There was no city more improbable than Calcutta;
Its location, climate and distance from the traditional historical centers of power prevented a favorable prognosis.
However, the Indian city won, becoming the political and economic center of the British Empire and the most important city in the Commonwealth after London.
There was a time when Calcutta was called Toronto, Hong Kong, Melbourne or Dublin.
However, it is a rarely visited place, probably avoided by the traveler unable to leave the constricted circuits and the corny and still current tyranny of the suffocating Golden Triangle.
(Delhi-Agra-Jaipur).
In a world of mentally lazy people and stuffy tourists, Calcutta is the unexpected city.
With renewed economic prosperity, it continues to be the great cultural destination of the subcontinent.
It is a city that has suffered numerous calamities throughout the twentieth century and, however, has never ceased to have the proud attitude of having been the capital of British India at its maximum splendor.
In 1905, Viceroy Curzon divided Bengal into two: Western Bengal, whose capital is Calcutta and with a Hindu majority, and Eastern Bengal, with a Muslim majority (now Bangladesh).
It was the “divide and rule” of the British to temper the growing Indian nationalism.
Such a decision tore apart the Bengali soul forever.
In 1911 came the ignominy of the capital's move to New Delhi, still a trauma that discreetly throbs.
In 1943 the catastrophic famine claimed almost three million people.
After independence, its wings stagnated, it could not take flight;
The millions of refugees from the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Nehru's socialist policies and again, the refugee crisis in the nascent Bangladesh in the 1970s, prevented him from doing so.
They were disproportionate challenges.
Stirred by serious social problems, she only knew misery and poverty.
In 1979 the communist party won the elections and was in power until 2011. After decades of economic paralysis, in the mid-1980s, Bombay surpassed Calcutta in population.
Calcutta is dying, even Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself declared: “Calcutta is dying.”
Meanwhile, the world was preparing to shroud her.
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India is much more than the Taj Mahal, Delhi and Benares
No city has made as sincere a pact with the past as it has.
Although it was founded as a trading post in 1686, it was not until the Battle of Plassey in 1757 that it became a city.
In reality, it is not even 300 years old and yet it already seems very ancient to us.
Calcutta was born old and immediately the city became a relic.
Its streets and buildings, palaces and avenues, have not suffered the irritating rehabilitative chisel of modernity.
Calcutta escaped the crushing bite of the modern: many public buildings still have elevator operators, its
rickshaws
are pulled by foot (unavoidable when the monsoons flood the city), centuries-old stews are cooked and its taxis are still the wonderful Ambassadors.
Howrah station, founded in 1854, in Calcutta.
DB Pictures (Alamy) (Alamy Stock Photo)
There is no city in Asia more open.
It once housed a prosperous Chinatown of which today only four dirty streets remain, although evocative of a better past.
In the Tangra neighborhood, its old Chinese stores and restaurants recall the commercial splendor of the city.
Its Armenian neighborhood is excellent for walking and had a Jewish community.
She also knew how to generously integrate hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis, all Muslims, and, as is well known, the city adopted the Albanian saint who dedicated her life to alleviating street poverty.
Unlike Bombay, Delhi or Madras, it is a friendly, hospitable and safe city, with friendly people who long ago gave up on being anything more than what they already are: the former capital of British splendor and the cultural center of India.
No city is home to so many bookstores and publishing houses.
His vital projection is intellectual.
There are publishers like Seagull that produce carefully edited and prepared works.
College Street continues to host a sensational second-hand book market and Park Street is home to the Oxford Bookstore, crowned by the coats of arms of Mountbatten and Irwin, both viceroys of India.
No Asian city experienced a period as fruitful as the Bengal Renaissance of the late 19th century.
These are the years of the poet, artist and playwright Rabindranath Tagore and the unrepeatable court of thinkers, writers, journalists and poets.
The imposing Metropolitan Building, in the central neighborhood of Chowringhee (Calcutta).Graham Prentice (Alamy)
What not to miss
It wanted to be London;
It is therefore a monumental city.
Its streets exude England and its topography is a London memento.
This is understood as soon as you arrive by train at Howrah station, founded in 1854 and still the largest in the country.
The Victoria Memorial is perhaps the most massive British footprint in India, a tribute to the queen whose statue remains more alive than ever.
The public buildings located in Dalhousie Square remain impassive, from where the majestic Raj Bhavan, former seat of the British viceroy, can be seen in the distance.
When you reach the central neighborhood of Chowringhee and look up to reach the imposing Metropolitan Building, you immediately understand the grandeur of the city.
The same reaction arouses the imposing Esplanade Mansion or the High Court of Justice of Bengal.
The Indian Museum, at Chowringhee, has remained unchanged since its founding in 1814 and is a remarkable example of a Victorian museum.
In the same area stands the city's grand hotel, the Oberoi, which still exudes 19th-century elegance.
New Market is one of the great markets in India: pure bustle and orderly chaos.
In the outskirts of the market there are numerous street food stalls with delicious
biryanis
that Calcutta has the audacity to reinterpret.
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Heritage of England are its magnificent private clubs, modeled after those found in Pall Mall. The Bengal Club, the Calcutta Club or the Tollygunge Club are indiscreet English stone, glorious Victorian rancidity and immemorial architecture.
In this city, full of culture, orientalist studies were born in the 18th century and Sir William Jones, a British judge stationed in Calcutta, rediscovered the richness of Sanskrit, later creating the Asiatic Society, a cultural prodigy, still in operation today and located in Park Street.
No Indian city has as much appetite as Calcutta.
In Bombay they live obsessed with money;
in Delhi, for power and politics;
and in Varanasi, for a holy death.
Here, however, they go out of their way to eat.
Its abundant gastronomy escapes the traditional and anodyne division between North and South Indian cuisine.
Calcutta is, above all, rice and fish.
It is the only meal in the country that is not served with all the dishes arriving at the same time, but rather requires the Russian service, that is, by successive dishes.
An example of the best cuisine in the city is perhaps the venerable Kewpie's.
Its restaurants and clubs serve retro, Victorian cuisine, sometimes difficult to find in Europe.
Mocambo, the large colonial-style restaurant, continues to cook Chicken Tetrazzini or Chicken kyiv.
Famous restaurants such as Peter Cats, Trincas or Moulin Rouge line Park Street;
living examples of an era that resists being closed.
Its renowned clubs are repositories of the best tradition of starter dishes from the last century, such as Steak Stroganoff, Lobster Thermidor, Cordon Bleu or Prawn Cocktail.
With a liberal tradition, many of the taboos and prejudices of Indian cooking (one thinks of pork and beef) discreetly disappear in the restaurants of Calcutta.
Flurys, the legendary English-style cafe and cookbook, continues to be a meeting place for Calcuttans.
Room of the Mocambo restaurant, in the Indian city of Calcutta.Kanval Chaudhary (Alamy) (Alamy Stock Photo)
The city is religious;
in their own way.
If the entire India vacillates between Vishnu or Shiva, the Bengali lives consecrated to the goddess Durga, a maternal figure who defeats Evil. The annual exponent of this veneration is the Durga Puja, a kind of Holy Week and Fallas in which the neighborhoods display artistic reproductions of the goddess (the famous
pandal
) which are later ceremonially immersed in the Hugli River, a tributary of the sacred Ganges.
Durga is the deity that defines the city and is worshiped in Kalighat, one of the most important tantric temples in the country.
However, beyond tantric passions, Bengalis are the ones who celebrate Christmas the most, an inheritance, of course, from the British.
As in the past, Park Street is illuminated, a Nativity scene is installed, turkey
roasts
are served and mass is attended in the beautiful Gothic cathedral of Saint Paul.
Hindu Durga Puja celebration on the streets of Kolkata, in October 2023. Avishek Das (SOPA Images/ Getty
Kolkata is also cinema and no one cracked it like director Satyajit Ray.
His filmography is already a serious and cult affair among film buffs and
Mahanagar
(1963), the most eloquent cinematographic tribute to that Calcutta of the fifties that is struggling to move forward.
On August 14, 1947, at 12:00 on a summer night, Nehru took the microphone and in his beautiful independence speech, he spoke of “a date with destiny.”
Calcutta never made it to that date.
British Airways has not had a direct flight from London to the former capital for a long time, but England lives in the bowels of this destination.
Some called it the city of joy;
tacky nineties aside, it is the great unexpected city.
Beyond stutters, miseries and tribulations, it has never wasted time comparing itself to other cities;
It is only compared to its capital past.
When the sun reclines and the miracle of the dazzling reddish sunset occurs, the entire city knows that its great daily victory is that while all cities fall into the imposture of reinventing themselves, Calcutta, more prosperous and haughty every day, continues without giving up.
Eduardo Barrachina
is a lawyer and solicitor in London.
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