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By Benjamin Zachariah [1]I: The Meanings of LivesIt seems not alittle self-indulgent for a historian to tell a story with oneself in it, evenif one is not completely at the centre of it; a story of one’s own life andfamily that purports also to illuminate a history: of Calcutta, and of worldsconnecting to Calcutta – Calcutta was formally renamed Kolkata in 2010, butthat’s not a part of the story I wish to tell. That renaming, a point on ameandering timeline that marked a process of denial of its history,appropriated to one language the history of a complicated city – one might havesaid ‘complex’, but everyone lives in a complex nowadays, so the word isambiguous. As I have been told ad nauseum throughout my life, I have anunusual name for someone who comes from Calcutta, and I should be called uponto justify it. There’s also another reason for the attempt, as a writerparticipating in public debates in the Age of Identities, and we might add, theAge of Youdentities, for we are not born with identities; we achieve them insome ways (identities) and have them thrust upon us in other ways (youdentities).Since we are all read through the lens of who we are perceived to be, and manyarguments for and against our writing are made ad hominem, this piece ofwriting can usefully be added to anything already ‘out there’ so that the adhominem arguments are at least a little better informed. And if, as aconsequence of the perceived need for affect and/or self-reflexivity, so muchacademic writing is thinly-veiled autobiography, I like to think I haveskilfully outmanoeuvred my fellow academics in this piece by tearing off thatveil altogether.But it is hardto tell such a story with any sense of linear chronology. Sufficientlyfictionalised, one can imagine this to be potentially one of those entanglednarratives which have to be unpicked with a fine comb by a reader who gives upin frustration after page 237, when the author introduces seven new charactersand a sub-plot in a new continent. This, however, is a true story written by ahistorian. I was born in1972, a year after the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, and shortlyafter the time Naxalites were being slaughtered under cover of that war inCalcutta by a Chief Minister of West Bengal who in his later life as Governorof Punjab reused the experience he’d gained to consolidate his reputation asthe political founder of the ‘encounter killing’. An air of defeated optimismmarked my early childhood. My parents’ friends’ circle, and my grandparents’friends’ children’s worlds, had been decimated by death, imprisonment andemigration; and a classmate of my maternal grandmother’s, whom I had known inmy childhood mostly as a Scrabble player and a purveyor of crisp Bengalihomilies, wrote a novel about the mother of a corpse with a number (this waslater translated into German by my mother).[2]My maternal uncle was already a reasonably successful drummer, and his circleof friends would occasionally lose another member to a motorcycle accident oran overdose of something or other that I didn’t understand.All of which isa way of providing what Bengalis consider porichoy – to recognise, tointroduce, and to situate someone in a social grid. It’s also a matter ofclaiming and maintaining status, which might be expressed in a form ofnamedropping in which a claimed familiarity with an important cultural orsocially important figure: can you say you met Manikda at breakfast? (Ican’t; but I did meet him at a gathering of the Calcutta Youth Choir, all ofwhom by which time were in their 70s or 80s). Were you in a theatre group withParthada? (I was, indeed.) And if the da is mystifying when usedfor people who are in some cases not only too old to be your older brother, butcould be your mama, kaka, or dadu, this is of course not actuallyabout the familiar or familial, but about establishing your contacts as part ofyour porichoy. You are only slightly more than the sum of your contacts:‘do you know who I am?’, said loudly and angrily in a dispute or a fight, canbe answered by ‘I don’t care a pubic hair for who your father is’, but everyoneknows it’s actually about whether you or someone you know knows the ChiefMinister’s Secretary, or whether the Police Commissioner will take your call.This deep historyof what it means to live in Calcutta has to be told in an East Bengali dialect,in which the professionals from mofussil towns who arrived in the 1930stalked to each other: small zamindars with smaller landed incomes thathad soon become insufficient for the growing needs of a family, with inflationand the collapse of agricultural prices from the late 1920s, soon to befollowed by the Great Depression, making a struggling middle class of personswith aristocratic pretensions.II. Mizrahi Mosaic[caption id="attachment_23491" align="alignright" width="379"] My paternal great-grandfather, Sheikh Muhammad Zakaria, after winning Calcutta's first bicycle race, c. 1893. Photo: Chintamon Studios, Calcutta.[/caption]In Nazi Germany, in order to be considered a Jew, one had to have at least one Jewish grandparent. I had two, making me more than enough of a Jew for the Nazis, but not enough for religious Jews or for most Zionists, who required a Jewish mother as part of the qualification. But grandparents are the next in line in my narrative; let me start a generation before. My paternal grandfather’s father was a Muslim. Sheikh Muhammad Zakaria, a businessman of some description, arrived in Calcutta from Awadh towards the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Since he was homesick, he looked to speak Arabic with someone, which meant, in Calcutta, the Baghdadi Jews (oral tradition has it that there were Jews in the court of the Nawab of Bengal in Murshidabad, and they’d made their way to Calcutta after Murshidabad had been destroyed as a trading centre by the East India Company’s predatory trade and military practices, as had the Armenian merchants). They had made their fortunes from the former East India Company monopolies of opium and tobacco – more opium, though; and the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora follows the opium route: Calcutta, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai. My great-grandfather married a Jewish woman (who he apparently courted by sending messages to her via the kites he used to fly across Calcutta rooftops: kite-flying was a part of Awadh that he had brought with him); she was a Cohen, which would be rendered only slightly inaccurately if described as the Jewish equivalent of a Brahmin, and she was also a direct descendant of the first Jewish settler in Calcutta. Sheikh Muhammad Zakaria thus stayed in Calcutta, produced offspring, and built himself a large house, which he later lost in a famous card game (it is said of him that he made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime). He dropped the ‘Sheikh’, Anglicised his surname to Zachariah, and when printing visiting cards, a box of which managed to accompany me to Berlin, had the ‘Muhammad’ shortened to ‘M’. He also won the first bicycle race in Calcutta; there’s a picture from the Statesman, then a liberal British-run newspaper, of him in vest and shorts, leaning over the dropped handlebars of the racing bicycles that we still can recognise in the modern versions. He probably did not teach his children any Arabic; he was anything but a religious man, and Arabic learning in Calcutta was still in the hands of traditional Muslim institutions that he would have considered backward. Judaeo-Arabic, however, was widely used in Calcutta (Arabic written in the Hebrew script), and Calcutta was the world centre for printing in Judaeo-Arabic, not too illogical a phenomenon for a city with illiterate typesetters who could therefore set type in any language. (In my childhood, and into the days of my university life around College Street and Harrison Road, small hole-in-the-wall printing shops existed with nineteenth century printing presses, mostly small and German-made, which in the days of colonial censorship and press regulations would have been easier to hide from registration and surveillance.)My paternalgrandfather, named Moses, was a quiet man, who I had just got to know when hedied; I was five. I have vague memories of playing cards, a strangememory-and-logic game called ‘Master Mind’, and chess, with him. He read a lotof poetry; he’d worked in the Tata Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur formost of his working life; he was a member of his local Masonic Lodge. After hisdeath, a letter in his papers suggested that he had contemplated writing theexamination for the Indian Civil Service, but had not done so, because he’dbeen misdiagnosed with tuberculosis and would therefore have been ineligible onhealth grounds for the ICS. The Tatas, who had long had the practice ofemploying former Civil Servants and government officials, was the next best tothat atmosphere. He drove an Oldsmobile in Jamshedpur in the early 1950s, andswitched to a more economical Fiat Millecento of 1956, the same model of carthat is parked outside the café where Marcello entertains his father on thelatter’s birthday in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. My father’s elderbrother drove that same car until the end of the 1990s, when it finally becameimpossible to put it back together or to find spare parts; among itsidiosyncrasies was a tendency for the self-starter to jam, requiring apush-start with the clutch being sharply released in second gear as one pumpedthe accelerator. One of the more famous pushers of that car, number plate WBC3352, was one John Birks (‘Dizzy’) Gillespie, but we’re getting ahead of thestory here.My paternalgrandmother, Rivka, was altogether a different person. Outgoing, energetic,capable of unreasonable tempers, unexpectedly egalitarian philosophies, andwith a financial acumen that continues to be of benefit to the family fortunes,she came from a Baghdadi Jewish family that was more conservative, I imagine,than her future husband’s family. She was born officially in 1905, but actuallyin 1900; I learned many years after her death from my mother that she’d reducedher age by five years out of consideration for her husband, who would otherwisehave been younger than her. (This was, for me, the solution to a number ofchronological problems I’d been having while processing her stories to me as achild when I was older and a trained historian who wished to translate thesestories from pleasant family memories to social history). When she was born, orwhile her mother was pregnant with her, her father died; her father died inchildbirth, as it were, and her mother married again, but was prevented fromtaking her daughter with her into the new marriage because the child wasclearly cursed, having caused the death of her father. My grandmother wastherefore entrusted to her Uncle Ezra and his wife Ramah, who lived in asprawling mansion on Theatre Road. They were, or Ramah was, rich (until theWall Street Crash of 1929, until the separation of Burma from India, whichseparated Ramah from her source of wealth, or after 1947, depending on thechronology one accepts, after which they were not, and had to subsist on thesupport provided by the Masonic Lodge, but fortunately the sprawling mansionwas a rented house, rented for the princely sum of 400 rupees a month, and theLodge could afford the rent). Her mother followed her new husband to Rangoon;mother and daughter were reunited during the Second World War, when Indiansfleeing the Japanese invasion of Burma walked back to India with whatever theycould manage to carry. (By the 1935 Government of India Act, Jews had beenclassified as ‘Europeans’, without regard to their place of origin; but in acrisis, as my great-grandmother discovered, this Europeanness evaporated veryquickly when faced with the rationing and discriminatory availability oftransport for the evacuation of Burma.) [caption id="attachment_23492" align="alignleft" width="381"] My grandmother, Rivka Zachariah, picture sent to her brother. Photo: Private.[/caption]The affluence of the family had not much joy in it for my grandmother; in her stories to me as a boy, she would always express disgust at her aunt’s ability to buy a dress for 100 rupees and wear it only once – she found it utterly wasteful, and her experience of opulence accompanied by waste turned her into the stereotype of the cautious and thrifty Jew. It was probably the only really Jewish thing about her. She started working as receptionist and telephone operator in a British-owned paint company at age 16 (this was where it made sense that she was born in 1900 and not 1905; in 1916, during the First World War, there were more jobs for women than in 1921). Between the ages of 16 and 40, she lived a full and independent life, and she bought shares in companies she regarded as reliable. In the 1920s, she travelled through the Eastern possessions of the British Empire on ships, often as the Captain’s guest, preferably in the company of two other young women of Jewish origin who were her friends and confidantes. A photograph from that period, sent to her brother in England, shows her in 1920s flapper style: short, loose dress, short hair – a style she held on to until her death. She learned music from one Stenton Dozey (I render the name phonetically, because I never saw it written down), and regretted that she learned less of the piano and more song: she had a pleasant mezzo soprano voice, sang live on radio in the early days of All-India Radio in the 1930s, and was generally expected to be the life and soul of parties. Her voice resembled, so it was said, that of the northern English music-hall singer Gracie Fields, which she was particularly proud of. (Though by the time I knew her, her range was limited and her hearing was fading, she taught my sister and myself a great many songs, and when she could no longer hear at all, she could still sit at my piano, sight-read my music and play it better than I could.)For the 1920s,this was a life that seemed perfectly reasonable, even on the verge ofrespectable, though by the 1930s it was already a bit suspect, with thebacklash against the social and sexual freedoms of the 1920s beginning. Much ofwhat that life must have been like for her must be inferred, for it could notaltogether have been told to a boy of 7 or 8. And there are objects that directa trained historian’s attention to more. She had a lamp in the shape of aBerlin bear in her collection (I have it now); but that was the extent of herallusion to Weimar Berlin that I could identify: the lamp itself might havebeen a later acquisition, perhaps in a shop in Jamshedpur after the WeimarRepublic was no more, but Weimar was certainly a world she knew of. She alsohad a collection of mildly anti-German jokes and songs from the First World Warera in her repertoire, and of course the obligatory Great War marching songs: Ilearned ‘pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’ from her. Then there werethe eastern aspects of her memorabilia: a hand-fan of Malacca cane weave, andother assorted objects. These she held on to for a whole lifetime: the cane isnow tired, but the fan survives.She married,aged 39 (officially reduced now to 34), in 1939, and had four children, threesons and a daughter. The daughter, the second-born of her children, died ininfancy during the brief evacuation of Jamshedpur, a steel-producing town, forfear of Japanese air-raids during the War – a death she blamed on the Indianaspiring Führer, Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been employed by the Tatas as astrike-breaker during the 1920s and 30s, his “Bengal Volunteers” replacing andintimidating workers on behalf of their employers. My grandmother believed thatin his days as a Japanese collaborator, Subhas had shared details aboutJamshedpur, which had made it easier for the Japanese to choose targets. Thiswas probably unlikely: Jamshedpur was hardly an unknown target. But I alwayshad the feeling that my grandmother never shared the general enthusiasm for theNetaji that others around her seemed to do, nor for his family. III: Internationalist Encounters, Communist Sub-PlotsThe only one ofmy great-grandparents I actually knew well was my maternal grandmother’smother. She came from a family of small zamindars in what had once been theBengal Presidency and was now Bihar, in an area that we knew as children fromher stories, but more from those of her older daughter, my grandmother: themuch-loved ‘Bishanpurer golpo’. Uma (that was her given name) married at14, as one did in those days, and was 90 when she died, in 1995, which made heryounger than my paternal grandmother or officially the same age, if her date ofbirth had been calculated correctly (it often wasn’t in those days). Shedidn’t, therefore, finish school; she spoke and wrote Bengali, Hindi andEnglish, and was an avid reader, a self-taught artist whose paintings were ingreat demand but which she never sold but gave away, and something of a geniuswith needle and thread in the ‘folk’ art of kantha stitch, the Bengaliart of drawing with thread. Her themes were not particularly ‘folk’, however,sometimes to the consternation of her contemporaries. As her eyesight faded inher 80s, she regretfully gave up her art, and slowly also her reading; sheliked listening to plays read aloud by her elder daughter, and if she knew the play,she would accompany the reading by synchronising the reader’s lines with herown voice, playing the role from memory. Poetry she remembered more vividly,and it was usually enough to give her the opening line of a poem byRabindranath or Tennyson to have her recite the rest. I was one of thebeneficiaries of her fading eyesight, having been given the right to raid hercarefully-arranged personal bookshelf for books I wanted to read. Inretrospect, I ought to have taken more of them, but I had an eye for thehardback 1920s editions of English-language books in her collection, and read anovel from her collection called Piccadilly Jim about an American inLondon and New York, when I was in my early teens.But it was herhusband, who apparently stayed alive long enough to hold me, his firstgreat-grandchild, in his arms once before he died, whose life I encounteredagain in a peculiar way, in the records of the Intelligence Branch of theCalcutta Police: he had apparently, after a degree in electrical engineeringfrom Sheffield University, proceeded to Berlin to an apprenticeship with aGerman company. There, in the 1920s, and in the heyday of the Weimar Republic,his peers included the group of Indian exiles who were considered to be closelyassociated with the Communist Party of Germany and with the Berlin IndiaCommittee, which had plotted with the Kaiserreich to try and overthrow theBritish Empire during the Great War: the remains of this great failed venture nowattempted to continue the good fight from their Berlin base. I do not know thisfrom my family’s stories about him (as far as I can recall, not much was saidabout Tarun Kumar Roy in the family after his death, or at least not to me, forI had not known him) – I discovered it from a serendipitous find in the policearchives in Calcutta:Below is an excerpt from a copy of a Special Branch, Madras, officer’s report, dated Dhanushkodi (port), 4th October 1929. It was routine for police authorities to keep a complete record of all Indians entering and leaving India, and for historians it can be quite convenient that such invasions of privacy left traces, indeed even narratives, albeit refracted through the report of the interviewing policeman, or the unknown police informer, to whom the information was divulged. The report states that: T.K. Roy, s/o Taraknath Roy, 87 Park Street, Calcutta – Indian student returning from abroad. This individual arrived at Dhanushkodi from London via Colombo on 4.10.29 having graduated as an Electrical Engineer from Sheffield University. He took an apprentice course in a German factory and spent about a month in Berlin. His travel and studies abroad for nearly two years and his own observations of the state of affairs in India have, he says, convinced him that India cannot exert any influence among the nations so long as she remains a subject country and that British administrators in India do not represent the real mind of the British people at large. Roy is of the opinion that the average Britisher knows nothing about India and its importance in relation to his own country. All the friction between the ruling and ruled nations is due entirely to the exploitation of British Bureaucrats in India. From the trend of his talk it would appear that Roy is rather disaffected with the British administration of India.He further said he happened to see Raja Mahendrapratap in company with one Chatterjee [a margin note adds: Virendra] at the Indian (Hindustan) Association Berlin about a month ago. He was pointed out to be the Indian Ambassador abroad. Roy learnt that these two individuals were exiles having been forbidden by the Government of India from entering India. This Chatterjee is reported to be connected with the Pacifist Movement which draws together the Subject Countries and Minor States in an alliance against the great powers. Roy says the movement indirectly fights against Imperialism.These two exiles met the Indian students at the association in connection with a tea party; had personal talk with the members assembled, enquiring about their welfare and native place. Roy was not much impressed by the personality of Mahendra Pratap; but learnt that this exile has been fomenting trouble against the British in China and Afghanistan.The report goeson to say that nothing incriminating found in his luggage and that he went tostay a day or two with another Mr Roy, an engineer, in Madura.[3]The same Tarun Kumar Roy, recorded a couple of years earlier as the sonof late Tarak Nath Roy of Arkandi, Faridpur, and of 67 Dhurrumtolla St,Calcutta, had successfully applied for a passport to visit England via Italy,Switzerland and France in 1927. No objection was raised, the only informationon record being from an Intelligence Bureau agent who stated that on 21st May1924 Tarun Kumar Roy had been present at a meeting organized by the communistNalini Ranjan Gupta, and attended, among others, by SC Sengupta, friend andassistant of the communist leader Muzaffar Ahmed.[4] Itis possible that the police did not associate the two – one way of avoidingsurveillance was usually to transliterate your name differently in English,adding or subtracting your middle name a few times, and/or juggling your knownaddresses – but more probable that he was watched for that reason; and he wasalert enough in the interview with the police on his return to India not topretend that he had not met the subversives he was suspected of having met,saying instead that he had indeed met them, but had not been particularly impressedby them.[5] Theinformation he divulged was already in the public domain.I shared with mylast surviving grandparent, Ganesh Bagchi, the news of his late father-in-law’ssuspected communism. ‘I have new respect for the old man’, Ganesh said on thephone to me (he was nearly 90 by then). He added that my great grandfather hadreturned to Calcutta and had become the Chief Engineer of the Calcutta ElectricSupply, which was a good opportunity for sabotage for a communist who wouldhave been an enemy of the state; but he never, to the best of our knowledge,used this opportunity.Ganesh, mymaternal grandfather, was somewhat romantic about his connections with theCommunist Party, though his active involvement seems to have ended in his studentdays in the 1940s, when he was an occasional courier of illegal literature,internal communications and the occasional parcel with unknown contents for thestill-young Party, also helping with famine relief organised by the communistsduring the Bengal Famine of 1943. He had a brother who had been an ‘anarchist’,a term given to members of the youth organisations founded in the aftermath ofthe first partition of Bengal in 1905, and who were usually worshippers of thegoddess Kali, and he had another brother, Debesh Bagchi, who composed music andwas a compatriot and friend of the musician Bhupen Hazarika, who would probablybe best known outside of specialist music and film circles for a Bengaliadaptation of Jerome Kern’s Ol’ Man River, one of the songs of thePopular Front. (Debesh was an alcoholic who died young in the 1960s, leavingbehind debts that swallowed up my grandfather’s, his brother’s, Mercedes Benz,brought back with love and a sense of status from Kampala, and driven far toofast through the streets of Calcutta by my grandmother at a time when therewere few women drivers in the city). Ganesh came from a large family of poorBrahmins from East Bengal, coincidentally also from Arkandi, Faridpur, like hisfuture father-in-law. He went to a school that was quite highly regarded, South Suburban School in Calcutta, and in 1939, won a prize at his school which included a copy ofAdolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in English. He then proceeded to St Xavier’sCollege, where the Jesuits taught him to speak English with less of a strongBengali accent, and gave him Daniel Jones’s pronunciation dictionary, which inturn gave him an improbable BBC accent that stayed with him for the rest of hislife. As theonly one in his family to get a proper education (there were minor governmentofficials in the family, but they had not been as educationally accomplished),he was expected to serve the family by marrying well, and a marriage had beenarranged with a suitable family, part of the dowry being a place paid for atCambridge University for him, but plans went wrong. Ganesh met Sudarsana Roy,my maternal grandmother, at Calcutta University as they both started their MAdegrees; he refused his arranged marriage, his family disowned him, and beforetoo long my grandmother was pregnant and had dropped out of her MA. Theymarried, of course, her father asking ‘what was the big hurry?’ when he wastold about the impending arrival of his grandchild. It was quite clear thatGanesh had ‘married up’.My grandmother,with her Brahmo Samaj background, was of an elite that Ganesh’s family couldnot match. Tarun Kumar Roy had educated his two daughters well, Sudarsana atSantiniketan, where she studied Arts shortly after the death of Rabindranath,the university’s founder (though she had met him when her father went to seehim when she was a teenager), and Sunanda, her younger sister, at PresidencyCollege, Calcutta, in the first batch of women students. (Sunanda studiedbotany and zoology, and both sisters later taught at the same school inCalcutta.) Sudarsana was a very well regarded singer, and many assumed she wasstudying music in her Santiniketan years. She also belonged to the communistelite – most of her cousins were party members, and as a 16-year-old with thevoice of an agitprop singer (she never needed a microphone to be heard), shehad sung at meetings of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and done herpart for the Popular Front before university and war took her away from thatfor a while. The Brahmo Samaj and the Communist Party – this was a pairing thatwas not unusual at all; but it is hard to write about in academic terms. At anyrate, my grandmother was something of a communist elitist, believing in theimportance of a political education rather than the ‘instinctive’ correctnessof the ‘working class’ – or from a different perspective, was a strong opponentof Stalinist populism: perhaps this was connected to a strong strand of Brahmorationalism. She was also on the other side of the famous Brahmo Samaj debateon whether Brahmos were ‘Hindus’ – for her, Hindus were irrational,superstitious and backward, and she was not one of them. Her sister disagreed.IV: East African InterludeMy grandfatherhas told his own story at least twice in public, in a thinly-veiledautobiographical novel called No Room for Love – a reference to the lackof physical space in the city of Calcutta that allowed people privacy – andthen in an autobiography published in the last years of his life, so there’snot much point my telling his story for him in any detail.[6]Soon after independence, he and his wife voluntarily returned to life undercolonial rule with their two young daughters, going to Kampala, Uganda, to teach.My grandparents’ place became a refuge for interracial couples seekingprotection and space (‘room for love’) away from the racism of the East AfricanIndian community, often of Gujarati origin (much to the annoyance of thechildren, who found themselves sharing rooms to make room for the new guests). Thecouple had their third child in Kampala, a son, who was referred to in thefamily as mtoto mwafrika. My grandfather became the first non-whitePrincipal of the Teacher’s Training College, and started to write politicalplays for an East African audience, with my grandmother in the leading roles.[7]Both Ganesh andSudarsana went to London for a teacher’s training course, and thence toAberystwyth, Wales, where they were supposed, in a nice ironic twist ofcolonial hierarchies, to teach the Welsh to speak the King’s English – mygrandmother, ever the actress, could of course do a decent English accent (mygrandfather’s English accent he owed, as we know, to Daniel Jones), but for herfriends’ entertainment, she would recite Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycatin a Welsh accent:The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, "O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are!What a beautiful Pussy you are!" Sudarsana’scousin was also in England then, married to an Englishwoman, and the twocouples travelled through Europe in the summer after my grandparents’ courseended. My grandfather had wanted to acquire a Volkswagen Beetle for thejourney, but his Jewish friends reminded him that it had been a Nazi car, andso he settled for a Morris Minor, with the number plate PLR 137 (it wasreferred to as ‘Poor Little Rabbit’). They returned to Kampala via India, wherethey had left the children with my great grandmother.They weresomething of a social sensation in Kampala, and were peripheral members of the nowlegendary Makerere circle which contained the writer then known as James Ngugi,[8]the Goan-origin writer Peter Nazareth,[9]my grandmother’s favourite dance partner Erisa Kironde,[10]and Murray Carlin, whose Not Now, Sweet Desdemona, about a theatre grouprehearsing Othello, is a tense story of interracial attraction andpolitics.[11]One of my grandfather’s students in Kampala, Rajat Neogy, was destined to makea name for himself, as the founder of the journal Transition in 1961,which was partly funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA frontorganisation, and included Wole Soyinka as a prominent member of the editorialboard.[12](My grandfather, who outlived Neogy by just over twenty years, had genuineaffection for him, even if Neogy’s bet with his friends that he would sleepwith my grandmother was, in my grandfather’s account, one that Neogy lost.) The familyreturned to Calcutta in the wake of Ugandan independence in 1963, therebyavoiding being expelled by Idi Amin a few years later; my grandfather wasinvolved in discussing employment quotas for Indians (which since the 1961Indian invasion of Goa suddenly also included the Goans, for whom he attemptedto speak). He said he found Milton Obote a reasonable interlocutor, and both mygrandmother and he had long had an aversion to Indian racism against Africans,which would now create a backlash against Indians who remained. His farewellspeech said he was going back to India ‘to forget that I am an Indian’. Butthere were more things to forget: my mother recounts having to unlearn a veryBritish English in order to fit in better in the Calcutta of the 1960s: shedeveloped instead, in the elite school she attended that had once been whitesonly and now contained a fair number of Anglo-Indians (formerly known slightlyderogatorily as Eurasians), an accent that used to be called ‘Bombay Welsh’, aswell as a more Bengali variant of English, both necessary survival skills for ayoung schoolgirl. She had learned classical ballet in Kampala, and shecontinued her dance education in Calcutta (which included more ‘traditional’Indian forms of dance, and later, modern dance and Graham technique, taught bya Brazilian in the Calcutta of the 1970s). Bengali had now to be more than adistant, written language, and the language of parents’ conversations; it hadto replace Swahili as the language of the house and the household (though mygrandmother and mother still spoke it to each other when I was a child, mostlyto communicate something I ought not to overhear and understand – as a resultof which I acquired a few useful words in Swahili to break their code). Swahiliin Uganda was, to make things complicated, a sort of British East Africanlingua franca, so their speaking it would not have entitled them to make anyclaims about authentic connections to Kampala; but even then, I could tell theymissed it intensely.V: Escaping the 1960sThe story goeson, of course, and as it gets closer to our own times, becomes slightly morefamiliar. But most historians like to tell stories of dead people, even if, asin this case, most of the material comes from second-hand oral testimony. Sincethe rest of the cast of characters is still alive, this would be the point atwhich to wind down the narrative. They who are alive cannot be spoken for, theymust be spoken to, sie können sich vertreten, sie müssen nicht vertreten werden.Beyond this point, the family histories retold to me, my own childhoodmemories, and the nostalgia for a Calcutta of diverse fascinations, not theKolkata of homogenised upper-caste and middle-class Bengali boredom and panicabout cultural contamination, will get the better of me. For it must be so thata change in name reflects or produces a change in the semiotics of belonging:the ‘return to authenticity’, Calcutta to Kolkata, or James Ngugi to Ngugi waThiong’o, is a mythical journey that cannot be undertaken. The postcode‘Calcutta 16’, where my paternal grandparents lived in a little alleyway whosename and oversized houses belied its size (‘Park Lane’), and my maternal uncle,mtoto mwafrika and drummer, played in his first bands in the 1960s andearly 1970s, was a metonymy, metaphor and microcosm for that diversity. ParkStreet and its jazz scene, restaurants and bars, and the party life of Parsis,Jews, Anglo-Indians, Muslims, bhadralok, and various groups living in orpassing through the city, have had enough romantic retellings. At one of theseparties, my father was gifted a Samurai sword by his rather drunk host, butwalking home at three in the morning carrying a sword in the time of Naxaliteswas hardly to be advised, so he left it behind to collect on another occasion,and by the time the man was sober, he’d forgotten the giving of the gift. Asthe 1960s made way for the 1970s, death, exile, the Emergency and load sheddingwere our best-remembered companions. Fragments of memories of passers-through-our-livescome back and forth: a man called Pulock (in my mind unreasonably associatedwith the man from Porlock who obstructed Coleridge’s view of Xanadu), invitedto stay for a few days, who stayed for six years. And a large and jovialCanadian, whose plans to travel through India included the ambition to learnHindi; he never left Calcutta, and all the Hindi he ever learned was ‘idrkidr charas milta?’. Optimism, for us, was largely through books, many discoveredin one of my favourite spaces to read, Christel Das’ magnificent library at theGoethe Institut on Ballygunge Circular Road, which brought the wealth oflearning of the German-speaking world into our lives, and which was cancelledand torn to pieces in a wanton act of bureaucratic vandalism after she retired.The moral of the story is therefore the tone of the beginning of thesereflections: an air of defeated optimism marked my early childhood.Disclaimer: Aversion of this article is soon to be published in a Festschrift for ProfessorRahul Peter Das, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [1] This piece started itslife as a Christmas party academic lecture at Halle University in 2013, at therequest of Professor Rahul Peter Das, when I was Indian Council for CulturalRelations Professor there.[2] Mahasweta Devi, Muttervon 1084 (transl. Aparajita Koch) (Bonn: Bonner Siva, 2003)[3] IB Sl No. 44/1928, File No. 53/28, ff.150-149, West Bengal State Archives (WBSA), Calcutta. [4] SB office letter signed SHH Mills to MF Cleary,Personal asst to director, IB, Simla. Dated Calcutta 17th October1927. IB Sl No. 44/1928, File No. 53/28, f. 158, WBSA, Calcutta.[5] IB Sl No. 44/1928, File No. 53/28, f. 158, WBSA,Calcutta.[6] Ganesh Bagchi, NoRoom for Love: A Chronicle of the Forties (Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop,1999); Ganesh Bagchi, My Days and Ways (Lincoln: FCM Publishing, 2015)[2014].[7] Two of them, Of Maliceand Men and The Deviant were published: Ganesh Bagchi, ‘Of Maliceand Men’, in David Cook and Miles Lee (ed), Short East African Plays in English(London: Heinemann, 1970) [1968], pp. 67-82; Ganesh Bagchi, ‘The Deviant’,&#160;Transition,No. 2 (Dec., 1961), pp. 25-29; also published in in Cosmo Pieterse (ed), Ten One-Act Plays (London:Heinemann, 1968), pp. 167-190.[8] On the Makerere theatrecircles, Peter Nazareth, and in passing on my grandparents, see Ngugi waThiong’o, Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (London: HarvillSecker, 2016), Chapter One.[9] Peter Nazareth, In aBrown Mantle (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1972); JohnScheckter, ‘PeterNazareth and the Ugandan Expulsion: Pain, Distance, Narration’, Research inAfrican Literatures, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 83-93[10] Erisa Kironde was a writerand politician, one of the targets of Idi Amin’s regime. See his post-Aminreflections in https://www.nytimes.com/1979/04/08/archives/rebuilding-uganda-after-amin.htmlaccessed 23.07.2019.[11] Murray Carlin, NotNow, Sweet Desdemona (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1969).[12] Paul Theroux’s obituary forNeogy, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-rajat-neogy-1324133.html accessed 02.07.2019; Therouxwas part of the circle around Neogy and the journal. See also Robert G Gregory,‘LiteraryDevelopment in East Africa: the Asian Contribution, 1955-1975’, Research inAfrican Literatures, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 1981), pp. 440-459; Robert G Gregory, The Riseand Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian’s Contribution pp.177-178, for the connections between Ganesh Bagchi, Peter Nazareth, Ganesh’sfriend and fellow playwright, and Neogy and the journal Transition. TheDeviant was published in Transition: see note 7, above.Benjamin Zachariah is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Trier. His research interests include: transnational revolutionary networks, global fascisms, the Cold War and decolonization, historical theory and the historiography of postcolonialism.Citation: Benjamin Zachariah, What I Learned From My Grandparents, and Other Stories: Fragments of Biography, Autobiography and a History of Calcutta, in: TRAFO – Blog for  Transregional Research, 31.03.2020, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/23490. 