Calcutta
Two Years in the City
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
In 1999, Amit Chaudhuri moved back to Calcutta, the city in which he was born. It was a place he had loved in his youth and the place he had made his name writing about. But upon his return he discovered that the Calcutta of his imagination had receded and another had taken its place.
Lyrical, observant and profound, Calcutta is a personal account of two years (2009–2011) spent in one of the least known – yet greatest – cities of our time by one of our leading novelists. Using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and towards the twenty-first, when – utterly changed – it seems to be on the verge of another turn.
Along the way he evokes all that is most particular and extraordinary. From the homeless and the working class to the old, declining haute bourgeois; from the new malls and hotels to old houses being destroyed by developers; from politicians on their way out to the city’s fitful attempts to embrace globalisation, Calcutta brings a multifarious universe to life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The "two years" in the title of this eloquent work of noblesse oblige is misleading, since the Indian-English author, musician, and professor of literature (The Immortals) was born in Calcutta in the early 1960s and spent much time there in the decades since. Chaudhuri draws on mostly tender, impressionistic memories of his hometown descriptions familiar to readers of his fiction trilogy Freedom Song (collected in one volume). He felt compelled to write about Calcutta because of the city's down-on-its-heels modernity, edgy diversity, and Marxist politics; he was taken by Calcutta's crumbling colonial glory and architecture, its Bengali bourgeois class that aped the English ways, its literary and artistic inheritance (Tagore, Shankar), and its enormous number of destitute immigrant workers. The twice-partitioned Bengali capital became a kind of exotic mistress that the author, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, could not quit, and while his impressions are astute, his considerations of the lower classes, including the servants in his house, can seem patronizing.
