Calcutta

City of Contrasts

Calcutta, the capital city of West Bengal, India, is located on the east delta bank of the Hooghly River, a branch of the Ganges. The former capital of British India (1772–1912), Calcutta has the nation's largest metropolitan area, but retains its international reputation as the “problem city of the world” (Moorhouse 1974)—a microcosm of India and the Third World. Calcutta has a growing population of over 14 million. Approximately a million of these sleep on the streets. As many as 5 million residents live in makeshift cardboard or bamboo-thatched habitats. Another 5 million are considered “slum dwellers.” The remaining 3 million live relatively well in homes and apartments in Calcutta.

Paradoxically, Calcutta was once the richest and most important cities in India. A city of palaces, an intellectual, cultural, and commercial capital, Calcutta is a monument to the faded glory of the Raj, British India. From 1599, when the British established “a quiet trade” with India through the East India Company, Calcutta was considered an imperial city of the British empire. In 1912, Calcutta ceased to be the country's capital, though British fortunes could still be made for another two or three decades of political and economic domination. Even today, Calcutta has a prosperous side. Most people work to make a living. Universities educate the young. Businesses succeed. Culture inspires. Five-star hotels and restaurants exist for tourists. Calcutta has many foreign banks, several chambers of commerce, and a stock exchange. The city serves as the major educational and cultural center of India, catering to a growing cosmopolitan population.

City of Refuse

More than most urban centers, however, Calcutta has an acute housing shortage. In addition to densely populated public and private housing units, there are hundreds of bustees, or slums, where about one-third of the city's population lives. (Bustees are officially defined as “a collection of huts standing on a plot of land of at least one-sixth of an acre GAIA” [n.d.]). The majority of these huts are [Page 40]tiny, flimsy, unventilated, unfinished, single-story rooms with few sanitary facilities and little open space. In part, because of bustees, ecological congestion and air and water pollution remain a medical and environmental crisis in the city.

Homeless people asleep in the streets of Calcutta c. 1950

Steve Prezent/Corbis; used with permission.

The weather in Calcutta exacerbates the poverty and disease. Though it is warm enough for the masses to sleep on the streets in winter without freezing to death, exposure to disease and unsanitary conditions continue to put millions at medical risk. The summer monsoon season lasts four months and creates a unique challenge: Huge shafts of water threaten to flood the homeless from the streets. As Geoffrey Moorhouse describes it: “Calcutta before the monsoon means being soaked with sweat after walking a slow fifty yards; it means not having an inch of dry skin except in air-conditioning.” When the monsoon breaks in June, there is a torrent of water and fierce thunder. “The streets are awash, the motor traffic is stalled, the trams can no longer move and only the rickshaw-pullers keep going through the floods, up to their knees and axles in water” (Moorhouse 1974, 25). As the storms rage and the river floods, the city becomes a breeding ground for malaria and other diseases that thrive on moisture.

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