City of Dreadful ”

Hokitika Guardian, 14 June 1921, Page 3

City of Dreadful ”

CENSUS REVELATIONS IN CALCUTTA. On population alone Calcutta, with its suburbs, can claim to lie the second city of the Empire, says the correspondent of the “.Morning Post.” Mr Kipling preferred to call it the ‘‘C itv of Dreadful Night,” and the census operations now in progress suggest that his nomenclature has lost nothing of its fidelity with the passing of the years. In India, the illiteracy of the people is such that the census cannot he conducted by the simple process of delivering forms and collecting them when they have been filled in. An elaborate procedure of enumeration is necessitated which occupies some weeks, and it is only the final process of checking by more highly trained operators which can be conducted on a specified night. It is the initial enumerating process which, in Calcutta, has revealed some truly amazing facts regarding the poo pie’s habits of liie. For some years past an Improvement Trust lias been engaged in performing for the worst Calcutta slums the service rendered in the ease of the Seven Dials area by the construction of Charing Cross road. A huge Central avenue is in course of construction. The preliminary census reveals the fact, | however, that the population of the I vicinity, so far from migrating, has | re-created the slum- problem in intensified form. Rather than leave their traditional neighbourhood, the family I or group of families which formerly 1 possessed a house, now occupies perhaps , one room at an enormous rental, i Thirty-five Chinamen, all living witli- ! out wives, are occupying a single room, 20 feet by 15 feet. Upon bamboos stretched across the rafters of a stable, which itself affords a refuge for a dozen hackney carriages, fifty men have their only home in Calcutta. Tn c a number of houses in the same locality the average population inside the house exceeds 500. When the enumerator, with a false optimism, supposed his work finished in one of these (ljjlectnble dwellings, lip was invited to

mount on to the roof. There he • discovered ninety men accustomed to regard the roof as their permanent dwelling place. Lest it he supposed that a roof is an indifferent habitat, it is necessary to state that to a large and rapidly increasing class in- Calcutta a roof-dweller, even if he have no covering over his head, is a member of the opulent classes. Street arcades, doorways, etc., offer scores of instances of similar dwelling places.

Not less remarkable than Calcutta’s crowded dwellings and queer dwelling places are the many abnormalities of its population. In the whole, city, for 100') males there were at the last, census only 47b females. Amongst the Moslems the proportion was only 390' females to every thousand males. Amid conditions such as these it is hardly surprising that the last census revealed the fact that of every seven women of adult age in Calcutta, one was of loose character.