Calcutta - a metropolis in crisis

"Why not write a poem about a bloody great mess that was dropped by God and called Calcutta. About how it throngs, smells and lives and gets ever bigger". Gunther Grass is not the only one to have been affected by the former capital of British India and its ethical, moral and emotional limits. The first General Governor of Calcutta, Robert Clive, regarded the city as the most corrupt place in the entire world. Mahatma Gandhi described Calcutta as a dying city and the Indian-Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul describes Calcutta as a city without future with the words: "All of its suffering are sufferings of death. I know not of any other city whose plight is more hopeless".

Almost every presentation of this city with a population of many millions could carry the sub-title "a city in crisis". Indeed, no other city is connected with poverty, illness, suffering, death, decline and hopelessness in quite the same way as Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. The culture shock experienced by visitors from the west is overwhelming - in every sense of the word. The poverty and chaos of Calcutta explode upon all one's senses. This may also be the reason why TV, writers and journalists have tended to focus on Calcutta more than other cities to the great displeasure of the Indians who accuse the west of concentrating on the negative side of India. Indeed, Indians also reacted with mixed feelings to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mother Teresa, who, until the award, had been largely unknown in India. They felt that the award focused the world's attention on the seamy side of Calcutta. A film adaptation of a French bestseller about life in the slums of Calcutta was prevented from being broadcast by the Indian government - eventually so many changes were made to it that hardly any similarities with the book remained.

The people of Calcutta, that is, the Bengali middle class and the city's intellectuals reacted even more sensitively to the award. Rajiv Gandhi's comments, reflecting the impression of many Indians, that Calcutta was a dying city caused a storm of protest and endless debate in the West Bengali parliament. The people of Calcutta actually love their city and accept the dilapidated living conditions, the lack of space, the lack of clean water, the dirt, the daily power cuts and the extremely crowed public transport with scolding resignation. They regard Calcutta as the most Indian of all cities.

The Calcutta of today, a demonstration of the insurmountable problems faced by the growth of the city in the third world, was, until the independence of India, the second largest city in the British Empire after London, the largest and wealthiest city in India, the country's most important port and largest industrial location. It was the colonial city par excellence, the bridgehead for British rule in India and a place from where the hinterland could be exploited, also to the benefit of the Indian elite in Calcutta.

The impoverishment of the hinterland and the population explosion drove many of the poor from rural areas into the city. The flow of people into the city increased following the splitting of India and the creation of refugees from the east of Bengal. The city's economy, however, collapsed and offered no new jobs. The city's already precarious balance between population numbers and the ability to support them was destroyed. Originally planned by the British to accommodate a maximum of one million, the nightmare that has become Calcutta is today bursting at the seams. Within 30 years the population of Calcutta grew from 4.4 million in 1961 to over 12 million today. Just like a lake, that can no longer carry anymore pollution, Calcutta collapsed.

The dramatic consequences of this highly explosive mixture of population explosion and economic decline are apparent at every turn. Together with Delhi, Calcutta belongs to one of the world's seven cities with the worse air pollution. The unbearable hot and humid climate together with the exhaust-fume impregnated air has led to a situation in which almost half of the city's population suffers from bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis or other bronchial illnesses. The drinking water is as contaminated with lead as the air, since the pipes delivering it date from the previous century. Only half of the city's population, however, are actually connected to the water supply system. Sewers exist only in the city centre, meaning that the annual monsoon creates streets swimming in excrement and high-water. In conditions such as these the fact that the power fails on an almost daily basis does no longer seems to annoy anyone.

But the most depressing thing of all is the consequences caused by the hopeless overpopulation. There are over 30,000 people to each square kilometer. Two thirds of Calcutta's population live in the officially recognized slums the so-called Bustees. At a cost of around 2 dollars a month they live in primitive huts made  out of clay, corrugated iron and old wooden boxes. These, however, are the privileged ones taking advantage of the close social contacts and at least a bare minimum of sanitation. Less fortunate still are the squatters, who live in terrible conditions pitching their "houses" made out of cloth and plastic sheeting against the walls of houses. But the worst of all is reserved for almost one million of the dirtiest - in the truest sense of the word - that possess only a tin bowl and a dirt-encrusted mat. Their existence is lived out on the pavements, in the doorways of houses, under the ox-pulled carriages, next to refuse dumps and public sewers, and between rats and mangy dogs.

Noise, mass poverty and the well-known hot temperament of the Bengalis have made Calcutta into a powder keg. Nowhere else is the atmosphere more aggressive than here. And yet! Calcutta, this nightmare city, seems to bounce with life. The philosophy of life shared by the Bengalis is one of optimism, vitality, humor and creativity. And the impact of this enjoyment of life in face of the terrible conditions in which they live is almost physiological. No where else in India are celebrations so exuberant, is there so much laughter or are debates so intense and controversial as here in Calcutta. That what Bengalis think today is done throughout India tomorrow, according to an Indian saying. Home to the first Indian to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Rabindranath Tagore, city of the philosophers Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, and stronghold of Indian intellectuals and revolutionaries, Calcutta is regarded as the culture and art centre of the Indian subcontinent. No where else are so many artful and ambitious films made. The city produces hundreds of literary magazines, there are hundreds of theatres, mostly performed by amateur actors, an annual book show attracting two million visitors, most of whom are from Calcutta and are unable to read. In short: Intellectual life as in no other Indian city. Regardless of the number of times the ultimate demise of Calcutta has been forecast in the past, the people of Calcutta remain proud of their city.

City of misery and happiness

Women cook rice in cans on tiny coal stoves, children search through garbage cans for vegetable remains, mangy dogs and dark black birds wait, hoping that something might fall to the floor. Old and dented cars blow out thick exhaust gases and loud Vespas and rickshaws make their way along the smog-ridden streets.

Calcutta, capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a sea of misery. Yet the flow of people from rural areas into the city continues unabated. No one is sure how many people live in this, the biggest and youngest of Indian cities. The number is at least 11 million with a further 2000 arriving daily to join the search for a place on the already overcrowded pavements.

It was here in the middle of this poverty that Mother Teresa, who was buried on Saturday evening, founded her "Missionaries of Charity" order. She gave the poor and starving a warm meal, the dying a bed and - for her the most important thing of all - she gave them care and the feeling that they were not alone in their fate". 

The order is housed in a gray stone-built building next to the temple of the Goddess Kail. In days gone by, people were sacrificed to her; today Hindus burn their dead in front of the temple on the riverbanks of the Hugli, a tributary of the holy River Ganges.

The fishing village of Calicata was named after Kali and was mentioned for the first time by a Bengali poet in 1495. The harbor city of Calcutta grew out of this fishing village. Calcutta was chosen as the base for the East India Trading Company in 1690. Calcutta was the capital of British India from 1773 to 1912. The city's economic boom began during colonial times. Extravagant English buildings with Indian influence such as the Victoria Memorial were built. Most of the former villas, however, are today in ruins. From 1914 increasing numbers of rural people moved out of the countryside and into the city in the hope of finding work. A large flood of refugees descended upon Calcutta in 1947 as the Muslim part of Pakistan (east Pakistan became Bangladesh) separated from India following heavy battles.

Calcutta, however, is not only a "dying city" as Rajiv Gandhi, the last Prime Minister of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty, once said. Calcutta is also the centre of Indian intellectual life and art. The French writer, Dominique Lapierre, lived in the "city of happiness". In his best-selling novel he wrote that no where else in the world had he found so much love, care and happiness as in the poorest parts of Calcutta.

[Kirstin Wenk, Berliner Morgenpost vom 15. September 1997]