Mother Goddess Calcutta dissected yet again, with a fair bit of titbittery thrown in
Drooping spirits? Ten years later it had become a death rattle. Calcutta was on the eve of the fierce Naxalite uprising. The City of Hope of Anita Desai was turning into the City of Dreadful Night of the Bengali poet Phani Bhusan Acharya. A pity Krishna Dutta makes no mention of Phani Bhusan. He wrote the classic poem on Calcutta, an absolute gem called Mumurshu Nayika, loosely translated as ‘The Dying Courtesan’.
The dying courtesan is Calcutta. Outside, the hearse waits. She’s coughing blood (shades of gory Naxalbari killings!). Like ghost figures, her five lovers turn up at her hospital bedside. The doctor says, "She needs blood." The lovers look at each other. "Who? Me?" Now no one wants to sleep with her. The poem tells us that the five lovers are the five Pandava brothers "seeking Draupadi in solitary lust".
We know too well who the five are who sucked Calcutta dry and, when the crisis comes, are deserting her. The British, Americans, Punjabis, Marwaris and the ‘South Indians’—the boxwallahs, corporate executives and bureaucrats. Economists called it the flight of capital. Instead of getting a blood transfusion from them, the city nearly bled to death. Poor Draupadi. Staked, lost and disrobed. Five husbands, all honourable men, and yet she is anathavati nathavat, the husbanded yet husbandless lady.
But Calcutta survived. She is the city of timeless Kali, the last place on earth where the mother goddess cult predominates more than prevails. The jacket of Dutta’s tribute has three illustrations: a lolling-tongued Kali, a pensive Rabindranath and a petrified stiff-upper-lip, marble-cold Victoria Memorial. An intriguing trinity: tantric Hindu, rational and humane Brahma, rotund Queen Victoria trying hard to be a petite Mumtaz Mahal.
It’s precisely this Mona Lisa enigma of Calcutta’s personality (this damned courtesan who refuses to give up the ghost) that has attracted such diverse visitors as Louis Malle, Jean Renoir, Thomas Merton, Mircea Eliade, Dominique Lapierre, Gunter Grass and many others. All they want are one-night stands with her after which they return to their luxury cocoons in the west—some exhilarated, others depressed, still others ashamed and guilty. But no one wants to give blood to this debilitated prima donna, once the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
No one—certainly not that troubled Teutonic Titan called Gunter Grass, to whom Dutta devotes all of five pages. During his first visit in 1975, he dropped in unannounced and uninvited at a Writers’ Workshop Sunday literary session. It was not, as Dutta reports, a "Bengali writers’ group"; it was a coterie of young Indian Writers in English that met at my Lake Gardens residence. Native, that is Bengali, writers Grass could tolerate. Indians writing in English were to him bits of turd "in a pile of shit that God had dropped and named Calcutta". So he listened to the poems we read out and discussed and, as he puts it, "nibbled pine nuts (he means peanuts) and did not know which of the lady poets he would like to f**k if the opportunity presented itself". So this is what goes on in the mind of a potential Nobel Laureate at a literary meet that does not suit him.
If this sounds like titbittery, let me say there is a fair amount of it here—most of it, thank God, not so unsavoury. To the making of books on Calcutta there is no end, as her bibliography shows, because to tire of Calcutta is to tire of life. Dutta’s contribution to the Calcutta Mystique is crammed with useful, easily digested information, presented in a well-organised fashion. It has indices of street names, people and places with excellently selected historical material, brief biographies of eminent Bengalis (to the making of eminent Bengalis there seems to be no end, either) and it showcases the rich variety of Bengali expression.
There are two ways to know Kolkata: be born a Bengali (like Krishna Dutta), or marry one (like me). Only one Indian language divides the world into two distinct classes: Bengali and non-Bengali. I will suggest another, profounder division: mother-goddess Kolkatans and father-god non-Kolkatans.