Günter Grass's criticism of Kolkata should be seen not as the outpouring of a sneering Westerner, but of a humanist, cast in the classical mould
I must begin with a confession. Apart from admiring his very considerable literary attainments, I am extremely partial to Günter Grass for a very personal reason. His book on Kolkata, Show Your Tongue, is dedicated to “Mr and Mrs Karlekar and the Calcutta Social Project.” The reference is to my late parents, Kalyani, and Govind Vinayak, Karlekar, who established the Calcutta Social Project in the 1960s for serving Kolkata's poor, particularly slum and street children. It ran schools, a craft training centre, and a shelter for those who had nowhere to go, and conducted sports activities, music classes and nutritional programmes. It had a committed and distinguished executive committee, whose members included Mrs Dipali Mitra, The Pioneer's editor and proprietor, Chandan Mitra's mother.
During his five-month stay — originally intended to be for a year — in Kolkata in 1986-87, with his wife, Ute, Grass was a frequent visitor to the CSP, as the organisation is usually referred to. later, he wrote warmly and approvingly of the project in Show Your Tongue, and continued to support it with donations even after leaving Kolkata. This was in sharp contrast with the general tenor of the book which was harshly critical of the city, where it came for some very sharp reaction.
Having stated my bias, required by norms of journalistic ethics, I would like to make a few observations about the writer and the book. The former is known to be gruff, direct and blunt, with a marked proneness to see the world in sharply contrasting colours. The book and his decision to come and live in Kolkata, stemmed from his ideological position, which was markedly left of centre. He was strongly supportive of a wide assortment of non-establishment intellectual, literary and cultural groups as well as human rights organizations. He had close links with the leaders of the 1968 Student’s uprising in Europe and had campaigned for the German Social Democratic Party, of which he became a member.
Grass had a strong, deeply emotional, and perhaps a trifle simplistic view of poverty, which, he seemed to believe, existed because of a lack of ameliorative action. He did not seem to recognise that social and cultural conditions also contributed, along with exploitative economic relations, to perpetuating it. What seemed to intrigue, and also perhaps anger, him was the joy that illuminated the lives of even the poorest of the poor of the city. How could they be happy despite their terrible living conditionsIJ
Here one sees the limits of the rational and humanist mindset emerging in the West in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation, which is deeply condemnatory of the irrational and the emotive. It fails to recognise that both are powerful presences in the human psyche and can have a most beneficial impact on society. Thus, the rational decision for Britain might have been to make peace with Germany after the latter had overrun the whole of Europe during World War II. But it fought back, stood up to the ordeal of the london Blitz, and played a key role in defeating Hitler. Equally, many revolutions are exercises in hope in defiance of reason and their success, triumphs of the human spirit over daunting adverse circumstances.
Grass was steeped in Western humanism except for a brief and ephemeral association with Nazism in his youth. Given his background, his criticism of Kolkata, which he had visited four times, should be seen not as the outpouring of a sneering Westerner, but of a humanist, cast in the classical mould, who was puzzled and exasperated by a phenomenon which defied all Western understanding of logical human behaviour. But then, he is not the first Occidental to be stumped by Kolkata's celebration of life in the teeth of killing odds.