It’s both fulfilling and edifying to approach Calcutta as a single entity, within an all-encompassing mindset. That established, we can then zoom in on whatever we choose: main features, specialties, deepest obscurities and anything previously unknown. 

London Signage

 

Calcutta Signage

The city’s very individuality is the first thing that stands out. In fact, there’s no other place like it. No cliché, this. In my experience, I’ve encountered many a comment about what Calcutta itself is like, but virtually none that imply that it’s like somewhere else. In other words, the city is taken for what it is, not some knockoff or imitation of another city presumed to be worthwhile for Calcutta to look up to for inspiration.

The prospect of becoming something that one is not is a gimmick employed by enterprises both public and private for purposes of prestige, morale, or selling an idea. Meanwhile, a city so well-defined as Calcutta is just going to continue being itself.

Calcutta Dating

London Dating

 

London Burials

There was once a brief time when I attempted, for interest’s sake, to compare Calcutta with some other big riverine city, so as to discern like factors as well as differences. This process often leads to opinions that are downright competitive, such as which city came first, which one influenced the other, which one’s ‘better’, which one’s ‘worse’, etc. Not my intention, though.

Within the riverine category, Cairo comes to mind, though I’ve not been there. Rangoon I found to have many Calcuttan notions, but not the same ambience. I’d always wondered if Shanghai might have a bit of a sister city feel to it. Well, maybe it did in past days, but apart from the Bund, most stuff of character has been bulldozed. The future heritage that replaced it will be one of similarity to other huge cities with little left to love. At any rate, Calcutta is so much more intact than others in its class, even now.

Calcutta Dwelling

 

London Dwelling

In ‘An Area Of Darkness’, the late Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul wrote of his first visit to Calcutta in 1962:
‘But nothing I had read or heard had prepared me for the red-brick city on the other side of Howrah Bridge... at first like another Birmingham; and then... like London, with the misty, tree-blobbed Maidan as Hyde Park, Chowringhee [sic] as a mixture of Oxford Street, Park Lane and Bayswater Road, with neon invitations, fuzzy in the mist, to bars, coffee-houses and air travel, and the Hooghly, a muddier, grander Thames, not far away.’

Evocative prose indeed, but to my mind, a quaint perspective on an environment not easily captured. I expected Naipaul to invoke the name of Charles Dickens, perhaps to associate the city’s vibrancy in a familiar context for the benefit of Western readers, but his later ‘verdict’ on Calcutta was characteristically withering and without value.

London Salon

 

Calcutta Salon

Speaking of Dickens, when the South African director Ross Devenish was filming a BBC adaptation of ‘Bleak House’, he wanted the atmosphere of the nighttime streets to be ‘like Calcutta’. Which particular Calcutta, he didn’t say, but I knew what he meant. Dickensian London, with all its slime, sleaze, and dismalness, remains intriguingly, intoxicatingly dramatic. The same applies to Calcutta, though without the limitations of a famous author’s specific era. The city has always been obliged to unabashedly speak for itself.

In contemporary terms, the two cities aren’t very similar at all, no matter what has been proclaimed to that effect. One needn’t emulate the other. Calcutta has plenty of style already. Aside from the well-known associations of the past, and the mutual challenges facing all members of the Mega-City Club of Planet Earth, London is pretty much irrelevant anyway. 

London Nocturne

 

Calcutta Nocturne

Nevertheless, there’s that curious but convincing replica of Big Ben’s clock tower, over on the east side, built by an Anglophile with access to a few crores. Fine, it’s a nice tribute. (Dubai sports an even more bizarre skyscraper version.)Personally, and without being tokenly slavish to Indic styles just because India’s the context, I would’ve voted for a free variation on those exhilarating towers in Chittaurgarh, Rajasthan. One is dedicated to Fame and the other to Victory.

The thing is, the single most essential reality turns out to be refreshingly simple: Calcutta is an Original. What else could it possibly be? 

And what a relief – as further questing for any comparisons that result in competition are highly unnecessary, annoyingly distracting, and patently absurd. Calcutta has no competitors. True originals never do.

Stay curious, have fun, and be sure to come when Calcutta calls!