One would like to begin a geographic discussion of squatter settlements in Calcutta from something of an objective point of view, but that is impossible. Every record of the situation, every photograph, journalistic report, anecdote and discussion of the "experience" leads to the same dead end. To be poor in Calcutta, to be a Dalit - "Untouchable" - in that city, is to be consigned to an existence of wretched being. It is such a place that Mother Teresa won her Nobel Peace in 1979 for organizing the simple, terrifying act of gathering the near-dead from the streets and giving them a place to die in their last hours of life - 54,000 in the single decade of the 1980s (Desmond 11).
Calcutta is a port city on the Bay of Bengal in the northeastern state of India designated as West Bengal. As such, the majority of its population (66%) is comprised of Bengali-speaking natives of the region; although, in the true polyglot fashion of the country, Hindi- and Urdu-speaking Indians comprise sizeable minorities (20% and 9%, respectively). Technically, Calcutta proper is only one of 75 local governing bodies that make up the Calcutta Metropolitan District, or "CMD," which includes the infamous sister city of Howrah lying opposite Calcutta along the banks of the Hooghly River. Howrah had the dubious honor in a 1971 census of accounting for a population of nearly three-quarters of a million people - without a single sewer among them (Moorhouse Plate 9). By general consensus, Howrah must be included in the Calcutta "megacity," bringing the total population as of 1993 to a conservatively-estimated 12 million people (Linden 29). That "estimated" is a necessary qualifier: Calcutta's homeless population has never been successfully counted - because no one has really cared to try very hard. With or without the bottom-bottom rung of Calcutta's poor added-in to the total mass of humanity there, it is the largest city on the Indian subcontinen...