Calcutta calling

After independence and partition, tourists going to India had a one-wish destination and the Indian Tourist Board strongly recommended that they went there, and that little cartoon Maharajah who was the Air India mascot was keen to fly them. It was Kashmir. Kashmir was India for foreigners8230; I would suggest that the great, great joy 8212; the real adventure of India 8212; is actually to be found in its cities, not its palaces. And the most exciting are rarely included on tourist itineraries. Calcutta is the steaming, insistent, sinned-against-and-sinning yet transcendent cultural, ethical and argumentative pulse of India. You can see why it isn8217;t top of everyone8217;s list of places to go. It isn8217;t an ergonomically competent city. On the international Stockholm-meter of urban efficiency it barely registers a minus one. It8217;s a mess. An exhausting mess of smelly chaos and joy and learning. Of poverty, poetry, pathos, chai and laughter. In the cacophony of Calcutta there is a heavenly coherence; a tabla rhythm that is the heartbeat of India.

Part of the brilliance of the place is that everything gets reincarnated. Calcutta is the appellation of colonialism. It was the seat of occupation. A city created by the English from a few warehouses8230; It still has the most impressive colonial buildings. Not the weirdly apologetic nostalgia of Lutyens and Baker8230; dressed up as a civil servant8217;s Mughal architecture that we were supposed to be proud to leave behind8230; If you ask nicely you can be shown the room where a subcontinent was governed from Rangoon to Trincomalee. There are seats for the military, the administrators, judges and police, and what8217;s most striking is how unstriking it is. How small. How very, very English and clubbable. This room is a room where you8217;d never have to raise your voice above a patrician murmur, yet you can only wonder at how many million lives were directed and dispatched from this senior common room. How small was the effort needed to plunder India. How temporary it feels, how chancey. What a 8216;cor blimey8217; bluff. Go and look at the rather touching English churches and their rundown graveyards and see how really chancey it was8230;

Excerpted from a comment by A.A. Gill in 8216;The Spectator8217;