North Calcutta Quotes

A final image: Udayan standing beside her on the balcony in North Calcutta. Looking down at the street with her, getting to know her. Leaning forward, just inches between them, the future spread before them. The moment her life had begun a second time.

After Simla, I must mention Darjeeling, with its pretty white houses, overlooked by Mount Kinchinjinga, 312 miles to the north of Calcutta, 6,900 feet above the level of the sea, about the eighty-sixth degree of longitude, and the twenty-seventh degree of latitude—a charming situation, in the most beautiful country in the world.   Other

Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south. Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula

Partition-related communal violence had actually begun long before, beginning with the Muslim League’s call for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946.4 Starting with the bloodshed in Calcutta and other places in Bengal, this fire had spread to Bihar and UP, and later West Punjab. By mid-1947, the flames had engulfed most of North India, from the NWFP in the west to Bengal in the east.

On August 16, 1946, tensions boiled over in Calcutta. Known today as the “Great Calcutta Killings,” riots between Muslims and Hindus erupted throughout the city. Three days later, 4,000 people had been killed, and over 100,000 people had been left homeless.

Most notably, violence began breaking out between the land’s Hindu and Muslim populations. Tensions were especially high in Calcutta, a city of millions, the population of which was split between Muslims and Hindus.

The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata. Shortly after that, people affiliated with the League of Koreans in Japan started showing up on our doorstep, eager to persuade us to make the journey. They were all in favor of the mass repatriation.

And yet, certain physical aspects of Rhode Island—a state so small within the context of America that on some maps its landmass was indicated only by an arrow pointing to its location—corresponded roughly to those of Calcutta, within India. Mountains to the north, an ocean to the east, the majority of land to the south and west.

Near by spectacular Dunottar Castle towered above sheer cliffs, jutting out defiantly into the grey waters of the North Sea. Here ‘Braveheart’ William Wallace had burned the English garrison alive in the castle chapel and, later, 167 radical protestants had been squeezed into a small dungeon and left to die in Scotland’s own ‘black hole of Calcutta’.

The following year, 1959, the Japanese Red Cross Society and the Korean Red Cross Society secretly negotiated a “Return Agreement” in Calcutta. Four months later, the first shipload of returnees left the Japanese port of Niigata.