Frederic C. Thomas - Calcutta Poor: Inquiry Into the Intractability of Poverty

Calcutta Poor

Elegies on a City abobe Pretense

Frederic C. Thomas

First published 1997 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Copyright 1997 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Catloging-in-Publication Data

Thomas, Frederic C.
Calcutta poor: elegies on a city above pretense / Frederic C. Thomas.
p. cm.
An East Gate book.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-56324-981-2 (hard).
1. PoorIndianCalcutta.
2. Economic assistance, DomesticIndianCalcutta.
1. Title
HV4140.C34T45 1996
362.50954147dc20
9635877
CIP

ISBN: 13:9781563249815 (hbk)

Calcutta Poor

A lmost every book written about Calcutta begins with extravagant language describing the citys squalor and putrefaction. It is as though Calcutta has always had a perverse fascination as a dreadful place. As early as the 1770s, the first Governor of Bengal, Robert Clive, called it the most wicked place in the universe. Nearly one hundred years later, one of his successors, Sir George Trevelyan, wrote: Find, if you can a more uninviting spot than Calcutta&. The place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse, but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously. Rudyard Kipling in his oft-quoted portrayal, called Calcutta the city of dreadful nighta city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease & where the cholera, the cyclone, the crow come and go, by the sewerage rendered fetid, by the sewer made impure. Young Winston Churchill was more matter-of-fact and whimsical when he wrote to his mother: I shall always be glad to have seen itfor the same reason Papa gave for being glad to have seen Lisbonnamely, that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again. Mark Twain, who stayed only one or two days, found the weather enough to make the brass doorknob mushy. On a visit in 1963, V.S. Naipaul could only conclude that Calcutta was an abomination.