Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
author’s repetitive use of the image of dust in this novel, no doubt, has a witty
concern to this.
In Chapter 2 of this novel, again, the novelist, while writing about the
dilapidated roads and the streets of Calcutta, which are always, as he observes,
“being dug up” either for the ongoing construction of “the underground
[metro] railway system [of 1984]” (Chaudhuri, 11) or for some works like the
replacement of underground pipes, reiterates the image and considers the city
of Calcutta as full with “mounds of dust.”
A City of Traffic-Jams:
Calcutta as ‘the city of traffic-jams’ is also a prominent image
recurrently appears in A Strange and Sublime Address. The predicament of
traffic jams is one of the many features that typify the city of Kolkata. It is due
to traffic jams that the flow of vehicles in many streets of the city often turns
to a state of complete standstill. Historically speaking, traffic-jams have
always plagued the city of Calcutta, particularly since the 1930s. Jagannath
Chattopadhyay, in an article “Howrah Bridge: Akhon o Takhon” (“Howrah
Bridge: Now and Then”) published in the Sunday special supplement
“Rabibar” in the Bengali daily Bartamaan (Calcutta, July 03, 2005), records
how the movement of traffic on the Pontoon Bridge __ the old Howrah Bridge
__ was always impeded by huge traffic jams created mostly by the carts and
hand carts that crossed to and from the city of Calcutta during the 30s and 40s
of the 20 th century. Chattopadhyay also tells in his essay that these huge traffic
jams were one of the major causes behind the erection of the new Howrah
Bridge or Rabindra Setu (1943) over the river Hooghly. Sukanta Chaudhuri,
in his essay “Traffic and Transport in Calcutta,” (1990) speaks much about the
traffic-jams of Calcutta and also mentions a number of causes that create
tedious traffic-jams in the city. Some of these are: limited road-space in the
city of Calcutta (only 6.5% of the total area of the city is devoted to roads);
shortage in the number of bridges over the river Hooghly to connect the city
with rest of the country; an abundance of slow vehicles like hand carts,
rickshaws (including hand rickshaws), push vans and other small vehicles;
shortage of one-way roads in the city; an acute shortage of parking spaces in
the city which compels people to park their vehicles on the streets or roads; an
excess of street hawkers or footpath venders whose “stalls tend to cluster at
road junction” (Sukanta Chaudhuri, 149); and voluminous pedestrian traffic
that stops the normal flow of the traffic every now and then. Really, the list is
almost endless!
In A Strange and Sublime Address, Amit Chaudhuri too reflects upon
this perpetual problematic of traffic-jams in the city of Calcutta and refers to
this at several places in the text. For instance, we are told how Sandeep in the
novel is accustomed to hear the blowing of horns in the first traffic-jam of the
evening in the road near Chhotomama’s house in the city:
He [Sandeep] heard car-horns blowing in the distance. He
Vol. II. Issue. III 194 September 2011