Reaction Mixed in Overcrowded City : Book About Calcutta Inspires Tourist ‘Craze to See Slums’

Santhi Bhattacharya, one of this city’s most enthusiastic and able tour guides, was complaining the other day about a new breed of tourist.

Until recently, he said, the few Western tourists who came to Calcutta were content to see the city’s famous monuments--mostly such relics of the British Empire as the ornate memorial to Queen Victoria or Dalhousie Square, once the headquarters of the British East India Co.

To show the “other side” of Calcutta, the terrible overcrowding and the poverty, a professional guide would typically escort his clients on a fairly sanitized excursion to a railroad station or to one of the homes for the dying established by Mother Teresa, the saintly Albanian nun who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

“The Howrah railroad station was a big hot cake for us,” Bhattacharya said.

Recently, however, the guide has noted what he sees as a disturbing trend. “Now there is a craze to see the slums,” he said. “They want to ride in a rickshaw and see the slums.”

Chance to See Poverty

One Japanese travel agency actually organized a youth tour package to Calcutta so that children of the affluent Japanese society would have the opportunity to see abject poverty firsthand. This prompted Calcutta’s establishment newspaper, the Statesman, to respond with a sarcastic editorial:

“Despite Calcutta’s reputation, its long-suffering citizens never really thought that their city would one day figure on the tourist map of squalor. But now children from the land of the rising yen are to be conducted on a tour of what might be called the city with a yen for oblivion.”

The main reason for this heightened interest in Calcutta’s lowest levels is a best-selling book by French author Dominique Lapierre entitled “The City of Joy.”

Since it first appeared in French two years ago, “The City of Joy” has been translated into 16 languages and sold more than 3 million copies. On the streets of Calcutta these days, the book is often seen clutched in the hands of Western tourists. If Paris has the Guide Michelin, Calcutta has “The City of Joy.”

A Book of ‘Faction’

The book purports to be a factual profile of a slum across the Hooghly River from Calcutta in the industrial suburb of Howrah. Lapierre himself calls the book “faction,” which he defines as “true facts put together in a composite manner to tell a story about events that do not precisely occur at the same time.”

For example, Lapierre, who co-authored several other best-sellers with American writer Larry Collins, including “Is Paris Burning?” and “O Jerusalem,” changed the date of India’s first detonation of an atomic device in 1974 to “somewhere around 1980” to help the flow of the story. Likewise, a historic drought, a flood and a hurricane were all lumped in the time frame of the story to provide more drama.

“The City of Joy” is a dramatic, very sympathetic portrait of a slum that focuses on the lives of a poor rickshaw puller and a Roman Catholic priest. In the French version, the priest is a Frenchman. In the British and American editions, he is Polish.

Actually, Lapierre said in a telephone interview from his residence in New York, the character is based on two priests, one French and one Swiss, who are still working in Calcutta.

Donates Half of Royalties

Because of his sympathies for the poor of Calcutta, Lapierre said he is giving half of his royalties from the book and from a planned movie version to Calcutta organizations helping the poor, including a home for the children of lepers. So far, he said, the book has made about $2 million. So by his reckoning, it will generate at least $1 million for Calcutta’s poor.

Although response to the book around the world generally has been glowing--the French newspaper Le Monde called it a masterpiece--reaction in Calcutta has been mixed. One of the priests used by Lapierre as a model for his character burned the book after reading it, angered over passages that involved sexual intercourse in a leper colony. However, Lapierre said that he and the priest have since made up their differences.

Meanwhile, the governing board of the main community organization in Pilkhana, the actual name of the slum that Lapierre called Anand Nagar (City of Joy) in his book, unanimously rejected a donation of nearly $400,000 from the author on the grounds that the book is an “exploitation of poor people.”

“We read his book,” said Dr. Sushil K. Sen, 80, a physician and president of the Siva Sangh Simiti (Committee of Mutual Aid) in Pilkhana. “We did not like it. What has been stated in the book is all fantasy.”

Angry at Rejection

Lapierre is furious at the rejection of his money. He contends that the antagonism is the result of an internal feud in the organization, which was created by one of the priests featured in his book.

“My feeling is that it is a personal attitude of two or three people who felt that their own role in the story was not big enough. Because of their vanity the poor will suffer,” he said.

Most of the social workers in Pilkhana opposed the decision to reject the money, he added. “The money I offered will be used elsewhere. I am submerged in requests for help.”

In addition to the royalties from the book, Lapierre said he has received 40,000 letters from readers containing donations amounting to another half million dollars.

Meanwhile, some city officials see the book and surrounding publicity as a way to improve the city.

Calcutta Mayor Kamal Basu recently submitted to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi a $1.5-billion proposal for saving Calcutta. Included in the proposal are plans to install new water mains, add 18,000 toilets to the sewage system and convert dung from Calcutta’s 30,000 cattle into methane to fuel power plants.

Basu called his plans for a revived Calcutta “City of Joy: Designs for Tomorrow.” In Calcutta’s highly charged intellectual circles, there are several objections to Lapierre’s work, which has focused on the city a degree of attention not seen since the early publicity about Mother Teresa’s charities.

Deviates From Reality

They include the fact that the main Indian character in the book, rickshaw puller Hasari Pal, is described as a Bengali--that is, a native of surrounding Bengal state. In reality, the overwhelming majority of rickshaw pullers are from Bihar, the terribly poor Indian state to the north.

Also, Pal is a Hindu, whereas most rickshaw pullers are Muslim. He lives with his family, while most pullers live alone in Calcutta and send their earnings to families in the countryside. And in Pilkhana, the slum area described in the book, bicycle rickshaws--rickshaws pulled by men riding bicycles--are used, not the kind pulled on foot by Pal.

There are also some religious objections to the book, which is imbued with Western, Christian attitudes toward poverty as reflected in the following passage, purportedly a sermon delivered by the main priest character to a group of slum dwellers:

“It is easy for any man to recognize and glorify the riches of the world. But only a poor man can know the riches of poverty. Only a poor man can know the riches of suffering. . . .”

The idea that suffering is a means to a higher end is alien to the Indian mind, tour guide Bhattacharya said. To a Hindu, suffering is suffering.

Bhattacharya lives in an ashram directed by his brother, a Hindu holy man. The ashram maintains a free medical clinic and, like many other Hindu organizations, dispenses meals to the city’s poor. He contends that the extensive publicity given “The City of Joy,” Mother Teresa and other Christian social workers ignores the good works of the native Bengalis.

Decries Negative Emphasis

However, the guide’s main objection to the attention focused on his city since publication of “The City of Joy” is that it once again emphasizes the negative side of Calcutta--the filth and the slums and the disease.

Perhaps no other great city in the world suffers the same depressing image as Calcutta. Calcutta-bashing has been in vogue among journalists since the time of Rudyard Kipling, the British writer who penned the following stanzas in a poem about Calcutta:

As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,

So it spread--

Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built

On the silt--

Palace, byre, hovel--poverty and pride--

Side by side;

And, above the packed and pestilential town,

Death looked down.

While it has always had its miserable side, Calcutta remains the cultural capital of India.

Its bookstores contain the greatest variety of English and Bengali prose in Asia. Calcutta has 33 museums, including a strange, privately owned marble palace built in gaudy rococo style at the center of a poor neighborhood, where a priceless work by 17th-Century artist Peter Paul Rubens is displayed. It has 29 legitimate theaters--a critically acclaimed production of French playwright Jean Anouilh’s “Becket” in English has recently finished its run--and more than 5,000 dramatic clubs.

The city has 27 daily newspapers, including two in Chinese.

For many Indians, and a small group of foreigners who live there, Calcutta remains one of the most stimulating cities in the world.

Diplomat Likes City

“This city grows on you--and I don’t mean like a mold you have to scrape off,” a senior Western diplomat based here said.

“The image of Calcutta abroad is that this is the eighth circle of Dante’s hell. But Calcutta is different than that,” the diplomat continued. “Between reality and perception falls a shadow. This city is poor but people are all scratching to make a living. Look at the streets: Everyone is in a hurry someplace.”

Further, he noted, Calcutta is on the rebound.

“I have the impression that Calcutta has hit bottom and is on the way up. Bankers are showing more interest in the place. Businessmen are more confident.”

A new petrochemical complex in Haldia, about 80 miles south of Calcutta where officials hope to establish a modern plastics manufacturing center, has boosted hopes of a regional revival. Meanwhile, the half-completed Calcutta subway system, Calcutta Metro Railroad, the first subway to be built in India, has become a source of pride for residents.

Slum Now Improved

Even Pilkhana, the dreary industrial slum profiled by Lapierre, is much improved from the descriptions given in the book.

The dirt paths described by Lapierre have been paved. A three-story dispensary with special wards for children suffering from malnutrition is now run by the Siva Sangh Simiti amid this community of 70,000. Storefronts and private homes have been converted into hundreds of small manufacturing centers and assembly shops where residents make aluminum boxes, radio parts and fans.

Donations from French families, inspired by a French schoolteacher who took up the Pilkhana cause, have paid for vocational training centers for boys and girls in motorcycle mechanics, welding, carpentry, sewing and block printing, among other trades.

In short, it is no longer the sump of misery depicted by Lapierre.

Lapierre agrees that conditions in his slum have improved dramatically. However, he says that the improvements have resulted in higher rents that have forced 20,000 residents, including the leper community that was central to his book, to move away.

As a result, he said, “The City of Joy is moving and new cities of joy are opening up all over.”