Contemporary Kolkata’s image has been defined by three key themes. First, it is the “second city of the empire”, the place where the Raj began, which today amounts to hundreds of crumbling, ghostly remains; a city of melancholy, a city of what once was.
Second, it is the center of the “Bengal Renaissance”, the intellectual heart of the Indian national revival, the city that has been graced by such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray.
Third, it is the city of misery, the place that — perhaps more than any other Indian urban center — has been characterized by almost unimaginable urban squalor and deprivation. This is the city Mother Teresa presented to the world, an image that was quickly popularized by the Hollywood movie “City of Joy” (an adaptation of the book of the same name). Kolkata has to cope with the tensions caused by the clash of these themes. If the city is to revive, it is going to have to resolve them.
Image-wise, India suffers from a peculiar problem. Despite the astonishing growth of the last 15 years, visitors are normally not interested in the country’s rapid development or wealth. The romance is to be found in poverty, because only in poverty will the backpacker be able to find himself. For this quest, Kolkata is the ideal place to come. It is a city of poverty, a giant slum, a mass of refuse covering up its other characteristics. In large part this is because of the work of Mother Teresa.
It’s clear that she is the personality who has done more than anyone else (with the possible exception of Ray) to define Kolkata’s post-independence image, and as such needs to be looked at closely.
I wanted to examine Mother Teresa a little more sympathetically, and so I visited the small museum that has been set up at the mission house to commemorate her life. There, one critical theme kept repeating itself, almost as a source of pride. For Mother Teresa, wading into extreme poverty was a spiritual exercise — by working with the poor, she believed she was getting closer to Christ. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. What’s important is that it’s an aim that is not particularly conducive to reviving a city — if poverty is where God is found, where is the incentive to end that poverty?
Talking to the volunteers (currently dominated by Spanish, Japanese and Americans) at the backpacker hangouts on Sudder Street, I realized that few of them are motivated by religion. But it was clear that they had little interest in the city beyond its plight as a place that “needed” their help, and that they hoped to find some sort of spiritual satisfaction in their volunteering. Again, this aim is stated clearly at the mission house, albeit with a crucial distinction — exposure to poverty (as opposed to the act of volunteering) is supposed to spiritually change the volunteer. This is why the mission has no problem with volunteers devoting just a few hours of their time, leading to the absurd spectacle of five people queuing up to clean the mouth of a single, dying man. Volunteering is a sacred cow, of course, and very few people pause to question whether or not a deeply ingrained volunteer culture is actually in a city’s best interests.
In the case of Kolkata, the city’s problems are complex. Its chances of ever reclaiming the status it held at the height of the Raj are close to zero, but it remains a potentially world-class city.
Over the course of the 20th century, it managed to just about survive three cataclysmic events that would have destroyed a place with lesser spirit — the Bengal famine of the 1940s, the violence and refugee crisis following the partition of India, and the refugee crisis (perhaps the largest in history) following the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Today, its low importance is symbolized by its relative lack of blackouts, a clear sign that it is no longer such an important business center. As the former UN undersecretary Shashi Tharoor noted: “It used to be said that when Calcutta catches a cold, the rest of India sneezes. Today, if Calcutta has a cold, the rest of India looks away — and hopes that the virus isn’t catching.”
This context is what’s important, yet most volunteers know nothing of it, and are nonplussed by their ignorance. Once again, it’s the India of the imagination that counts, an “eternal” place where poverty is romantic. Why Kolkata? I asked them, and all they could give was a shrug. If you want poverty, there are any number of Indian urban centers one could pick. Is the most romantic option really the most wise? Volunteering here is all well and good, but if you are doing it solely for your own spiritual development, while at the same time exporting an image of the city that is entirely at odds with the image the place needs to project, you will end up doing more harm than good, and the problems of Kolkata will never be solved.
