Calcutta is a young city. British traders chanced upon its site at the end of the 17th century and built a port town over the next two centuries. There were neighbouring colonial settlements: Dutch, Portuguese and Danish. Economic opportunities drew migrants to the new town: Indians as well as Jewish bankers, Arme-nian estate agents, Afghan pedlars, Chinese shoemakers, Scottish missionaries and Portuguese burglars.

Political disasters and famines brought in refugees. Many settled in squatter colonies, fighting pitched battles with legal landowners for years. In 1969, the official figure for those awaiting rehabilitation was 1.3 million. In 1981, 3 million migrants accounted for 31 per cent of the city's population. The city was built by colonial masters, but its architecture, cuisine and languages were largely the hybrid concoctions of the culturally displaced across races and tongues.

Residents at present include most major linguistic groups in South Asia: Bengali, Hindi or its variants, Urdu, Oriya. But there is more: Assamese, Chinese, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Pushtu, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil and Telugu. People learn two languages, if not three: even the unlettered cannot hope to get by without being able to speak at least two.

If Bengali is the major language for creative writing, English is the language of science, law and scholarship. Bengalis have long written in more than one language, and the success of Calcutta writers in English pre-dates Salman Rushdie's by more than half a century. Yet, of the 3,395 periodicals at present registered, 1,571 are in Bengali, 978 in English, 362 in Hindi, 110 in Urdu, and 86 in 17 other languages ranging from Chinese to Arihani. The rest are multilingual.

In what sense may such a city to claim that it is “a city of literature”? Unesco awarded Edinburgh the status in 2004. Unesco has its own rules, but what does one mean in claiming the tag? One could cite the city's enthusiasm for writers, its love of reading, its many literary landmarks and events, its scholarly traditions. Calcutta, for instance, produced the first Asian Nobel laureate in Rabindranath Tagore. It was here that Thackeray was born and Dickens's second son buried. The great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib lived here for a while, and the city has produced distinguished authors in English, Hindi, Gujarati, Maithili, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu alongside the Bengali greats. Charles Baudelaire dreamt of a voyage to Calcutta; Mark Twain could not wait to leave the place. It is a city that inspired and enraged Kipling and Macaulay, Ginsberg and Grass.

But these are not genuine merits. The core of Calcutta's claim is that its literatures fashioned protocols of literary commerce before most places in the world. The rudiments of its literary life are marked by cultural translation and exchange, with the literature in each language implicated in that of any other. It is in such mutual entailment that Calcutta finds its identity, its festive openness almost compensating for its admitted material failures. If other cities tend to define their literatures, Calcutta invents itself as a city only in its literatures.

George Otto Trevelyan had described Calcutta's river, the Hoogly, as “the peasant's god, the poet's theme”. The chaotic urban sprawl, like the river, may still be only the peasant's god, but its creative vitality is surely a theme for poets.

Professor Swapan Chakravorty will be debating at The Battle of Ideas in London, November 1-2. www.battleofideas.org.uk

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