Uniquely placed, over the decades, to at once view and receive these drifts and convergences, is Flurys, at the corner of Park Street and Middleton Row. Flurys is a tea shop. Once created by a Swiss confectioner, it’s now owned by the Apeejay Group, who made their money in tea. If, upon entering, you turn left and occupy one of the tables overlooking the new large glass windows, you can partake of the astonishment of this area, as hordes of pedestrians, with an odd urgency about them, wait, some distance away, to cross to the Free School Street side. You order your coffee and cake, or rissole, and, every five or ten minutes, see the scene repeat itself: the current of passers-by advancing aimlessly, then beginning to congeal at the traffic lights, and finally dispersing, scattering, and temporarily losing form. It seems to you that there are all kinds of people in that crowd visible from the Flurys window — office-goers; wage-earners; youthful groups in jeans; tourists; people who have returned to these parts for tea or coffee; Europeans, in their loose handwoven clothes, with bare white arms showing. They all seem to have arrived from, or to be moving towards, some landmark: New Market, further up, off Free School Street, or one of the half-lit restaurants on either side, or St. Xavier’s College, or Chowringhee. When you look up from your cup, you’re struck by this mixture of unpredictability and purpose.
I probably first saw Flurys when I was five or six years old. My earliest memory is of going with an older cousin (my aunt’s son) and a cousin around my age (a maternal uncle’s son, in whose house the older cousin was staying as a lodger) to Flurys on a Sunday, and finding its interior humming loudly. The older cousin, a migrant from Assam, was an exceptional student, and was studying for his chartered accountancy while working at Guest Keen Williams. He — despite his meagre means, and perhaps in anticipation of the success he’d one day have — made at least one extravagant gesture a week, which included buying us books or comics; that day, it was a trip to Flurys. I say “earliest memory,” but that doesn’t mean it was my first visit; I remember a sense of recognition on entering the place. Certainly, the Bombay I knew had no venue for such focussed congregating, where every item on the menu — baked beans on toast, sausage roll, scrambled eggs, pineapple pudding cake, buttered toast — had an idiosyncratic pedigree. That day was the first time I had a chicken croissant — croissant-shaped bread sliced through the middle, buttered, patted with mustard, and filled with shreds of roast chicken. This slyly unprepossessing confection was always a little too expensive to order (when a cousin was taking you out) without embarrassment, and often it was in short supply (a fact conveyed to you by an unrelenting shake of the waiter’s head), maybe because the croissant-shaped bread was produced in small quantities; until, about fifteen years ago, it fell off the menu and disappeared. My memory of its taste is a reminder that, in Calcutta, in a sort of ritual transubstantiation, you were constantly consuming the flesh and blood of urban modernity; that modernity was, at least until the moment I’m thinking of, the city’s bread and butter. The general high spirits (despite the surly waiters) in Flurys that afternoon is also my one memory of a city that still had no inkling of Naxalbari, and the lust for revolution.
Naxalbari is not far from Darjeeling in West Bengal; still obscure, it would be fair to say, despite its mythic elevation since 1967, as few people seem to know anything about the actual place. The “actual place” is yet another Indian village, with the characteristic vulnerability such villages have had, over several centuries, to the brutal mastery of the landlords and the state. In 1967, two radicalised communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, of bhadralok origins (admittedly, bhadralok has all sorts of contradictory registers: “bourgeois,” “elite,” “educated but not necessarily propertied petit bourgeois”—indeed, the whole cultured ethos of liberal modernity), organised a peasant rebellion there; in doing so, planting the seeds, firmly, for a movement whose long-term aim was not a series of local rebellions, but total revolution. From Naxalbari, the forgotten village, sprang an adjective, “Naxalite,” for a movement espoused by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), a radical Maoist breakaway faction of the more mainstream Communist Party of India (Marxist), which would be elected to power in West Bengal in 1977, and still rules it — precariously — as I begin writing this book. “Naxalite,” however, is more commonly a noun, describing an adherent of the movement; a noun that, until six or seven years ago, defined a type that had been consigned to Indian political history just as princely states and the British Raj were: a romantic, probably bookish, university student from the late sixties, ideologically transformed, or seduced (according to your vantage point), by Maoist rhetoric, or even coerced by circumstances into a movement that believed in nothing less than an apocalyptic reordering of the system. The type disappeared in the early seventies. After committing several of what Auden called “necessary murders” (of landlords, policemen, corrupt professionals), these proto-Bolsheviks were rounded up, imprisoned, and broken, or — more often — killed during the time of the arraigned Congress government. No modern middle class — this one was very much, in a sense, of the sixties — has responded to Marx in quite this way; and comparisons to early-twentieth-century Russia and mid-century China don’t hold, and not only because of the failure of the Naxal revolution. That generation — literally “lost”—has certain correspondences with the one apostrophised by Ginsberg in Howl a decade earlier—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” et cetera — though, here too, despite the ritual invocation of “best minds” in both cases, there are differences: between madness and ideology, self-destructive ecstasy and utopian rage. Nevertheless, the cliché goes that a generation of the “best minds” in Calcutta more or less vanished in the early seventies, in the manner Charu Majumdar, one of their leaders, did: in captivity.
The Naxalite, as the Maoist, has made a comeback — for, in the midst of the supremacy of the free market and the march of industry, and with corporate power and political interests converging, and land being wrested from local people for “development,” there has been unrest in the countryside. Calcutta, today, is surrounded, from its outskirts onward, by unrest. But the word “Naxalite” has a slightly different resonance now from its earlier one: of the bhadralok radical, destined, in a sense, for failure. The Naxalite or Maoist today represents not so much a romantic transgression as a genuine, probably unbridgeable, rift. In 1967, the independent nation-state was still young and relatively untested; but the revived movement puts the great myth of Indian democracy, which — according to its apologists — has worked for sixty-five years in spite of itself, in doubt. It clearly doesn’t work for a very great number of people.
With the emergence and then the crushing of the Naxalites, Flurys went quiet in the early seventies — as did Christmas in Park Street. Until, say, 1969, Calcutta had the most effervescent and the loveliest Christmas in India — probably, I’d hazard, based on my experience later of Christmas in England, the loveliest in the world. Warm, convivial, unfolding in smoky weather, it had the vivacity of a transplanted custom that had flowered spontaneously, but still retained the air of an outing, of an encounter with the strange. Its beauty and atmosphere derived not only from the Anglo-Indians, or the last of the English living and working in Calcutta, but also from a certain kind of Bengali who had embraced the festival. I was reminded of this Bengali type when walking through the Jewish Museum in late 2005 in Berlin, a striking building in an area called Hallesches Tör. Our straggly bunch had followed the guide irresistibly until we came, on the first floor, to a rather sparse reconstruction of an educated Jewish household from the twenties with a piano at the centre. On a sort of noticeboard was a newspaper cutting from the time, with a satirical cartoon recording the stages through which a Hanukkah transmogrified into a Christmas tree — clearly meant to poke fun at the new secular Jew. Although I’d been silent so far, I couldn’t help interjecting at this point (the guide encouraged dialogue): “This was happening in other parts of the world as well — it was happening in Bengal.” Two or three people in my group nodded, as if they knew exactly what I meant; and, perhaps, for a moment, they had an intimation that the story of change that had taken place in Europe had also occurred further afield.