They are full, as no building was ever filled before, with art and objects from
Bangkok
to Bristol and back, though almost everything seems to have been picked up from the auctions and markets and
dispossessed
households of Europe. There is a very old Queen
Victoria
in plaster standing large as life by the main stairway and a very young Queen Victoria in oak, somewhat larger, dominating a red marble room where another squadron of busts glare at her from the shadows. There is marble everywhere, in ninety
different
varieties it is said, transported across the seas by the ton to provide floors and wall panels and table tops. There are great swathes of satin hanging round windows and enormous follies of crystal glass hanging in chandeliers from ceilings. There are mirrors from Venice and vases from Sèvres and goblets from Bohemia and stags’ heads from the Trossachs and figures from Dresden and swords from Toledo and ormolu clocks from Paris and carvings from Bavaria and vast quantities of
Victorian
bric-à-brac that look as if they were scavenged in job lots from the Portobello Road on a series of damp Saturday
afternoons
in October; bronze boys on chargers all blackened with age, plaster fruit and stuffed kingfishers presented under glass domes, gewgaws in papier-maché and firedogs in cast-iron. A long gallery is so cluttered with these things upon, between, under and around its marble table-tops, that there is scarcely room to lay a finger between the bits and pieces; all collecting a patina of dust and cobwebs in a creepy half light.

And then there are the pictures. They stagger up the stairways unevenly and they hang lopsided round all the rooms; the gilt of their frames is tarnished and flaked; they are desperate for restoration and some of the oil paint is beginning to slide from the canvases in the terrible humidity of Calcutta. This is
catastrophe
, for many of them are masterpieces. Reynolds is here and so is Murillo, and Titian is said to be lurking somewhere. The guide books reckon there are four paintings by Rubens in this house:
The
Marriage
of
St
Catherine,
The
Martyrdom
of
St
Sebastian,
Minerva
giving
the
loving
cup
to
Apollo
and
The Return
of
Ulysses.
But when you stop before an aged and
indistinct
possibility and ask the old gentleman in the dhoti, who is taking you round, whether that is one, he just says ‘Oh, yers. That’s a priceless painting. Came from Europe. Oh yers. A priceless painting.’ Then he cocks his head on one side and looks at you keenly; and you simply can’t tell whether he is pulling your leg or wondering whether you are pulling his.

This is not a museum. It is a home, though you are very welcome to wander around it freely between the hours of ten and five for nothing more than your signature in the visitor’s book. It belongs to the Mullick family, who had long service and good conduct under the Mogul Emperors of India and were
eventually
granted the zamindar title to farm taxes, which made them as rich and landed as any British grandee was to become. It was built in 1835 by Raja Rajendra Mullick Bahadur, who had been orphaned at three and given an English guardian, Sir James Hogg, by the Supreme Court. Sir James presented his ward with a few birds to go with the Marble Palace (which wealthy young Rajendra started making at the age of sixteen) and that was the beginning of the menagerie. The Mullicks have been there ever since, collecting their treasures and their trifles when abroad, establishing a legend of charity when at home. For at noon every day their durwans at the gate begin to hand food and paise, a little gruffly, to a long column of destitutes who have been
waiting
with clamour and patience since the dawn; and the donation, it is said, continues until the limit of four thousand people has been reached. Meanwhile, the Mullicks themselves count their investments and cultivate their thoughts and are occasionally discovered playing Chopin on a grand piano in a corner of the marble ballroom; while the heat bears down and causes a little more stucco to peel from the buff front of the Marble Palace, and the great wooden blinds are drawn deep between the classical pilasters, and even the figures on the pedimented roof seem to droop in the sun. And if it were not for that burning sun, that queue of beggars, that noise and that smell, that air of being trapped, it could very easily be 7,000 miles away to the West. It is a Chatsworth of a place, muddled up with scenes from an
Indian
Great
Expectations;
and it would be no surprise at all to encounter Miss Havisham reclining in a corner among the
bric-à
-brac, the shadows and the cobwebs.