Calcutta I Love You, I Love You Not

By Rudrangshu Mukherjee

This essay is the first in a series commenced by the Edict titled ‘The Hometown Series’, which shall explore the feelings, descriptions, love, and maybe even hatred Ashokans have for their hometowns or their conceptions of home.

I am accepting, for the purposes of this essay, a simple definition of the term “hometown’” the place where one lives. In my case, this is the city of Calcutta where I was born, where I spent the better part of my life, the place where I will, in all possibility, continue to live till I die. In these many senses, Calcutta is “home’’ for me. But am I at home in Calcutta? The answer is an emphatic “no’’. The answer will be in the negative if the question were reformulated as “Am I most at home in Calcutta?’’ There are some other places where I have felt more at home than I have in Calcutta.

Readers will have noticed by now that I am writing about Calcutta and not Kolkata. There is a very good reason for this. Kolkata was the name of one of the three villages out of which Calcutta grew. The other two were Sutanuti and Govindapur. Kolkata was a village, Calcutta is a city. I am most emphatically a city dweller, not someone from a village. The English East India Company at some point in the late 17th century acquired the three villages mentioned above and from 1709 we have letters going to the headquarters of the Company in Leadenhall Street in London which have as their address: “Fort William in Calcutta.’’ This is the first clear mention that exists of what was to become by the second half of the 19th century the city of Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire.

Calcutta, unlike Delhi, has no medieval or ancient past. It was a city that the British built first to service their trade, then to serve as a bridgehead for their conquests in North India and then as their administrative headquarters before they made New Delhi their capital in 1911. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries, Calcutta had a well-demarcated area known as the White Town. The British laid out this area where they lived in a planned manner with tree-lined avenues, wide open spaced and elegant office and residential spaces. In the vicinity of the White Town grew what the British called the Black Town where the Indian lived. This part had narrow streets, often dingy and dirty. But the Black Town also had magnificent mansions in which lived rich Bengalis who had made their money by collaborating with the British. These buildings made Kipling call Calcutta the City of Palaces. The two parts of Calcutta, in spite of their distinctive characteristics, was linked by Calcutta’s principal thoroughfare (it is even today the city’s main road), a north-south artery which was in pre-British times a pilgrim track that linked two temples. The original name of this thoroughfare was The Old Pilgrim Road.

It is time perhaps to change registers from history to autobiography. I was born in Calcutta, went to school and college there and the better part of my working life was spent in Calcutta. In that sense I am a Calcuttan and I saw myself for a long time as a loyal Calcuttan.

That loyalty has worn thin.

I think I now have love-hate relationship with the city of my birth. When I was growing up in my Calcutta — my childhood, adolescence and youth— the city had a very vibrant cultural life: it was the golden age of Bengali theatre, Satyajit Ray was making his best films, there was a thriving and argumentative intellectual life fed by journals, magazines and discussions in the coffee house.

This ambience was an integral part of my growing up initially through my father who personally knew most of the eminent cultural personalities of the city. Both Sombhu Mitra, the leading theatre personality, and Ray were family friends. This culture had a very significant European dimension to it. Most of the cultural figures even though they were rooted in Bengali and Indian culture were also at ease with many aspects of European culture, its literature, painting, and in the case of Ray its music too. It was undeniably an elite culture but it was gracious and understated.

This has all but disappeared from Calcutta which is now a strident and raucous city hurtling into a future already captured by land sharks, heartless politicians and their hired goons.

It is no longer my city. It is my home where I am not at home.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Chancellor of Ashoka University, grew up in Calcutta. He completed his schooling and undergraduate education in the city.