Calcutta Displays Its Elegance Amid Squalor

It’s already hot and steamy at 6 a.m. as Calcutta goes through its morning rituals.

Joggers trot past the marble Victoria Monument and the members-only Mohammadan Sports Club. The trimmed grass of the nearby Calcutta Race Course is wet from the overnight monsoon rains.

Sheltered under the Hooghly Bridge a mile away, women cook a meager breakfast over a fire of dried cow dung for a group of children, some naked, some in rags.

Hundreds of people bathe in the sluggish brown water of the Hooghly River. Devout Hindus, blessed by a nearly naked priest, stand waist-deep in the river dipping copper bowls of spices and flower petals into the water. Later their women will return to the river steps with the laundry to slap the clothes clean on the stone.

Fifty yards upriver, near the flower market where servants of the rich buy garlands of fresh marigolds and hibiscus, street dwellers defecate into the water. But for them the river is holy, an arm of the Mother Ganges and, therefore, cannot be unclean.

Across the river, in a sprawling conglomerate of slums called Howrah City, children splash under the hand pumps that supply water for drinking and washing. People politely avert their eyes from others using the open sewage canals between the shacks.

In an hour, the roads will be choked with traffic, and the air will begin to thicken with a blue haze of exhaust fumes.

For a few Calcutta residents, today may be a relaxed day at the club. For millions of others, the day will bring another test of survival.

Everyone in the city will go without city-supplied electricity for at least two hours. The hit-and-miss telephones will create hours of frustration. Roads, pitted and impassable after a heavy monsoon, will trap tens of thousands of cars like flies in a spider web.

Calcutta is 300 years old this year. Job Charnock, an agent of the East India Company, founded the trading post on the Hooghly on Aug. 24, 1690, near the village of Kalikata, named for Kali, the feared goddess of power and destruction.

It was, until 1912, the capital of British India, the second city of the British Empire after London, a city that pandered to the pleasures of the great men of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Today Calcutta is in decay. Its Gothic Victorian-age buildings are crumbling and blackened with grime and mold. Shanties sprout like weeds in the sidewalk cracks.

Even Calcutta’s stately clubs look shabby. Walls are peeling at the Saturday Club, where wealthy Indians sip gin and tonic on the veranda overlooking grass tennis courts. The once-white uniforms of the bearers, as the waiters are called, are stained and gray with age.

Decades of migration from impoverished villages and from neighboring Bangladesh have swollen Calcutta’s population to 12 million.

City services are collapsing, concedes Hassia Abdul Habib, the speaker of the West Bengal state legislature.

“The roads are mind-boggling. Communications are horrible. You can phone London directly, but you can’t phone your next-door neighbor,” he says.

Calcutta, he adds, “is coming to a boiling point.”

At the same time, Calcutta throbs with life. It is the home of a vibrant Bengal culture, poetry and experimental theater.

“Bengalis are not business people,” says Ajay Chatterjee of the Calcutta Municipal Development Authority. “They love literature, songs, drama. They are not pragmatic or practical.”

Calcutta fostered all three of India’s Nobel Prize laureates: poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, physics researcher Chandrasekhara V. Raman in 1930, and Mother Teresa, a naturalized Indian citizen who won the 1979 Peace Prize for her work with the destitute.

Perhaps only Calcutta, with its appalling poverty and capacity for survival, could have given rise to the phenomenon of Mother Teresa.

Forty years ago the Yugoslav-born Catholic nun began to scoop up the dying homeless from the gutters and rescue them from an anonymous death. Her mission for the poor has spread to 92 countries.

From the start, wealth and deprivation have coexisted in these inhospitable surroundings.

Built on mosquito-infested delta land 80 miles above the Bay of Bengal, Calcutta swelters in temperatures above 100 day after day in summer. The drenching rains of the monsoon season, from July to September, bring only humidity, not relief.

British author Geoffrey Moorhouse called it an act of lunacy to build a city here. “Everything in nature was against it.”

Robert Clive, who turned the East India Company into an empire for England in the 1750s, called Calcutta “the most wicked place in the universe.”

Mark Twain, who visited in 1896, said the weather was “enough to make a brass doorknob mushy.”

Calcutta’s reputation also is stained by corruption and unending political intrigue. That, too, is nothing new.

Lord Cornwallis, who was made governor of India after his surrender at Yorktown in the American War of Independence, wrote from his headquarters in Calcutta: “Every native of India, I verily believe, is corrupt.”

With all its faults, most Calcuttans are intensely loyal.

“Bengalis love their wretched city with the same passion as a mother loves her sick child,” wrote Khushwant Singh, a leading Indian author and journalist.

“We know all about our problems, but I love Calcutta,” said Yvonne de Silva, who runs a private bus service. “It bugs me that people come to Calcutta and take pictures of our garbage and our streets. Why don’t they take pictures of their own garbage?”

Thousands of people live from the refuse, which the city can’t collect fast enough. Some sift through it for peelings or chicken skins for soup, competing with crows, cattle and pariah dogs. Ragpickers search it for anything to sell.

Women collect, dry and shape the droppings from the Brahman cattle, which roam freely. Others sweep up coal dust, wet it and roll it into balls of black mud called gril that also can fuel a cooking fire.

Looking down from her second-story veranda, Sheila Lahiri pointed to a shantytown that had sprung up opposite her apartment on Ballygunge Road, a street of elegant residences.

“Could you believe this was possible 15 or even 10 years ago?” said Lahiri, whose father, Lord Sinha, was given a hereditary seat in the British House of Lords.

Authorities long ago gave up the idea of tearing down the slums and focused instead on alleviating the misery.

Calcutta used to have 1,000 deaths a year from cholera, but the disease was brought under control by water filtering and installing 20,000 public hand pumps in the slums.

Calcutta has always been the refuge for the poor and displaced of eastern India. Waves of immigrants came with every ethnic upheaval, famine or war.

The population more than doubled from 4.4 million in 1950, to 9.2 million in 1975.

While the city grew, its resources shrank. A silting of the Hooghly virtually killed the port, which just 40 years ago received nearly half of India’s imports.

Recession, labor strife and political terrorism in the 1960s persuaded many businesses to leave. Fifty years after the government shifted to New Delhi, the economic center of India has gravitated to Bombay.

The Communists, now 13 years in power, blame the policies of the federal government in New Delhi for giving the state less than what they say is its share of national funds.

About 300,000 people have no home other than the pavement, according to some estimates. Stretched out on dirty rags or on the hard stone, they sleep undisturbed by the trucks and cars roaring past.

They have an average weekly income of less than $5.55, said a study by the Institute of Local Government and Urban Studies.

Thirteen percent of the street dwellers work as rickshaw pullers, earning an average of 66 cents a day. It’s the last major city on Earth where men pull passenger carriages like human horses.

The study estimated that 43% of the city’s residents live in huts in squatter settlements, refugee colonies or slum neighborhoods, known here as a bustees .

But an outsider walking through even the deepest slums of Howrah senses no anger or danger.

“Life is hard here. These people have nothing to look forward to,” said Bettina Borgmann, a German doctor who volunteered to spend her summer vacation in a slum clinic.

“But the people surprise me. Most seem quite happy. They are content with what they have. Just look at the children playing outside with whatever they can find. I have never felt uncomfortable here.”