ARMY OF BEGGARS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 March 1930, Page 10

ARMY OF BEGGARS

CALCUTTA’S UGLY SIDE. On an evening’s walk down Chowringhee—Calcutta’s best and one of the world’s finest streets you may see, if you look for them, a few ugly and sinister things as well as a very fair share of all things bright and beautiful; but there’ is one that may test your nerves —unless time and experience have fossilised them—a little more than all the rest dp, writes the Calcutta correspondent of the Manchester “Guardian 'Weekly.”

It is the sight of an apparently cheerful, half-naked tiny buy squatting in the middle of the pavement, bent double over his twisted knees, saluting passers-by with a feeble arm whose elbow-rests on the ground. In the cool ci' nightfall he wears a dirty piece of cloth round his neck. It hangs no lower because where the small of his back should be there is a horrible huge hump, and if the hump were covered his market value in the trade of beggary would be seriously depreciated'. At the apex of the- hump there is the sign of an old sore,-suggesting that at some time or other the point of the hump has been cut off rather clumsily.

The boy belongs to one of Calcutta’s largest commercial communities. At the census of 1921 it consisted of 26,926 persons describing themselves as beggars and prostitutes, 12, 366 people caliming to be procurers and prostitutes’ 14,560 simple beggars, and an uncertain proportion of the 708,513 people whose occupations were “insufficiently described.” The numbers of the,first two sections can be accounted for, of course, by the well-known influence of demand upon supply; and they do not include tho taxi-drivers and ghari-wallahs (cabmen) who take an active interest in the business. But the undiluted trade of beggary, in which the diminutive hunchback has a diminutive stake, is less simple and quite as vicious as that, and is not as plain and straightforward as it seems. Those who have troubled to explore its ramifications will tell you that almost the whole trade in Calcutta is organised and controlled by a syndicate, powerful and elusive, which “makes a very good thing” out of it. Adults they engage as beggars in the ordinary relationship of principal and agent or employer and employed, but Gio children, as a rule, are begged, borrowed, hired, bought, or perhaps stolen from their parents.

Their various “beats” are allotted to them; you can sometimes see. them being escorted thither’ by men who may bo members or servants of the syndicate".” If they arc cripples, so much the better; the more serious the deformity the greater .the profit. You will remember that AV. H. Davies was envied for his wooden leg by the tramps in American workhouses. But sometimes 11)0 Calcutta beggar’s deforipi’ty is lesg certainly due to njischancp than Mr Davies’s one-legged-ness is. One still hears tales, talk whjeb cannot altogether be discounted, of thingy most horrible done in some parts of India. Prudence, timidity, apathy, or the very difficulty of the problem—it is hard to say which —has hitherto restrained the authorities from any serious efforts to get to the root of the matter, or to dig it iip and destroy it if they have ever found it. But it is a good opportunity for the Calcutta Corporation, a preponderantly Indian body, to show what Indian administration can do, and it is a pity that they don’t make dpterniined use of it.