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Kolkata's iconic trams roll out to combat climate change
Summary
The Sundarban Tramjatra aims to raise awareness about trams and the Sundarbans. But the struggle to save trams in the teeth of government opposition remains an uphill one
Sundari tram amader, Sundarban (Our beautiful trams, our Sundarban).
As Swarna Chitrakar sings about crouching tigers and trundling trams at the Esplanade tram terminus in Kolkata, she unrolls the scroll she has painted. Tigers pounce on a flock of fleeing deer. Snow-white cranes fly over blue waters and kingfishers swoop to catch fish. A rishi sits in prayer at an ashram in Gangasagar while boxy tram cars run along the edges of the scroll, the passengers sitting by the windows engrossed in newspapers.
It seems an odd juxtaposition. Tram lines do not run through the mangrove forests and waterways of the Sundarbans.
But Chitrakar, a folk artist who paints patachitras, isn’t selling a tiger-safari tourist-brochure version of the Sundarbans. On her scroll, she has painted women carrying baskets of mud on their heads to shore up the river bank. She sings about pollution and cyclones and climate change. And that’s where trams come in. As the West Bengal government goes to court to dismantle its 150-year-old tram system, a group of activists are fighting doggedly to save it, not as a heritage tourist attraction, but as green transport in a time of climate change.
“Cities need heat plans," asserts Pradeep Kakkar, co-founder of PUBLIC (People United for Better Living in Calcutta). “A major contributor to heat in cities is carbon emissions. And trams do extremely well in reducing carbon emissions. “That’s why PUBLIC, which works to protect the Kolkata wetlands, became a litigant in the case to save Kolkata’s trams. The Calcutta high court blocked the government from bituminising the tram tracks and selling off the tram depots, a verdict the government has appealed in the Supreme Court.
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“We are trying to save both tram routes and mangrove roots," says filmmaker Mahadeb Shi. Shi’s great labour of love has been a film about trams—Kaather Baksho (The Wooden Box). He even captured footage from the last day trams ran on Howrah Bridge. His passion for trams found a co-conspirator in faraway Australia. Roberto D’Andrea is a retired tram conductor or connie from Melbourne who calls himself an “Australian tramwallah". He feels a kinship with Kolkata trams since he first visited the city in 1994 and heard the familiar “ding-ding" sound. Melbourne’s trams date back to 1885. Kolkata’s first horse-drawn trams showed up in 1873, making the two cities home to some of the oldest surviving tramways in the world.
When he heard Kolkata trams faced an uncertain future, D’Andrea teamed up with activists and art practitioners led by Shi to hold a Tramjatra festival in 1996 and since then they have organised one every few years. One year the theme was Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, another it was cricket. The aim was always the same: Make Trams Great Again.
“In the 1990s we didn’t think about climate change," says environmental journalist Jayanta Basu. “Now emissions from transport are a major issue. Kolkata in the last 60 years has shown the highest average temperature rise globally as per the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, 2.67 degrees Celsius from 1958 to 2018. What fewer people know is that 90% of that emissions have actually been created within greater Kolkata itself."
That’s why Sundarban Tramjatra (held from 28-31 March this year) with free tram rides, art workshops, cultural programmes and panel discussions wants to look beyond Kolkata to the entire region. “We wanted to bring the Sundarbans into the conversation," explains Shi. “It’s about regional climate security."
The Sundarbans are a buffer that protects Kolkata from devastating cyclones. They also act as a huge carbon sink. But now carbon particles from Kolkata’s vehicles and burning trash are being deposited on the Sundarbans’ mangroves, says Abhijeet Chatterjee, a scientist with the Bose Institute.
Trams are a way to lower carbon emissions and pollution. D’Andrea has designed little cards to drive home that message. He hands them out to curious onlookers peppering his spiel with smidgens of Bengali. Monsoon baagh (tiger), he says, handing out one which shows a tiger clinging to a branch in a torrential rainstorm. The back reads, “Air and carbon pollution is heating our planet and is making monsoon season cyclones stronger and more damaging." Summer Tiger gasps in a parched landscape under a glaring sun. Sea Level Rise Tiger barely manages to keep its head above water while fish swim around it. Finally with a flourish, D’Andrea hands out the solution. Clean Air Tiger gives both thumbs up to electric trams. “Poribesh bondhu (friend of the environment)," D’Andrea says.
Shi and D’Andrea and their band of tram-yatris are dressed in what they call their “Sundari lung" uniforms. Fedora, green shirt, shorts and long socks like Melbourne connies but the shirts have a Sundarbans touch. They are emblazoned with designs of mangrove leaves as lungs on the chest.
The usually run-down streetcar also has gotten a makeover for the Sundarban Tramjatra. Daubs of white paint cover the tram’s body with Sundarbans motifs in Worli tribal art style. A black-and-yellow striped snake sculpture slithers towards a window next to a red crab. Mangroves painted in white spring up along the sides, while turtles and cranes keep watch and a tiger lurks at the door. Graffiti plays on the connections like Ticket Collector and Honey Collector.
The colourful Sundarbans tram is all over Instagram reels but some would say this is just song-and-dance leading nowhere but nostalgia. Everyone has a tram story. I remember the early morning rattle of trams near our house. It was the wake-up alarm clock for many Kolkatans. Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar opens with a tram scene. Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani ends with one.
The fight to save trams can get mired in nostalgia for a lost city while both sides are as set in their arguments as, well, tram tracks. The government says Kolkata’s road space is crunched, trams impede traffic and it’s better to invest in electric buses and Metro systems. Tram activists say it’s not trams or Metro and electric buses but all of them. “Cities which removed trams are bringing them back at great expense," says Alok Jain, CEO of Trans-consult, an urban mobility consulting firm based in Hong Kong. “Kolkata is fortunate it retained that legacy. It’s ahead of its times." If the government gave him the tramways, he would run them at “zero loss to the government." He’s only half-joking.
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In a deadlock like this, art becomes an attempt to draw more stakeholders into the conversation. “We are trying to employ artistic approaches to open up some of the fixed positions to make people consider how things might be otherwise," says Mick Douglas, Australian artist and associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, who is co-curator of the festival. That remains to be seen. The government sent no representatives to the Sundarban Tramjatra.
As the gaily decorated Sundarbans tram sets off down Kolkata’s bustling Lenin Sarani, to the sounds of song, it immediately encounters a roadblock. Someone has left their car parked on the tram track. The tram grinds to a halt. Everyone mills around, arguing and complaining and taking pictures of the offending car. Eventually the driver appears. He seems startled by the sight of the tram and the angry passengers.
“I needed to use the latrine," he says sheepishly. “ Everyone parks here. I didn’t think a tram would come."
It seems a grim portent. But D’Andrea takes the opportunity to hand out his cards to passersby. While the struggle to save trams in the teeth of government opposition and apathy remains an uphill one, D’Andrea and his band have managed to defy the odds in one respect. On their trip to the Sundarbans, they saw tigers, something I’ve never managed to do. “We were really lucky," says D’Andrea. “It was good karma," says his friend Tony Graham.
They hope some of that luck and good karma might rub off on the trams as well.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
