On race days outside the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, boisterous children and adults sell racecards emblazoned with BOL, ‘best of luck’. This jocular anachronism sets the tone for the afternoon
After you pay your £2 entrance fee and heave yourself through a creaking turnstile, it feels like entering another time. Victorian, Edwardian or Nehru-era India: it’s hard to pin down, but it doesn’t feel like the present. Looking across the vast area of the course, you can see the marble Victoria memorial shimmering on the smoggy horizon. Lest we forget.
Kolkata, comfortable in the ruin and grandeur of its imperial buildings, seems immune to a new India. Its residents are more concerned with conversation and intellectual matters than following the country’s other metropolises into corporate modernity, or joining the disturbing march towards Hindu nationalism. The racetrack is a time warp befitting the city, with its own ghosts and remnants of the Raj but which thrives as a uniquely Indian phenomenon.
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