Invincible City: Tale of Kolkata, once ‘Calcutta’

KOLKATA: How do you define Kolkata, once Calcutta? Scarred, disfigured, slow. Bursting at her stretch marks after harbouring millions of refugees and migrants. Called the City of Dreadful Night by Rudyard Kipling. Eulogised as City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre.

Abused. Used. Abused again, like a woman of the dingy red-light lanes, a woman long past her prime.

Her identity appropriated, her name changed with each new master.

In love with ‘storytelling’, both Rajib De and Sohini Sen began their professional journeys in this tired, old city, in the same newspaper house.

Both introverts, he spoke mostly with his camera, and she, with her pen.

Depending on how they looked at it, life in the city was glorious, or hard. Globalisation still nascent, there were hardly any computers or Internet, and of course no mobile phones. ‘Breaking news’ demanded the sweat of physical toil through the streets, or indefinite waits in corridors of power.

Finding a great moment to photograph ‘could take hours, maybe’, even though its capturing had to be instantaneous and analogous, with no retakes.

The more they worked, the more the city came alive to them.

She revealed to them her peace, pace and routine, unchangeable except in the frenzy and fervour of a football league match, or Durga Puja. She spoke proudly of her children: Nobel Laureates, artists, authors, filmmakers, thespians, revolutionaries, yes even Olympians. And countless, nameless others who struggle for sustenance and never give up, ever.

Invincibility is their middle name. It is the city’s maiden name, too.

Kolkata longs to be redeemed by her people, to be freed of the silt and the slur, the debris and the dishonour.

Rajib and Sohini would be miserable, if after 75 years of the country’s Independence, their art was not able to redeem the first capital of British India, their invincible city

called Kolkata.