Kalkatta Chronicles: Rear-veiw Reflections

Author’s Note 

Kalkatta Chronicles is about a world, a personal world of characters that were so deeply enmeshed, so regular in our daily lives that we noticed them only when they were absent or when they began to fade. These characters came in a wide range of encounters which included everyday habits, peculiar accents, odd signs, customs and traditions and of course people. But if one looked carefully, there was a somewhat subtle but common thread that ran across each of these characters. Their story lay in hybrid; in mutation.

Kalkatta represents a slice of the city that had both wittingly and unwittingly borrowed from the British and the Bhodrolok but also could not help adding some of their own migrant seasonings to their borrowings, resulting in flavours that were completely fused and a social web that was gloriously entangled.

This Kalkatta had learnt to adopt and come to love jhaal and jhol and were past masters at managing gondogol. They called for a chota peg at clubs and were addressed by orderlies as memsahib. But there were hints of hybrid too: they opted for a meetha-saada paan that came to be known everywhere as Kalkatta meetha, beckoned their chauffeurs as Driver ji and referred to their female domestic help as Ayah didi. They went to schools that were English medium, convent or missionary, lived in paras but conversed with each other at home in Hindi and even Marwari. Their’s was a trilateral world that thrived in perpetual fusion.

Many of these nuances are now hard to find. With technology having seeped into our every breath, dissolving boundaries and identities like never before and instant being the only pace of time understood, many of them have faded into oblivion. My idea here though, is not to lament change or indeed look at a world and an order gone by with rose-tinted glasses. Neither is it to compare one world with another. It is only to recall, share and reflect upon a microcosm that came into being by a collision of cultures; a world that often took the mundane, the ordinary to the extraordinary and created lasting impressions. A microcosm called Kalkatta.