Calcutta street scenes 1988, India

 I was talking to a friend about Calcutta and decided to dig out my photos from 1988, when I was travelling around India. This led me to taking photos of the photos for this blog. I then found my travel diaries to do this text. However I didn't find any photos of the sights, so maybe I took those with my slide camera, rather than the film one. So the photos here are mostly just street scenes.

I had been working my way anticlockwise around India, Prior to Calcutta, I was in Puri, one of the four holiest cities in India and home of the Jagannath Temple. From Puri I took the Jagannath Express, an overnight train to Calcutta. Arrived at Calcutta's Howrah station the next morning and from there took a minibus to Sudder Street, which was the cheap accommodation centre. 

Calcutta was in the process of having an underground tube system being built and just one section was open, it gets delayed as the annual monsoon fills up what has previously been dug out. I went just 2 stops from Esplanade for 1Rs (7p). I don't seem to have any photos of the underground.

Calcutta was (at the time) the world's 4th largest city and was very busy, noisy and polluted. According to my Lonely Planet guide book it was the only place in India to still have hand pulled rickshaws and there were trams coming at you from all directions, strange double decker buses towed by a big lorry. A New Zealand friend pretending to pull a rickshaw -

And a rickshaw wallah waiting for business by a street barber -

A tram with a ladies only carriage -

Sugar cane, collecting water and wash time -

Some shops and a cinema -

I actually went to a cinema, to see Poltergeist 2, for 4 Rs. Whilst I was in Calcutta, it was the festival of Holi, aka the festival of colours as people throw lots of powders and coloured water - hence the purple colour 2 photos above and also these -  

This is the Howrah Bridge, a balanced cantilever bridge over the Hooghly River. Howrah is on the west bank, Calcutta on the east. 

Some ghat scenes -

Flower market by Howrah bridge -

And general street scenes - 

The Dakshineswar Kali Temple -

And finally, the famous rat park, at Curzon Park where hundreds of rats lived in a meshed enclosure. People would feed the rats. However it seems the rats have now gone.

These photos were taken 34 years ago. Although I've been back to India since, I haven't been back to Calcutta, or Kolkata as it was named in 2001.