ABSTRACT
Almost every book written about Calcutta beg ins with extravagant language describing the city's squalor and putrefaction. It is as though Calcutta has always had a perverse fascination as a dreadful place. As early as the 1770s, the first Govemor of Bengal, Robert Clive, called it "the most wicked place in the univene." Nearly one hundred years later, one ofhis successors, Sir George Trevelyan, wrote: "Find, if you can a more uninviting spot than Calcutta .... The place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse, but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously." Rudyard Kipling in his oftquoted portrayal, called Calcutta "the city of dreadful night---a city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease ... where the cholera, the cyc1one, the crow come and go, by the sewerage rendered fetid, by the sewer made impure." Young Winston Churchill was more matter-of-fact and whimsical when he wrote to his mother: "I shall always be glad to have seen it-for the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbon--namely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again." Mark Twain, who stayed only one or two days, found the weather "enough to make the brass doorknob mushy." On a visit
in 1963, V.S. Naipaul could only conclude that Calcutta was "an abomination. "
