India’s Second Biggest City Has No Skyscraper
Colonial buildings that have survived
By Michael Hardy in Calcultta
Calcutta is a city of 17 million people — twice the size of New York — without a single skyscraper. Although the second biggest city in India, Calcutta is a perpetual also-ran in the country’s mad scramble for business, tourism, and prestige, long ago surpassed by IT powerhouses like Bangalore and Chennai, the political clout of New Delhi, and the glamour of Mumbai. Once the crown jewel of the British Raj and the epicenter of Indian culture, the metropolis looks like a shadow of its imperial past, an effect heightened during a recent visit by the mixture of mist and smog that had settled across the city, shrouding the buildings in a gray fog.
Unlike Delhi, which has a long history, Calcutta was a purely English invention, created virtually ex nihilo by the East India Company to serve as the capital of their metastasising empire. As the center of administration, all the plundered wealth of India flowed into Calcutta, paving its streets, erecting its neo-classical architecture, and producing a London-on-the-Ganges complete with an imitation Hyde Park and a towering, white-washed cathedral. No sooner had the paint dried on the cathedral, however, when the British, fearful of the nascent Bengali independence movement, shifted their capital (in both senses of the word) to New Delhi.
In consequence, Calcutta today looks like a ghost town surrounded and nearly swallowed by a vast urban landscape spreading out of sight in every direction. Hundreds if not thousands of colonial buildings have survived and are now used as apartment blocks or office buildings, although many are in such disrepair that you can hardly believe they’re inhabited at all. With crumbling masonry, yellowing walls, and plants frequently sprouting through the roofs, the buildings appear to have been abandoned to nature after the British retreat. In a bit of delicious irony, many of these colonial palaces are now rent-controlled flats occupied by working-class families who the British, in their time, would never have allowed past the front door.
Like a city-sized version of a memento mori, these dead relics of a lost empire are inhabited, re-used, and re-cycled by the thronging crowds who push their way through the city’s broad, tree-lined avenues. In what used to be the grand entrance to a stately town house you might find a fruit seller or a motorcycle repair shop or a McDonalds. On the roads, taxis, auto-rickshaws, and human-drawn rickshaws jostle for space with the occasional Tata or Toyota.
Almost a third of all cars, and all of the taxis, are 1960s-era Ambassadors — those oversized, underachieving symbols of Indian automotive independence. Like Cuba, Calcutta has become a world leader in auto repair, keeping its ancient fleet of vehicles on the road long after a wealthier city would have sold them for scrap. Many of the taxis survive only as metal hulks, having lost every other human amenity and comfort.
Calcutta’s sidewalks are a world unto themselves. Unlike most Western cities, Calcutta has not criminalised poverty, so it’s impossible to pretend, as you can in New York or Paris, that the poor don’t exist. Indeed, you can hardly walk a block, even in the most fashionable areas of town, without passing the makeshift home of one or another destitute family, who, seemingly oblivious of passersby, continue to bathe, cook, argue, or work in full view of all humanity.
Children play hide and seek, men play cards around a small fire, women wash and hang clothes, and life proceeds, on a smaller scale and in more straightened circumstances, much as it does all over the world. Everything these families need is close at hand: food from nearby vendors, water from the free city taps, even haircuts from the local barber, who can be seen at every street corner, lathering up some man’s face for a shave.
Of course, there are still rich people and expensive shops aplenty in Calcutta, although they’re never far enough away from the poor for the city’s plutocrats to be entirely self-satisfied — or at least one hopes so. Young boys and girls beg for change at the entrance to every hotel and restaurant, and the view from all the chic new coffee bars is of the same old sidewalk-dwellers in their same old indigence. Calcutta’s politicians haven’t yet managed the trick of segregating the very wealthy and the very poor, although one suspects they’re working hard on it. As I boarded my train for New Delhi, I gave thanks that there is at least one great city in the world where the poor are not treated like toxic waste, where the civic debate is not over how to dispose of them but how to live with them — and how to allow them to live with us.
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Posted by 
I CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHY THERE IS NO REVOLUTION IN INDIA ????
People is starving to death, politicians are completely corrupted,
no law and order in the country and the population is getting poorer.
Specially in Bengal (Calcutta), where we can find the poorest people of the world, where we can find most corrupted politicians of the world (both left and right politicians).
Bengal needs a miracle to survive, may god bless you.
THE CITY WITH A HEART!
It is not true that Calcutta (Kolkata) was a purely British invention. Kolkata has a long and proud history as a sea port and a business hub.
About 80% of India is poor. Others go to absurd lengths to hide poverty but Bengalis acknowledge it try to eradicate it. Calcutta streets are full of migrants from Bihar and Bangladesh but there is no Shivsena-like movement to discriminate against them.
I am from Bengal but worked in other parts of INDIA. I have never seen the level of laziness and political mind of people compared to Bengal elsewhere in the country. They will neither move nor allow others to move. Bengalis have never been industrious historically and now also they just look for a quick job, eat well and live a selfish life.
Being a Bengali I feel ashamed of the situation in Bengal. I wish the new generation with English education and awareness becomes more entrepreneural and work hard to change the status quo.
The crown of jewel of the British Raj has been and is being made to walk backwards thanks to the regimental party ruling and plundering the city and th State since 1977. Regardless of who comes to power next and when, it would require a uphill task to un-do what they have “done”. It’s a dying city, and is driven by emotion and not being pragmatic. Once it was “what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow”, and now it’s more like “what India thinks today, Bengal can’t even think at all”.
Come-on Guys – give the city a break – no other place on earth has taken the body blows and yet it remains graceful. Calcutta will be great again – simply because it is the only cultural capital in India – concerts, galleries, book-readings – and one of the culinary capitals of the world. It needs to gain status as a ‘world heritage site’ and you need to talk-up its architecture and attractions and stop repeating the slander. From an American friend.
Kolkata has a spirit of its own. You ought to roam the streets to understand the city in its entirety. I am from Kokata and I have lived in many cities over the last decade. The author is absolutely right – the poor are allowed to coexist and the reason I think is the long history of communism in the state. It is for this reason that I have admired communism.
Population is a problem which needs to be tackled. However, the worst phases are over. The next decade will be when Kolkata will regain its lost glory.
Bengalies are the most lazy people of india. They considered themselves most intellectual among themselves but cant develop a big industry by their own. Barring Peerless their is no true bengali industrial house. They think about world but cant solve their own problems.In other states ,interest of state is supreme over other petty partisan interest.But in bengal opposite is the true. Think about Tata motor fiasco of Singur or Marine engg. college of Taratala. Despite being oldest marine emgg. college,it could not be upgraded to a university, but a chapter. Tamilian grab the prize catch.
Last year, my pilgrimage to the places where my forebears were born, lived and died included a long stay in Kolkata. A westerner, I thought I was prepared for the sights, sounds and smells of the city, but what a terrible contrast between my old family photographs and the Kolkata of today, with its decaying buildings, atrocious roads and barely-coping infrastucture. In the west, we hear a lot about economic progress in India, but it appears to have completely bypassed Kolkata. Some of the blame must fall on the communist government, whose inability to control population numbers, or even to clear the streets of rubbish, must be addressed. Suggesting that Bengalis are lazy isn’t helpful, either. I wish I could share Ami’s belief that the worst is over, though I can’t. But despite all, Kolkata and its people captured my heart. It saddens me more than I can say to see this great city falling apart.
Einmal was Anderes. Immer weiter so.
HAHAHAHA…. Bengalis deserve this for supporting old dumb communists since the past 30 years……
I still wonder what made people of Bengal to vote for these Anti economic liberalization communists depite the fact we are living in democracy. There is Congress, BJP, Mamata Benerjee atleast why not for them.
No wonder this state is so f’cked up and is infact worse than Bihar today. Glad to see the state of Bihar emerging as the second fastest growing state in India under the leadership of Nitish Kumar.
Blame yourself Bengal people, not the Government….. Atleast send your old Communist fags to China to learn about the globalization.
Super Seite. Gefällt mir sehr sehr gut.
Weiter so.