Reclaiming Kolkata

Kolkata and its inhabitants are urgently engaged in surviving the present moment, and the whole place is perched perilously on the edge of dysfunction. Traffic comes to an absolute standstill at rush hour every day, with cabdrivers actually switching off their engines rather than simply idling at a red light, knowing that the wait to inch forward may be 20 minutes or more. (There is, however, an efficient subway serving a stretch of the city on one side of the river, equipped, surprisingly enough, with television sets on the platforms to entertain commuters.) The city does have an odd, transmogrified, Dickensian air about it, but that's not just because the lowering Victorian brick office buildings, with their winding central staircases and wrought-iron fire escapes, evoke the world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. It's also because Kolkata buzzes with a street life that technology and prosperity have all but erased from the West: Kolkatans without running water in their homes use the fire hydrants for bathing or for washing saucepans; the proprietors of stalls selling cheap pakoras or clay cups filled with chai jostle each other for space on the sidewalk; men with manual typewriters set up desks on the street outside the law courts, copying and filling in documents that in the United States would be dealt with on home computers or at Kinko's.

And there is so much in Kolkata that belongs to an entirely different universe than the stately governmental buildings. One of the city's most astonishing sights is the neighborhood called Kalighat, a network of narrow streets filled with the storefronts of craftsmen who mass-produce, by hand, the clay models of deities that are used in the many festivals on the Hindu calendar. It's stunning to walk along these streets and see thousands of two-foot-tall, half-finished models of, for example, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, her graceful figure shaped from clay smeared onto limbs that are fashioned from straw and bound to a wooden frame. These models, after being painted with bright colors, will eventually be thrown into the river as part of the goddess's festival—and dissolve back into clay that will one day be transformed into more idols, an endless cycle of indigenous religious industry.

Elsewhere are reminders of the Indian aristocracy that flourished by cooperating with the British imperial rulers. Perhaps the most breathtaking sight in all of Kolkata is the Marble Palace, a wealthy landowner's home built in 1835, the lavishness of its construction matched only by the extent of its moldering neglect. True to its name, the building is filled with fine marble, with intricately inlaid floors and an extravagantly paved courtyard. Its musty rooms are stuffed with decaying treasures, their advancing ruin caused by age and humidity: vast gilt-framed mirrors now too clouded and spotted to re-flect much of anything; oil paintings whose canvases are so warped and darkened that the pictures are almost obscured, but are said to include works by Rubens and Joshua Reynolds. The Marble Palace, in a twist that Dickens would appreciate, is still home to descendants of the family that built it: several elderly brothers live in one wing, and visitors might well bump into an ancient, toothless brother taking the air on the veranda and looking as much like a relic as the spindly, threadbare chairs edging the ballroom whose wooden floor has long since rotted away.

The buildings once occupied by the British need not, however, be haunted by imperial ghosts—at least, so Chakraborti would argue. Rather, they can be put to use in ways that would benefit the city, with their aesthetic contributionas a happy by-product. Recently Dalhousie Square was included in the World Monuments Fund 2004 Watch List, something for which Chakraborti campaigned, and he hopes that this will be a first step toward reclaiming Victorian office buildings, many of which are in a terrible state of decay, as office space for modern Indian companies. This, Chakraborti claims, makes more sense economically than knocking them down and putting up new ones. "If a use can be established for them, why should they be demolished?" Chakraborti asks. Besides, he adds, if Kolkata's imperial edifices were built at the instruction of British overlords, they were built with the labor and skill of Indian craftsmen, and Kolkatans should make this legacy their own.

REBECCA MEAD is a staff writer at The New Yorker.