Thankappan Nair, the city’s dedicated chronicler. That was when the East India Company’s Job Charnock slipped anchor in the Hooghly. A Scots jute mill manager’s percipient wife noted the absence of old folk because they went home as soon as they retired. Corpses littered the pavements.“The history of Colonial Calcutta dates from August 24, 1690,” says P. About three million people died from starvation with the authorities in Calcutta, New Delhi and London in total denial.But Kolkata, changing by not changing at all, keeps the beat even as many have wondered, since former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi once made the mistake of calling it “a dying city”, whether its heart stops every once in a while. Even the Scots Sir David Yule, who headed the biggest British conglomerate, Andrew Yule and Company, market leaders in jute, tea and river shipping, couldn’t escape the taint of trade. “A Ditcher’s Diary” was a popular column in the European-owned and edited weekly, Capital.

It may no longer have the same chutzpah in claiming itself the tag of being the “cultural capital” of India. Desperate mothers tried to sell starving infants. Robert Clive thought Calcutta “the most wicked place in the universe”.). The piteous cry “Mago! Ektu phan dao” (Dear mother, spare a little gruel) of children tottering from door to door filled the air. They were birds of pasغير مجاز مي باشدe.” The English were always a tiny minority. The city belongs and has always belonged to the English, and the native community in it is simply a foreign and parasitical community which would cease to exist if the English were to abandon it.The 1940s was the decade of darkness. And keeps happening, quite magically indeed.Kolkata is a mad city because of its chaos, but it is also happily insane as it takes pride in this chaos and unscripted life and living. Refugee shantytowns swallowed up open spaces.There might have been no relief at all but for the vigorous campaign by the Statesman and its editor, Ian Stephens, who accused the authorities of trying “to play down, suppress, distort or muffle the truth... Despite a major repatriation effort when the war ended, many stayed back.

This would be considered a fault in any other big town. Shops and eateries straddled pavements.. Office lore had it, recalled Bhaskar Mitter, who became Andrew Yule’s chairman in 1968, that His Majesty was mightily impressed when crossing the jetty to a jute mill, the thrifty Scotsman bent down and picked up a strand of the silvery fibre. As it hurtles along in the here and now, its head remains turned Brass quick opening spool to the past.” The mythic horrors of “the black hole of Calcutta” of British imagination became the metaphor for the city until Saint Teresa, the Albanian-born Roman Catholic missionary, replaced it with an even more horrific image of death and disease. Waves lashed Bengal’s coastal districts flooding the city with destitute villagers. Its jute mills lost their raw material.” A correspondent in the Englishman, a local newspaper nicknamed “John Bull of the East”, declared more bluntly, “Calcutta is a purely English city. Independence the following August meant further waves of Hindu refugees fleeing the new Muslim theocracy next door.