The Porters Of Kolkata’s Howrah Bridge
Howrah Bridge, Kolkata. November 19, 2022.
If you've ever visited Howrah Station and taken the bridge across to reach there, you may have noticed the intermittent but neverending stream of porters sluffing bags to and from the station. When you get up close and personal with them, you get to see how hard and tiring that kind of work is. Many of the people I watched and photographed walked with a concentrated serenity that borderlined on meditation and suffering. Sometimes their eyes were closed for many steps at a time, after presumably working out subconsciously how many steps they could safely take to retreat inside to summon the reserves to carry on.
I'd initially thought that these porters were transporting goods between the station, the flower market, and its surroundings just across the bridge on the east side. This was already quite a journey on foot with a heavy load. But if you follow the paths of many of them, they vanish into the crowded streets and deeper into the city. It became clear to me then as it has on many occasions in the past that sheer human labor was the answer to the lack of infrastructure and resources to transport goods that are more closely aligned with the 21st Century way of doing things.
Somebody at the Kolkata airport struck up a conversation with me and I told him that I'd been coming to Kolkata for over a decade. And as a Bengali, he wanted to know if I'd noticed any changes in the city as compared to Mumbai. And of course, the answer to that question was a resounding no. I think Kolkata will be locked into the past of some bygone age, for better and for worse, for decades after all of us are long gone.
I’ll be adding an image gallery here with more images soon.
