Holiday in India & Bhutan (3): Kolkata
It must be admitted that our arrival in Kolkata had been somewhat underwhelming: dazed with jet lag, no sightseeing, and a huge thunderstorm. But the next day (Friday) was utterly different and totally magical.
We left the hotel at 9 am and were not back until 5.45 am, so a day of almost nine hours, but we saw so much – and, although the weather was very gloomy and very humid, it was dry.
First stop was the Mallick Ghat Flower Market.This is one of the largest flower markets in India and, having started in 1855, one of the oldest. It is located underneath the Howrah Bridge, alongside the railway tracks and next to the Mallick Ghat (a ghat is a series of steps leading down to a body of water, in this case the Hooghly River, and something I saw previously in Varanasi).
It is a large, sprawling, nosy market where every day fresh flowers are constructed into elaborate and decorative structures for weddings and festivals. On our visit, the focus of activity was the forthcoming festival of Durga Puja which is massive in West Bengal. Two things struck me: all the work was done by men with hardly any women in sight and all these flowers must cost a lot of money in a country where most people are very poor
Our next destination was the Railway Museum. I confess that railway locomotives are not my thing – my interest is aircraft – but this is a holiday organised by Great Rail Journeys and the history of the Indian railway system is fundamental to the development of India as a unified nation.
The third visit of the morning was to Mother Teresa’s House & Orphanage. Mother, as she is simply called, was actually born in Albania where she was named Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu.She founded The Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and it is now a famous and worldwide endeavour supporting the poor and marginalised. She died in 1997 and she was made a Catholic saint in 2016. We were able to observe the room where she lived and worked and the tomb where she is buried.
The fourth site of the city tour was the Victoria Memorial. This huge edifice was constructed between 1906 and 1921 in honour of Queen Victoria who was Empress of India from 1876 to 1901. Apparently, it is the largest monument to a monarch anywhere in the world.
It is now a museum and, while it does have statues of Queen Victoria and Clive of India, it celebrates the revolutionaries who campaigned for Indian independence, often using violence and murder in the face of a repressive British regime. We need a museum in Britain which presents a balanced view of the history of the British Empire.
It was time for some lunch. Our bus took us to Park Street in the centre of town which is noted for the number and variety of its eating establishments. We ate at a pleasant place called “Flurry’s”.
The main focus of the afternoon was a walking tour of an area known as the Potters’ Colony. There are over 500 pottery workshops in this quarter, where the potters make statues of various sizes and colours of Hindu gods and goddesses from the clay of the Ganges River, a practice known as Kumortuli.
It was like peering into a myriad of Aladdin’s Caves and, given the time of the year, much of the activity was directed at the festival of Durga Puja with many impressive examples of the multi-armed goddess.
Another experience awaited us: a short journey on the city’s circular railway. This was constructed in 1984 and has 20 or so stops. We travelled the five stops from Bagbazar to Princep Ghat. The trains only stop for a few seconds at each station and our group of 15 had to move fast to be on board in the same carriage. The carriages have no doors or windows and they are very basic and very dark with hawkers and beggars moving from carriage to carriage.
The so-called ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ might come to mind, but actually it was a fun experience to see how locals get around.
Our final site of the day was the Prinsep Memorial, a Palladian porch constructed in memory of an eminent Anglo-India scholar James Prinsep (1799-1840) who made Kolkata his home.
After such a long day, it had to be an early night because we had a really early start next day . What could possibly go wrong?