35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘THERE’S BLOODLETTING AS WE SPEAK’
swiftly moved its headquarters to Bombay. Half a century on, in
1911, the Raj followed suit, shifting its administrative base to New
Delhi. But even decades later it was Calcutta where fortunes were
still made. When the British finally left India, the city retained far
more of the essence of the Raj than Delhi, Bombay or Madras, and
continued to host the twentieth-century avatars of merchant princes,
now called international corporations, until the red flags of
Communism waved in the city streets. Only then were the ghosts
of Empire exorcised forever. The violent Naxalite faction also
frightened many Indian businesses out of Bengal, and Calcutta
plummeted into a decline unequalled in any peacetime urban
history – as if finally consumed by the dark forces that had erected
it.
When East Pakistan, which had once been much of East Bengal,
became the independent nation of Bangladesh in December 1971,
India found herself in military occupation of the fledgling country,
and on the brink of war with what had been West Pakistan. This
meant that Calcutta found itself a mecca for around ten million
Bangladeshi refugees fleeing war, flood, and famine. Thus began
the second and worst wave of what could be called a ‘housing problem’
in the city. It wasn’t really a problem, since problems can be solved.
It was a living nightmare that turned Calcutta into the biggest slum
on earth. The first wave swept in after independence, as Hindus
arrived, fleeing the eastern portion of the newly created Muslim
state. The ‘housing problem’ was, as most social problems tend to
be, in reality a poverty problem. In 1981, the population was
estimated at seven million; today some put the figure closer to
twenty-five million. That’s almost the population of Canada, for
instance.
‘Oh, darling!’ said Lady Sinha, when I telephoned her from Delhi.
‘Things are very bad. You’ll find the city has deteriorated dreadfully.’
I found it hard to imagine Calcutta any worse than it had been
when I last visited the place, in 1975. But these weren’t the only
things that were bad for Lady Sinha: her son, Sanna, the Hon. S. P.
Sinha, was dying with cirrhosis of the liver.
Back in 1975, her husband, Lord Sinha, had still been alive. His
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