Your Culture is not Good Enough – Confession of an arrogant urban planner

Aparna Das is an architect by training, having obtained her Master of Science degree in Urban Development Planning from The Development Planning Unit at University College London, United Kingdom. Additionally, she served as a Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, during the academic year 2018–2019. 

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I got out of the shared auto at the gate of Sagor Dutta Hospital. There was neither a gate nor a hospital in sight. The auto driver announced the stop’s name, so I assumed it must be there. This is a major landmark in Kamarhati city, one of the thirty-eight cities within the Kolkata Metropolitan Area in West Bengal. I have been coming to Kamarhatty Jute mill settlements for some time now; for the first time, I came here for work, and in the later years, there is no particular reason I can put forward. Maybe I smell history here, and that fascinates me. In 1877, Jardine Henderson Ltd set up Kamarhatty Company Limited along the banks of the Ganges, which is still operating, making it one of the oldest functioning composite mills in the world. The company’s management has changed hands, and now it is being done by the homegrown entrepreneurs. The town Kamarhati- with softer ‘t’- as the Bengali locals will pronounce it, is situated along the Hooghly riverbank. But where I got down, I did not get any whiff of the river or the pride of being the host of the composite jute mill.

This place does not align with my perception of what Kolkata has always represented—a city of intellectuals with creativity oozing from everyone’s pores. One of the stereotypes I grew up hearing is that Bengalis dominate the cultural sphere; they value education and pursue creative interests. This stereotype has been repeatedly challenged, as it is today, while I stand at the hospital gate stop. Nonetheless, it persists. Scrolling through Google Maps of these areas on the computer screen contradicts my real-time experience. The road is dusty and crowded with men and women, children, beggars, autos, hand rickshaws waiting to go somewhere, arriving from elsewhere, gossiping, or striking a business deal—much seems to be happening here. This dusty road is layered with a cacophony of honks, popular film music, and commercials, with jingles selling wedding sarees and gold jewellery. Overwhelming is an appropriate emotion here; that is how I felt. It is overwhelming.

When the concoction of crowd, dust, and sound is blended with temperature, it challenges my civility. I pushed someone while getting out of the auto-rickshaw, who was in a rush to enter the same auto before I could get down. There is no time to waste; everyone seems in a great hurry to accomplish a task. I failed to appreciate any aesthetic in the entire set-up; it could have been anywhere, like in Meerut or Aligarh – any place in Uttar Pradesh or Chhattisgarh. I anticipate this is the working mill culture, which brews as people do a certain type of work and belong to certain social strata. But what was missing was my appreciation for any of these as a ‘culture’. I only pitied them and looked at them as subjects of my research who needed help and support. The divide is apparent even in the academic literature on jute mills, written mainly by Bengali Scholars. Influenced by the Marxist paradigm, this literature focuses on the plight of the mill workers and their miseries. Nowhere do I get to know if they ever sang a song or expressed themselves in their language. What creative pursuits do they adopt, or are they not good enough to do it? What are their dreams, their aspirations?  Culture also has a hierarchy.  Or is it difficult to flourish in the presence of another dominant culture?

From the Sagor Dutta gate stop, I walked along the jute mill wall named McKenzie Road, which culminates in Graham Road. Following that road will lead me to my destination—the Trinamool Party Office, the ruling party in Bengal for the past decade. Amid the abundance of Rahmans, Razias, Abduls, and Sikanders, names like McKenzie and Graham stand out as an aberration. Surprisingly, these outlier names are well accepted among the locals. They pronounce McKenzie and Graham with ease, obviously with an accent. At first, I did not understand until I saw the road’s name on a roadside pillar with a wooden placard engraved with the road’s name. The pillar and the placard stand as a testament of time, and even when the structure has aged, the name is still legible from a distance. Surprisingly, there is no demand from their end to change them. This can also be interpreted as a political oversight; in a country where rechristening roads and buildings is of paramount importance, the survival of these names speaks volumes.

Walking along the stretch of Mackenzie Road that leads to Graham Road, the contrast in the evolution of built form is stark. The left side is embanked with an imposing, one-storey-high solid wall supporting a ceiling with a Northern lights window, typical of a mill building that embodies a century-old past. Even after so many years, the wall stands tall and has aged gracefully; its dull brick colour is livened with brightly coloured posters announcing the next convention or trade union protest. In contrast, the right side appears more temporary; the shops are put up in a makeshift manner. The shacks sell all sorts of goods, from cheap handkerchiefs to plastic or iron kitchen implements. Each hawker has chosen to blare music, adding to the environment’s noise level. A few of the shops are on hand carts. Upon closer look, it is obvious that the wheels of these hand carts have not moved for some time; they are jammed. This side of the road appears temporary, but judging it solely by its ephemeral nature would be unfair. The right-hand side is developed with investments from Scottish entrepreneurs who had the support of colonial rulers to exploit the locals and profit from a commodity—namely, jute, a highly sought-after product during wartime. These entrepreneurs did not adhere to protocols or regulations while operating in a foreign land, yet the solid tall wall exudes confidence. It conveys an impression that every action is codified and obeys legalities. This perception may be misleading, as it appears legal but may not be so.

On the other hand, the left side of the road has evolved with the investment of the local people. The jute mills are running erratically on average for only about 3 months a year, which is just good enough to make supplies for the procurement by the public entities. Logically, as the industry closes, the workers should leave for greener pastures, as has happened in other parts of the world. The demographic data of cities like Kamarhati reveals entirely different observations. The population of these cities has not declined; people have just diversified into other livelihood options. Mill workers have become entrepreneurs, hawking, operating repair shops, groceries, and other activities. Unlike the experiences of the United States or the United Kingdom, where the closing down of industries leads to a ghost town, this is not the case here. The working population in the lean period does another kind of work; they build and engage in real estate practices, albeit informally, providing affordable shelter options, and the entire place thrives.

Inside the party office, sitting along with councillors, and other jute mill employees, my idea of ‘bangali’ took many somersaults. I heard only Urdu and Hindi and conversed in Hindi with everyone I met. Even when I started speaking in Bangla, their responses were in an accent , which hit my linguistic sensibilities. It is a sin if one cannot pronounce the syllables’ correctly. I switched to Hindi. My arrogance about the cultural dominance of Bengali identity had to adjust to the multilingual reality of this place.

A ten-minute walk on Mackenzie Road informs me much about the planning practices in a city like Kamarhati. The KMA’s statutory planning documents are far from capturing these nuances of daily practices in Kamarhati. What is legal and what is not legal is an elusive concept. It is interesting to observe the tolerance level of the state administration. The tolerance level of the administration is evident in which piece of land gets protected, and what gets encroached on. A straightforward ‘best use of the land’ approach cannot explain these complexities as we study land use planning. As I walked these roads, I realised I was also grappling with a more complex question: Is it that this place lacks a developed culture, or is it I, obsessed with my cultural superiority, who has failed to recognise it? Perhaps the aesthetic and order I sought were not absent, but simply different from my expectations. In that clash of perceptions, my arrogance stood exposed, and I understood that culture is not a static idea, like planning, that needs constant evolution.