Oh Calcutta!

by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2009)

A difficult lesson to learn and to accept, emotionally if not intellectually, is that there is rarely gain in society entirely without loss. That is surely one of the reasons why nostalgia is so common a response to the passage of time: it is not only lost youth that is regretted, but a lost world, at least in some or other of its aspects.

Needless to say, there was far more to Calcutta than its poverty. Among other things, it was by far the most literary city in India. There was as much energy as despair, and the Bengalis prided themselves on their artistic refinement and creativity, and relative indifference to the grosser aspects of economic existence.

But not every change is to be welcomed. A Bengali friend of mine, a doctor now practising abroad, said that he noticed a coarsening of the worldview his fellow-countrymen and an intense hunger for money that was not pleasant for him to behold. The refinement of people, still in many respects superior to that of westerners, was declining in favour of grossness and vulgarity. Fast food was making inroads into the local diet not because it was inherently better, cheaper or even more convenient for the middle classes (very far indeed from that, for they still had servants, including cooks), but because they thought it was modern and western: in other words, they lacked the proper discrimination to reject what was worthless.

None of these arguments lessened my regret, however. But the melancholy was as nothing compared with that which I felt on visiting the synagogues of Calcutta.

The third synagogue is the Beth El, opposite what was once the Jewish school in Pollock Street, which had 800 pupils.

Both the Mogen David and the Beth El synagogues are very grand, capable of seating congregations of several hundred, and indicative of a once very prosperous community. The benches and chairs are beautifully-made and proportioned. There are pictures of the patriarchs of the powerful, wealthy and philanthropic Elias and Ezra families on the walls, who once dressed in Turkish costume and then adopted western costume. There are plaques commemorating their donations and in one case their sacrifice: killed over France in 1944, fighting in the RAF.

The synagogues have been declared historic monuments by the Indian government, and that is what they now are. The last cyclostyled notice posted on the notice-board of the Beth El synagogue, about a meeting of the committee, was dated May 21, 1989. No services are ever held there now, the community having dwindled to about six or eight people, mostly in their eighties, only one of whom is fit enough to come to the synagogues to light a candle on Friday evenings. Soon the Jewish community of Calcutta, more than two hundred years old, will be completely extinct.

Progress there has been, self-evidently so, but not in everything.

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