In the song La Vie Boheme from the musical Rent, why does Benny reference Calcut

Question:In the musical Rent, Benny sings the following lyric during La Vie Boheme:

"Bohemia, Bohemia
Is a fantasy in your head.
This is Calcutta.
Bohemia is dead."

Why did Jonathan Larson choose the city Calcutta (aka Kolkata)? How does it represent the antithesis of Bohemia?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: In the musical Rent, Benny sings the following lyric during La Vie Boheme:

"Bohemia, Bohemia
Is a fantasy in your head.
This is Calcutta.
Bohemia is dead."

Why did Jonathan Larson choose the city Calcutta (aka Kolkata)? How does it represent the antithesis of Bohemia?

Calcutta, in popular American concept, is a hot steamy underbelly of a city teeming with starvation, poverty, and disease. Benny is saying that their idealized utopian Bohemia does not exist and that instead they are living in filthy squalor similar to the poor in Calcutta.

Now, this is just me thinking out loud - I'm not well educated about Calcutta, so don't sue me if I'm going off of cultural stigmas and not cold, hard facts.

I'm assuming, though, that he's looking at Bohemia as an idealised anarchist society that doesn't worry about worldly goods, while Calcutta is more rigidly defined by classes and a huge gap between the wealthy and poor, characterised by cycles of need and excess.

Kolkata (Calcutta) is known for its literary, artistic and revolutionary heritage. I assume it was a reference to the fact they all were singing about their own revolution.