PACKED & PESTILENTIAL TOWN

By the sewage rendered fetid, by the

sewer

Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by

the swamp

Moist and damp ... As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its

bed,

So it spread--Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and

built

On the silt--Palace, byre, hovel--poverty and pride--Side by side; And, above the packed and pestilential

town, Death looked down.

THAT was how Calcutta seemed to Rudyard Kipling 70 years ago. Last week, slowly recovering from a cholera epidemic that killed 2,000 people, India's biggest city was as much as ever a pesthole, and in the words of the U.N. World Health Organization one of the most unhealthy places on earth. Hemmed in by salt marshes, clinging to the angleworm course of the chocolate-colored Hooghly River, the city of Calcutta's 4,000,000 people inhabit an area about half the size of the District of Columbia. Take away the city's parks, lakes and roads, and the human density is on the order of 135,000 persons per square mile. Thousands live in the streets, with entire families staking out bits of curb, usually under the protection of a marquee, where they sit, sleep, urinate, wash their clothing, cook their skimpy meals over fires made from shreds of dung scraped from the tracks of wandering sacred cows.

Calcutta shocks the eye with its misery, its swarming beggars on stumps of legs holding out stumps of arms, its starved mothers feeding infants at shrunken paps. It stings the nose with mingled odors of garbage, curry, roasted onions, rancid mustard oil, human sweat. It assaults the ear with the cry of hawkers, the shriek of cartwheels, the incessant din of horns sounded by bearded Sikh cab drivers who hurtle past in ancient taxis as if pursued by many-handed Kali herself.

The Black Hole. Calcutta is Kali's city, sacred to the ancient Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Britain's Empire Builder Job Charnock founded Calcutta on the banks of the Hooghly 268 years ago, near a Hindu shrine called Kalighat ("the landing-place of Kali") that marked the spot where a finger of Kali fell when the blood-drinking goddess was sliced into 51 pieces by the disk of Vishnu and scattered over all India.

Death and destruction have long been the city's lot. The Nawab of Bengal stormed Calcutta in 1756, stuffed 146 English prisoners into the famed Black Hole, a prison cell that measured 18 ft. by 14 ft.; the next morning only 23 were alive. Malnutrition, cholera, smallpox, plague pay regular calls. The opening act of the great Sepoy mutiny took place in Calcutta; more than 6,000 Moslems and Hindus were slaughtered in its streets in the wild communal rioting of 1946 that preceded the partition of Pakistan and India. In Calcutta a howling well-armed mob can come to life in seconds and, seemingly, on any excuse--a fraction of a cent increase in tram fares, an auto accident, a rumor. The police beat down the mobs with lathis and tear gas; the mobs fight back with stones and paving blocks and Calcutta's own secret weapon: electric-light bulbs filled with nitric acid.

The Calcuttans are mostly Bengalis and --when not rioting--a charming, easygoing people who love the roaring life of their city, would rather talk than eat, and do anything rather than work with their hands. Bengalis crowd Calcutta University (40,000 students), but the factory jobs in the industrial belt are mostly held by Biharis; Orissans do much of the physical labor needed in the city; wily Marwaris are merchants and bankers. Though some educated Bengalis occupy high government posts and dominate the professions, little is left for most but minor clerkships and unemployment.

The Favored. On top of this bubbling pit live some 10,000 privileged people--Marwari millionaires, British and U.S. businessmen, Indian government officials. They flourish on the jute, tea, iron ore and textiles of Calcutta, which handles half the seaborne trade of India. For them and for the small middle class there are air-conditioned restaurants, palatial cinemas, nightspots, cricket fields, rowing clubs, handsome residences. They take late evening cocktails by the fountains in the Grand Hotel's Scherazade Garden.

The British stamp is still on Calcutta. Streets bear such names as Wellesley, Cornwallis, Amherst, Curzon. Britons, ignoring the acres on acres of jampacked bus tees (native hovels), called it "the city of palaces,'' referring to university buildings, cathedrals, exclusive clubs, and governmental monstrosities typified by the Victoria Memorial--which took 20 years to build, was opened by the Prince of Wales in 1921, and is now slowly sinking into the oozy subsoil of Calcutta.

But the British Raj is gone now, and Calcutta is more odoriferous than ever. It suffocates under the weight of its people. Every day 300 more are born. Every week unemployed hundreds pour in from the countryside. There are five men for every three women in the city. From 4,000 to 5,000 of the desperately poor live permanently in the busy Sealdah railway station, sleeping in the dirty waiting rooms and on the platforms, lying under benches and around ticket windows. The city's administration is clumsily divided between the Calcutta Corporation (in charge of sanitation, drainage and water) and the state of Bengal, which handles, or mishandles, everything else. To charges of corruption, nepotism, mismanagement and inefficiency, Bengal's aged Chief Minister Dr. B. C. Roy, 75, recently replied airily: "I am so much in the right that I do not bother to convince others that they are in the wrong."

The Communists. Calcutta's ingrained miseries, insoluble within the means available to correct them, and the result of a succession of Congress Party failings, have given the Communists much to build on. Communists now control one-fifth of the seats in the state assembly; party membership in the last two years has doubled to 24,000. When Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Calcutta in 1955, the Red apparatus was able to fill the streets with 2,000,000 screaming enthusiasts.

This week the state assembly is meeting in Calcutta, and high on the agenda is a bill for slum clearance--the first such major legislation ever introduced in Calcutta. Even this first timid gesture to clean out the bustees is opposed by the Communists. They argue that the bill favors the bustee landlords, who are to be compensated for their slum holdings, and that the money would be better spent on improving areas where there is no running water and where eight toilet seats serve 400 people. Cynically, they add that nothing will come of slum clearance anyway.

Calcuttans are waiting to see. Their city, as always, boils with activity night and day, restless and surcharged. In the evenings, families line the 1,500-ft. Howrah Bridge for a cooling touch of breeze from the distant sea, or stroll the green acres of Maidan Park. Holy men chant by lantern light as the devout perform their religious ablutions in the muddy water of the Hooghly. The bazaars are choked with wandering fiddlers, fortunetellers, cloth merchants, naked children, sidewalk barbers; every third man has fountain pens for sale. In their thousands, the always-hungry poor lie down on their hard beds on pavement, railroad platforms, under bridges. Some of them will not rise in the morning.

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