Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Oh, Kolkata!

A.A.Gill

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

The real adventure of India is to be found in the cities, writes A.A. Gill

After independence and partition, tourists going to India had a one-wish destination and the Indian Tourist Board strongly recommended that they went there, and that little cartoon Maharajah who was the Air India mascot was keen to fly them. It was Kashmir. Kashmir was India for foreigners. The lakes with their houseboats were perfect for honeymoons, the weather was balmy and warm (as was the food), the views were stunning, the shopping more-ish and the people friendly. Sadly not to each other. Events — and the idiot Mountbatten’s snobbish, botched national conversion — put Kashmir out of bounds and India had to come up with Plan B.

With typical resourcefulness they invented Rajasthan. Well, they capitalised on the romance of a lot of crumbling houses with absurd plumbing in a desert and one remarkable palace in a lake, which by the way is like the Eiffel Tower — far better seen from a distance than visited.

With Rajasthan came the tourist triangle of Delhi-Agra-Jaipur which, if you’ve never been to the subcontinent, is a good place to start. Tourism seeped out into the vast confusion of the country: the beat and batik of Goa, and the athletically fornicating vegetarians of Kerala. Before tourism, what tourists there were would have gone to the hill stations of Shimla and Ootacamund or the tea plantations of Darjeeling and Assam. Anywhere that imitated Switzerland.

I would suggest that the great, great joy — the real adventure of India — is actually to be found in its cities, not its palaces. And the most exciting are rarely included on tourist itineraries. Calcutta is the steaming, insistent, sinned-against-and-sinning yet transcendent cultural, ethical and argumentative pulse of India. You can see why it isn’t top of everyone’s list of places to go. It isn’t an ergonomically competent city. On the international Stockholm-meter of urban efficiency it barely registers a minus one. It’s a mess. An exhausting mess of smelly chaos and joy and learning. Of poverty, poetry, pathos, chai and laughter. In the cacophony of Calcutta there is a heavenly coherence; a tabla rhythm that is the heartbeat of India. Now it’s Kolkata, and before you all start to sneer and raise your Spectatorish blood pressure, get puce about political correctness and damnable ingratitude, remember it’s their f***ing city. It’s India’s city. It’s Bengal’s capital and they can call it what they damn well like.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page