India Oh, Kolkata!
The real adventure of India is to be found in the cities, writes A.A. Gill After independence and partition, tourists going to India had a one-wish destination and the Indian Tourist Board strongly recommended that they went there, and that little cartoon Maharajah who was the Air India mascot was keen to fly them. It was Kashmir. Kashmir was India for foreigners. The lakes with their houseboats were perfect for honeymoons, the weather was balmy and warm (as was the food), the views were stunning, the shopping more-ish and the people friendly. Sadly not to each other. Events — and the idiot Mountbatten’s snobbish, botched national conversion — put Kashmir out of bounds and India had to come up with Plan B.
With typical resourcefulness they invented Rajasthan. Well, they capitalised on the romance of a lot of crumbling houses with absurd plumbing in a desert and one remarkable palace in a lake, which by the way is like the Eiffel Tower — far better seen from a distance than visited.
With Rajasthan came the tourist triangle of Delhi-Agra-Jaipur which, if you’ve never been to the subcontinent, is a good place to start. Tourism seeped out into the vast confusion of the country: the beat and batik of Goa, and the athletically fornicating vegetarians of Kerala. Before tourism, what tourists there were would have gone to the hill stations of Shimla and Ootacamund or the tea plantations of Darjeeling and Assam. Anywhere that imitated Switzerland.
I would suggest that the great, great joy — the real adventure of India — is actually to be found in its cities, not its palaces. And the most exciting are rarely included on tourist itineraries. Calcutta is the steaming, insistent, sinned-against-and-sinning yet transcendent cultural, ethical and argumentative pulse of India. You can see why it isn’t top of everyone’s list of places to go. It isn’t an ergonomically competent city. On the international Stockholm-meter of urban efficiency it barely registers a minus one. It’s a mess. An exhausting mess of smelly chaos and joy and learning. Of poverty, poetry, pathos, chai and laughter. In the cacophony of Calcutta there is a heavenly coherence; a tabla rhythm that is the heartbeat of India. Now it’s Kolkata, and before you all start to sneer and raise your Spectatorish blood pressure, get puce about political correctness and damnable ingratitude, remember it’s their f***ing city. It’s India’s city. It’s Bengal’s capital and they can call it what they damn well like.
Part of the brilliance of the place is that everything gets reincarnated. Calcutta is the appellation of colonialism. It was the seat of occupation. A city created by the English from a few warehouses built on the side of the massive brown Hooghly river — a holy arm of the Ganges reinvented by the Bengalese. It still has the most impressive colonial buildings. Not the weirdly apologetic nostalgia of Lutyens and Baker — their Viceroy’s Palace in Delhi always strikes me as a whining Dear John letter made of stone. Part vainglory and bluster, part simpering apology begging forgiveness, dressed up as a civil servant’s Mogul architecture that we were supposed to be proud to leave behind; a Mogul palace being humped by a Huddersfield railroad station.
Calcutta is more impressive because it’s more honest. It represents money and power and was built without doubt. Here is the massive Queen Victoria Memorial, far more sumptuous and bonkers than anything we dared build at home; a rival Taj Mahal for a plain, dumpy old white woman. In its surrounding park, thousands of games of cricket are played in strips, each set of fielders overlapping those on either side, a marvellous confusion of a game that is now more theirs than ours. In the old Viceroy Palace, if you ask nicely you can be taken in India’s first lift and shown the room where a subcontinent was governed from Rangoon to Trincomalee. There are seats for the military, the administrators, judges and police, and what’s most striking is how unstriking it is. How small. How very, very English and clubbable. This room is a room where you’d never have to raise your voice above a patrician murmur, yet you can only wonder at how many million lives were directed and dispatched from this senior common room. How small was the effort needed to plunder India. How temporary it feels, how chancey. What a ‘cor blimey’ bluff. Go and look at the rather touching English churches and their rundown graveyards and see how really chancey it was. The average ages are pitiful. The graphic means of meeting your maker numerous and exotic.
It was when I saw little knots of tourists standing around an obscured outline in the street that it finally came home to me (or rather, abroad to me) what bad taste, what sorry manners colonial tourism is. We were looking at the outline of the old Palace Guard House, better known to the gung-ho Brit as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Long since pulled down, it is the ghost of an old grievance and to come here, to resurrect it, is to miss the vital point of this city. It is a centre of radicalism, of cultural excellence. The home of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray and Subhas Chandra Bose.
Bose is a peculiarly Bengali hero; his statue stands and stares at the clerks’ palace. He is as venerated here as Gandhi and was the Che Guevara of Indian independence — though a bit fatter and myopic. A communist who raised a nationalist army to fight against the British, which unfortunately meant fighting with the Japanese, and still being on the wrong side for the right reasons. This is still a fundamentally communist city. The local government banned computers in municipal buildings just as India’s technical software and programming industry took off. They did it to protect the jobs of thousands of paperfilers and docket-fillers. Again, the wrong decision for the right reasons. Bengalis are famously stubborn and argumentative. Sometimes called India’s Yorkshiremen, except they are also intellectual, artistic, friendly and good at cricket — so not like Yorkshiremen at all really.
You should go to Calcutta to see an Indian socialist city rescued from provincial Anglo occupation. The streets of booksellers, the coffee shops, the seafood, the gats on the river. You should see the temple to Kali — the Dark Destroyer, Calcutta’s patron goddess — the most awe-filled holy place I know, next to which that embarrassing Albanian necromancer Mother Teresa built her evangelical death warehouse.
Calcutta is one of the last places that still sports human rickshaws. Not peddling on a bike, but pulling like a back-to-front wheelbarrow. If you really want to get a feel for our collective shared colonial past, you should hire one, slip the chap a little extra and ask if you can pull him around the Victoria Monument while he tells you how bloody marvellous the railways are.
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