Source:
https://scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3074195/sex-and-city-1920s-tour-through-seedy-nightlife-calcutta
Lifestyle/ Arts & Culture

Sex and the city: a 1920s tour through the seedy nightlife of Calcutta in this tale of beauty and decadence

  • First published in 1923, Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Bengali memoir describes a man’s shady, nocturnal adventures in Calcutta between 1901 and 1920
  • Now translated by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, it’s a conscious attempt to explain what goes on in the city’s seedier parts
A street in the ‘Native Quarter’ of Calcutta in the 1920s. A newly translated 1923 memoir, Calcutta Nights depicts a man’s nocturnal adventures in the Indian city in the early 1900s. Photo: Getty Images

Calcutta Nights, by Hemendra Kumar Roy (trans. by Rajat Chaudhuri), Niyogi Books

The first two decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of urbanism in sociology and philosophy: Georg Simmel wrote about the metropolis and mental life, and Walter Benjamin penned portraits of Western cities including Paris and discussed the work of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe in the context of the flâneur, the dandy who roamed the streets to observe the city and the people.

While any number of European and American cities received attention as centres of power, beauty and decadence in the first quarter of the century, Asia remained obscure. Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Bengali memoir Raater Kolkata, recently translated by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, goes some way to addressing that gap.

Published in 1923, Raater Kolkata is an account of a young man’s nocturnal adventures in Calcutta, now Kolkata, a city in the eastern part of India, also the first capital city of British India. The book records what Roy saw in the city at night – the sex, the crime, the gambling, the cremation grounds – between 1901 and 1920. Because it spoke about these “dark” subjects, Roy, renowned and respected as a crime-fiction writer, published it under the name of Meghnad Gupta.

Calcutta Nights, by Hemendra Kumar Roy.
Calcutta Nights, by Hemendra Kumar Roy.

While translator Chaudhuri and the blurb locate the book in the context of the 1905 partition of Bengal and the first world war, Roy does not discuss factors such as the British Empire. In the prologue, he writes that his book is a warning for adult male readers to protect their children from the dark places at night.

He is a classist and a misogynist who casts a gimlet eye at everything that is not genteel, or everything that emerges at night: “But without a sharp eye, no one would be able to decipher the extent of wrongs, the extent of vileness and brutality concealed beneath this outward shield of religiosity.

“Despite [goddesses] Chitreswari of Chitpur at one end and Kalikadebi of Kalighat at the other keeping watch on the domain of Calcutta, everyday Satan and his sinful followers [arrive in] the city in hordes, pulling wool over their divine eyes.”

Roy clarifies that he writes about certain risqué things to condemn sin: “The evening dresses of modern European beauties are dangerous indeed. First of all their complexion is beautiful like the juicy pink seeds of cracked pomegranates, their youthful busts are exposed by deep necklines, and many of them, with the amazing bare beauty of their ample milk-white cleavages, completely freeze the viewer’s eyes. Murderers kill the body but these fair beauties kill the minds of men. They should be punished according to law.”

Roy also writes about Calcutta’s Chinatown, but not without an “Orientalist” gaze – he catches a Chinese man and a beautiful woman looking at him so intently that he thinks he is being hypnotised.

Workers go for their lunch hour at the Birla Jute Mill in Calcutta in the 1920s. Photo: Getty Images
Workers go for their lunch hour at the Birla Jute Mill in Calcutta in the 1920s. Photo: Getty Images

“Chinatown is a ‘must-see’ Calcutta neighbourhood … go to Chinatown once, you will no longer feel, you are in Calcutta. At night the light and shade, the people, the conversations, the homes and houses will all evoke strangely variegated recollections and imaginations about faraway China in your mind.”

Roy visits the beggars’ quarters, or bhikiripara, a part of the underworld that is unknown to the middle classes. Ordinary people give alms to beggars but the latter use the money to buy drugs.

“From time to time I have peeled into the life of bhikiripara. The narratives of their joys and suffering could have added a new dimension to Bengali literature, but unlike Russia no Bengali Maxim Gorky has been born in this country. So we cannot find any mind-boggling depiction of this soviet of socially excluded people in our literary outpourings,” he writes.

Horse-drawn carriages pass in front of The Grand Hotel in central Calcutta. Photo: Getty Images
Horse-drawn carriages pass in front of The Grand Hotel in central Calcutta. Photo: Getty Images

Several sketches of the city had been published before Roy wrote Raater Kolkata. But his book stands out for its conscious attempt to educate men about what (mostly) men do at night in the city.

Roy indicates that he has more “uncounted store of material” about the fearsome aspects of the city and a positive reception would, he suggest, would prompt him to publish more.

It’s possible that while it must have been quite a sensation when it came out, Roy’s male readers did not appreciate the didacticism, and there were no sequels to the book. But Raater Kolkata remains an interesting book for readers interested in history and Asian experience of transition to modernity.

Asian Review of Books