Reflections of a typical neighbourhood in Calcutta’s south. Photo by author.

Farewell, my city…show us the way Asian women, show us the way to bitter exile.
Agave in Euripedes’ The Bacchae                                               

The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room. – Orhan Pamuk

The red lights did not forbid, /Yet the city of Calcutta stopped suddenly/ in its tempestuous rush; /taxis and private cars; vans and tiger-crested/double-decker buses/stopped precariously in their tracks./ Those who came running and screaming/ from both sides of the road –/ porters, vendors, shopkeepers and clients –/ even they are now like still life on the artist’s canvas./Stunned they watch/crossing from one side of the road/to the other, with uncertain steps, /a child, completely naked. / It had rained in Chowringhee a short while ago. – Nirendranath Chakraborty, Jesus of Calcutta (trans Manish Nandy)

“Though I left it 21 years ago as an ‘economic refugee’ to come and live in Delhi, I still consider the strange and sublime address of Calcutta as home. My relationship with this city is like that of a spectator watching a man walking across a tightrope. Each time you turn around and look, you’re sure he must have fallen off. But no, by some miracle he’s still on the line. Teetering and swaying, but still up there. Each time I come back things are that much worse, that much crazier. But I keep returning, and I guess I always will.” The speaker is a middle-aged Bengali who lives and works in New York. But in one respect he is representative of a diverse cross-section of people who, scattered across the world from Melbourne to Memphis and from Hounslow to Hong Kong, maintain a tenuous but lasting long-distance connection with Calcutta, the city they once lived in. – Jug Suraiya, ‘Calcutta Chromosome’, Outlook¸ January 2009 

A series of meditations on the idea of movement and exile, on the idea of leaving and return, on the idea of Calcutta the city, which according to Jug casts a spell so deep, the chronic attack of nostalgia transcends time and space. He calls Calcutta the portable city of the mind (which) flourishes all the more as the real one declines. Is it that easy? Can exile be romanticised? Is it akin to moving to another room in a territory of imagination? Or is exile bitter? Is exile a moment of deep and unmitigated sadness? What about the tightrope city you loved more than yourself and wanted to ropewalk too? Have you left it to its fate? Will the city, in a moment of deep thought, stand still in your remembrance? Does anyone in a ten million city make a difference? 

Having left Calcutta thrice in the last decade and returned twice, the questions came back to haunt me again the whole of last week, as Calcutta went for a weeklong ablution and as I try to settle, and as an economic refugee, in cut and dry Delhi. Am I in exile? Am I in a mode of perpetual displacement from the people and the city am so full of? Delhi is but a night’s journey. But I feel so far away. And every time I leave, I am as if chained to the idea of Calcutta even more. The portable city with its full weight comes to bear on my shoulders. I must remember it well, I say to myself. I cannot let it be. I cannot let it be forgotten.  

But there is a bigger thought. Can it be possible to be exiled in the twenty-first century? The Greeks exercised it even within the limited nautical of the Mediterranean. The Romans had often sent to exile restless men into far territories, for they had half of the world under their feet. Why even Rome was said to have been found by Aeneas, a man hounded into exile by the Greeks. Since the Babylonian Exile of the Jews of Judah in the 6th century BC, exile has been a constant factor for Jews. Myths abound about the wandering Jew and the Last of the Just. History and legend are all about movements – individual and masses – men and matter – into space and time and continuum. Endless wars have ravaged endless men and their home and hearth. Countless women have been widowed, forcefully removed from men they have loved. Men have been forced out again and again. And again and again have men built to destroy. They have gone out in search of new land, and new riches and were forced to take up living elsewhere; life away from the land they had grown up thinking as their own. 

Literature abounds too in the idea of exile. James Joyce, a mind traveller in his own right, hardly lived in Dublin but all his work is but an epic chronicle of Dublin by day and Dublin by night. He could never leave Dublin in mind. Take Pamuk, a foremost chronicler of modern Turkey, who has confessed to having never lived away from his home in Istanbul overlooking the Bosphorus. Joyce and Pamuk are two great examples in literature about the idea of exile, especially from the city they consider their talisman. While the former flourished despite it while all the way re-living it in mind, the later physically remained in its throes while wandering across its multiple histories and selves. 

The Joyce/Pamuk dichotomy is perhaps one of art’s eternal motifs, not far from the cultural dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian – two orders of creation, the first privileging discipline and reason while the latter imagination and restive genius. Incidentally, this category was popularised by Frederic Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy), who himself was a man who could never find a place of rest in moral-philosophy, belief (as a critic of Christianity) in person (having fetishized his partially Polish identity), or even in his mind (collapsed into madness late in his life). Nietzsche was Ecco Homo himself, the First Man and hence perpetually in exile. Another example near home would be Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. Ray, confessedly the urbane sophisticated auteur that he was, felt the safest when on his chair at his large, airy room on Bishop Lefroy. Ghatak, hounded by the partition and feeling of being exiled in a new land, away from the rivers and estuaries of Bangladesh, could never find poise. His restlessness gave his cinema restive immediacy and supplied new blood to his genius. Ray’s poise made him one of the greatest ever in his vocation. They are both, in their own way, a classic reinforcement of the Nietzschean dichotomy. 

It’s a simplistic divide perhaps but they can in a way make sense of the immense complexity of the idea in the 20th century. As the world grew smaller, more literate, and ever keener to experiment in various degrees of applied democracy, leaders around the world became even more and more despondent, autocratic, and violent, resulting not only in a series of wars and movements in mass scale but also causing tectonic shifts in the idea of land, of territory and resultantly of what it means to be in exile. This is all too familiar history but there are some names, which come back again and again. Leon Trotsky, hounded by his own men and his colleagues led by Stalin went to exile again and again and even when that was not enough, was assassinated. Walter Benjamin, one of the finest philosophers of the early twentieth century was committed suicide to escape being caught by Nazis. The Soviet Union had enough examples. Consider poet Anna Akhmatova, who, like Pamuk, though under very different and severe circumstances, never left the USSR but preferred to live in penury and obscurity in St Petersburg for much of her later life while watching near ones being sent to gallows. Akhmatova was never exiled physically but all her life she was exiled from the men in her life, the loves she sought despondently, the freedom to work and compose and of course from any official recognition of her work. She found kinship in Osip Mandelshtam, another great Russian poet who died in a transit camp on his way to the Gulag, sentenced to exile by Stalin. As against Akhmatova and Mandelshtam, there is Isaiah Berlin, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky — all great men of letters, great poets, authors. All of them forced to leave Russia, a country they at one and every point deeply loved, because they did toe their party line, or were considered antithetical to the Socialist experiment. But so were Akhmatova and Mandelshtam. But they preferred to stay back, while the former went away. Both groups chose their way to their individual destiny and perhaps to greatness. But both were, forever and for sure exiled. Again, Milan Kundera hounded out of Czechoslovakia and found refuge in France, for not being a communist. Years ago Charlie Chaplin was hounded out of America for allegedly being one. Exile it is. Exile it was. Orders and regimes come and go while men of letters, men of thought and diction, men with insight into the past, present, and future are evermore, ever again exiled from the immediacy of their present and from the promise of their future. 

I find solace in these men, in their work, in their journey. They say Odysseus is not about the journey back home to Ithaca from Troy but a journey within. I take that literally. For the portable city of the mind is with me and I continue to live with it, bound by the endless histories of Dionysian exile and forced by the Apollonian need for order, matter, and livelihood. It is hence in my own, private historical materialism that the tightrope city of Calcutta survives, which I perhaps can never live in for long, but one, which I can never fully leave either.