Oh! Calcutta~I
| Date | 07 April 2021 |
| Author | SANJUKTA DASGUPTA |
| Published date | 07 April 2021 |
| Publication title | Statesman, The (India) |
Furthermore, inThe City of Dreadful Night, published in 1899, Kipling's description of Calcutta bears the classic stampof the triumphant colonizer's gaze. After all, it is the optics that initially determine the responses and the reception
"Let us take our hats off to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we drive in over Hugli Bridge in the dawn of a still February morning. We have left India behind at Howrah station, and now we enter foreign parts. No, not wholly foreign. Say rather too familiar…" Why this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth coming across India to see!" … Then a distinctly wicked idea takes possession of the mind. What a divine-what a heavenly place to loot! … adorned, docked, wharfed, fronted and reclaimed by Englishmen, existing only because England lives and dependent for its life on England!"
The contradictory responses of appreciation and disenchantment about the city of Calcutta were not much different even in the eighteenth century. Various surviving documents tell us that there were at least fifteen travellers to Calcutta in the 18th century, of them three were non- Englishmen and two were women. Jemima Kindersley's travelogue titled "Letters from the Island of Tenerife, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies" was published in London in 1777. It is generally regarded as the first book on India written by a British woman traveller. Jemima Kindersley was not impressed by the layout of Calcutta either-" it is as awkward a place as can be conceived; and so irregular, that it looks as if all the houses had been thrown up in the air, and fallen down by accident as they now stand; people keep constantly building; and everyone who can procure a piece of ground to build a house upon, consults his own taste and convenience, without any regard to the beauty and regularity to the town…all the English part of the town, which is the largest, is a confusion of very superb and very shabby houses, dead walls, straw huts, warehouses, and I know not what".
In post-independence, postcolonial India, writers both local and global, have evinced their fascination and frustration in...
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