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studiedly derivative as the Mullick Palace, here recalling the Taj, there recalling the Salute. “Passing through the Queen’s vestibule into the Queen’s Hall under the dome,” says Murray’s
Handbook
, which characteristically gives twice as much space to this Raj Taj as to the Kailasa Temple at Ellora,
    one sees the dignified statue of Queen Victoria at the age when she ascended the throne (the work of Sir Thomas Brock RA); this gives the keynote to the whole edifice.
    Yet out of this confrontation there emerged something new in India, an explosive mixture of East and West, a unique culture which, however despised by the non-Calcutta Bengali as jumped-up and camp-following, gave Indian nationalism many of its prophets and heroes. The Bengali will tell you that British officials were urged to treat the South Indian as a slave, the Punjabi as a friend, and the Bengali as an enemy. But when the Bengali tells you this he is speaking as of lost glories, for today, with Independence and the partition of Bengal (in Calcutta the words are synonymous), the heart has gone out of Calcutta. It is a city without a hinterland, a dying city. Even the Hooghly is silting up, and everyone agrees that Calcutta has ceased to grow economically, however much it might spread physically. Though there are endearing vestiges of the Mullick Palace mentality in, say, the literary criticism of Professor Sa-dhan Kumar Ghosh (compassionately dealt with in the
New Statesman
by Malcolm Muggeridge), Calcutta is exhausted, its people withdrawn. It has Satyajit Ray, the film director; it has in Sunil Janah a photographer of world stature; Bengali typography, nervously elegant, is perhaps the best in India. But the glory lies in the past, in Tagore, in Bankim Chandra Chatterji, in the terrorists, in Subhas Chandra Bose. (1962 was a good year for the Bose legend: one libel action brought by a member of the family against an Englishwoman, and another reported reappearance, this time as a sadhu in the Himalayas.)
    Calcutta remains what it always has been through growth, creative disorder, quiescence. It is still, despite the strong challenge of Bombay, India’s principal commercial city, and the element of Calcutta culture which might be said to be dominant is that represented by the business buildings of Dalhousie Square and the squat business houses of ImperialTobacco and Metal Box on Chowringhee. There in air-conditioned offices may be found the young Indian business executives, the box-wallahs, the new Indian élite. A generation ago such positions would not have been acceptable to any Indian of birth; and he almost certainly would not have been accepted. But the Indian genius for compromise is no less than that of the British. The box-wallah culture of Calcutta is of a peculiar richness, and if it has not yet been explored by Indian writers this is because they have been too busy plagiarizing, or writing harrowing stories about young girls drifting into prostitution to pay the family’s medical bills and stories about young girls, poor or pretty, who inexplicably die. This culture, though of Calcutta, is not necessarily Bengali. Commerce is controlled by the British and increasingly since Independence by the Marwaris—it is almost with pride that the Bengali tells you there is no Bengali businessman worth the name. The Marwaris are Indian but are spoken of throughout India as a community even more alien than the British: the feeling against them in Calcutta is something you can cut with a knife. No one of standing wishes to be directly employed by the Marwaris. The conditions are not as good as those offered by the British who are reputable; in the public mind Marwari businessmen are associated with black-marketing and speculation. No one who works for the Marwaris can therefore properly be considered a box-wallah—your true box-wallah works only for the best British firms. (“Tell me,” they were asked at Imperial Tobacco, “was that very large