Monday, May 11, 1964 University Daily Kansan
Page 5
Calcutta, Living Paradox, Shows Both Extremes
CALCUTTA, India—(UPI)—All great cities have their contrasts and paradoxes, Calcutta takes them to extremes.
India's largest and richest city, it has a population of six million, of whom no fewer than one and a half million are refugees. The hungry and homeless sleep in the streets outside the sub-continent's gayest hotels. Sacred cows contribute to the frequent traffic jams. India's biggest port is in constant danger of being silted up.
Calcutta seems less businesslike than Bombay though it does more business; it lacks the stately monumentality of New Delhi though it was the capital of British India until 1912; it outstrikes both those cities in cosmopolitan glitter and abysmal squail.
Though it is the most Indian of cities, Calcutta was founded by the British. Job Charnock, of the East India Company, established a settlement on the Ganges River, 85 miles inland from the Bay of Bengal, in 1860. The settlement spread along the east bank and enveloped a village called Kalikatta, still the Bengali name for the city. The cluster of neighborhood hamlets coagulated in to the starting point of British power as it spread through India. Calcutta was the home of Warren Hastings, the site of the "black hole" massacre, the capital of British India from 1834 to 1912.
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The British may have felt at home with the humidity, which is twice that of London, but probably not the temperature, which is pleasant during the winter but frequently climbs over 100 during the sauna-like summers.
R-1 KOTZIN CO., LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
After the partition of India, and of Bengal into East Pakistan and West Bengal, Calcutta became the capital of West Bengal state. A Baleege of Calcutta resents being classed with its temporary residents, that rootless floating population of refugees from Pakistan and job-seekers from the back country. The proper Calcuttan considers that his city, the birthplace of the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabinbranath Tagore, is still the cultural capital of India. A Calcuttan thinks of himself and his city more or less the same way as a Bostonian thinks of himself and Boston.
The present population of Calcutta is genuinely cosmopolitan. It has India's largest population of Westerners, and of Orientals—from Tibet to Tokyo. The number of Westerners is in fact larger today than it was during the days of the British Raj. Many British plantation owners and businessmen closed down after independence in 1947 and went home to England, but came trooping back, as partners, managers or technicians, to this city which has plenty of sunshine and no servant problem.
Calcutta office leading the way. Calcutta has two Chinatowns with a total population of about 20,000, whose allegiance is split between Taipei and Peking.
Calcutta was the bridgehead for the return of Japanese business to India, with the bank of Japan's
Even after nearly two decades of religious strife between Moslems and Hindus, more than one in six residents of Calcutta is a Moslem. The Indian Moslem population numbered one million in the 1961 census, and there is Pakistani Moslem population of 100,000.
of office workers, teachers, students, artisans and lawyers. The leadership is provided by professors, barristers and other intellectuals, many of whom are virulently pro-Peking. Several hundred of them were put into protective jail custody after the Sino-Indian border war broke out in 1962. Since their release, they have snatched the leadership of the party back from the anti-Peking, pro-Moscow faction.
Calcutta's politics are paradoxical. India's communists claim West Bengal and its Calcutta capital as their stronghold. But unlike such a state as Kerala, where the communists enjoyed a brief spell of power on the votes of farmers and workmen, the Calcutta Communists include a large leavening
But however powertui and articulate the Communists in Calcutta claim to be, and despite the number of seats they always get in the metropolitan municipal corporation and the two houses of the state legislature, the Communists have never come close to even a Red-dominated coalition.
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