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Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914)
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Calcutta: Two Years in the City By Amit Chaudhuri, Hamish Hamilton, Rs 599
There is a figure in literature, featuring prominently in Modernist novels, who makes an art of jaywalking in city streets: he is the flâneur. This would be someone like Leopold Bloom walking down the streets of Dublin to buy pork kidney from the butcher’s, the narrator in Swann’s Way perambulating in the Champs-Élysées, or, in a reversal of gender prerogatives, Mrs Dalloway making her way to a florist’s shop in London on a June day. By virtue of their desultory wanderings — they keep losing themselves in the labyrinths of the city to find their way — they are observers par excellence, for whom every person passing by, every object on offer in the modern temples of consumption, the shops and arcades, becomes a text to be studied minutely and deciphered. Closer home, a flâneur would be a babu like Kaliprasanna Sinha, alias Hootum, idling around in the seething corners of 19th-century Calcutta, writing sharp, satiric sketches of life that are still without a parallel. These men, rarely women, are not necessarily in love with the urban spaces they have come to inhabit; it is just that their souls are stretched tightly over the city skies, often causing them, in the course of their wanderings, to have such visions of the streets as the streets hardly understand. In their imagination, the city becomes a palimpsest, its present gathering meaning in the light of the past, which lingers in a state of erasure.
In the book, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, Amit Chaudhuri essays forth from his apartment in Calcutta’s Sunny Park in various directions — to nearby Ekdalia; Park Street and Free School Street towards the city centre; Shobhabazar in the north; to “Kamalgachi”, Rajpur and Bantala in the fringes. He is also a flâneur mapping Calcutta, where he is simultaneously at home and in exile. Calcutta is the city of his birth, the city discarded when his family moved to Bombay in 1962, the city of chhuti, of summer vacations spent in his uncle’s house on Pratapaditya Road, and the city somewhat grudgingly accepted as home when he moved back here to be with his parents in 1999. For Chaudhuri, Calcutta is the quintessential modern city, not because it is “‘new’ or ‘developed’”, but because of its “aura of inherited decay and life” that would make it a kin of Joyce’s Dublin or Eliot’s London. In Chaudhuri’s private mythology, the city’s association with holidays from school — when time gave up its linear progression to eddy around deeply familiar objects like the “green French windows with slats, the intricate cornices on the balconies, the red stone floors, the stairs rising to the wide terrace where clothes are hung to dry ” — makes it a place forever bathed in a crepuscular light, an enchanted place of “play and freedom”. This particular quality may also be one of the reasons why, for all protestations to the contrary, the city still loves its bandhs — the days of ceasework, the economy be ignored — which, like so many other things, are a legacy of the Left’s long rule in West Bengal. “Bengal cultivates — and simultaneously mourns and celebrates — its disconnect with globalisation.” The private and the political, the home and the beyond merge in Chaudhuri’s fraught relationship with Calcutta.
His discomfort with Kolkata, as opposed to the Calcutta of yore, has much to do with the city’s newfound willingness to give up its past as it pell mell joins the rush for the savouries of globalization. The green slatted windows, which, as Chaudhuri points out, are to be seen both in the early 19th-century Chinsurah oils capturing the metropolis in a moment of change and intermittently all over the present city, can also suddenly be found placed on the road today, as in a surreal image, yanked out of the structure which had held it so long. The window without its moorings would be familiar to inhabitants of Calcutta — it would instantaneously signify an old building being ‘promoted’, to the status of an apartment or a ‘condominium’, which, in due course, would be endorsed by celebrities who have replaced the gods. It is part of the process in which Calcutta is learning to become ‘hip’ — it involves, among other things, congregating in perfume-scented malls instead of, say, the terrace, to enjoy leisure; ‘eating out’, especially in Italian or Chinese restaurants (Chaudhuri makes detailed case studies of this particular phenomenon); and, most importantly, forgetting history, and with it, the language that shaped it.
The creeping oblivion on the last front occasions Chaudhuri’s frantic questions, “And, excuse me, Dada, did the Bengal Renaissance really happen? Could you point out its signs?” as he seems to lose his way in a Calcutta he can hardly recognize. It is the query of the flâneur who has loitered in streets searching for a city, only to discover that the city has long left its local habitation to curl up around texts containing a time, a language, a culture, a class, a state of mind, all of which are diligently being wiped off.
The author as the protagonist of his own narrative displays the classic symptoms of flânerie — he makes his class position clear at the outset, situating himself in such elite places as the Bengal Club, Taj Bengal’s Hub, ITC Sonar Bangla or the dining room of a “newspaper magnate”. This means that even while interrogating, say, the owner of a ‘pice’ hotel in Free School Street, or walking down Park Street with a migrant beggar, he is in the crowd but vehemently not of it. When there is no actual glass wall, whether of Flurys or of his car window, to separate Chaudhuri from hoi polloi, an invisible one of the mind ensures that he stands outside the action, conscious of being viewed with suspicion by his interviewees on the streets, but taking notes with “sociological rigour” for this book nonetheless.
However, the rigour seems to take its toll soon, and after the first few pages of ramblings around Free School Street, Chaudhuri never ventures out on foot into the roads again. When he is not travelling by car to malls, five-star hotels or to the house of the anachronistic Inga-Banga couple, the Mukherjees, to whom he devotes a sizeable portion of the book, he sits in his apartment studying ‘other’ lives as they present themselves to him. “People begin to arrive in the mornings. The young man, Raja, who cleans the cars in the building, strides in to collect the car keys; the cook rings the doorbell; then the part-time help, Kamala, my father’s daytime carer.” Chaudhuri’s account of his family’s ever-absconding, pilfering, cook, Lakkhi, is more in the nature of the mandatory gossip about servants exchanged among women in kitty parties than a demographic study. Coming almost at the end of the book, it also reads like an afterthought — a belated attempt to balance out the descriptions of upper middle-class life that make up most of the narrative.
The book is erudite throughout, lyrical at places, and boring at others, at least for a Calcutta-pent reader like me for whom certain sections, like those on Chaudhuri’s analysis of the political scene of West Bengal, convey nothing new. There is also a claustrophobic quality to the book that I could only attribute to a failure of the empathetic imagination, of the author’s ability to enter the lives of people not related to him. Ever conscious of his difference, of his being the “Massachusetts or Bombay” type, the conspicuous scion of a disappearing bhadralok class, Chaudhuri ends up writing a book that is more about himself, his family members and his “natural distrust” of casual acquaintances, than about the city and its inhabitants. The book could as well have been titled ‘Amit Chaudhuri: Two Years in Calcutta.’
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