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| Calcutta during the 1950's |
Calcutta, during the 1950's, felt the problems of a rising population caused by the influx of refugees. One sphere in which this impact was felt was shortage of space. From a gracious and leisurely city, Calcutta in the fifties became a noisy, crowded and a melancholy city. It became a city of shortages, especially of food grains and housing. The middle fifties saw the The city in the experienced strikes, hartals and mammoth political rallies which were led by tram workers, bank employees and students organised by the Communist Party of India. The disruption that these caused, together with the squalor and disease -both results of the refugee problem- were beginning to give Calcutta the global notoriety which became an integral part of the city's identity in the second part of the 20th century.
It was in the fifties that the nature of politics in Calcutta underwent a radical change. Agitational politics emerged as an equally important sphere as parliamentary politics. The latter together with the government and the official machinery of the state remained under Congress control. But politics on the streets and of agitation passed completely into the hands of the CPI. The Congress came to be identified as the party of order and privilege. It was not perceived from the fifties as a party that spoke for the people or all the time represented the interests and aspirations of those who it elected to power.
The flip side of the disillusionment with the Congress was the growing popularity of the CPI. In the first two general elections held in the fifties, some of the constituencies elected communist candidates. In the Assembly Elections of 1957, the CPI won as many as fifteen assembly seats in Calcutta and its industrial suburbs. The Left was emerging as the principal opposition to the Congress. This was also evident in the rallies and the demonstrations with tens and thousands of people participating that the CPI could organise, and in the number of successful general strikes it could call. Its support base in the city was spread over the working class, sections of the white collar workers, students and a number of cultural organisation.
The Communist Party and the kind of mass agitation it could organise and the opposition to the government that it could mobilise created alternative centres of power to the existing establishments. The political scientist Partho Chatterjee has observed, " If Writer's Building, Raj Bhawan and the Assembly House were the centres from which the destiny of the state was being controlled by those who had the mandate to rule, then Esplanade East, the Monument and the Brigade Parade grounds, lying outside the protective cordon thrown around the citadels of power, were the rallying points of mass protests." This protective cordon was an integral part of the administrative and repressive measures taken by the government to counter rallies and demonstrations. The measures often included arrests and firing by the police as retaliation to the large scale destruction of public property indulged in by the protesters.
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Shakti Chattopadhyay and
Sunil Gangopadhyay
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Despite the many problems faced by the people of Calcutta and the political turmoil that surrounded their lives, the fifties recorded some major achievements in the field of art and literature. There were the plays put up by Bohurupee, a theatre group established by Shombu Mitra. They staged Bengali translations of two of Ibsen's plays -Dashochakro (The Enemy of the People) and Putul Khela ( The Doll's House). But even more remarkable were the productions of Tagore's Raktakarabi (1954) and Charadhaya (1951). In cinema, Satyajit Ray's "The Apu Trilogy" broke completely new ground and took Indian cinema to the world.
In the same decade Ray was also to make Jalsaghar (The Music Room) and Porosh Pathar (The Philosopher's Stone). New types of films -new because they broke from the traditions of popular Bengali cinema- were also made by Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. {mosimage}The fifties also saw the emergence of a new group of poets centered around a magazine called "Krittibas".Sankha Ghosh, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay and many of their contemporaries combined with a high degree of lyricism, a muted passion and a measured reflection of life around them.
At another level of creativity was the organisation of cultural events like the Bango Sanskriti Sammelan which was begun in 1953 and the Yuba Utsav which was begun in 1955.
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Uttam Kumar and
Suchitra Sen |
There were also remarkable accomplishments in the writing of novels.Coincidentally or otherwise, some of the writers produced novels centered around a river. One should particularly mention here Advaito Mallabarman's Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1956) and Somaresh Basu's Ganga. Kamal Kumar Majumdar's Antarjaler Jatra (1959) marked a new experimentation with language and religious faith.
The level of popular culture, Bengali cinema in the fifties witnessed the arrival of the pairing of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. These two would continue to captivate cinema-goers for more than two decades.
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