The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta

Travel Guide

Calcutta

Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India’s industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born.

Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades.

“After all, everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta, The city is situated between a river and a swamp. Its weather Mark Twain had said ‘ was enough to make a brass doorknob mushy.’ For six months out of the year, you are never dry. You take two to three showers a day to keep cool , but start sweating the moment you turn off the tap. The dry winter months, where I arrived, were worse. I woke up some mornings feeling my chest was on fire. Breathing in Calcutta, Manash, the neighbourhood doctor told me, was like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”

“Other insights include the floods, the paanwallas who perched on stoop son street corners and sold their wares off carts. Most of the city’s goods are transported this way. Most of the buildings you see are concrete and covered in mildew, with political slogans graffitied all over them. Bazaars seen fish, tea shops have their benches spilling out onto the pavements and roads. Most noticeable are the slums beside the caged balconies of the middle classes.”
At the time the book was written “Calcutta was not a happy place. UIt was in its twenty third year of Communist Rule and its third decade of factory closures.

It has been steadily eclipsed by Bombay and Delhi.