Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri

by Amit Chaudhuri

Kipling s city of dreadful night , the nightmare experience of Jawaharlal Nehru, heroine of a hundred thousand loves , a pestilential behemoth Calcutta provokes extreme reactions in almost everyone who has encountered the city. Despite having probably the filthiest climate on earth , described by Mark Twain as enough to make a doorknob mushy , despite the doomsday predictions about it being a dying city , Calcutta throbs with a life and a vitality all its own, drawing people from all walks of life to engage with it. This anthology brings together essays, stories, poems and memoirs of people who have shared an ardent relationship with Calcutta. From Henry Meredith Parker s early nineteenth-century vignettes of life in the city to Ulrike Draesner s overwrought images at the turn of the new millennium, from Tagore s elegiac reminiscences of his childhood home to Sandipan Chattopadhyay s hallucinogenic depictions of nights spent on the footpath, Memory s Gold celebrates the coexistence of the sacrosanct and the blasphemous, so characteristic of Calcutta itself.

Unknown Binding

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.

He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

[Udaiiiiiii]

Got this from the library. Not planning on reading the whole thing. It's nice to have lots of short stories to read.