Radharani was not yet 11. She was well-born but now reduced to penury. Her father was dead, their vast wealth was lost and her mother too was ailing. Little Radharani made a garland of wildflowers and went to the mela hoping to sell it. She needed only a paisa or two to buy medicines for her mother.
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Radharani in 1875. In the old currency system, which prevailed during the time, one rupee equalled 192 pies and one pice equalled 3 pies. An anna equalled 4 pice or 12 pies, and one rupee equalled 16 annas. The shift to the decimal series was effective from 1957. Thereafter, the rupee came to be divided into 100 paise.
At a time when bribes for Group D jobs with monthly salaries ₹30,000 upwards reportedly range from ₹5 to 15 lakh, the story of Radharani’s garland seems ludicrous. But then so is India’s inflation story.
Inflation is the rate of change of price. And while economists and experts will hold forth on it eloquently in terms of CPIs and PCEPIs and GDP deflators, the common man understands it less as a market concept and more as a lived experience, the behemoth between life and good living.
Shobha Rani Chatterjee is the oldest of all those whom The Telegraph interviewed for this story. The nonagenarian, who lives in south Calcutta’s Baghajatin area, recalls the famine-ridden 1950s: “Those days, vegetables, pulses and fish were cheaper than water. You could get a whole ilish for ₹5, but we were still starving because there was no rice.”
Tapesh Chandra Sen’s family shifted from Odisha to Dumdum’s Motijheel in the early 1950s. The 86-year-old retired medical practitioner recalls someone urging his grandfather to stock rice as it was going to get dearer. These are some of the prices of things he remembers: ₹20 for one maund of rice; ₹5 for 250 grams of tea and 2 annas for the bus fare from Motijheel to Shyambazar. (One seer equalled 1.25 kilos, and one maund 37.3 kilos.)
Vintage style photograph in antique frame sits on a table beside an old rocker with a postage stamp patterned quilt over the back of the rocker.
Retired engineer Shyamal Kumar Bhattacharya’s private school fees in the 1950s was ₹3 a month. This was when Bengali newspapers advertised jobs seeking schoolteachers at a monthly salary of ₹70 plus DA of ₹5. Special representatives for established firms made ₹100 a month plus perks; stenographers employed with the Board of Secondary Education, West Bengal, enjoyed a pay scale of ₹125-275, while an ailing person’s attendant could earn ₹35 per month plus free food and lodging for her 24x7 services.
In January of 1953, in one of the Sunday editions of Anandabazar Patrika, a Mr Banerjee from Lansdowne Road advertised in the Brides Wanted section for a 32-year-old groom working for a private company and making ₹150 a month, and so did a government clerk with an earning of ₹210 per month. In the same edition, one Mr Sarkar put on sale his two-storeyed house with seven rooms in the Lake Road area all for ₹40,000.
In the 1950s, the exchange rate was 4.77 rupees per dollar, as against 3.30 in 1947. As per the First Pay Commission in 1946, the minimum pay for central government employees was ₹55 and the maximum ₹2,000. The Second Pay Commission report from 1959 recommended a minimum pay of ₹80 and a maximum of ₹3,000. In 1953, when Calcutta Tramways Company announced it would increase second-class tram fares by one paisa, it provoked widespread protests and mob violence.
No matter how idyllic these prices might seem today, the common people then still felt the pinch. In the Bengali version of the 1956 film Jagte Raho, a tipsy Chhabi Biswas sings about inflation to the bumpkin Raj Kapoor. “If I were to rip out my heart and put it in my wallet, and pluck out the currency note from the wallet and wedge it where the heart used to be, what would happen?” The reply is embedded in the same song. “Ei taka-ta to cholbei/Dhak dhak dhak dhak cholbei/Shudhu kolje ta jao bhangate, kichhu milbe na ek rotti… The currency note will still work/Dhak dhak dhak dhak it will beat on/ But try and use my heart in the market/And you’ll realise it is a thing of zero value.”
One way to reconstruct the “good old days” is through prices of coveted food items. Nearly every other interviewee brings up the price of mutton. Sen remembers how during a National Cadet Corps camp in Agra in 1958, he had purchased 50 kilograms of mutton at 75 paise a kilo. He was the quartermaster. He remembers mutton getting more expensive, very quickly. “It was ₹5 per kilo in Durgapur in 1965.”
Retired bureaucrat and former MP Jawahar Sircar, 72, says, “When I was a child, we used to collect the diamond-shaped 2 annas to buy one ice cream.” Sircar grew up in the Lake Market area in south Calcutta. Those days the neighbourhood had quite a few South Indian eateries where one could get a dosa, a plate of idli and a coffee, all for ₹1. When Sircar was in high school, his pocket money was ₹5. He says, “I could buy a second-hand book for 25 paise, Reader’s Digest cost 2 annas, mutton cutlet at Deshapriya Park was ₹1 and Radubabu’s shop in Rashbehari sold two slices of butter toast and one piece of kosha mangsho for 50 paise.”
Economist Abhirup Sarkar’s uncle would like to tell the story of how in the 1930s, 4 rasamundis cost 1 paisa and Sarkar himself will tell you that in the 1960s, the sweet shop Jalajoga used to sell a bomb-like rajbhog for 4 annas. He remembers having seen a cricket match between Marylebone Cricket Club and India in 1966 at Eden Gardens, the tickets for which cost ₹5. Nayantara Palchoudhuri, who is a fourth-generation tea planter, says, “In the 1960s, a small bhnar of tea cost 25 paise. Those days, quality Darjeeling tea sold for ₹75 per kilogram.”
In the 1970s, the rupee-dollar exchange rate just doubled; from 4.76 it went to 7.50. A pair of Naughty Boy shoes cost ₹20. A cinema ticket in the lower gallery cost one rupee and some paise. Retired bank official Pranab Bhattacharya says, “When the naya paisa was introduced in 1957, annas were discontinued. In the early 1980s, 10 paise became the lowest acceptable denomination. Today, the government has stopped printing ₹10 notes. The same thing had happened for one rupee, 2 rupee and 5 rupee notes in the 1990s.” The first Metro service in Calcutta, running between Esplanade and Bhowanipore, was flagged off in October 1984. The ticket price was ₹1.
Old-timers will remember a Bengali rhyme that goes: “Ek poishar toilo/Kishe khoroch hoilo/Tor daari, mor paaye/Aro dichhi chheler gaaye….” It is about oil worth one paisa and all that it has been used for. It speaks to a certain time, a certain economy. But in 1981, on a Bhubaneswar-bound train, when a strapping Sarit Kumar Chakrabarti tried to pass some 2 and 3 paise coins to a beggar, he threw them away. “Even he knew they were of no use,” says the retired chief postmaster general.
In 1991, gold price was ₹3,466, against 1947’s ₹89; in 2001 it climbed to ₹4,300 and became ₹26,400 in 2011. The price of an LPG cylinder in 1991 was less than ₹67.90. By the end of 2000, it was ₹222.25. Petrol was ₹12.23 in 1990 and ₹28.70 by the early 2000s. When yellow taxis lit up Calcutta’s roads in the 1960s, the base fare was ₹3.25. In the 2000s, it went up to ₹20. Today, the base fare exists in theory, there are only
asking rates.
From the turn of the new millennium, the nature of these urban anecdotes changed. Yardsticks too. Definitions of necessity seem altered, as do those of good living and extravagant living.
The good FM might insist that inflation in India is “manageable” but the truth is, in keeping with the spirit of the times, we, the people, have unwittingly traded the pinch for the punch.