Andrew Whitehead

 

Twenty Years After

09/06/2012

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Twenty years ago this month, I set foot in India for the first time. A life changing trip.

I landed at Calcutta on Royal Jordanian airways - my luggage landed at Dharan in Saudi Arabia. It was mid June, sweltering. I took a taxi in from Dum Dum airport, and gagged with disbelief as we passed the stink of Tangra.

The Kenilworth hotel denied any knowledge of my room booking, but had a vacancy in the 'old' wing. A room as big as a ballroom, with lots of fauna - but the lights were so dim you couldn't see the cockroaches. Very thoughtful!

A great trip - met Jyoti Basu, then chief minister, and Mamata Banerjee, who's now in charge.

My task was to make a radio programme about Communism in West Bengal, which much to my amazement and delight attracted the most prestigious award I've ever won. (If you're curious, you can hear the programme on this page - it's the third in the series).

I fell in love with Cal - and I've never fallen out of love with the city.

The photo above is of a street scene in Calcutta, near the CPI(M) headquarters in Alimuddin Street - the flag is of the street hawkers' union. I managed to see a bit of Wet Bengal beyond Cal. The photo below was taken as I was interviewing villagers in Nadia region - I can't remember whether they were CPI(M) supporters, or people complaining about thuggery by party comrades.

I stopped at Delhi on the way back. A year later, I pitched up as BBC correspondent there. And the rest ...
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The two Bengals

22/05/2011

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It's strange how Partition can disrupt political cultures so entirely - like twins being separated in adolescence, the same stock can have hugely different outcomes. Take Punjab - united prior to 1947 by a common language and a syncretic culture, Partition has cast the two halves if Punjab into hugely different political trajectories. Or Bengal on the other flank of the sub-continent. West Bengal turbulently pluralist - while Bangladesh has never quite found its feet, and much as in Pakistan, the army is the dominant institution.
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All this is prompted by reading two pieces of journalism this weekend about the two Bengals. Ian Jack in the Guardian has been reading a revisionist history of Bangladesh - by an academic, a member of the Bose parivar, whose roots lie in West Bengal.

He lavishes praise on Sarmila Bose's Dead Reckoning. 'As all good history tends to do, it complicates and contradicts the heroic narrative of national struggle.' Her book - I've just started reading it and it is wonderfully well written - challenges the conventional Bangladeshi nationalist account of the killings amid which the nation was born. She suggests that the massacres by the Pakistani army and its sympathisers were nothing like as bloody as often recounted - and that the killing of Bengali Hindus and of Urdu-speaking Biharis by advocates of Bangladeshi independence were much more substantial that previously imagined.

The other article is Amit Chaudhuri's Diary in the London Review of Books - a chronicle of the final demise of 34 years of Communist-led state government in India's West Bengal. Communist dominance was an indirect consequence of Partition. Bengali Communists won the loyalty of East Bengali refugees - not their only 'vote bank', in Indian political parlance, but an important one. In the last few days, Communist croneyism has been voted out in favour of the shrill populism of Mamata Bannerjee, West Bengal's Joan of Arc (my analogy not Amit Chaudhuri's).

Reading it all, I pine for Alimuddin Street and Chowringhee and Calcutta's Maidan - and for that sight as you fly in to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose airport of 'the palm and plantain trees, low houses and ponds'. As they say in the west: 'Oh, Calcutta!'
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Cool Cal - chaotic Cal - captivating Cal

05/02/2011

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Calcutta - that beguiling, maddening, beautiful city captured in all its complexity by the ever engaging Ian Jack in the Guardian
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World Cup canvassing in Cal

15/06/2010

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Here's a clever piece of election canvassing! A candidate in the recent municipal elections in West Bengal - the state whose capital is mighty Calcutta - issued the election leaflet I've copied below (thanks Nazes!). Folded over with Bengali on the front and Englisn on the back - and inside, a World Cup match schedule.

You might not think that India is World Cup crazy. But it is! Especially its football capital, Calcutta. In thousands of homes, this election leaflet was given pride of place by the TV.

Which party alighted on this campaigning master stroke? A regional party, the Trinamool Congress. Which party came out on top in the elections? Correct!
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Red Calcutta

30/05/2010

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The very first time I set foot in India was at Calcutta airport, back in 1992. I was making a radio documentary about the staying power of West Bengal's communists - you can hear it elsewhere on this site. Back then, Jyoti Basu's CPI(M) has been in power for fifteen unbroken years.

Fast forward another eighteen years to the present, and the Communists still govern West Bengal. Jyoti Basu, who at one stage came within a whisker of becoming India's Prime Minister, is now dead. But his party marches on.

Not for much longer, according to Jason Burke in today's Observer. He reports that the party is being outflanked by a populist split from Congress led by Mamata Banerjee - who I met on that first trip to Calcutta all those years ago. The party's epitaph has been written many times and they have proved remarkably resilient - but this time, the pendulum seems to be swinging away from Alimuddin Street (the CPI(M) headquarters).

Whatever, that first trip to India instilled in me a huge affection for Calcutta, which remains undimmed. A wonderful city with fantastic architecture and a vibrant culture.
  
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