A time-travelling flâneur

A frequently-ignored aspect Banerjee explores is the multiculturalism of south Calcutta

MEMOIRS OF ROADS

Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization

Sumanta Banerjee

Oxford University Press

175 pages; Rs 695

Walking the streets of 19th century Paris, Charles Baudelaire experienced — as Walter Benjamin explained in his grand, incomplete The Arcades Project — both erlebnis and erfahrung, the anaesthesia and the excitement of the senses of a flâneur, as he wandered about aimlessly. This mapping the urban streets with his feet prompted him to write such lines as, “In the heart of some old suburb, muddy labyrinth, / Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment, / One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head, / Stumbling, bumping against the walls like a poet.” Almost echoing the sentiment, Gil Pender, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris tells the exceedingly beautiful Adriana, muse to Picasso and Modigliani, “And when you think that in the cold, violent universe, Paris exists... Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.”

As far as urban hotspots were concerned, 19th century Calcutta — as Kolkata was then known — was a pretty hot one. The second biggest in the empire where the sun never set, it was the proverbial melting pot for people and cultures, not only from all over India, but all over the world. Almost a contemporary of Baudelaire and a flâneur to boot, Kaliprasanna Singha notes his wry observation in the prose classic, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha. Journalist Sumanta Banerjee performs a similar task, albeit not only geographically but also historically, walking down Chitpur Road, Bagbazaar, Theatre Road and Rashbehari Avenue in the pages of his slim but very well-researched and lucidly written book.

Books on Calcutta’s streets are a dime a dozen, most of them without merit. Two excellent books on the subject are A Jaywalker’s Guide to Calcutta by Soumitra Das (also a journalist, at The Telegraph), and Geoffery Moorhouse’s Calcutta: The City Revealed. Both are narrated from the perspectives of casual pedestrians, those who are not in a hurry to get anywhere, but can linger around, taking in the sights and sounds — and, of course, the ubiquitous smells. 

Mr Banerjee also adopts a similar strategy: Of the five slim chapters in his book — there is also an Introduction and a Conclusion — three are named after arterial thoroughfares of the city: Bagbazar Street, Theatre Road and Rashbehari Avenue. He imagines the first to be the grandmother, the second to be the midwife and the last to be the “Bengali Middle-Class Homemaker”. These classifications are as much historical as geographical: Mr Banerjee looks at the streets as they were constructed from the 19th century into the 20th, as the city expanded from the overcrowded Black Town in the north, to the less congested — only comparatively — and newer south. As is evident, these classifications are a tad simplistic, and what really rescues them quotidian details he provides.

For instance, in a section titled “Theatre Road as an ‘Old Curiosity Shop’”, Mr Banerjee describes the street’s popularity as a site for boarding houses: “...quite a number of Englishwomen were eking out a humble living by running boarding houses. In fact, the very first house on Theatre Road, on the right as one entered it from Chowringhee... was a boarding house run by one Mrs M Campbell.” He tells us that after changing hands a few times in the 1920s, it became a boarding house again in 1931. “The lanes behind were littered with similar boarding houses... Mrs Walter’s in 48 Theatre Road in 1918, Mrs Blake’s on 25 Camac Street, till 1936... and Mrs Kindler’s boarding house... till 1936.” The popularity of these cheap, temporary residences is testimony of Calcutta’s ever-shifting floating population, which must have only multiplied in recent years. 

Another frequently-ignored aspect he explores is the multiculturalism of south Calcutta. “Rashbehari Avenue was not merely a Bengali middle-class enclave,” he writes. “Prominent among people who migrated here were people from south India — Tamilians, Malayalis, and Kannadigas.” Komala Vilas, now known as the Banana Leaf, which possible serves the most delicious sambhar in all of Calcutta, also finds a mention, as does historian P Thankappan Nair. Having lived around this area in my childhood, it is possible for me to acknowledge what he Mr Banerjee writes about. My complaint is with the fact that he does not mention how this multiculturalism has gradually eroded over time.