Calcutta (41 page)

So many of these latter-day Moguls had taken themselves and their small fortunes back to Britain for good by the end of the 1960s that the Bengal Club had sold off its impressive exterior and its library and moved in close order and closer confinement to the back of the building. Early in 1970 came the two
mortifying
days when the auctioneers disposed of the last remnants of the power and the glory in the front, and there never was a gloomier moment in Calcutta’s long, long history of the Raj and its reach-me-downs. For the front rooms of the club had been reduced to a jumbled heap of junk. On the terrace, with its
commanding
view across the Maidan, there were thirteen bathtubs drawn up in line ahead, and they were all very grubby. Beside them were thirteen lavatory bowls, and heaven knows what
degraded
future lay ahead of them. The corridors were piled with wicker rocking chairs, springy bedsteads, mahogany tables and disconnected lamp brackets. The front rooms were buttressed with wardrobes and chests of drawers, more bedsteads and rolls of mirzapore carpet. Pictures were stacked in their frames on top of the drawers – two copies of a print by Stubbs, of
William Evelyn
of
St
Clere
in
Kent,
a version of
Man
with
a
Soft
Hat
by Franz Hals, dozens of watery reproductions of boats, among them Prince Philip’s
Bluebottle
. On top of everything there was a
layer of dust. During the hours of viewing before the auction, the occasional British memsahib could be seen and heard bustling around the premises with her bearer dogging behind ‘… can’t find them … and I haven’t got time to mess about today …’ But when they actually auctioned this decrepit residue of the old Bengal Club, practically everything in sight was knocked down cheap to once subservient Indians. Who never, in all Calcutta’s history, would have been allowed past those wrought-iron gates for any other reason at all.

The British were merely repeating, on a small and ingrown scale, what they had experienced twenty-three years before at Independence. But that had differently and perversely been a time of hope as well as a time of regret and nostalgia. For there had just been horror in this city, which had seemed bent on destroying itself, and suddenly this had stopped, as though a tap had been turned off. So that when the end of the Raj came, it came in Calcutta rather decently and well, with expressions of goodwill and old comradeship in arms and mutual aid in the years ahead.

The only people hurt in the city that Friday, when imperialism was over and Indians ruled themselves at last, were the ones who fell off overloaded lorries which were rolling round town as mobile grandstands. They had been Independent since five minutes past one in the morning, Calcutta time, when bells had started ringing, conch shells had been blown and people in the streets had started shouting ‘Jai Hind’ (Glory to India) whether they were Hindu or Muslim. A few hours later Mr Suhrawardy, the Prime Minister of Bengal, returned to Mahatma Gandhi, who was praying and fasting in their house among the bustees, and told him; ‘I have just been round Calcutta and I have seen a miracle.’ At eight o’clock a salute of seventeen guns boomed from Fort William, the Indian flag was broken for the first time from the masthead there, and half an hour later Mr Fairbairn,
secretary
of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, unfurled another brand new flag over the Royal Exchange. Charitable institutions started feeding the endless poor of the city.

Throughout that day there were crowds everywhere, happy for the first time in well over a year; 200,000 surged round
Government House, where the last representative of the Raj was packing his bags. Some of them scaled the gates, got inside the building and pinched some of the gubernatorial crockery as souvenirs; the Mahatma let it be known next morning that he would be glad if every plate and saucer were returned at once. There were even Hindus of the lowest castes ducking each other exuberantly in the swimming pool that Lady Lytton had
installed
long ago for persons of much higher rank. On the streets, portraits of the Mahatma and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose were held high by dancing people. Brass bands mounted on some of those lorries played the British and the Indian national anthems alternately, with ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack up your Troubles’ on the side. The Grand Hotel had thought fit to announce beforehand that Scotch and beer would be available on this occasion in its Palm Court, for there had been much austerity since the war and during the year of terror. The Golden Slipper Club held a dinner-dance that night at which evening dress was essential. The Empire Cinema was showing Robert Young and Susan Hayward in
They
Won’t
Believe
Me.

For the British the day was overloaded with sentimentality, as it was almost bound to be. The BBC was giving them their daily dose of that everlasting serial radio diary, ‘The Robinsons’, on its long-wave broadcast from London at breakfast time, with ‘Music While You Work’ and ‘Those were the Days’ to follow later. Listeners could see from their morning paper that Queen of the South had just beaten St Mirren 8–0 at home in Scotland. They could also see that in England there were people with the same sharp trading instincts that had been sending them and their ancestors to Calcutta since 1690. The Dormy House Hotel in Westward Ho, the Montpelier Hotel in Budleigh Salterton and sixteen other hotels in the West Country were all anxiously enquiring ‘Are you leaving for England?’ and offering a refuge if they were, for a consideration. Miss Grove, of The Garden School at Gulmarj in Kashmir, was offering to escort children to their final destinations in England in exchange for the part-
payment
of her own fare home. The British, in fact, were coming excellently up to scratch. Burmah-Shell was giving its employees an Independence Day bonus.
The
Statesman,
which was still
owned in London, was bubbling with proper pride. The speed with which, during this final, brilliant Viceroyalty, less than five months in duration, the transfer of power has been achieved, is almost stupefying, ‘it said that morning.’ Nothing of comparable magnitude or such spontaneous generosity has been effected in the annals of mankind.’

There was a letter in the paper a few days later from an
Englishman
which caught far better than any editorial what many of his compatriots in Calcutta were doubtless thinking and feeling, though few of them would have cared to show this, because to be British in this great imperial city had always meant that at the very best, you never unbuttoned yourself too much in front of the natives, however friendly you might have become. ‘
Yesterday
‚’ wrote this Mr Stephens, Apostrophe for the first time, and from the heart, much to my surprise, I said “Jai Hind”. In itself, for its bigger meaning, I have always liked the term, as I like India. But its recent historical associations are most obnoxious. It stuck in my throat. My whole energies and idealism as a civilian had been put into helping to win World War II for what I thought was righteousness. Like other British folk in India, I at that time underwent bitter personal suffering, in long separations and in loss of dear friends and relations, also of my home, and scarcely more than two years ago “Jai Hind” was still being shouted on the Burma front against those fine men, British and Indian,
fighting
on my side, the right side as I believe, by those others – traitors to my thinking – who had Joined Subhas Bose and the Japanese. I was not, until yesterday, able to forget these things.

‘“Jai Hind” was also shouted at British people here in Calcutta with plainly insulting intent, during the cold-weather riots of ‘45/’ 46; and forgetfulness of insults is not easy. Even last
Friday
, Independence Day, it sometimes seemed to be meant more in challenge than friendship. In general, however, that was a wonderfully friendly day, our harried, hatred-filled Calcutta was transformed, and I felt happy too, so I smiled and waved in answer to the shoutings; but I could not bring myself actually to utter the phrase. It was one for which I felt perhaps almost as much repugnance as Muslims themselves have for parts of
“Bande Mataram”. Yesterday, the day of Id, in Chowringhee, next to me in a traffic block, was one of Calcutta’s countless lorry-loads of jubilant, slogan-shouting people, Hindus and
Muslims
intermixed. They waved and smiled, shouting “Jai Hind” and I waved back. Seated nearest to me, on the wooden
footboard
, was a young Muslim in colourful fresh f clothing for the Id. He had evidently noticed that, though smiling too, I had
carefully
avoided answering. He bent forward. “Please say it, sir,” he pleaded. “We didn’t like it either, but we do now. We have
forgotten
about quarrels.”

‘I said it at once, without reflection, readily, from the heart; and I do not think I will have further difficulty.’

The moment when every Englishman would have to swallow his pride and the insults it attracted, when he would have to get out of India with a sore but rather soft heart, had been a long time coming, but it had been prepared some years before it actually happened. It was certainly within the scheme of things maturing in the collective mind of Mr Attlee’s Labour
Government
which, two years before, had appointed the gentleman who was packing his bags in one part of Government House while the jubilant citizens of Calcutta were removing his cups and saucers from another. Sir Frederick Burrows, in fact, departed in some confusion. In order to catch the flying boat from the river at Bally to England at the appointed hour, his bodyguard had to hustle him and his lady wife through the crowds so
unceremoniously
that there was no time to say goodbye to his civil and military officers or to any of the leading citizens. Thus did
Calcutta
see off the last British Governor of Bengal. It would never have done for Queen Victoria, or even for Lord Curzon, who had also represented the mightly Raj here.

But, then, Sir Frederick Burrows,
GGSI, GCIE, DL
, had never been quite as other men usually were when appointed to sit in Government House at Calcutta, in spite of his various
decorations
. In the place of men who had never, during their own military service, been much less than a captain of Lancers or a lieutenant of Dragoons, here was one who had been but a
company
sergeant major in the Grenadier Guards. And where
Wellesley
, Hastings, Amherst, Auckland, Hardinge, Bentinck,
Ronaldshay 
and most of his other predecessors in that splendid palace had been peers of the realm, Sir Frederick, on stepping into their shoes, had just completed several industrious years as President of the National Union of Railwaymen.

THE
Western world began to take notice of Calcutta’s now celebrated plight fourteen years after Independence. Many people were well aware of it before then, but only if they had been in professional contact with it, or if they had actually seen it
developing
themselves. In the spring of 1960, however, the World Bank sent a mission to India to review the progress of the
republic’s
economic development during its First and Second
Five-Year
Plans, and to investigate the prospects of the Third Plan which was due to come into operation the following year. The mission was shocked by what it found in Calcutta and said so in its report. At almost the same time, the Indian Prime Minister was quoted in the international press on the same subject. ‘
Calcutta
‚’ said Mr Nehru, ‘is the biggest city in the country, its
problems
are national problems, quite apart from problems of West Bengal, and it is necessary that something special should be done. If the whole city went to pieces, it would be a tremendous tragedy.’ From that moment Calcutta became news, for here were clearly the makings of disaster, which always has provided the most stimulating news, mankind being never more lively than when he can respond to the dreadful with a twinge of horror and a spasm of compassion.