Kolkata, the city of ‘joy’, has been reeling inside the murky waters of nostalgia for a very long time. They say things belong to an old-world order here, and people are too affected by the dazzling stem of slowness, as if the entire town were transformed into an afternoon-dozing and plodding gully.
Over the decades, the urban spaces seem to have accumulated an overwhelming older population, seething under the weight of melancholy and sickness. It has backtracked into a space of geriatric buildings, themed eateries, and religious festivals. Everything else is buried below the blind iridescence of city lights.
After years of denial, I finally believe that Kolkata suffers from the disease of ‘grey time’ (Laura Salisbury) − endless waiting without any hope of fulfilment or progression. This is a city of immeasurable departures, suitable only for Instagram reels, and puerile podcasts; and every return feels like an odyssey of an untethered homebound traveler.
You wait for a vacation, come back to your ageing, longing parents, meet your ‘unfortunate’ friends who failed to leave or chose under some inexorable circumstances to stay back, take photographs of lost loves and familiar fruit-sellers, and write a sentimental post on the deplorable condition of people and politics. Perhaps, it is a place that must be abandoned or reckoned only as a memento or studied as a resting, meditative zone.
There was a time when I would despise and wisecrack about my relatives and companions for leaving my city. It was a betrayal of sorts. Now, as an insider who spent more than 30 years of his life in Kolkata, and an outsider who was compelled to leave for lack of better opportunities, I have been trying to comprehend and measure the depth of this strange sadness that haunts this city.
Following the rape and murder of a woman doctor at R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9, Kolkata finally awakened to an intimate and submerged reality. As the city surged under the mass of thousands of women protesting on the streets and demanding justice and safety, an observer might have detected a sudden unhinging of a disillusioned population. It was heartening and restorative to witness the expanse and galvanising potential of this massive gender rebellion, the solidarity and collective defiance of the state government and its police, the chorus of national anthem and ghazals, provocative banners in the high wind, and women reclaiming nights of a hysteric, insomniac city. This crusade for equality is also gradually entering and dismantling the performing arts scene in Kolkata. However, one wonders if one singular event is disquieting enough to shake the pillars of a sedentary city. I believe that this long-anticipated feminist churning could be an unnerving and terrifying alarm to the lotus-eaters of this city.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The collective inability to deal with the decay of our habitation and culture often pushes us under the blue and glue of nostalgia. Everything that disappears leaves behind a trace in the form of tangible and ethereal memories. We tend to fill those vacuums with overused and time-tested elements from the past.
The present then becomes a ritualistic repetition of cultural products. From incessant tributes to Satyajit Ray and daring detectives of fond adolescence in Bengali cinema to songs of Tagore in traffic signals and solo albums, one is continuously surrounded by glorious lumps of time. This practice of re-playing and re-producing is akin to a drug that neutralises the poverty and mediocrity of the present.
Let alone literature and the arts, the average Bengali youth is everywhere else except in Bengal.
If you are unable to locate them in high corporate houses, you will find them in odd restaurants and office canteens in states like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana or Odisha. At the risk of sounding reductive, one must still ask if the state of West Bengal feels like a sinking ship with all its bolts and wood coming undone. The death of the thriving jute and engineering industries, three million job losses in recent times, politically sponsored syndicate culture, pervasive policies in educational institutions, the agonising end of the communist party, the dwindling social solidarity due to the decline in large-scale practices of reading, writing, and speaking in Bengali, among other things, have ruptured the dreams of home-related growth and prosperity. Especially in the last three decades, along with the consistent evaporation of industrial investments, theatre, literature, and cinema have also flatlined against both regional and national platforms.
I don’t know any longer if we should mourn the passing away of the 150-year-old tram services and the discontinuation of yellow taxis or placate ourselves with that succulent potato in biryani and the artistic abundance of Durgotshab.
The word nostalgia emerges from the Greek root nostos (return home) and algos (pain) and the later fusion of Modern Latin and German into ‘homesickness’. Neuroscientists and cognitive psychology find both negative and positive dimensions behind individual nostalgic recollections. However, I would like to suggest that people belonging to a shared community, when facing collective cultural and financial crises, often take refuge in mental simulations of past events that usually exceed autobiographical memories. The stories of a community that flow into consciousness are not simply historical narratives and political perturbations but are often overlaid with hyperbolic, folkloric accessories.
Times of distress, anxiety, and political ineffectiveness, along with a sense of collaborative defeat could push an entire population to a triumphant past, a sublime block of time when the entire nation was defined by its presence. Such illustrious episodes are then multiplied and cloned, not only as bearers of time-stamped honour but mostly to keep the public inert and complacent. Here, nostalgia functions as a faulty time machine that breaks down before bringing its travellers back to the present. Like the amnesiacs of Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, Kolkata too is perhaps trapped somewhere between 1960 and 1970. Like a senile lover eternally leaving and arriving, I only hope that together with the nights, the city is reclaimed as well.
Asijit Datta is from the School of Liberal Arts, SRM University.
