In some ways, I thought as I headed into Kolkata last month, my route across India was looking very anachronistic. Mumbai, Chennai and now Kolkata: those were the three principle centers of British power during the heyday of the Raj. Chennai (Madras) was the oldest British post, Mumbai (Bombay) became British as part of the dowry Charles II got from his Portuguese bride, and Kolkata (Calcutta) was the center of British power in India from the 18th century to 1911 when the capital was transferred to Delhi.
In all three cities there are plenty of signs of the British presence: race tracks, clubs, excellent missionary schools and colleges, botanical gardens and of course large railway stations and government buildings. But none of these places felt post-colonial; they are, I suppose, post-post-colonial. India has been independent for so long, the British impact on Indian culture was so limited, and Indian life is so rich and complex that the British era seems increasingly remote from anything people care about. (And it helps that the English language, the most durable thing that the British left behind, is something that Indians learn today for entirely non-colonial reasons.)
Anyway, the three cities have had very different histories since independence. Mumbai hopes to become a global financial center, Chennai is the cultural capital of India’s most economically dynamic region, but Kolkata has mouldered in the hinterlands. These days it looks like some of the faded European capitals that were built to serve large empires but now can’t keep up the maintenance on their impressive physical plants. Think Vienna and Lisbon.
Kolkata in its prime was the metropolitan center of an Empire that included modern India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma. These days there’s a lot of seedy grandeur. Parts of the city look surprisingly like neighborhoods in Rio: people carry on their lives among shabbily maintained buildings dating from a wealthier time. But Kolkata’s problem isn’t just that the government left 100 years ago, taking all that sustaining tax money with it. The break up of British India also cut Kolkata off from its hinterland. Frosty relations with Pakistan meant that East and West Bengal had little to do with each other, and rabid nationalists in Burma drove out hundreds of thousands of Indian families who had settled and prospered there over the centuries—much as East Africans drove the Indians out as part of lame-brained and self-destructive policies of “indigenization” when those countries gained independence.
I visited Kolkata as part of my three week India tour last month; it was actually my second trip there. Six years ago I visited while West Bengal (the Indian state of which Kolkata is the capital) was still under communist rule. It was an Indian religious holiday at the time; as I drove in from the airport, on every lamppost and corner were swastika flags for the holiday (the Nazis stole the swastika from Hinduism as an “Aryan” religious symbol) and the hammer and sickle banners of the Communist Party of Bengal. The city looked as if it were celebrating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and I felt a very long way from home.
Since then the communists, weakened both by allegations of corruption and by the unpopularity of some economic reforms that, belatedly, they were undertaking, have lost power, and my ride into town looked less like a Leni Riefenstahl film clip and more like today’s India. Cows on the road, yes, and infrastructure that lagged far behind anything you’d see on the road from a major airport in China, but glossy towers rising nevertheless: high tech workplaces and apartment complexes for those who work in them.
Both of my visits to Kolkata have been much too short. This is one of those cities that needs to be savored. East Bengal went to Pakistan at the time of Partition and ultimately ended up as Bangladesh, but Bengali culture in both halves is rich, intellectual, playful and subtle. It’s a bookish culture; Book Street in Kolkata by the university features stall after stall of books in every language and on every possible subject, and Bengali students and intellectuals love to gather in coffeehouses by night and plot revolution, reform and literary manifestos. Love affairs, too, I’m told, are part of the mix and a lot of poetry gets recited in a city which is enormously proud of the great poets who have flourished here.
Kolkata today has something of the air of a beaten-down rustbelt city in the US. Indians, especially English speaking ones with the skills to take advantage of the country’s economic opening, tend to be a pretty optimistic bunch. But in Kolkata there was a lot of gloom and doom. There’s the generalized Marxian/dependency theory gloom that is profoundly convinced that nothing good can ever happen in a global system dominated by heartless metropolitan capitalism that you can find in faculty lounges all over the world—but it’s a little denser here given the long reign of communists (actually, despite the hammer and sickle flags, leftish social democrats rather than revolutionary reds) in local government. But there’s also a sense that the city has been hammered: the central government hasn’t exactly showered Kolkata with funds, and while other parts of India have taken off, Kolkata seems to be lagging.
Many people told me that Kolkata has great colleges and bright young people, but that the kids have to move away to get ahead. They go to Delhi, Mumbai and even further afield. (Some, I think, are in my neighborhood in glamorous Queens.) There was a kind of “Kolkata makes, the world takes,” sense of resignation among some of the journalists and professors I met with.
A lot of this has to do with the disappointment that many seem to feel with the leadership of Mamata Banerjee, the founder and leader of the All India Trinamool Congress party. (Don’t worry; people refer to it as the TMC.) After years of experience in the central government, she led her party to a landslide victory in the 2011 elections, ending 34 years of rule by the communist-led Left Front. There were a lot of people who thought this would lead to some exciting shifts in policy and a surge in investment. It’s still early for a final verdict, but so far that isn’t happening, and the sense that even a change from the Left Front can’t help Kolkata has, it seemed to me, thickened the cloud of gloom.
Banerjee hasn’t exactly led the march toward market liberalism and policy change in India. She’s used her influence in the coalition government in Delhi to block the so-called Multi-Brand Retail law that would have allowed large foreign retailers like Walmart into India. She’s held up a water agreement with Bangladesh that might have led the way to closer economic relations. She’s also opposed land sales that would have allowed new factories to open and, according to some of her supporters, has been somewhat erratic and personalistic in her governing style.
Perhaps; I wasn’t in Kolkata long enough to get to the bottom of all this and I’m sure that Banerjee has her own point of view about all this. Every politician in a democratic society has to think carefully about what the voters want, and questions like relations with Bangladesh and land sales are hot button issues with many people.
But it did seem to me that the Kolkata pessimists are missing the big picture. Kolkata’s problems are partly policy driven, to be sure, but the city’s basic problems come from the loss of its economic hinterland. For Kolkata to flourish, Burma, Bangladesh and northeastern India have to begin a process of economic integration and cooperation, and they’ve got to attract both domestic and foreign investment to make that happen. Fortunately for Kolkata, this is a time when all the local parties plus Washington, Tokyo and many others want exactly that kind of regional integration and development to take place.
The reopening of Myanmar/Burma is a big piece of this picture, but so also is the growing concern that many people in India feel about developments in the country’s isolated northeast. Almost entirely cut off from most of India by the Bangladesh boundary, northeastern India is a largely tribal and economically backward part of the country—in many ways more like a continuation of Burma with its fractured tribal and religious landscape. (There are a lot of Baptists in northeast India thanks to active missionaries in the past.)
There have been decades of unrest in the northeast: insurgencies against the center, conflicts over land and resources between tribal and religious groups, conflict between “native” northeasterners and migrants from Bangladesh and elsewhere: it’s a rich and tricky mix. Overall, the people I spoke with in Kolkata thought that India had generally made a hash of things in the northeast, and there was a lot of concern about the future — especially as China disputes the frontier and is building up heavily on its side of the border.
One Bengali asked me a question that was on a lot of peoples’ minds: “If China attacks India, will the U.S. protect us?” I gave a diplomatic answer, saying that if the Prime Minister of India makes an emergency call to the White House, the U.S. President will take the call. But after talking to various diplomatic and policy sources, it’s clear that the security of India’s northeast is getting a lot more attention than it has had in the past—in Washington and elsewhere.
The big story in India while I was there was only beginning to break while I was in Kolkata, but electrified the country and riveted attention on the often-neglected northeast. Violence between non-Muslims and Muslims in the northeast over what some said was increased illegal immigration from Bangladesh and others said was a longstanding resource conflict attracted the attention of Muslims across the subcontinent. Threats were made against northeasterners living in other parts of the country; in scenes reminiscent of the horrorshow of Partition, special trains were thronged with northeasterners fleeing cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai where they had been led to expect revenge attacks by local Muslims.
For Kolkata, the confluence of all these events and forces means the opportunity of a lifetime—if the political and business leadership can act. India’s vital interests now demand a fundamental reordering of the situation on its east. The northeast must be pacified and developed and the opportunity represented by Burma’s opening must be exploited in full. Furthermore, India’s peace and stability is impossible without developing a deep and mutually rewarding and acceptable partnership with Bangladesh.
Getting this right is necessary for India’s national security—a weak northeast and a chaotic Burma is an open invitation to China—and it is necessary for its stability at home. Working with the national leadership, Kolkata’s intellectual, business and political community has an unparalleled opportunity to link their priorities and needs with India’s national strategy.
The importance of all this goes far beyond India. The opening of Burma—and the patterns of instability and violence in that country—together with the trouble in northeastern India matter to many other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and to the U.S. as well. On the other hand, the vast commercial and industrial opportunities that the successful development of this region could create will benefit people all over the world.
Mamata Banerjee has the ear of New Delhi. The issues that matter to her region increasingly matter to the whole world. I left Kolkata feeling that both the city and the region are on a historical cusp. If Kolkata and India develop and implement the right kind of regional policies, the city will again become a metropolitan center in a prosperous region. And if they get things wrong, the cost will be high.
Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. Let’s hope Kolkata and its friends and associates in Delhi and around the world get this right.