“It’s peculiar to musicians,” he says. “I have a friend who is a musician who’s exactly the same way before he travels.”
None of the reasons for my return had to do with Calcutta being what it’s still often stubbornly called — a “capital of culture.” When my parents moved here in 1989, I realised slowly that it had ceased being any kind of centre. Of course, over it (already stunned as it was by power cuts) still hung, like a presence that wouldn’t go away, the shadow of the Bengal Renaissance — that is, the great changes that had taken place from the late eighteenth century onward to produce figures like Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore, who created the Brahmo Samaj, the reformist sect that decisively turned away from an “incorrigibly plural and various” Hinduism towards a unitarian, Upanishadic world view. And this unitarianism, through which, in effect, man discovers he’s suddenly alone in the universe (despite a putative God), would have deep philosophical implications for the appearance of liberal modernity in Bengal, with men like Madhusudan Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and others feeling compelled, as it were, to take upon themselves the hard task of creating a new literature and culture: a new image of man himself. I had no illusions about the present-day inhabitants of the city having any real interest in this history.
* * *
The eighties was, as I said, a time of rebirth. There was the actual feeling of being born another time as I stepped off the cheap flight from Heathrow and experienced, in the hour after arrival, the onrush of life and traffic becoming real. Related to these student’s journeys was my birth as a writer — or perhaps, again, rebirth, as I’d been writing for more than a decade, trying to be, at different times, Enid Blyton, Rudyard Kipling, one of the anonymous poets of the Bhagavad Gita, T. S. Eliot, Tagore, Samuel Beckett. Then, in London and later in Oxford, I had a deep desire to revisit home, to escape everything dead and still around me — by home I mean India, perhaps even Calcutta (though it wasn’t my home), and by India and Calcutta I mean “life.” I was possessed by a desire, especially when I was reading, to revisit life, and, in Oxford, I found it was possible to do so in R. K. Narayan’s stories — a writer I’d earlier dismissed, as D. H. Lawrence said the English once dismissed classic American writing as “children’s literature.” But, in those years, I found it possible to discover Calcutta in the oddest of places — in the mining town in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand, which she said she wanted to explore to the last detail, including the “creak of the laundry basket”; the across-the-balcony exchanges in Naipaul’s Trinidad; the economically conjured-up neighbourhoods and streets in the stories in Dubliners. Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. Why, in 1999, did I move to it? Because I’d been rehearsing that journey for years: as a child, in trips from Bombay in the summer and the winter; and later — in my continual search for a certain kind of city — in my reading. And Calcutta would make its way back to me, unexpectedly, through Irish literature and Mansfield and Eudora Welty and the writing of the American South. There was movement on both sides, or from many sides. Even later, when I finally became a published writer, that city would be given back to me by my readers, from their strange identifications and instants of recognition. My friend Aamer Hussein, the British-Pakistani short-story writer, told me how Mai Ghoussoub, the publisher of London’s Saqi Books, had, on reading the section on Chhotomama shaving in the balcony in A Strange and Sublime Address, phoned him and laughed: “It reminds me of Beirut!” I was delighted, like a child, but not surprised. Was this a “contrapuntal reading,” in Said’s manner? Or was it evidence of how, even in modernity — perhaps particularly in modernity — we have shared, primal memories of the spaces we’ve inherited and which came to exist in the world in the last two hundred years? When we speak of shared memories, we hint at some uninvestigated, autochthonic past. But what of the world, the cities, that arose in the nineteenth century? Are we the exiles and travellers of the last two centuries, or our ideas and visions?
What do I mean by “modernity,” in the special sense I discovered through the Calcutta I knew as a child? Not electric lights, telephones, cars, certainly, though it might encompass these — we had plenty of those in Bombay. I’ll keep it brief: by “modernity” I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. My first impressions of Calcutta from the mid-sixties are of a Chowringhee whose advertisements shone through the smog; and of my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road in Bhowanipore, which, with its slatted windows, seemed to have stood in that place forever. It was built, in fact, roughly forty years before my first becoming conscious of it. Similarly, the city itself — which is by no means old by the standards of Rome, Patna, Agra, or even London — is, actually, fairly new, its origins traceable to three hundred and twenty years back in time, the groundwork for the Calcutta we now know probably laid no more than two centuries ago. Yet if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new — that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of “modernity.”
Let me provide an example. In the Courtauld Gallery in London hang several exceptional Cézannes, among which is one of the painter’s several viewings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and the fairly empty countryside (barring a few houses nearby) before it. This view is framed by a large pine tree, its branches flailing against space, but not quite obscuring the view of the mountain. On the right-hand side, at the bottom of the mountain, where the empty yellow stretches and rectangular patches of greenery end, you notice something horizontal — except that it’s rising very slightly at an angle — with dark arches, like a bridge. It is a culvert. The curator’s small note points out that by including the culvert in the scene Cézanne is marking the incursion of modernity into the world of nature, or words to that effect. My first response was to disagree. For “nature,” in keeping with the simmering abandon of the time, and reminiscent of his younger contemporary Gauguin, is painted by Cézanne with a palette of incongruous colours, with pinks, oranges, and yellows: the scene, far away from the city, crackles with Parisian newness. The culvert, once you notice it, is the only thing that looks genuinely, deeply, old: instinctively, Cézanne paints it an organic, faded brown. Its colour is identical to the rocks on that side of the mountain; the rest of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire has iridescences of pink. Cézanne is telling us, with great delicacy, that modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature — in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself. The shadows etched under the arches are mysterious, like a womb’s darkness; and since Cézanne himself is a progeny of the modern, how can he not feel that it’s older and darker than the earth and the mountain?