In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi casually referred to Calcutta as a “dying city” when he responded to a question in Parliament about why most major airlines no longer flew there. This provoked an uproar in Calcutta and an angry demand for a retraction from the state government, which was controlled by one of India’s two Communist parties. The Telegraph, the city’s most literate newspaper, quickly conducted a poll and reported that two thirds of Calcutta’s citizens felt the city was not dying at all but merely “decaying,” a distinction perhaps best appreciated by the residents themselves. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi was only the most recent notable to continue a long tradition of denigrating the city. Rudyard Kipling once referred to Calcutta as “the city of dreadful night” and Winston Churchill, in a letter to his mother, observed, “I shall always be glad to have seen it—namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again.”
And yet, I eventually came to love Calcutta, in a complicated, guilt-ridden way. For all of its troubles, Calcutta remained India’s thriving center of culture and thought, the nation’s largest and most alive city, more proud to have been the home of India’s three Nobel laureates than of the merchants and industrialists who had made Calcutta a thriving commercial center at the turn of the century. Once the capital of all of British India and in recent years of the state of West Bengal, the city was a crazy, appealing mishmash of architectural styles. The English imperialists had erected near-replicas of the government buildings they remembered from home. Calcutta’s rich had displayed a weakness for Italianate arches, domes, turrets, pilasters and porticos, and built hundreds of “palaces,” most of them now decrepit but still so romantic that parts of the city looked like a stage set of old Southern mansions from a Tennessee Williams play. Calcutta was also the headquarters for Mother Teresa’s worldwide network serving the poorest of the poor. Every day at her home for the dying, the sisters tended rows of twisted, emaciated forms; in the evening they returned to the simple walled complex known as Mother’s House, and softly chanted prayers as they knelt on a cement floor in a candlelit room.
But what I loved most about the city was its people. Calcutta was defined by the Bengalis—creative, passionate, deeply intellectual, sensitive—a stereotype accepted by the Bengalis themselves, and one I found in many ways to be true. Within the city lived one of the world’s greatest concentrations of poets, artists, filmmakers, novelists, actors and thinkers. Very few actually made a living from their creative activities, but that was beside the point. When I met a Calcutta accountant, he told me he was really a writer; a surgeon invited me to his latest play. A rickshaw puller knew how to find the home of Moni Sankar Mukherjee, one of India’s most successful novelists, because Mukherjee, he informed me, was his favorite author. Calcutta had also produced Satyajit Ray, one of the few Indian filmmakers with an international reputation, who told me that his work “has been possible only because I have lived here, and have loved Calcutta.” Bikash Bhattacharya, an important young artist whose paintings of the city were haunting in their satire and desperation, said simply, “Calcutta is my mother.”
Calcutta had been the home of many unusual women, too. The nineteenth-century reform movement in Bengal that sought to ban purdah, sati and child marriage had elevated the status of wives in the middle class, and a hundred years later, Calcutta’s women were still better off than those in the north. Dowry deaths were rare in Calcutta, and women were not as afraid of harassment and verbal abuse in the public streets. Calcutta’s women had also benefited from the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore, the city’s poet laureate and its most famous Nobel Prize winner, who had been one of India’s greatest supporters of women’s rights.
Calcutta was a place of a thousand revelations, but I was especially struck by the way it worked as a leitmotif in the lives and the work of three creative women: a filmmaker, a painter and a poet. All of them worked under adverse conditions unimaginable in the West, and yet all said they could not be as creative living anywhere else. They alternately romanticized their lives and felt guilty about Calcutta’s squalor, and simultaneously loved and hated their city. But they seemed to blossom not in spite of but because of the misery around them, and the city always appeared in some startling form out of this tension in their work.
I also found in the subtleties of their creations some of the most impassioned statements and sentiments I had encountered about women in India, and women anywhere—even though not one of these women considered herself a feminist, associating the word with politics and single-minded groups that they saw as ineffective and uncreative. They wanted their work to speak to a much wider audience, in a voice that was strong, angry and even accusatory, but still tempered by irony and a sense of life’s ambiguities and biological contradictions. In the end, the three women taught me not only about Calcutta, but about the relationship of an artist to her environment, and why women who thought and created in the India of the 1980s found it impossible not to rebel.
... [Sections on Aparna Sen, Veena Bhargava, Nabaneeta Dev Sen]
All I know is that I will return to Calcutta and be as guilt-ridden as before. I also know that in the end, for me, Calcutta was a case study in how misery and oppression may produce creativity, and how they can sharpen an artist’s insights into society and herself. But it was interesting, and not surprising, that the mightier influence on the three women’s work came from the experience of simply being a woman.
The three Calcutta women I met identified themselves as filmmaker, painter and poet first, but it was undeniable that their experiences as women enriched their lives because they had to be, in a sense, both men and women—professionals, and mothers and wives. Although the partitioning of their lives took time and concentration away from the creative process, ultimately it brought enormous depth to their work. “Women are broken into little parts all the time,” Aparna Sen told me. “It’s very difficult to arrive at harmony, because in this kind of work, you need to give of yourself completely. At the same time, a woman has a tremendous emotional experience to draw on.”
None of the women said they felt a larger responsibility toward improving the lives of other women in India; they hoped that their work spoke for itself. “I’ll tell you in all honesty that I can’t think of devoting my life to the education of women, because that’s not my scene,” Aparna Sen told me. “But I can make films. Perhaps I may sound awful to you, but I feel that by doing my own thing the way I believe, and not abiding by every single rule that is laid down, I am in a way holding myself up as an example. I don’t presume that I am, but I don’t see what else I can do.” Nabaneeta Dev Sen had told me much the same thing. “Every feminist poem is one woman’s way of speaking of all women,” she said. “Even confessional poetry speaks about a group.”
She paused and smiled. “Don’t you think that every creative woman is a lover and a revolutionary?”
~~May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among The Women of India -by- Elisabeth Bumiller
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