Word: calcuttas
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BEFORE the polls opened, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi seemed confident and optimistic. Later, while her opponents smeared their foreheads with vermilion and danced in the streets of Calcutta, Indira was withdrawn and downcast. In last week's off-year elections in four of India's most important states, Indira's once all-powerful Congress Party emerged undefeated only in her home state of Uttar Pradesh. Elsewhere it went down to stinging defeats. The results were, in fact, so poor that they cast grave doubts on the Congress Party's ability to continue as India...
UNDER the shadow of great wealth," the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore lamented, "starvation moves across the land." So it always has in India. Ten million died in the Bengali famine of 1770, four million in 1877. Shrunken bodies littered the streets of Calcutta in 1943. As recently as 1965 and 1966, when the monsoon rains failed, thousands would have died but for the emergency shipment of 10.5 million tons of U.S. wheat, one-fifth of the American crop. India has always seemed to be dismaying proof of the Malthusian thesis that the world's population must inevitably increase...
...wraps around the waist and is worn over a blouse of contrasting color-cotton or wool for the daytime and silk in the evening. She uses cosmetics only occasionally and does her own hair-though she admits that she is encouraging a romance between a Sikkimese youth and a Calcutta hairdresser in the hope of importing the kingdom's first coiffeuse. She describes her home as "a poorish palace but a palace." It is a 64-year-old, two-story white stucco building with five bedrooms and a tin roof. In Gangtok, the family gets around in a white...
...often invisible to the rest of America. Unlike the destitute of other times and places, its inhabitants are not usually distinguishable by any of the traditional telltales of want: hunger-distended bellies or filthy rags, beggar's bowls or the lineaments of despair. Harlem's broad avenues?clean by Calcutta's standards?bop to the stride of lively men and women in multihued clothing; the tawdry tenements of Chicago's South Side are forested with TV antennas. Even in Mississippi's Tunica County, one of the poorest in the nation, where according to the latest census eight out of every...
Small equestrian figures are prevalent in village shrines, in part because of the horse's aristocratic connotations and in part for his mystical significance: his fleet hoofs are believed to bear riders safely to the spirit world. The cat is held in reverence by the Bengalis of Calcutta because it is the bahana, or mount, of Shashti, the Bengalese goddess of fecundity. Brightly colored Kalighat paintings of cats were made by street painters for sale to pilgrims to Calcutta's Temple of Kali. One of the most impressive objects is a brass figurine from Orissa; it shows...