The City of Joy is having its own ‘to be, or not to be, that is the question' moment.
Just as Hamlet starts his soliloquy contemplating death as well as suicide, the city of Kolkata is having thoughts about its own Ophelia, the tram car. The reason is simple, the Mamata Banerjee-government of Bengal has decided to shun the oldest and the most affordable mode of public transportation system of the city from its roads and only keep a light shade of it for some joyride along the Maidan, an expanse of greenery with the iconic Victoria Memorial looking across.
Trams have been a close-knit component of Indian cities for years. Introduced by the British, this mode of transport has ferried people for generations in Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai), Madras (now Chennai) and even in smaller towns like Nashik or Bhavnagar.
To trace back Kolkata’s tryst with this urban mode of transportation, one needs to time travel to the past and go to February 24, 1873. It was on this day 151 years ago, that the first tram of Kolkata, albeit a horse-drawn carriage, made its debut between Sealdah and Armenian Ghat along the Hooghly River covering a distance of about 3.9 km.
After some initial hiccups, which led to a temporary suspension of service in its initial days, trams returned to the streets of Kolkata in November, 1880. This time it was a metre gauge service and the route was covering a bit more - from Sealdah to Bowbazar and then via Dalhousie Square to Armenian Ghat. The very next month, the Calcutta Tramways Company was formed and registered in London on December 20, 1880.
Since its inaugural run, trams spread to neighbouring Howrah across the Hooghly River and from horse-drawn carriages it became a fully electric powered tram car service by 1900. It had a brief tryst with the steam engine driven ones in between. The tramways were snaking along the roads of Kolkata with its total track length excluding depots and termini hitting 70.74 km by 1969. The wooden coaches were replaced with steel bodied cars in 1982 and polycarbonate trams were introduced in 2008. In its latest addition, many twin coach trams were reduced to single coach ones and in 2013, air-conditioned trams joined the fleet.
While all these happening, successive governments; be it the Congress or the Left Front or the Trinamool Congress, none thought about expanding the network. On the contrary, it kept dwindling. Though some new routes were added like trams began plying up to Joka in the southern suburbs or to Ultadanga in the east of Kolkata, yet many more routes in the main business district of the city and Howrah were discontinued. The death knell of the trams was gradually being sounded, thanks to the dismal maintenance of coaches little or no effort in modernising the fleet.
But, that did not deter the city’s dwellers from boarding the bold majesties. So much so that the trams of Kolkata made some grand appearances on celluloid and were made immortal as well as synonymous with the city.
It is difficult to forget the opening credits of Satyajit Ray’s classic cinematic experience of Mahanagar (1963). And how best to portray a bustling Mahanagar (the metropolis) like Kolkata than to train the lenses on the quintessential trams. Ray’s award-winning cinematographer Subrata Mitra, who had also filmed the globally acclaimed Apu trilogy for Ray, simply focuses on a moving tram and a jungle of criss-crossing electric wires with the cable gliding along for over two minutes as the opening credits roll on. Once credits for the film’s screenplay, music and direction finish rolling, Ray takes his audience from the cables to inside the tram car with the camera focusing on Anil Chatterjee, the protagonist. Throughout the credits, with the changing tempo of violin, cello and flute, along with the tram’s cable; Ray sets the perfect tone for the audience to enter into the myriad realities of a metropolis, the Mahanagar.
And its not just in Mahanagar that Ray had used the Kolkata trams to carry forward his cinematic storytelling. In Apur Sansar, the third of the Apu trilogy, Ray used the tram as a constant space for urban Kolkata, where the protagonist Apu, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, reads a letter from his editor and gradually his dreams turn to reality. The sequence is shot inside a tram car.
When celebrated director Ritwik Ghatak shot his 1958 film Bari Theke Paliye (The Runaway), the tram cars of Kolkata formed a background of the essential narrative of the film, the mechanical urbanisation of a metropolis.