Kolkata as a city

‘India’s cities house the entire historical compass of human labour, from the crudest stone breaking to the most sophisticated financial transactions. Success and failure, marble and mud, are intimately and abruptly pressed against one another, and this has made the cities vibrate with agitated experience. All the enticements of the modern world are stacked up here, but it is also here that many Indians discover the mirage-like quality of this modern world.’ Sunil Khilnani, in his book ‘The Idea of India’ has beautifully captured the contradictions, the sheer breadth of life, but also the all-pervasiveness of suffering and exclusion at the heart of life in Kolkata. Ambedkar said over 50 years ago: ‘in politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradiction?’ And now, 50 years on, India’s economy is one of the largest growing in the world, yet on my way to work I walk past children who aren’t going to school, men and women washing themselves in a muddy pond, and men straining against carts loaded with bags of cement, pushing it down a busy road.

A hospital is a place where the value a society places on a human life can unconsciously be evident. I had the misfortune to visit a government hospital in Kolkata the other day, as the lovely woman in charge of our office has been admitted. There were rows of people lined outside, some of them lying on sheets and obviously pretty well encamped there. I don’t know whether they were family members visiting or whether they were waiting for admittance. We made our way up to the third floor, and walked down the corridor – remove from your mind visions of white sparkling walls and floors smelling slightly of disinfectant. I saw stray cats wandering around, and the smell in the area around the toilets was foul. In the ward itself there were about 50 beds; the mattress was about 5cm thick on a wooden board and that was it. My friend had seen a doctor, and had been told the next time she would be seen would be in 6 days; in the meantime all she had to do was to lie on this paper thin mattress and struggle with her pain. But on the plus side she did say that the food was good.

Kolkata has several very high quality hospitals, but the elites that are able to afford these hospitals must live in and experience a different city to the vast majority in Kolkata. The air conditioned shopping malls and offices are a world apart from the bustees, and the two worlds are mutually exclusionary; I am sure that many of the elite have no wish to see first hand what life is like in the slums, and the poor are excluded by security guards from the shopping malls and cafes. It is almost as if there is an insurmountable glass barrier between the two worlds. Perhaps I am being too negative – I have met some people from the richer classes who are working in the NGO sector, but they have told me themselves that this sector is not a popular one in which to work; people want jobs in IT, finance or business.

But I am forgetting another part of the city: the old colonial area. I visited this with two other volunteers a couple of weeks ago. It was relatively peaceful with far fewer people around, but at the same time it was slightly strange seeing such physical evidence that the British were actually here. I visited the cemetery for the East India Company: India definitely got its own back on the British, there were so many graves for people who died very young, and many children. It was quintessentially British, but at the same time surrounded by lush tropical forest: very strange. I definitely would not want to visit at dusk…..