3 - Calcutta in the War

Summary

Thousands of Allied troops arrived in India between 1941 and 1945, and the United States occupied military stations throughout the country to support a massive force. These war efforts, part of the China-Burma-India theater of operations, created a military economy in India that increased the market for Western entertainment. By late 1943 in Calcutta, optimism about victory had become prevalent, and large numbers of Allied soldiers stationed in the city were enjoying live music, Hollywood moving pictures, gramophone recordings of jazz, and English-language radio broadcasts. This chapter focuses on the influence of the Allied military's entertainment economy on jazz production, dissemination, and consumption between 1943 and 1945. It frames the war in a transnational setting by suggesting that the American and British militaries were catalysts for entertainment globalization, and captures a historical moment during a time of penetrating and somewhat unconventional human movement into the city. It discusses military radio broadcasting, local jazz gramophone disc markets, the scope of military entertainment, and the contextualizing forces that brought meaning to jazz.

For local music industries and infrastructures to be economically successful, there must be large numbers of customers, adequate resources to economize on production costs, and significant density of human capital. Wartime Calcutta had gramophone recording studios and production plants, music stores to sell instruments, radio broadcasting infrastructures, local and foreign musicians, and tens of thousands of troops with money to spend on diversions, all of which supported a dynamic market for Western entertainment during the war. The military administration supported live and mechanically reproduced music for troops in both military venues and commercial enterprises, thus reformulating entertainment economies and reframing the market for jazz. A secondary argument of this chapter is that the active process of embracing globalized popular music sometimes involves ignoring or remaining uncommitted to local concerns. Partially borrowing from Pat J. Gehrke's idea of “uncommitted localism,” I suggest that we sometimes withdraw from local concerns in our quest for cosmopolitan encounters, which in this chapter includes Western entertainment in elite clubs, and I claim that during the Bengal famine of 1943–44, patrons of Firpo's Restaurant and Bar, arguably among the leading jazz establishments in Calcutta, gave meaning and context to entertainment vis-à-vis social ills associated with the famine.