On Calcutta

** I regret to say that the following image has been copied by one DEVIKA and posted in Facebook without acknowledging me. This image is a rare one. I got this book from my college library, scanned the image and uploaded it. I have no intention of copyright infringement ; I already mentioned the source and the publisher. However, DEVIKA copied it from my blog and published in FB which garnered many likes; but I was put in the dark about this theft.

In 1975, Raghubir Singh compiled his photographs of Calcutta in an eponymous book published by The Perennial Press, Hong Kong. Its cover was designed by none other than Satyajit Ray. Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times wrote a long introductory article. The photographs were doubtlessly good but my attention was drawn to particular text on the Bengalis. There are lot of derogatory comments on Calcutta and its natives but there were some comments on Bengali lifestyle which attracted my attention. I quote relevant portions from the book to showcase the Bengalis who love high-brow culture and can talk volumes on it informally (known as ADDA). 

“If you look for extravagance in Bengali sophistication it is easy to find, not so much in its ceaseless verbal display – the kind associated in other climes with literary cocktail parties and academic common rooms – as in a genuine and frequently astonishing enthusiasm for the remote, the incongruous and the arcane. On an early visit to Calcutta I was talking to a high police official about revolutionary terrorism in his district, only to find that the conversation had been mysteriously diverted to the subject of William Makepeace Thackeray who, it turned out, had been born in Calcutta. Which was my favorite Thackeray novel, the policeman wanted to know. When I admitted I had read only “Vanity Fair”, he urged me to get hold of “Henry Esmond”. Where else in the English-speaking world, I still wonder, could you get that advice in a police station?

Then there was the police official who was approached on the behalf of French director Louis Malle who was in Calcutta filming documentary footage for the cycle of films that later appeared as “ Phantom India”. The occasion was a demonstration near the West Bengal legislature that the police were about to disperse with what is known in India as a Lathi – charge. ………M.Malle had expressed a discreet interest in this technique of crowd control and wanted to know if he could record it on film. Ordinarily, Indian police are no less sensitive to this kind of publicity than Mayor Daley’s troops in Chicago but this, after all, was Calcutta. The officer in command said he had followed M. Malle’s career in Cahiers du Cinema and would be honored to have him film his lathi charge.

For Calcutta, it was almost a predictable response. On still another occasion, a group of intellectuals organized a protest demonstration against Andre Malraux, of all people. They had heard that Malraux, then minister of culture in France, had threatened the tenure of Henri Langlois as secretary general of La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, the world’s largest archive of old movies. Almost as a reflex, these Bengalis hastened to express their solidarity with Jean Luc Goddard, Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut and all other luminous figures they had read about.”

I got this book from St.Xavier’s College Mumbai library. This book has a history too. It was a gift to the college library by none other than Gerson da Cunha !