ABSTRACT
The history of nineteenth-century Calcutta is usually identified with a concurrent history of the bhadralok. And yet it was peopled by a whole host of other groups: migrant workers, shopkeepers, labourers and an army of clerks. What were their experiences? As a huge low-to-middling workforce arrived in the city, they constituted a significant layer in the urban experience, even self-consciously acknowledging the tremendous role that the city played in their everyday lives. Contemporary street songs on Calcutta, which this chapter studies, provide important entry-points into this mental world of the city’s lower social orders. Popular street and print culture, particularly songs, consistently foreground the city as a site for discussions on social and topical themes. While offering quotidian images of city life, they also constituted vital social commentaries on modernity, colonialism and urbanism. In addition, they acted as crucial circuits of information and gossip, news and rumour that constantly shaped and reassured their moral and mental worlds. Calcutta’s prominence as a colonial metropolis for British India in the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. Originally starting out as a small trading outpost in the late seventeenth century, Calcutta grew in size and impact after the East India Company captured power in the region. With its spacious European classical-style villas lining the eastern and southern reaches, and official buildings along the Esplanade marking the nerve-centre of British trade and administration, it was a place that evoked a sense of grandeur and elegance, giving rise to the expression ‘City of Palaces’ in the eighteenth century. The rapid growth of Calcutta that followed, stretching longitudinally along the banks of the Hooghly, also saw segregation in the residential settlement pattern – with a White Town with largely European inhabitants populating the area surrounding the fort, and a teeming Black Town peopled by Indians squeezed into the northern part of the city.1 Visual and textual representations of the city produced by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are remarkable in how they completely shut out the presence of the indigenous populations except by way of foil for the White Town. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the figure of the lone Indian servant hovering over the British master had come to be replaced by the images of the brash irreverence of the jubilant crowds attending the
hook-swinging festival, or filthy and chaotic masses in bazaars and streets. The Black Town in such narratives was ‘a sprawling appendage that only survived because of the white town and remained the great defect in this capital of empire’ (Chattopadhyay 2005: 29). From the nineteenth century onwards we have educated Indians offering their own perspectives on the urban experience that was Calcutta, but even these remained largely negative. The bhadralok, we know, were never at home in the city. The city was not worth habitation because of the pollution, dirt and disease that was rampant within its limits. Despite the novelty of the metropolitan experience, the city was looked upon as a place of ruin and corruption, decay and deprivation. The countryside was fresher, purer and idyllic in contrast (Sarkar 1999: 176-177, Chattopadhyay 2005: 32). Not surprisingly, one would think, given that the metropolis symbolised, among other things, the material and political triumph of the Raj and the concurrent enslavement of the educated Bengali, whose sole reason of existence in the city, ironically, was service to the colonial state. What is missing from this spectrum of representations, however, is the experience of the lower social tiers. While undoubtedly some views were shared vertically across the layers – such as those on women, migrants etc. – other, more specifically socially ordered perspectives, were an inherent part of the city’s long-standing traditions of popular street cultures. Traditional musical performances, entertainment in the form of jhumurs and khemtas (rhythmic sensual dances) and panchalis (couplets based on mythological themes), had been around for a while, but there emerged new urban variants in Calcutta at this time in the form of kobi-songs, with their strong abusive elements in the form of kheud. While often simply sharply observant and amusing accounts of city life, the songs could turn loudly and unambiguously critical, packed with pungent hatred of the wealthier residents, and not surprisingly, erring women. A strong culture of humour overlapped with these performative cultures which allowed the airing of critical opinions on the city and found effective expression in irreverent couplets and verses circulating in the streets. There was yet another category of songs on the city that developed independently of this performative tradition from the late nineteenth century onwards and was shared by reading/singing and listening groups. Printed as short pamphlets and composed in sometimes stylised and sometimes rudimentary, colloquial Bengali, such songs offered perspectives and comments on dramatic happenings or major developments that presumably affected all city dwellers. Despite anxieties about surviving in a harsh environment, Calcutta’s material munificence and technological marvels provoked awe and admiration. As bridges spanned mighty rivers, and electricity dispelled evening darkness, people were awestruck by these events and wrote prolifically about them. Unlike the educated middle classes lamenting the passing of old days,2 there was a joyous celebration of city life. Poems and songs composed in the traditional style of rhymed couplets marked the construction of the Pontoon bridge over the Ganges in 1874,3 the illumination of the same bridge in 1879, the laying of the tramway in the city in 1880, and even the municipal drains in Calcutta (Drener Panchali) in 1874. But
frailty in the face of natural disasters, disease and death also drove home the ephemeral nature of modern civilisation. The cyclones of 1867 and 1877, the scare of worms in edible fish in 1875 and the spread of dengue fever in 1872/74 fanned fears of an impending apocalyptic doom in which the city’s residents would have to pay for their sins. There was also the sharing of everyday news – often sensational – like the explosion at the Colvin Ghat in 1876 and the Sonagatchi murder in 1875. This chapter studies such songs from this period, exploring the interstices between a largely pre-modern, pastoral and deeply indigenous sensibility and the onset of a rushed modernity and urbanity in nineteenth-century Calcutta, the consequences of living and working in a harsh colonial environment, and their wider significance for the newly emergent public sphere in the city. There are two characteristics of the songs that I wish to emphasise here: one, that the songs were vital bearers of ‘news’ and gossip, and acted as circulating newspapers for a population living outside or marginally within the limits of literacy; and two, how these were interwoven with discursive layers on social themes and debates relating to urban life. A broader meta-language underlying the songs, I would like to argue, is that of ‘knowingness’, as Peter Bailey suggests in the context of the nineteenth-century music hall songs of the working classes in England. In Bailey’s study, ‘knowingness’ represented a new alertness that was part of the cosmopolitan urban sensibility, which had to ‘know’ its world in order to survive. The ‘knowing intimacy’ displayed in popular song motifs and tropes with urban themes thus enabled sizeable constituencies to collectively identify with the songsters and song writers. In nineteenth-century Calcutta, as I show, the knowingness did not just translate into being canny in a new urban environment, it also invited thought and reflection on that experience – prodding at the boundaries of urban social hierarchies, airing the debate between the right to sexual freedom and conjugal obligations, and questioning the legitimacy of municipal and taxation regimes. The educated Bengali, too, wrote about Calcutta, but their concerns were very dissimilar. Their acknowledgement of the technological marvels of the British empire was indifferent, at best tardy. When they did speak about these it was to complain about the inconvenience caused by the city being dug up all over or the lack of clean water supply (Tagore 1930: 81-82). Registering mixed feelings about Calcutta, with its abundant wealth and opportunity, and an alien lifestyle rivalling one that was habitual and sanctified by custom, bhadralok writings closely interrogated their own social and cultural investment in the city. One such literary response, the Kalikata Kamalalaya, recorded the changing times as indexed in contemporary popular perception.4 Set up as a dialogue between a city dweller and a villager, with the latter confronting the former as his alter-ego, the work posed the author’s own self-doubts to a wider readership. Under the onslaught of the countryman’s impeccable reasoning, the city man puts up a tough but spirited defence of his city, but the response is riddled with ambiguity. Such divided selves were to form an endemic feature of educated writings in the times to come.5 There is a constant dialectic of identity and alienation for the
bhadralok within the colonial urban space. Anxiety persisted particularly on the upsetting of Hindu ways of life and codes (Dutta 1981: 127-153). In Kantalaler Kolikata Darshan (Kantalal Vists Calcutta) the author, an academic and novelist, presents mixed messages. When Kantalal, a young man, visits Calcutta from a neighbouring village, he is swept inadvertently into a circle of intrigue and crime (Chaudhuri n.d.). Even as he manages to escape, slowly adapting and learning to survive under harsh conditions, Kantalal’s seeming inexperience is replaced by canny urban sense. As a friend remarks on meeting Kanta sometime later, ‘the Calcutta wind has got you’, the metaphor summing up pithily all that the city was capable of inflicting on the outsider – corruption of the moral fibre, stripping of innocence and a hardening of the soul (Chaudhuri n.d.: vol. 1, 91). Kantalal in his pristine days is the epitome of Arcadian virtues. On his arrival he is shocked to find the city abounding in cheats and swindlers – from the fake blind and lame beggars to embracing strangers who steal all his worldly possessions. He witnesses the avarice of lawyers and the illicit trade in girls (Chaudhuri n.d.: 11-12, 20-21, 41-42). But in the end, he emerges unscathed, albeit wiser. Despite his eventual adaptation to city life, Kantalal is amazed by what he sees in Calcutta, his heightened appreciation of the view from the top of the Ochterlony Monument being aestheticised by the author thus:
What he saw transformed him into a state of stupor. The golden rays of the sun setting over the Ganges in the west had lit up the distant red clouds in the horizon filling it up with an enchanting glow. There were hundreds of ships visible on the river, while the countryboats with their white sails disappeared slowly and gracefully like white birds into the tree line. Millions of buildings all around him stood tall and proud testimony to centuries of industrial success. . . . Down below one could see numerous small hackneycarriages and electric vehicles, and thousands of people on the move resembling armies of ants. A grand, dazzling scene! Kantalal remembered the proverb that did its rounds in the mofussil, and marvelled at its aptness: ‘if one has not seen Calcutta, one literally remains unborn’.
