Kolkata, India

And we're back in the big smoke: Kolkata — called Calcutta until 2001.

Kolkata has a population of 4.5 million, the fourth biggest megacity in India. The Port of Kolkata is India's oldest operating port. Our ship is moored in the section from where indentured labourers set off in the 1800s to work in foreign lands: the Caribbean, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji. Today this part of the port has been sold to developers who are building a high-end club and dining precinct, but it's a work in progress. Fortunately many of the old buildings, such as the famous Clock Tower, are being retained in the development.

Kolkata is considered the cultural capital of India. A number of Nobel laureates are associated with the city, and it's home to national institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts, the Indian Museum and the National Library. The International Kolkata Book Fair is the most attended book fair in the world. (Hence our Bengali guide's pride in the culture of his home town!)

Yes, there's cricket in Kolkata but it's also the home of Indian soccer. Apparently there is fierce rivalry between Kolkata teams. Not sure what happened to the top half of that soccer player below — maybe it's a good thing that he/she is unidentifiable.

As I've mentioned (occasionally!), Bengal has a long and very distinct history, which I shall summarise as a footnote* for fellow history fans.

By the late 1800s, Calcutta — under British crown rule — became the de facto capital of India, and the centre of politics, education, science and the arts. It was also the second largest city in the British Empire, after London.

Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, died in 1901. What ho, said the then Viceroy of India, this is the perfect time to build a monument [I quote] 'in memory of the greatest and best Sovereign whom India has ever known'. Etc. Funded by wealthy local donors (like the White House ballroom), the Queen Victoria Memorial is the largest monument to a monarch anywhere in the world. It has a museum dedicated to Queen Vic and hosts public lectures, so it is functional as well as grand. Its address is 1 Queens Way, and there's no number 2 or 3, or any other number on this road. There's 64 acres of gardens, but of course you have to pay to enter them. The Royal Calcutta Turf Club, a very snooty horse-racing centre, is across the road from the memorial. I wonder how the cart-horses feel about their neighbours.

This area of Kolkata is called the Maidan, which means 'open field' in Bengali. The Maidan is a big green space in the centre of the city.

Queen Victoria never set foot in India, but there's another woman who is equally (or more) associated with Kolkata: Mother Teresa. Born in Albania, she moved to India when she was 19 and never left. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and was canonised as St Teresa of Calcutta in 2016. We visited the Mother House and her spartan bedroom/office; there's also a museum. No photos are allowed inside either the Mother House or the museum, although I could photograph her tomb.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order that focussed on the poorest of the poor, and ensured that people did not die alone on the streets. The order now operates in more than 130 countries and has more than 4000 nuns who vow to give 'wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor'. They assist the dying, feed poor people and run clinics, orphanages and schools. It's quite a legacy.

A terrible video, I apologise, but you can get a glimpse of the nuns working in the house today. The bronze statue of Mother T above is life-size. She was tiny. Quite a bit smaller than me!

Of course, she had her critics. Some politicians felt that she was commodifying poverty and Calcutta was becoming known as the city of slums. Other criticism was more targeted, such as the lack of pain relief in her houses for the dying. Still, I think that when Anubis weighs her heart against the feather of Ma'at, she'll be deemed worthy for the afterlife. (Then again, in Hindu belief, liberation from the afterlife is the ideal. This is what happens when I start mixing belief systems: chaos.)

Back to the pragmatic. I love this photo that Ken took of a Missionaries of Charity nun, crossing the road to the Mother House in front of an Ambassador car. Hindustan Ambassador cars were made in India from 1957 to 2014. Most of them still operational are yellow taxis. We saw them everywhere in Kolkata. The 'no refusal' tag means that the driver can't refuse your request, no matter who you are or where you're going.

We're standing on the Howrah Bridge overpass. We descend into the floral bedlam of the Kolkata Flower Market, a wholesale flower market, and it is busy. Flowers are everywhere in India: they're used daily for rituals, festivals and weddings. People buy flowers as daily offerings to the gods. Wherever there's a temple, there are flower sellers. Wherever we went, we were presented with flower garlands – often marigold garlands.

After a dizzying stroll through the market, we came out at the other end and have a marvellous view of the the bridge. This is our guide Partha and two of the ship's crew, who have been shepherding us through the blooming madhouse (geddit?) like energetic kelpies rounding up some wayward sheep.

I loved this young couple being photographed on the banks of the river, with the bridge behind them and the bathers on the ghats. The modern, the ancient, the religious, the profane, all in one. And this nonchalant street dog, who had a nap on this young boy's T-shirt wares!

Then we made another dash through the flower market. What in carnation is going on here, I said to Ken. It's simply unbe-leaf-able. Are you bouquet? (Sorry.)

We climb back up to the Howrah Bridge.

The Howrah Bridge is a symbol of Kolkata and West Bengal. Built during World War 2, which is a remarkable feat when you think about it, it's the busiest cantilever bridge in the world: around 100,000 vehicles and about 150,000 people cross it every day.

Buses and trucks are all colourfully decorated; we were told that trucks are not allowed to drive through the city between 8 am and 5 pm. They have to drive at night, so they're all parked along streets in the city during the day. And cows? In Kolkata, cows are not allowed within 35 km of city limits – but we did see a few. As Partha said, India has laws for everything. It's just that no one takes them too seriously.

I think I've already said that India celebrates 130 festivals every year. We were in India just before Diwali, the biggest festival of the year, so we saw lights being strung and buildings decorated in preparation. Coinciding with Diwali, West Bengal celebrates Kali Puja. It's a distinctively East Indian festival. (Puja means act of worship, or act of devotion to a deity.)

Kali is a dark manifestation of the warrior goddess Durga. (Do you remember Durga, with the 10 arms, whom I so admired? She has her own big festival in Bengal, called Durga Puja.) Kali is usually shown as a blue or black multi-armed figure, with her tongue sticking out and wearing a necklace of skulls. Kali must be celebrated at night, with alcohol and meat — a bit of a Dionysian figure, clearly.

I gave AI these specs and asked for a picture of Kali. In the blue one, her tongue is coming out of her throat. Hmmm. I tried again, this time specifying black. Now her tongue is a bit OTT, don't you think? And she has seven arms. In both cases, she looks toned, slim and kind of cute, which I hate about AI pictures.

This was the perfect time to visit Kumartuli, a traditional potters’ neighborhood in Kolkata, where craftsmen make intricate clay idols for festivals. At this time of the year, Kali is centre stage. I asked Partha who buys these statues. Some are bought by individual families, other bigger ones are bought by communities. They're created new every year. You can't just pull an old one out of the cupboard, like we do with Christmas decorations. (Speaking for myself.)

The craftsmen start with wire and straw armatures, then gradually plaster the statue with clay from the river. They take weeks to make.

Once the clay dries, it's polished and painted. None of these are quite finished, unfortunately. At the end of the religious ceremonies, the statues are placed in the sacred waters of the river. In a nice circularity, typical of India, the clay returns to the river bed.

I vastly prefer these depictions of Kali to the AI versions.

Still in this neighbourhood, I persuaded the young couple to pose for me as they were trying on bridal crowns, while Ken watched the young man, aka the accident waiting to happen, on the bamboo scaffolding.

St John's Church was built in 1784 by the British East India Company. It has individual seats, not pews; an upper level for the upper-class attendees; a pipe organ from the early 1800s; and a painting of Jesus whose eyes follow you around. The church office is also where the BEIC officials did their, um, official work.

The church has a number of plaques that commemorate many British officials, including John Pattle who was such a liar that when he died, the devil wouldn't let him leave India, and he had to be pickled in rum to ship back to England, and then he sat up in the rum and his wife died of shock and had to be pickled in rum as well, then the sailors drank the rum and the ship exploded and so on. (That's according to William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian, who's excellent on the subject of India. It's not on the plaque.) Most of the plaques are sober and self-glorious, and assure us that the honoree is a man and a soldier and a Christian, and if he had a wife, she's sometimes mentioned in the last couple of lines.

The painting of the Last Supper by Johann Zoffany is famous for its portrayal of people in power at the time he painted it in 1780. Judas, for example, has the face of the local auctioneer at the time.

I'm all for churches and temples and graveyards and things, but also in the church grounds is the memorial to the victims of the Black Hole. Remember the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta?

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in Fort William that was about 4 by 6 metres, where the Nawab of Bengal held British prisoners of war one night in 1756. According to one of the survivors, 146 people were held in the dungeon, and 123 of them died. Modern historians quibble about the numbers: some say 43 died, others say 18 died. Whatever the truth (history!), it was an opportunity for the BEIC to claim to be a victim, and for the Black Hole of Calcutta to go down in legend.

One more place to go.

Next: Varanasi

*Bengal was a powerful kingdom from early times, with trade links to other ancient empires because of its cotton textiles. It had well equipped armies — including hundreds of war elephants, which forced Alexander the Great to abandon his eastward military advance and go back to Greece. Both Hinduism and Buddhism (Nepal is just across the border, and China is a stone's throw away) were practised for centuries, but in the 1300s Bengal became part of the Mughal empire, and Islam became the state religion.

By the 1600s the Mughal empire was in decline and the Hindu aristocracy was in ascendance. Which is when (as we know by now) the British East Indian Company arrived in Bengal, a story full of twists and turns and mutinies and alliances.

Calcutta grew and grew, like Topsy, and so did the resistance against Britain. In the late 1800s Calcutta was the home of the Indian nationalist movement (as we saw in Chandannagar). In 1905 the British viceroy decided to stop this nonsense and chopped Bengal into two: West Bengal and East Bengal. (Do not confuse this with the Partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. That's a completely separate debacle.) The locals did not take kindly to this attempt to divide and conquer: British officials were assassinated and British goods were boycotted. In 1911 Britain was forced to reunite Bengal. (And in a hissy fit, moved the capital to Delhi.)

This really looks better on a bigger screen. www.julie-anne.online