Night Stop in Calcutta

...the sarangi, which is shaped and sounds like a viola...

...We don't discriminate," he stammered, "but, but we've had trouble with writers in India...

...The walls of the buildings are lined with open racks, each rack or two a separate book store, and before each rack crowds of interested young men poring over titles or reading the contents, oblivious to the jostling of the crowds and even an occasional cow...

...Roy, a remarkable figure, had drafted the basic Comintern strategy on the "Eastern question" and had been the first to call attention to the revolutionary potential of the landless peasantry...

...A large room, about fifty by fifty, with bare green walls and small wooden tables, it occupies the second floor of a large ramshackle building...

...Although it is only 6 o'clock in the morning, it takes more than an hour, now, to ride ten miles to the airport...

...One flight above, fittingly enough, was the headquarters of the Radical Humanist, a left-wing sect which perpetuates the memory of M. N. Roy, the founder of Indian Communism...

...No," he replied slowly, and then, suddenly: "Look here, if you give me your promise not to write, I'll give you a visa...

...These are the "lucky" refugees from East Pakistan, driven out during the Hindu-Moslem riots, who have managed to find a small shelter and a precarious livelihood...

...Capitol in Washington...

...The second singer now enters and the two begin "talking" to each other in a lighter, almost child-like "happy" tune, though the singing is still descanted and the dream-like trance state remains...

...The atmosphere of intense, argumentative discussions reminded me of City College in the Thirties...

...In the "downtown" business section of the city, one finds thousands of persons sleeping on cots outside the establishments...

...Ringed by neon signs, it looks curiously like the downtown park in Mexico City along Avenue Juarez...

...From general knowledge, one is prepared for everything in India —the smell, the filth, the ubiquitous cows, the women washing themselves in the streets, the people sleeping on This is the first of five articles based on notebook which Daniel Bell (cut at left) kept while touring Asia last spring...

...I walk with a friend along the western part of the city, around a huge park—reserved, he tells me, for demonstrations for Nehru...

...These are not beggars, I'm told, but watchmen for the shops...

...and trams are too crowded, and expensive...

...The exercises opened with the singing of We Shall Not Be Moved (it was strange, in this new diffusion of culture, to hear this old Christian hymn sung in the explosive gutturals of Oriental rhythms), and closed with a set of graduation speeches by representatives of each national group...

...A tall, languid man in his late forties, he expressed in his own way the universality of certain literary types...

...Although the Kamasutra is sold in bookstores, few Bengalis seem to have read it...

...and went on to 4 o'clock in the morning, and a sizable number of persons, I'm told, stayed through the entire ten-hour performance...

...They sit around a long, rectangular table, most of them in their early twenties, sharp-eyed, quick-tongued, a reminder, too, of the universality of the radical world...

...It is Sudhin Datta's achievement to have introduced four to five hundred new words into Bengali, giving it a new flexibility and nuance for modern, varied expression...

...The exchange was fast and furious...

...I went one Saturday night to hear some Bengali singing...

...so does every car on the street...

...One is struck time and again by the nondescript character of Calcutta...

...It sounds as if wild geese or pigs were engaged in a calling contest...

...Sections of the singing reminded me vividly of the chanting in a synagogue when the haftorah, or sections of the law, are read in the sing-song, yet subtly varied, chant...

...this goes on for ten minutes or so...

...I asked...

...After ten minutes of these slow, low, long-held notes, the rhythms shift and quicken somewhat, and the singer, as if shaken from a drugged sleep, now begins repeated wailing, high entreaties, sung against the upper palate, while the miridanga, which previously had been patted softly, now begins an insinuating, strong jazz beat...

...and, quite strangely, a harmonium, which had been introduced by the British in the 18th century and was used to provide a swelling, counterpoint resonance to the strings...

...A radical student leader himself just a few years ago, he was the most popular instructor in the University...

...Poverty likes to huddle close, and open space becomes too frightening...

...The Bengalis take their culture seriously...

...In a slow evolution, he finally repudiated Leninism altogether...

...In Calcutta, later, I recounted the incident to an Indian friend...

...I asked...

...Despite all the space, people don't sleep here...

...Bell was on a year's leave from Fortune magazine (where he is associate editor and labor specialist) organizing international academic seminars for the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Around the large meeting room were specimen wall newspapers written by the students, most of them earnest, hortatory pleas to avoid drink and to join the union, and in the large, modern library was a comprehensive collection in politics and sociology ranging from Harold Laski to Talcott Parsons's most recent work, Economy and Society...

...That's a strange request, and I can't give any such promise," I replied...

...He has written for Commentary, Encounter, Preuves and scholarly journals here and abroad...

...One turns a corner and confronts the exact replica of the columned church of St...

...It would seem that the middle-class Bengalis, recoiling from the animal-like life on the streets, maintain this strict sexual prudishness to emphasize their differentiation...

...His questions and his conversation were largely on French literary gossip, and one could, I imagined, easily set Sudhin Datta down in London and Stephen Spender in Calcutta with little loss of personality or mannerism in the exchange...

...The highly stylized, controlled music seemed to fit with what I was told is a very high insanity rate in the middle-class families of Calcutta, due, so said an intellectual friend, to the intense sex inhibitions of Bengali culture...

...It publishes a weekly, half of whose pages are devoted, like the de Leonist press, to reprinting long, half-forgotten articles by the dead, revered leader...

...But what one finds, instead, is a disconcerting melange in which every style—gothic, baroque, Victorian—is transplanted and placed willy-nilly with no relation to one another...

...I went one Sunday morning with a friend, K. K. Sinha, to the graduation exercises of the labor college in New Alipor run by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions...

...The seeming monotony of these notes, at least to Western ears, makes it sound as if some catatonic person were singing in a trance, and it is possible that the tribal, religious origin of these songs may have had as its purpose the inducing of a trance-like state...

...Since when do you discriminate against writers...

...Everyone knows," I said, "how difficult the United States is about visas, how cumbersome and even humiliating some of the procedures are, and we deplore it, but India is such a moral country...

...The others, hundreds of thousands, wander aimlessly around the city, cooking their meals in the streets over little braziers, squatting in the alleyways to relieve themselves, sleeping in the open at night...

...After several days of waiting, I received a short-stay transit visa through India...

...The festivities began at 6 p.m...

...But, like the founders of all Communist parties, he left the Comintern...

...ugly, scabrous lots piled high with refuse...

...This prudishness contrasts strangely with the open life in the streets, with the legends of the Kamasutra, the ancient Hindu manual of subtle instruction in the different sexual positions, and with the worship of the lingam, or phallus, in the temples of Siva and other Hindu gods...

...every shop will employ one or two to guard the premises...

...women washing their rags and themselves from little water spouts...

...One would have thought that a city which was once the capital of India, and which the British had occupied for so many years, would have achieved some style...

...At the end of a half hour, it seemed as if wo had known each other all our lives...

...If I were a businessman or an engineer, would I require such permission...

...The consul at the Embassy, a small, thin man with an abstracted air, looked briefly at my passport and said: "I'm sorry, I'll have to get permission from my government at Delhi—it says on your passport that you are a writer...

...men squatting, shaving or being shaved on the sidewalks...

...In his later years— he died in 1956—Roy attacked the entire idea of political parties and called for a new ethical emphasis in politics...

...The singers—there were two paired against each other—were accompanied by four instruments: the si tar...

...The speeches, delivered in old-fashioned elocutionary manner with stilted gestures, were full of such phrases as "Although we pass over the door to a new future, we will always remember our alma mater—" Who said that the older anthropological theories of culture evolution were wrong...

...From Dum Dum Airport one rides along a road lined endlessly with little tin and wood huts, each four to six feet wide, lit by a naked electric bulb or a kerosene lamp, selling barley, cereals, patent medicines, charcoal or any of a dozen other products...

...The cab honks constantly, trying to force the ox-drawn carts to the side...

...Although we had just met, in five minutes the two of us were off in a sharp, heated debate —not on the road to power, as it would have been in the Thirties, but on the road to economic growth...

...Bell is author of Work and Its Discontents, editor of The New American Right, a contributor to Princeton's history of American Socialism, and a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University...

...And the large Government house erected as a tribute to Queen Victoria looks like a cross between Sacre-Coeur and the U.S...

...A bazaar in its own way, it displays yard after yard of books...

...His disciples now meet every Saturday afternoon, above the India Coffee House, to discuss recent political events and plan the next issue of the Radical Humanist...

...On driving through the city on the way back to the airport, the scene is one of complete devastation...

...A song begins with low, long-held moans which are punctuated by quick explosive bursts...

...Off College Street stands the India Coffee House, the informal "commons room" of the University students...

...Martin's in the Fields near Trafalgar...

...A former editor of The New Leader, Mr...

...A city is revealed most vividly in the early morning light—especially a city like Calcutta which lives in the streets...

...There were 36 students from six countries (Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Burma and India) who had spent three months in courses ranging from how to write a wall newspaper to time-and-motion study...

...the pavements—everything except one unnerving fact: the sheer quantity of it all...

...How cheap labor can be...

...This is the future look of the world after H. G. Wells's "shape of things to come" has been realized: sagging buildings, with plaster flaking like mange on a dog...

...As in other parts of India, the linguistic revival is strong in Calcutta...

...Besides, it's too far from the wharf and market areas where a man might earn two rupees (three shillings) for a day's work...

...One finds odd contrasts in Calcutta...

...thousands of people circling aimlessly in the gutters...

...As in the effort to extend Hebrew or any other archaic language, the chief problem of Bengali is to find words that can encompass new experiences...

...The revolting physical impressions—the blind woman with a crying infant pulling at her teats, the little beggar boys thrusting their stumps of arms and legs into your face, the jostling, hostile crowd ready to become a mob—all remain, but one gradually begins to sort out the life of the city and obtain a sense of its constituent parts...

...The songs, each lasting about a half-hour or more, use the basic ragas, or the notes sounded by the sitar, and weave these into involved raginis or patterns...

...College Street, in the eastern section of the city, abuts the University...

...It was part of a 14-day Bengali festival in which traditional music, drama, dance and folk tales are presented each night in a large, tented area, with space for five to six thousand persons...

...I met Amlan Datta, a tense, wiry, bespectacled chap with a small, bony face, who teaches economics at the University...

...His movement was the chief "escape hatch" for Indian intellectuals out of Communism, as Trotskyism was in the West, and many of the active figures in the fndian politico-cultural scene are former Royists...

...India," he replied reflectively, "is becoming a great power...

...Calcutta is a Bengali city, and the Bengalis, a clannish people, are quite proud of their tradition...

...Every Saturday afternoon, he occupied a table at the Coffee House, hectoring the students, exchanging ideas...

...Who knows, perhaps we had— not in some previous Hindu incarnation, but in the temperamental and intellectual aspects of character which bring people into the radical movement all over the world...

...I met Sudhin Datta, who, since Tagore, is the outstanding Bengali literary figure...

...cows walking placidly in the streets or picking their way through hundreds of people still sleeping amid the incredible din, and the smudge and smoke of the cooking pots with their acrid yet strangely pleasant smell...

...a long-necked instrument which is plucked like a mandolin but which gives off a humming, twangy sound...

...the miridanga, a drum which is patted on one side and used to provide a strong, accented beat on the other...