Snake charmers have gone but the ‘charm’ remains

There used to be snake charmers on the Maidan, the vast green area in the very centre of Calcutta. Turbanned Indians playing pungis, a wind instrument made from a gourd, would entice a cobra to raise its head from its basket, and possibly even move a little to the swaying pungi and its tune.
I saw some when I passed through Calcutta in the 1970s. India had passed the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, originally to halt the export of snake skins, but apparently it wasn’t until the late 1990s that animal-rights groups convinced the government to act against snake charmers.
There were none on the Maidan or outside the adjoining Victoria Memorial in August 2014. Nor were there any sacred cows any more in the city centre, wandering free, dropping their crap or lying in the road and hindering the furious traffic.
In Hinduism, the cow is a symbol of wealth, strength and a full earthly life. An Indian tells me that two decades ago Calcutta’s cows were removed to outside a 50-kilometre radius. This may be so but they can still be seen in the old streets of outer districts, nearer than that. Cow dung is still made into little cakes and stuck to walls to dry for use as fuel for fires.
Pariah dogs continue to roam in some areas but it is said that these have animal rights too and are being sterilised, rather than put to sleep.
The cows and cobras may be gone but to this visitor Kolkata’s amazing teeming streets are remarkably similar to how they looked nearly four decades ago. Yes, Calcutta is now Kolkata. In the late 1600s, the three villages that predated Kolkata were ruled by the Nawab of Bengal under Mughal suzerainty. In 1690 the East India Company was granted a trading licence. After the Indian rebellion of 1857 the British government took over the direct administration of India until independence and partition in 1947. As they were wont to do, the British anglicised “Kolkata” to “Calcutta”. The switch back was made in 2001.
It may take some time for the Westerner to adjust to the full-on life in this huge city of 4,500,000 people, most of whom seem to be around at any particular moment. Flyovers have appeared with more under construction and a north-south metro line was opened in 1984, but the constant cacophonous traffic remains. “Please horn” or “blow horn” is painted on the back of most buses and trucks but the Kolkata driver needs no invitation. The din is mostly mindless.
Kolkatans accustomed to crammed ageing buses and trams have got some relief from the 28-kilometre metro, the first underground railway in India An east-west metro is under construction but no one seems confident that it will be finished any time soon. More lines are planned, one of these days.
Signs in the metro warn against spitting but the urban population is more health-conscious now, and the chewing and spitting out of betel leaf, a mild stimulant that produces a high rate of oral cancer, seems to have almost disappeared. The tell-tale red splodges on walls and pavements are gone.
The battered buses remain packed, the old trams less so. Somehow the constant tangle of hand-pulled rickshaws and carts, bicycle rickshaws, tuk-tuks, yellow Ambassador taxis, cars, buses, trams and trucks seem to avoid each other and the pedestrians who drift off the crowded pavements into the road.
Banned from the largest roads and confined to the back streets are the city’s hand-pulled wooden, goods carts and the rickshaw wallahs (wallah: a person who is associated with a particular work). The creaking conveyances are still common, with their human horse running between the shafts with dogged steps.
West Bengal state was ruled by the Left Front for 34 years (1977–2011), making it the world’s longest-running democratically elected communist government. The Marxists wanted to rid the city of hand-pulled rickshaws, ruling it inhuman if a man pulled other people. However, protestors said that 10,000 rickshaw wallahs and family members would be left penniless, so it was decided instead not to issue new licences. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, remain on the streets but as they die off, they are mostly not being replaced.
Apart from hand-pulled wooden carts weighed down with goods, other men still shuffle through the streets with huge loads on their heads.
Sunday is a relatively quiet day for the normally brutal Kolkata traffic. Perhaps this is why in the heart of this metropolis one Sunday a man is seen driving a herd of about 50 goats alongside a major road. They are on the way to be slaughtered. Another day in an old area there are three goats tethered on the pavement: fresh goat’s milk, anyone?
Kolkata’s pavements are home to endless street traders operating from makeshift stands protected from the tropical sun and monsoonal rain by tattered plastic covering. Old mangles squeeze sugarcane to produce a fresh drink. A smouldering rope dangles from the tobacco seller’s stand, to light your fag. Many of them sleep in the open at their stands overnight.
The pavements need repair. Late one Sunday afternoon two women are among a gang repairing a stretch of pavement. Two hours later, as night nears, one of the women is still working away.
A rare sight these days is the solitary fortune teller who I spot on the massive Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River, with two green birds in a wooden cage to help him select the cards that are said to know your fate. Another roadside seller has twigs from the neem tree, to clean your teeth.
People were right in a way when they warned me that Calcutta/Kolkata would have changed in the past 40 years and I shouldn’t expect a nostalgic trip reviving memories of lost youth. On the way in from the airport there is a huge new area of apartment buildings, modern-day industries and shopping malls. But who cares? I came to see the old Calcutta and, albeit minus snake charmers and holy cows, it still largely exists. There always was a feeling that this place was just too big, too packed, too extreme to be brought under control.
“Charm” may not be quite the correct word for the raw life lived out in the open in this pulsating and fascinating Indian city but it is a place like few others.