Trade missions tend to be more noticed in their country of origin — more by the supplicant than by the supplicated. Nicola Sturgeon’s visit to Beijing recently, for example, was a story in Scotland and no more than a comma (if that) in China’s public attention span.
The case is likewise for Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, who arrived in London in July on a five-day trip that, among its scheduled highlights, included tea at Buckingham Palace — though only with Prince Andrew — and a meeting at the Foreign Office with the employment secretary, Priti Patel.
The visit wasn’t without incident or interest: impromptu, Banerjee announced that she wanted her government to buy the Hampstead house where the greatest-ever Bengali, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, had stayed for a few months in 1912. But only in India was any of this reported. In London, not a jot or tittle appeared.
Anyone who encountered her on of one her brisk strolls through London would have seen a small 60-year-old woman in a sari, a tourist perhaps, and not understood her as the political leader of a state of 91 million people, where the population of a single district, with a name you’ve never heard before, can easily outnumber that of Scotland, Ireland or Wales.
The state capital is Kolkata. The chief minister, who is known as “Didi” or “big sister”, has made a significant impact on the city since her party, the Trinamool [grassroots] Congress, replaced the state’s long-serving Marxist government in 2011.
Unlike the Marxists, the Trinamool party has no obvious political ideology other than the obligatory nod towards helping the poor. On the other hand, it cares passionately — and expensively — about how things look. Railings, gateposts and public buildings in Kolkata have been repainted in Didi’s favourite colours — blue and white — while an enormous programme of street lighting has installed three-stalked lamp standards in settlements all the way from the Bay of Bengal to the Himalayas.
Like columns did for ancient Rome, they mark the reach of Didi’s empire — on an overnight train journey, you can fall asleep to the dim light of these tridents through your carriage window and wake up 500 kilometres later to find yet more of them shining palely in the morning mist. They must have cost billions of rupees and made someone, or perhaps several people, very rich.
But Didi’s vision goes beyond fresh paint and streetlights. Her frequently stated ambition is to turn Kolkata into a London of the East — and it was for this reason above all others that she and her numerous party flew 8,000 kilometres to put up at the St James’s hotel.
The two cities have, of course, a shared history that dates from Kolkata’s 17th-century foundation as an English trading post. Both retain elegant and occasionally bombastic imperial architecture — neoclassical or Gothic — while in the grand domed outline of the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata has the largest monument to a British monarch — perhaps any monarch — erected anywhere.
Both stand on rivers that were once great arteries of imperial trade. Of the two, it’s the River Hooghly that preserves something of the business of that time, with tumbledown warehouses that still hold sacks of food grains and cement and grubby little coasters riding at anchor in midstream.
Otherwise, in contrast to London, Kolkata feels diminished; the second city of the empire hasn’t kept up with the first, even though the economic relationship between their respective countries has been turned on its head. Really, as any Kolkatan will tell you, the city has been on the skids since the British decided to move the Indian capital to Delhi in 1911.
It amounts to a century of decline, accelerated now and then by catastrophes such as Indian partition and the Bangladesh war, which Didi hopes to arrest, if not reverse, by making Kolkata “like London”.
And how would she do this? Would she, for example, pour money into the repair of the city’s many ruinous buildings? Would she mend the pavements and the tramlines so that Kolkatans could move around more pleasantly and safely? Would she curb the excesses of the car? Would she plant trees or build new riverside theatres, or declare the city’s Art Deco suburbs off-limits to developers?
No, none of these things. To be like London, Didi has decided that what Kolkata needs is a ferris wheel. As there is a London Eye, so there will be a Kolkata Eye. A riverside site has been found, and a British firm of consultants appointed.
If all goes to plan, customers will gaze out from their air-conditioned pods over the tumultuous city, the great bridges across the sludge-brown river and the industrial suburbs.
The world has many less interesting views to offer, certainly, but only a chief minister as dedicated to gimmicks as Didi would see a ferris wheel as a primary route to civic salvation for an urban conurbation of 15 million people. Then again, like the Marxists before her, she may be acknowledging a simple truth: that rebooting a city is tough when the historical tide is against you.
Better, then, to concentrate on the cosmetic element, the stuff people notice: wall paintings of Marx, Engels and Lenin once upon a time; fancy lampposts in the present; a big wheel next to a river coming soon.
Clubland, Kolkata-style
Two other things unite Kolkata and London. The first is expensive property and the second is the institution once known as the gentlemen’s club. Both promise cool seclusion — anyone who has endured the humidity and clamour of a Kolkata summer understands their appeal, which is the same as the five-star hotel’s.
But the high price of a flat is mysterious, given the poor shape of the city’s economy and Kolkata’s reputation in the rest of India as a tattered Victorian has-been. Also, there are so many of them. On the airport road, the grey shapes of tower blocks fill the horizon like a battle fleet. Who would want to live in these hot and remote flatlands, even with a rooftop swimming pool?
The question is misjudged. This isn’t about living but about owning. As Londoners are coming to understand, prices owe at least some of their rise to property’s wonderful ability to turn black money into white. In Kolkata as in London, foreign investment and money laundering are what get houses built.
As to clubs, no other Indian city has so many — the Bengal, the Calcutta, the Tollygunge, the Royal Calcutta Golf, the Saturday, the Lakes. Some are very old; the golf club is the oldest outside the British Isles.
They were — and largely remain — anglophone and anglophile retreats, struggling to retain a sense of difference and decorum by imposing dress codes that, while they have done away with cummerbunds, still make the visitor think twice before he sets foot in one.
The rules vary subtly from club to club, and sometimes between rooms in the same club. Sandals are sometimes allowed, for example, provided they have a back strap. Shirts may be worn without jackets or ties if the shirts have collars.
The writer Amit Chaudhuri, a friend, was once prevented from entering the bar at the Calcutta Club because his shirt, though collared, had the wrong kind of tail. Only bush shirts are permitted without jackets. The bottom of a bush shirt is straight, where as Amit’s had a gentle curve.
Somewhere in the shadows, perhaps behind portraits of old dignitaries whose eyes have been replaced by peepholes, a relay of club servants must be kept on permanent lookout for this kind of outrage. Their job is to keep India at bay.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
