Photo Essay: ‘Kolkata is a kaleidoscope: turn your gaze and a new pattern will emerge. What you wish to see is therefore a combination of what you want to see and what your gaze is capable of perceiving.’

- Abin Chakraborty

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, there exists the Mirror of Erised, which promises to reflect the viewer’s deepest longings, however unattainable they might be. Whenever Harry (orphaned as a baby) looks at the mirror, he finds himself flanked by images of his departed parents, enjoying a kind of familial warmth that he knows he will never be able to receive.

In many ways, Kolkata is bestowed with the ‘Erised’ magic, too: sometimes, gazing at the city reveals what you lack, and what you aspire to be, rather than what the city is. If you are a lonely soul who prefers solitude and quiet, the ghats at dawn or the office buildings of Dalhousie Square at night will beckon you; if you’re a heritage enthusiast, you’ll be charmed by the old colonial buildings, their upcycled renovated South Kolkata versions and the many quaint splendours found around Park Street or Esplanade; if the hustle and bustle of urban life is what you are after, Shyambazar, Burrabazar and Sealdah will honk at you; and if you’re looking for some gastronomic delights, then the whole city will spread its platters for you which will bring you cuisines from the Koreas to the Caribbean islands.

Likewise, if you're on the lookout for corruption then all the news portals will scream at you about the many crores of rupees associated with multiple scams. If you are interested in the transactions of the flesh, the notorious Sonagachi red light district might whistle at you. If you are looking for real estate deals, old buildings across the length and breadth of this city are constantly being sold off or demolished to make way for skyscrapers and malls. On the fringes, wetlands are being rapidly transformed into plots for new gated communities (more often than not, there are knives, guns and bombs at play, for getting enough pelf out of the deals being made).

Looking into the mirror of this city, however, can often be problematic, because of the dense smog that wraps our afternoons, even as new painters and artists continue to inspire new ways of perceiving our world through diverse representations.

These judgments ignore the beauty and bounty of this city because of a parochial vision, perhaps generated by unacknowledged miasma of disappointments—even though splendor and squalor often jostle together in this strangely beloved, much maligned city of ours.

In other words, Kolkata is a kaleidoscope: turn your gaze and a new pattern will emerge. What you wish to see is therefore a combination of what you want to see and what your gaze is capable of perceiving.

Unfortunately, this multiplicity is often lost for those who are dismayed by the city’s refusal to abide by the patterns others wish to impose on it and this has been the case for decades. Like many other colonials longing for home, the English author Rudyard Kipling called Calcutta The City of Dreadful Night (1899) and then went on to disparage Calcutta even further, by comparing it with Simla in “A Tale of Two Cities”:

Thus the midday halt of Charnock-more's the pity
Grew a City
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed
So it spread
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built

Long after the collapse of the empire, Geoffrey Moorhouse in his book Calcutta: The City Revealed (1971) predicted imminent apocalyptic catastrophe for Calcutta. Victoria Graham, who perhaps in honour of her imperial namesake, called Calcutta “a synonym for… a city in its death throes” for the Los Angeles Times in 1985. Of course such disparagement did not just come from foreigners. The former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi called Calcutta the “dying city” in 1985, quite possibly because the Indian National Congress continued to lose its way in the communist-dominated West Bengal of the 1980s. Even fellow Bengalis have at times reiterated this funereal rhetoric as evident from Ananya Roy’s book City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (2002). In recent times, this eschatological rhetoric has gained greater momentum through several Bengalis, generally settled elsewhere, within and outside India, who have chosen to berate the city of their birth on several print and online platforms. Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council has commented on how Kolkata was apparently murdered; novelist Saikat Majumdar has identified Kolkata as a city where nothing is created anymore; journalist Somashree Sarkar called Kolkata a “city in ruins”; and the academic Asijit Dutta—who previously taught English in a private engineering college in Kolkata—described the city as “a place that must be abandoned”.

While there is no denying that like all other metropolitan centres within India, Kolkata has its fair share of problems, these judgments ignore the beauty and bounty of this city because of a parochial vision, perhaps generated by unacknowledged miasma of disappointments—even though splendor and squalor often jostle together in this strangely beloved, much maligned city of ours.

Consider for example the photographs below of a string of buildings opposite Ahindra Mancha in Chetla. If you look at the two buildings side by side pictured below, you’ll see a succinct summation of that juxtaposition of beauty and decay which often appears to be the hallmark of this metropolis. The banana leaf green walls, glowing like a youthful sapling after a quick shower, with timbered louvers shading a long balcony of bright yellow and an arched gate with art deco pillars signify a well-maintained private establishment, which continues to successfully exhibit the unique hybrid style which became characteristic of Kolkata’s urban modernity, where new and old mingle with adaptive flair and practical wisdom.

This is also evident from the peach and purple two-storeyed building below where iron grills, balustrade, Venetian blinds, dentil cornices, and semi-circular ledges coexist together as part of a wonderful mélange, which is abundantly visible across Kolkata and its suburbs, in buildings both crumbling and standing tall.

The crumbling kind are similar to the building seen below, which appears to be a skeletal structure of exposed bricks from which one can still discern a row of pillars and tympanums characteristic of Victorian architecture. This skeletal house above is adjoined to the successfully-maintained green building.

It is quite probable that both houses once belonged to two branches of the same undivided family which lived in considerable prosperity. Evidently one branch of the family went on to acquire greater financial success and stability, which the other branch only knew through its intimate absence. Both are representative of Kolkata, a city that, like most other third world metropolises, has gone through different cycles of capital accumulation and consumption. While one branch of the conjoined houses apparently kept up with the rising tides, the other suffered from the ebbing currents. Both are Kolkata, and Kolkata is not exclusively one or the other—it is a liminal space, which, in spite of its 350-year-old history, continues to evolve and expand.

This evolution is something one can trace on the house located here, where the portico topped by a grilled balcony is shaded by a gable roof, behind which one can observe lunettes accompanying doors and windows. These architectural signs refer to the typical colonial styles which were dominant during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The building is also supported by several columns which can be seen at the corners of the balcony. Significantly, the inhabitants of this household are not afraid of material modernity, as evident from the air conditioning units and cars which can be observed from outside. In fact, the external facade may well be seen as a metaphor of typical Indian ‘jugaad’, where multiple utilities jostle for space without any apparent harmony as also evident from the inverted L-shaped drainage pipe jutting out from the roof, which of course could have been placed and coloured more discreetly. The indiscretion is both a mark of apparent disregard for aesthetic considerations, as well as a marker of privileging utility over external gloss.

If this assumption is correct, then this is also characteristic of one generation of Bengalis, who knew the infernal menace of poverty well enough to discard ostentatious trappings of exhibitionism in favour of fiscal prudence, which was also linked to a world of kinship and community where selfish self-aggrandizement necessarily took a back seat to collective endeavours of solidarity and togetherness.

Both are representative of Kolkata, a city that has gone through different cycles of capital accumulation and consumption. While one branch of the conjoined houses apparently kept up with the rising tides, the other suffered from the ebbing currents.

Kolkata, my beloved, is all this and more. Depending on your day, fortune or the season, Kolkata can glimmer with all the shades of good, bad, and ugly, without ever congealing into any one image or mould. Therefore, even as Sanyal and his ilk of Bengali carpenters sawing their own branches keep moaning about Kolkata’s poverty, infrastructural weaknesses, or other maladies, the city keeps welcoming, enchanting, and energizing thousands in ways that defy conventional parameters of economic analysis.

One such example was a recent cultural programme performed by children belonging to a cultural organization named Shobdokolpo, which witnessed scores of children coming together to recite, sing and dance to the words of Rabi Thakur, Nazrul, Sukumar Roy and much more at Ahindra Mancha on 5th January 2025. The joy, enthusiasm, and the transmission of unquantifiable cultural values through such events create a unique cultural identity which continues to counteract a world governed by profit, material greed, and utilitarianism, one that pulverizes all that is soft, kind and sensitive in human identities.

This event is not unique. Hundreds of such organizations across Kolkata and Bengal continue to nurture these bonds and skills which defy the logic of marketability, which is engulfing the education sector as a whole. When Bengalis of Kolkata—having recently tasted the improved amenities offered by certain other cities—decry our strangely beloved city, I am reminded of Madhu and Bidhu in Rabi Thakur’s Pujar Saaj, and the immature celebrations of Madhu after receiving a begged satin shirt as opposed to Bidhu’s shirt from chintz. Although not entirely, but some aspects of Kolkata are akin to that dear, honourable chintz shirt, even though it has its own share of muslins, silks, furs, and Egyptian cotton as well. I embrace and love it all.

I hope more people will remain mindful of all that is precious and wonderful about this city of ours despite all its pitfalls. This is a lifelong affair for most of us, a mysterious mashooka, whose zikr keeps alive the incantations of ecstasy Ghalib knew all too well:

Kalkatte ka zikr jo kiya tune humnasheen
Ek teer mere seenay mein mara kay haye haye!

This, in fact, is the key: the perspective of the beholder. It makes all the difference. While some Non-Resident Bengalis chastise Kolkata for a variety of reasons to assuage the Oedipal scars of their own souls—perhaps on account of some heartbreak, trauma, or professional snub—those of us who leave out of Kolkata for occupations elsewhere often yearn to return to the sights and smells of the city with renewed vigour and anticipation. My condolences to those who have severed this bond. From Kipling to Rajiv Gandhi, Kolkata has outlasted its naysayers in more ways than one, and will continue to do so to other flotsams of history, who grievously overestimate their own inflated self-importance.

As the wind rushes across my face late at night, my bike zooming along Red Road, the thrill that I feel is not just an adrenaline rush from the speed, but the ethereal warmth of a place I call home. A place that knows all of my firsts. Perhaps that is why, as I look at the welcome sign that greets me as I cross the Second Hooghly Bridge, as visually exciting as the Howrah Bridge itself or salivate at the wafting smell of kebabs from Arsalan, the city becomes a mirror that keeps reflecting all the new experiences, with my daughter, my wife and my friends, which I hope to experience in various myth-fringed alleys and bylanes of this hallowed city. A city that, despite all aspersions cast upon it, continues to resonate and glow.

***

Abin Chakraborty is an established academic who has published in magazines and journals including Cafe Dissensus, Madras Courier, Setu, Borderless, Kitab, Acumen etc. He is also the co-founder of Plato's Caves and the editor of Postcolonial Interventions, an online journal. You can find him on Twitter/X: @AbinChakraborty, Instagram: @platoscavesonline, and (Instagram) and Facebook: @Plato's Caves Online.

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