Symphony In Chaos

It’s a journey into a veritable maelstrom. Beginning amid backfiring buses, trundling trams, belching trucks and hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Howrah Bridge every day. It takes you right up to the crossroads of Chitpur, close to the rows of leather shops the Cantonese Chinese set up in this eastern Indian metropolis more than a century ago. It’s a journey archetypal of the one undertaken by Hasari Pal, the famished protagonist of Dominique Lapierre’s 1985 bestseller City of Joy.

It’s a journey to what is undoubtedly Calcutta’s lifeline - the country’s biggest wholesale market in Burrabazar. An area which seethes with crazy excitement, devoid of limits or horizon, along the muddy Hooghly where scores of fishing boats and trawlers lie peacefully at anchor. It’s a place whose contours are rendered hazy by the shroud of soot and smoke over the entanglement of uneven roofs and antennae. The tapestry woven over and over again with the trucks heaving along the pockmarked roads, the distinct spires of the Ganesha and Kali temples close to the river, the silhouette of a lone crane on the banks, the steel and glass of factories crinkled in the humid haze of the afternoon sun.

It’s a market that stretches across a crazy sprawl of over eight kilometres and puts through daily deals worth Rs 200 crore and odd, employs an estimated 10 lakh people and trades in - as they say in Bengali - everything from pins to elephants. Says Bidyut Ganguly, the soft-spoken commerce and industry minister of West Bengal: "Other wholesale markets have come up in Siliguri, Kochi, Delhi and Patna but Burrabazar still remains the largest in the country." Down the shutters for even a day and the city’s arteries will, quite simply, choke.

Calcutta’s celebrated author Moni Shankar Mukherjee remembers Burrabazar’s colonial, if not glorious, past. That the market was developed by the British who managed to assemble traders from faraway Haryana. Then came the successful Marwaris from Rajasthan, drawn to the lucre of the trading centre like bees to flowers, followed by the dealers from Uttar Pradesh. And since then it has only grown. Old-timers say the British had set up the market primarily for jute mills and cotton looms, developing it next to the Hooghly because trade back then depended heavily on the waterway. "Later, when the Howrah station and the bridge were built, business boomed automatically because of the market’s proximity to both," reveals Satya Prakash, general manager of Paper Products Limited.

Prakash, who has spent nearly four decades in this eastern Indian metropolis, feels if only the state government had cared to nurture it properly, the market would have been comparable to those in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Agrees Ashok Jhunjhunwala, whose family garment business in Burrabazar continues for more than five decades: "The market could have definitely improved with proper infrastructure." But he hastens to add that "modernity would have taken away the human face Burrabazar has acquired over all these years".

You wouldn’t be far from truth if you took him literally. Ask any of the 10 lakh lined, worn-out faces, more than half of them migrants from neighbouring Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Those that have come to find life and longing in Burrabazar find it easily. Even as the rest of the city is engrossed watching master blaster Saurav Ganguly at the majestic Eden Gardens or reeling under a mammoth rally led by firebrand Trinamul leader Mamata Banerjee or even wrecked by flash floods from the swirling, muddy waters of the Hooghly, life goes on in Burrabazar with an energy and vigour that is constantly renewed. Here, hundreds of thousands of Hasaris live a million lives. During the day, lakhs of labourers work in tandem with the babus on their gaddis. During the night, they lie in and around the dark, silent alleys along with the underworld, getting acquainted with the bitter taste of hafta and dhanda and the rudiments of labour mafiadom, till the next daybreak when they can re-mingle with the sweat. For those caught in the heat of this seething nightlife, Burrabazar represents neither culture, nor history. For them, it’s just a way of living.

Does the dark beckon because there isn’t enough work? "There is no dearth of work...all those who come here pick up the odd job every now and then," remarks S.K. Jain, a jute broker who has been at work in this throbbing marketplace for more than five decades. And why not? Burrabazar does not deal in one commodity. If you are a newcomer and uncomfortable with rice, deal in jute. If that does not find a good buy, move over to potatoes. And if you want to avoid the icy godowns where the vegetables are usually stored on reaching Calcutta, then shift to spices. Or garments. Or medicines. Or even flowers. Burrabazar is the real free market of opportunities.

Then there’s Posta, on the banks of the Hooghly, which houses Asia’s largest commodities market. On its heels are Bagri market for stationery and plastic items, Mehta building for drugs and Ezra Street shops for electrical appliances. Each day, Burrabazar gets its uninterrupted flow of farm products and edibles - vegetables from Bihar, fruits from Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kashmir, eggs and poultry from Andhra and Karnataka, fish from Orissa and neighbouring Bangladesh, shellfish and honey from Sunderbans and tobacco and betel leaf from Patna. And the rest - cereals, rice, cotton products, fish, medicines, sugar, stationery, plastic products, iron sheets, asbestos and secondary steel - from all corners of India. In a market which is one of the most diversified in Asia, Burrabazar offers no fewer than 500 varieties of clothing items and an astounding 7,000 shades of colours in saris everyday.

The market swarms with both man and machine. Buildings housing hundreds of offices rise several floors, coexisting peacefully with the network of covered alleys and narrow passageways lined with hundreds of stalls and workshops, like a human beehive humming with activity. "Here, business is done on faith...my work culture is no different from my ancestors," remarks Amlesh Sharma, even as he loads baskets of shirts and trousers onto pushcarts. Sharma deals only in hard cash and small slips, two modes which complement each other. A slip ensures supply which, in turn, ensures cash.

A centuries-old practice which no one has seriously thought of discontinuing. "Otherwise, we’ll need all the chartered accountants of India to come to Burrabazar," remarks Ashok Maniktalla, a member of the Burrabazar Gold Merchants’ Association, speaking from behind the painted iron bars of his heavily guarded shop. Nearby, past the metalworkers, scores of bare-torsoed men and children roll bidis, faceless in the dimly-lit dingy rooms in one of Burrabazar’s poorest quarters. "It has been like this for years... even generations. Burrabazar has not changed. It probably does not want to change... life will continue like this unless an earthquake shakes everything up," quips a trader, flinging the words even as he smoothly supervises onions being loaded on to a truck. Unlikely. Burrabazar would just rise from the shambles and slip back easily into its role of being the country’s busiest commodities market.