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Heads fall off from time to time Some of them old, some of them young The conductor hollers into the crowd: ‘Keep moving forward to the back!’ —Jam, Sankha Ghosh
O quel cul t’as! (What an arse you have!) —Title of a painting by Clovis Trouille on which the title of the musical Oh! Calcutta is based
CAVEAT ‘The sun goes around the Earth once in a year.’ This line in wobbly English, on old concrete, is accompanied by a text-book sketch that shows a tiny Sun orbiting a giant Earth marked by angles of inclination and the position of the Pole Star. The message relays a fact, not an opinion. There is another statement of fact that comes as a corollary: ‘There is no life on the Mars because Mars is not stationary as the Earth in the space.’ The guerrilla graffiti of Kartick Chandra Paul has been around since the mid-1980s, the time I started being a full-fledged observer and participant in that experiment of a city called Kolkata. As a schoolboy, I would encounter the same geocentric message, the same diagram scrawled across walls of houses, colleges, offices, cinemas, sweet-shops and on walls that guarded private plots of wild growth from public streets. This astronomical lesson was a counterpoint to the other, more pervasive variety of graffiti—political messages, caricatures and cartoons, with the ubiquitous hammerand-sickle insignia or the hand of the Congress (it still
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mattered back then). Contrasted with this form of visual hysteria, that would be accompanied by caricatures and cartoons, KC Paul’s stern ruminations on a Ptolemaic universe had the air of Truth, so what if it was the wrong Truth. Paul’s scrawls were once everywhere. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, with blue-and-white striped flyovers and giant billboards advertising television reality shows and jewellery, there are far fewer signs to tell us that the Sun revolves round the Earth. The political graffiti has also almost vanished after the government of the time invoked the West Bengal Prevention of Defacement of Property Act in 2006—not because of a sudden aesthetic awakening but to ensure that the rising rival political force of a street-fighting lady in chappals would not out-graffiti the ruling party. But on a wall under the flyover next to Sealdah Station coughing out and sucking in thousands of people, I found one whitewashed wall, turned grimy with dust and piss, which told me, to my bewildered delight, that the quiet heretic KC Paul was still around. The seventy-three-year-old man from Howrah has now moved more literally to the streets, setting up shop and bed at a busy south Kolkata crossing next to a bus stand. A Class 8 drop out, Paul worked as an apprentice with a car mechanic before joining the Indian Army where, in 1962, he made his discovery. He had even written a letter to NASA, pointing out how Copernicus and company had got it very wrong. NASA’s polite
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letter that the heliocentric theory worked just fine for the world did not deter his belief. ‘There isn’t any demand now [for my pamphlets]. But as soon as I am proved correct, people will flock in the thousands to buy them,’ Paul had told a friend of mine who met him in 1988. In 2012, he told a reporter, ‘All those who ignore me today will have to come back one day and admit that I was telling the truth.’ KC Paul’s story is joined at the hip with that of the city, which still believes in its utterly special, if no longer central, position in the country it is a part of. Not commerce, not political power, not IT can displace ‘shonshkriti’, culture, that most non-material and therefore most lasting of things. And where else is shonshkriti to be found but in the ‘cultural capital of India’? If the present government’s project is to make Kolkata a ‘second London’, this is a more banal version of Kolkata’s supreme belief in its cultural superiority through what Schopenhauer termed the Will: ‘a mindless, aimless, non-rational urge at the foundation of instinctual drives and at the foundational being of everything’. Through the ’80s and ’90s, I grew up in a Kolkata that considered itself to be barely part of the hinterland of India, an island of culture and genteelness. Dum Dum Airport connected direct to Heathrow and JFK; Delhi and Bombay were Indian cities ‘out there somewhere’. Such delusions that have held up the city have also been protective for a metropolis in dysfunction and disrepair. The city that Kolkata feeds off to this day
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was born by the destruction of Bengal. The catastrophic famine between 1769 and 1773 reached its height in 1770, which was when the de facto rulers of the East India Company announced an increase in land tax across the province to make up for its losses. Tax was collected violently and the Company started building a city for its officers and their families. Some ten million people across Bengal died. Food stock was siphoned off to the new city of Kolkata. Towns, including the old capital of Murshidabad, all but shrivelled and died. A glorious British city in the south of Bengal was born out of the death all around. A city that even as it falls apart, exists, like Magritte’s floating castle in the air.
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