‘Death’ of an icon in Kolkata’s Maddox Square
Eastern Indian metropolis’ love for the Byzantine pleasures now a victim of millennial ‘sameness’
‘Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket.’
— Araby (Dubliners [1914], James Joyce)
Standing in the middle of the hoi polloi at one of Kolkata’s most talked-about venues for the annual autumnal carnival called Durga Pujo, earlier this month, I felt no less crest-fallen than that adolescent boy in James Joyce’s timeless short story Araby, whose visit to the bazaar in his quest to procure a suitable keepsake for ‘Mangan’s sister’ — the girl he was infatuated with — ended in a complete washout of sorts as the fabled market neither lived up to the boy’s imagination nor did it help fire up his passion any further for the girl.
Talking of adolescence, infatuation, unrequited love or a simple style-quotient, yours truly was fortunate enough to have grown up in a city in the 1980s and 1990s when it had something unmistakably iconic about its cacophony, despondence, squalor and chaos ... There was no dearth of lived experiences, there was no fear of failure, there was no need to see life necessarily in terms of all its cut-and-dried vital parameters, there was no urge to measure ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ in terms of material possessions … and there was no need for IPL either. Those open terraces at the Maidan’s three fabled clubs — East Bengal, Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting — were social hotspots that could beat any of today’s chic coffee shops and malls hands down in terms of their sheer spirit to soak up the rain and sun and have little to regret about the many unfulfilled desires of life. The irony is certainly not lost on the fact that for a city that would once swear by the embroidered artwork on the milk-white, pure-cotton finery graced by matinee idols Uttam Kumar or Soumitra Chatterjee, to have now made a beeline for branded merchandise is perhaps one of the surest signs of a globalised urge to be in tune with the rest swallowing Kolkata. Brands thrive. Icons perish.
Back in the 1980s and until the late 1990s, Maddox Square used to be one Pujo venue that would bring the city’s “haves” and “have nots” under one carnivalesque umbrella like no other. You “aspired” to be in the shoes of that gentleman in his early 20s who would come to the Pujo pandal lockstep with his female companion whose tryst with nine yards of silk or chiffon was all too palpable, though not her trust in a homegrown style statement. For those young females who had just managed to earn a gate-pass of sorts from home for a Pujo late-night, that Boudi (common Bangla parlance for elder brother’s wife) in a Kanjeevaram or Dhakai Jaamdaani would be the markup for the coming wedding season and beyond. It’s another story that the same Boudi to the younger menfolk would be the embodiment of conjugal bliss and pure passion all rolled into one — something of a benchmark for shortlisting those matrimony ads in the Sunday editions! If the legend of Durga is pure imagination, then Maddox Square is the earthy equivalent of a dream-merchant’s paint booth.
But ‘Whither Maddox Square?’ I ask myself as my wife and I wade our way through a charming, colourful crowd of millennials. The Boudi is nowhere to be seen, perhaps having ceded ground to a selfie-obsessed nouveau-Smart generation! Like the ‘boy’ in Joyce’s Araby, I could feel the ‘two pennies fall against the six pence in my pocket’. Worse still, I didn’t have a ‘Mangan’s sister’ to infatuate about.
■ Sanjib Kumar Das on Twitter: @moumiayush. Instagram: @sanjibshares.