Adventures of a Desi KnitterKnitting (and now sewing!) keeps an Indian academic sane in the States. Almost.

Calcutta!

§ July 23rd, 2007 § Filed under Travel § 10 Comments

If you have even a passing acquaintance with South Asian history (and historians), you know that Calcutta, Bengal (and Bengalis) can be ignored only at your own peril. Capital of British India, hub of the Indian national movement, and now, nerve-centre of postcolonial navel gazing one of the major cities and regions that recent historiography on modern South Asia has examined exhaustively. Every semester, at least one student asks me – Hey Professor, why do we read so much Bengal stuff? Every semester, I come up with a bland answer instead of the one that I would really like to give. Of course, Bengal-bashing by those of us who work on other South Asian regions is as much fun as any other rehearsal of academic loyalties and pet peeves. Still, it is an idle question to ponder on an idle summer afternoon – not that I’ve been having many of those, mind – what would a modern South Asia syllabus without Bengal look like?

On a recent trip to Calcutta (or Kolkata as it’s now called), a visiting historian friend and I decided to abandon such subversive thoughts and instead plunge into the rich delights the city offers. It was a lot of fun to actually comb it with a colleague. Lots of old buildings, some majestic, others crumbling, dot central and north Calcutta. My father-in-law, who’s a regular local patriot and an inveterate urban hiker, will suddenly point out an (usually decrepit) old structure where Ronald Ross did malaria experiments, or William Makepeace Thackeray was born, or Subhash Bose or Rabindranath Tagore lived. This ‘Crumbling Calcutta’ image is, of course, a cliche, done to death in the popular international media, but the joys of suddenly physically coming upon places associated with past events and personalities that I read and teach and write about never fails to delight and surprise me every time I visit this city. Since my camera played truant this trip and a lot of my monument pictures didn’t come out well, above are a few snapshots. First is the massive marble paean to British imperialism from the early 20th century, Victoria Memorial.

We took a boat on the Hooghly (as the Ganga is known here), gazing at the many old British warehouses alongside the riverbank, recalling way too many details about East India Company trade and colonial policy regarding textiles and opium. (The red and yellow building in the third picture is a very typical Calcutta colonial structure).

Buildings aside, Calcutta, as has been argued recently, is also famously a site of informal sociality. Its ‘adda’s (friends getting together for long and wide-ranging chats about life, the universe and everything over chai) are legendary. Alas, once again due to my wretched camera, just a couple snapshots of the many different addas I spotted across the city (the bottom picture is of a famous tea-joint that is practically mobbed at teatime). They are almost certainly discussing the spectacularly bad display, yet again, by the Indian cricket team at Lord’s against England in the recently concluded test match. The guys in the second picture, on the other hand, are happier with their own carrom game, which they play on the roadside near my house with a makeshift bulb after dinner for a couple of hours.