Achinto

I would like to pay tribute here to Achinto, the Calcutta-based documentary photographer. I have carried several of his pictures on my blogs. He has documented people, labour, community, life,and habitat in India’s cities and villages. But it is the labouring people of Calcutta that he has worked on most extensively – reminding one of the tradition of F Engels, P Mayhew, Jacob Ris, and Walker Evans.

My long association with Achinto has been a very important element in my personal growth. His images brought to life for me something William James had written:

“…the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly, and now I perceived by a flash of insight that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack I had never noticed the great field of heroism lying around about me. I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance; and yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the labouring classes. ... There everyday of the year, somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient enduring racked to the utmost under the length of the hours of the strain.”

Photo: Achinto

International Literacy Day

8th September, is International Literacy Day.

This date has powerful resonances for me. On this day, in 1998, we had organised a women and children’s rally, in Priya Manna Basti, a jute-workers’ settlement in Howrah, the blighted industrial city across the river from Calcutta.

That was a very special occasion indeed, in the early days of our community empowerment initiative in Howrah slums. We had been working on women’s literacy (in Urdu), and we had also just started Talimi Haq School (Right to Education School), a non-formal learning centre for poor and working children. Hence we thought it was appropriate to observe Literacy Day.

There was also a funny aside to that successful rally. We had made arrangements for biryani (a fragrant, succulent rice and meat dish) to be cooked, to feed all the rallyists after the programme. The responsibility for the biryani had been given to a local man, who had solicitously volunteered to help. On the morning of the rally, Amina and Huma, my colleagues in PM Basti, discovered that this man had other plans of his own. He had organised a party for his wife’s birthday. And the feast for his party – was to be our rally biryani! And so they intervened, ejected the fellow and took charge of the cooking. And everything eventually turned out fine.

Most of all, I remember singing out resonantly with the children, as our rally wound its way through the narrow slum lanes, the beautiful song that used to be broadcast over national television in the late-80s, under the National Literacy Mission:

Padna likhna sikho, o mehnat karne walo
Padna likhna sikho, o bhook se ladne walo

Ah aah ih eeh ko pehchano, alif ko likhna sikho
Kuh kha guh ghah ko apna hatiyaar banana sikho
Andhere se ujiyare tak paer badhana sikho

Padna likhna sikho, o mehnat karne walo
Padna likhna sikho, o bhook se ladne walo

In translation:

Learn to read and write O toiling people
Learn to read and write O you who’re battling hunger

Learn to recognise Ah Aah Ih Eeh, learn to write Alif
Learn to make Kuh Kha Guh Ghah your weapons
Learn to extend your foot from darkness towards light

Learn to read and write O toiling people
Learn to read and write O you who’re battling hunger

We observed International Literacy Day for a couple of years after that, with other women’s programmes. Then I swallowed the fact of our failure and inability to do anything substantive in the face of the utter perverse apathy and unresponsiveness of the authorities and institutions, and let this day pass. But my colleagues in Howrah, and especially Amina and Binod, always remember this day and observe it in some fashion.

To people in India - Calcutta and Bengal used to be identified with learning, culture, the arts, political consciousness etc. Even today, educated people of the older generation in other parts of the country hold this city and state in high regard. But the reality today is somewhat different.

I know that in my lifetime I shall not see a literate Calcutta, or even a Calcutta where every child receives basic education. And nothing I might do personally will make a difference. I know that those who have the power and responsibility to address such matters – just don’t care. Nor do the systems exist to enable such goals. Yet, I go on, trying to do whatever little I can, to make a small difference, to a few children, in one place.

I am in, of and for my city. But yet I stand apart, and am an exile in my own land. When one is out in the streets of Calcutta, at every moment everything all around defies law, orderliness, civility, rationality, taste, aesthetics, hygiene, sense, concern for the other. The image of the person of Calcutta that I am constantly filled with – is of a base, brutish, boorish, ugly, foul, filthy, violent, selfish, blind, malevolent, hateful, herd-driven, mob-mentality, beast.

And yet even that is not the full truth. A visitor to the city can also conclude that this is a warm, humane city, of sensitive, refined, aware people. Nature in this city – is also similarly ambiguous: this is the most frightfully hot, humid, infernal place; and yet, a gentle breeze, the quality of light, the feel-fragrance of the air, can be uplifting and endearing.

Poverty, squalor, filth, apathy, civic indiscipline etc – are also of course there in other cities of India. But yet perhaps Calcutta strikes one as different, and especially symbolic of all these things. There is also the long tradition of westerners’ gaze on Calcutta, which offends the educated, middle-class and affluent people here; they’d like their city to be well thought of, without themselves having to do anything in their lives towards that.

A concerned, aware citizen has to grapple with all this for herself, come to her own understanding, which is informed, unbiased, rational and compassionate, and act accordingly.

I like to think that there must be a higher reason and purpose behind Calcutta’s travails, something of significance for all of humanity. It is here that all the issues and challenges of life are out in the raw. Calcutta is something elemental. Here, every day, at every moment, darkness and light, knowledge and ignorance, apathy and compassion, high and low, good and evil - confront each other and battle. It is a theatre of humanity, the kitchen and alchemical laboratory of life, where the “human” is cooked and distilled.

I hope like the biryani which we successfully rescued, something fragrant and delicious results!

Rebuilding Calcutta from below

Something like the Unnayan renewal proposal calls for institutional ownership and capability that is currently non-existent. Nor has the civic consciousness of the citizens reached a stage of taking unequivocal and unassailable ownership for the future of the city – something that would then drive city planning and management.

The lack of public ownership of public domain concerns – that is the key limitation.

Privatisation of the public domain is the character of the age, and to see that happening through an apparent public domain concern is terrible, with deep damage. Building such civic ownership – when formal authorities and institutions are riddled with incompetence, apathy and corruption – is the foundational infrastructural requirement.

City and metropolitan renewal has thus perhaps necessarily to begin with community and slum renewal. Planning wisdom has to discern that empowering the vulnerable, for social and economic betterment, improved shelter and habitat, and building public ownership and cooperative action for environmental justice - may be the foundation and catalyst for rebuilding the blighted city. Public ethics is the key to renewal.

Whose city? We have to move from an elitist fixation with the city, which in the ultimate analysis is very limiting, and devoid of imagination.

In systemic terms, lack of awareness and disempowerment of large numbers of the poor allows the free-riding and pillage, and this makes the city a fount of inefficiency, unreason, ugliness, all of which should be seen and felt to be as distasteful as they are. Hence, improvement in the lot of the disenfranchised should be in the direct long term interest of anyone wanting the city to be a thriving, well managed, efficient place.

Slum renewal begins the process of infrastructure upgradation and improved urban management – which the city can only benefit from.

Public ethics, public domain activity – is a subject that needs to be looked at, and not assumed. Public issues are typically used instrumentally for private ends. Instead organisational means must be used instrumentally to serve public ends.

In a capital-starved environment, it is only the potential value of land under present depressed use that offers the resources to address the huge social development and infrastructure gap that Calcutta suffers. Howrah, with its huge tracts of industrial land, presently under closed, sick and obsolescent industry, could provide the answer. And this could also afford the means to begin the long-term process of laying the much needed infrastructure.

Building regulations in Calcutta

Building regulations in the city would definitely not permit what Unnayan's proposal for canal-side renewal visualised e.g. extensive terraces, open spaces or even such high densities as proposed in the mixed use complexes.

Thus, small plots with small box-like structures is all that the regulation ions can promise. All kinds of detailed regulations on internal spaces and mandatory lines would also affect the project. Arcades as proposed would be unthinkable. Hence there is a case for reviewing the entire body of regulations, towards transforming these into something that positively encourages urban renewal and architectural excellence.

The kind of complexity and richness suggested in the Unnayan proposal is very difficult to achieve under the existing regulations. There are very few qualified people running the building department in Calcutta Municipal Corporation, and they are incapable of conceiving the scope of architectural design. The sole motivation is to increase the pressure of restrictions and thus enforce a clamp-down on errant developers. Errant developers are not dissuaded by this and buildings still collapse thanks to incompetence and corruption. The final result is enforcement of mediocrity. With no scope for excellence or aesthetics or urban environmental quality.

Thus the Unnayan proposal is something that highlights the existing limitations of the system and challenges these. Even if the proposal is never accepted, it remains as a document that can strike at the conscience of the city.


I am grateful to my friend Devananda Chatterji, architect, who was responsible for developing the renewal proposal on behalf of Unnayan, for his clarifications on this subject.

Towards renewal in Calcutta

The Beliaghata canal-side area in Calcutta is today one of the most blighted, decrepit and foul environments. Large numbers of squatters lived beside the canal, on its sides and over its bed. There are large congested, low-rise basti or slum pockets. A quiet process of illegal conversion goes on. There are closed, sick or obsolescent factories. Large tracts of vacant land. And a canal, that was once navigable is now dead, and a foul open sewer.

Flooding occurs because of the siltation of the canal and building upon the east Calcutta wetlands. In 1999 October, flooding reached peak levels and underscored the crucial importance of de-silting the Bidyadhari river. That work was taken up. The squatters were evicted. But there will continue to be a problem. The basic social problem – of squatter resettlement - remains. Experience has shown that they simply return after some time. Squatters were recently evicted from along the rail-tracks adjacent to Lake Gardens. They are to be resettled in Nonadanga in east Calcutta. While the state govt’s acceptance of their resettlement is a major advance, what is being done is very far from the resettlement norms of international development agencies, like the World Bank or Asian Development Bank.

In 1995, an independent civic effort was initiated by Unnayan, to develop a viable plan for the proper rehabilitation of the canal-side squatters. Eventually, this led to a blueprint for highly remunerative area renewal, involving revitalisation of the canal and navigation, and large-scale residential, commercial and institutional developments – which would also satisfactorily provide for squatter resettlement.

The proposal also enabled a bold new vision of Calcutta’s future as a bio-technic city, a powerful organism for the sustainable and bio-regionally appropriate development of city and hinterland in the riverine, deltaic southern Bengal.

The canal nework of Calcutta stretches into the city’s hinterland, the lush green deltaic ecology of South Bengal, which includes Sundarbans. A canal city was conceived of for a culturally vibrant populous lively city, a green tropical city with water, reflecting the articulate nature of its presently distressed people.

Greatest challenge facing Calcutta

There are a number of very serious threats to the long term health and well-being of Calcutta.

The city is sprawling eastwards over the sensitive wetlands (which are part of the Sundarban deltaic eco-system). For over a decade and a half now, the impact of this has been felt on the city’s drainage system. Within the city, there are severe disparities and inequities in provision of civic services. Maintenance and development of service infrastructure is hostage to the free-riding and pillaging by the powerful and rich.

Environmental health is consequently seriously threatened by water-borne and malarial diseases. Lack of access to adequate supplies of drinking water, which is compounded by inadequate sanitation – this is the principal environmental problem for Calcutta. Municipal statistics from Howrah suggest that infant mortality rates in slums are significantly higher than that in non-slum areas. A third of the metropolitan population lives in slum settlements, where the conditions are most degraded. In some areas, service latrines are used by over a hundred persons.

The city as a whole becomes a zone of conflict and violence, between the haves and the have-nots, with the middle-classes getting it from both sides. The degraded and poverty-ridden slums of the city are like subterranean boiler-rooms producing crime and riots, which can make city life nightmarish.

Frontally addressing such questions, with a view to humane transformation, is the greatest challenge facing the metropolis of Calcutta.

Go to the people!

“Go to the people, live with them, learn from them, start from what they know, build from what they have.”

Mahatma Gandhi

Chance encounter

The city is a place for multiplying happy chances and making the most of unplannable opportunities.

Lewis Mumford

Ten years ago I discovered the remarkable book An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin. This was published in 1994.This is an investigation of emotions and personal relationships which looks at how people, past and present, escape from loneliness, fear and aimlessness, find new forms of affection and adventure, and can avoid being prisoners of their memories or mistakes.

Here’s the final section of the book.


‘My life is a failure.’ Those were the words with which I began this book, and I finish it with the story of a murderer who repeated that phrase many times, until one day …

Half a minute is enough to transform an apparently ordinary person into an object of hatred, an enemy of humanity. He committed a murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then in his desolate jail, half a minute was enough to transform him again, into a hero. He saved a man’s life and was pardoned. But when he got home he found his wife living with someone else and his daughter knew nothing of him. He was unwanted, so he decided that he might as well be dead.

His attempt at suicide was also a failure. A monk summoned to his bedside said to him, ‘Your story is terrifying, but I can do nothing for you. My own family is wealthy, but I gave up my inheritance and I have nothing but debts. I spend everything I have finding homes for the homeless. I can give you nothing. You want to die, and there is nothing to stop you. But before you kill yourself, come and give me a hand. Afterwards, you can do what you like.’

Those words changed the murderer’s world. Somebody needed him: at last he was no longer superfluous and disposable. He agreed to help. And the world was never the same again for the monk, who had been feeling overwhelmed by the amount of suffering around him, to which all his efforts were making only a minute difference. The chance encounter with the murderer gave him the idea which was to shape his whole future: faced by a person in distress, he had given him nothing, but asked something from him instead. The murderer later said to the monk: ‘If you had given me money, or a room, or a job, I would have restarted my life of crime and killed someone else. But you needed me.’ That was how Abbe Pierre’s Emmaus movement for the very poor was born, from an encounter of two totally different individuals who lit up a light in each other’s heart. These two men were not soul-mates in the ordinary, romantic meaning of that word, but each owes the other the sense of direction which guides their life today.

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase. Even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed, and how it has never been possible to predict for certain how a human being will behave. History, with its endless procession of passers-by, most of whose encounters have been missed opportunities, has so far been largely a chronicle of ability gone to waste. But next time two people meet, the result could be different. That is the origin of anxiety, but also of hope, and hope is the origin of humanity.

A tale of two cities

The ancient Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, which are aids to instilling an organic consciousness in human society, are also essentially about the cities of Ayodhya, and Hastinapur.

In the same way as an epic serves to guide seekers of truth and wisdom through the slings and fortunes of their own lives by upholding a personalisable figure, such as Lord Rama, and describing his exile and wandering, similarly, the mythic cities are also metaphors for the process of becoming of any city, to an Ayodhya, the city of compassion and justice.

Thus, one can think of the journey of a city, through history, in terms of a cycle of birth, growth, prosperity, stagnation, decay, blight, recrudescence...

Mythology becomes the means for continuous renewal through the living culture of the people, as individual, institutional, city and social life trajectories act out, anew, contemporary versions of the epic events, with consequences that mirror mythic outcomes.

Or shatter mythic patterns and bonds to now enable otherwise unimaginable new possibilities.The tale of the two cities, of Calcutta and Howrah, may easily be viewed mythically - for instance, in terms of the story of the two brothers, fated to be king and sage respectively, that is common to both Hindu and Islamic thought.

Few cities in the world have experienced what these two did - in terms of their rapid growth and massive industrial edifice, their wealth, and size and scale of their vast rural hinterland, the extent of their regional economic linkages - and the weight of the apathy to their labouring people.

More fundamentally, this process of urban growth was accompanied by profound enlightenment in the social and cultural sphere, through which elite, European-inspired accomplishments and deep-rooted spontaneous folk sensibilities were integrated, to produce giants of creativity, intellect and wisdom - like the revered poet-sage Rabindranath Tagore.

The story of the rise of these cities is also the story of the renewal of a tradition, of awakening, re-connecting with roots, and building with this strength. The subsequent process of decline, decay and blight in the economic, environmental and social spheres in turn leading to a moment when the wheel is again ready to be turned, and a heroic journey begun, through which a barren, arid wasteland is now to be made verdant.

Howrah has always been viewed as a ‘coolie (i.e. labourers’) town’ that did not merit any serious civic effort. The history, the context of resource scarcity, the survival imperative in the people of Howrah, and the parasitic greed and activities of profiteers, all interact to make today’s Howrah the ultimate planning nightmare, or challenge, depending upon one’s perspective.

The very blight that characterises Howrah today, can also be seen as a rare opportunity to shape the Howrah of tomorrow. This is the gift of Howrah’s history.

Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford, American social philosopher, and one of the leading thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

Born in Flushing, New York, Mumford assiduously and single-mindedly devoted himself to writing. Over a period of 60 years, Mumford wrote some thirty books, covering subjects as diverse as the history of cities, the history of machine technology, art and architectural criticism, and literary criticism. He is most widely known for the books The City in History and The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. He passed away on 26 January 1990. Though widely honoured during his lifetime, with fellowships, professorships, awards and honorary doctorates, he remains largely unknown in his native America.

Mumford may be seen as one of those who have enabled today’s environmental consciousness. Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has referred to him as ‘the patron saint of environmentalism’. Mumford's ‘organicist’ philosophy was deeply ecological. His varied concerns converge on the problem of defining an ethic which would fuse the classical socialist values of justice and community with what we would today call environmental values. As early as 1930, we find him writing that the three main threats to modern civilisation were the destruction of forest cover, the depletion of non-renewable resources, and the awesome destructive power of modern weaponry. His first major work, Technics and Civilisation (1934), underlined the links between industrialisation, the increasing intensity of energy use, and pollution.

Mumford recognised that ecological degradation was, at least in part, the outcome of a flawed value system which had “missed the great lesson that both ecology and medicine teach - that man’s great mission is not to conquer Nature by main force but to co-operate with her intelligently and lovingly for his own purposes.” Ecological degradation, he believed, is inescapable in an economic system driven by the belief that quantitative production had no natural limits. Indeed modern technology is profoundly anti-ecological - “driven by the desire to displace the organic with the synthetic and the pre-fabricated”, it exhibits a “barely concealed hostility to living organisms, vital functions, organic associations.”

Mumford anticipated the alternate theorists of today. He was a critic of both capitalism and communism, holding them to be but two variants of a centralising, destructive and violent system of production. But he did not wholly turn his back on modern technology, seeking instead to bend it to serve human and environmental needs.

In an age of specialisation, Mumford was a sociologist, philosopher, cultural historian, art and literary critic, and authority on architecture and city planning, a true Renaissance man. In 1923, Mumford was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, an experimental group that paved the way for several projects in regional development, including the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1932 Mumford began to write a column of architectural criticism, ‘The Sky Line’, for the New Yorker.

Mumford was deeply influenced in his youth by the work and thought of Patrick Geddes, the eccentric Scottish biologist, town planner, educator and peace activist (1854-1932). For Mumford, Geddes’ work provided the basic direction and the skeleton which he then added flesh to. In 1938, as consultant to the City and County Park Board in Honolulu, Hawaii, the follower of the ‘garden city’ Master prepared a booklet Whither Honolulu? based on his study of the parks and playgrounds of that city. Again, recalling Geddes’ efforts at organising ‘cities exhibitions’, in 1939, Mumford worked on a documentary film The City which was shown at the city planning exhibit at the New York World’s Fair.

Geddes’ young son Alisdair was killed in the First World War. He saw Alisdair in Mumford and wanted him to assist him in his work. Mumford was very oppressed with Geddes seeing in him the return of his dead son. Later, after his own son, who was named Geddes, was killed in the 2nd World War, by which time Patrick Geddes was no more, Mumford became a leading propogator of Geddes’ thinking and diligently assisted his biographers.

Mumford was deeply interested in India. He studied Indian history and religion and closely followed Geddes’ town planning work in India. Mumford was personally acquainted with Radhakamal Mukherjee, the Indian professor of sociology and disciple of Geddes, whose work dwelt on human interactions with nature - which he called ‘social ecology’. Mukherjee has written extensively on the ecological basis of civilisation in Gangetic Bengal, culminating in the emergence of Calcutta as a metropolis - but one that makes a dysfunctional break from its ecological and social roots.

Read the Time magazine cover story on Lewis Mumford (18 April 1938) here.

Mumford's moment of epiphany

Mumford was, in his own words, a child of the city. Beginning from the time of his childhood walks in the city with his grandfather, his ‘Manhatta’, in all its resources, was his true university.
Here's an extract from his autobiographical volume Sketches from Life.


“I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. ... One twilight hour in early spring, starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky. Here was my city, immense overpowering, flooded with energy and light; there below lay the river and the harbour, catching the last flakes of gold on their water ... And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that had made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come. The world at that moment, opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch. In that sudden revelation of power and beauty, all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me, and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence that came, not from my isolated self alone but from the collective energies I had confronted and risen to."

Like a gardener ...

"Town planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes and interest - as we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people, places where they will really flourish. To give people in fact the same care that we give when transplanting flowers."

Patrick Geddes

Beyond the Prison of Mirrors

Night.
Ascent.
Lights of the city.
Memories:
of funereal processions of once beloved saints,
and conflagrations, of riotous arson,
spreading hatred's poison fire.
The stars, far away, faint dots in the black sky.

Day.
Descent.
The needle of eternal knowledge
poised on the still waters of the ocean of sacrifice,
ringed by the pearls of devotion and service.
The light of the city dispells the noon of despair.
Streets, paved with jewels of wisdom, beckoning the children,
to come, and build tomorrow's citadel of peace.

From great killings partitioning the soul
to joint celebrations for union of hearts:
now is the city truly lit.
The light of the city
glows
with an infinitude of starlight...
a symphony of illumination.

Rebuilding the city, from the grassroots

Children must play

Irrespective of the surroundings, irrespective of their plight, children are after all children, and they will play, come what may.

Watching children play, amidst a blighted, squalid environment – yields clues about the child’s imagination.


"The child in sunshine sees the violet shadows upon the dusty road just as the impressionist paints them: it is only the mis-educated grown up, who has been trained from old pictures, or perhaps still more from printed descriptions of them, who persuades himself that the same shadow is brown. To escape from common literary epithets and to be encouraged to observe how often earth is purple, grass gold, and the sea all possible colours is a training which most of the older generation have missed and which the younger are not by any means sufficiently receiving."

Patrick Geddes