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Calcutta: Two Years in the City
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.
Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, 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 toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.
Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, 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 toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.
Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
307 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
54 people are currently reading
1026 people want to read
About the author
Amit Chaudhuri
60 books175 followersAmit 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
August 12, 2013
From Aravind Adiga’s raucous, Booker Prize-winning ‘White Tiger’, to the much-feted ‘Narcopolis’ by Jeet Thayil and the vibrant reportage of Katherine Boo’s ‘Behind The Beautiful Forevers’, much of the recent, globally celebrated Indian writing has arrived from the point of view of those at the bottom looking up.
While the western appetite for what one might glibly label slum-lit shows no sign of abating, it’s evidently not the whole story from a nation seeking awkwardly to establish itself as an increasingly significant economic super-power.
Amit Chaudhuri’s invigoratingly genre-defying 'Calcutta', then, stands out as a book about a city from an unapologetically upper-middle class perspective: its opinions evolved not by the daily scrabble for spare rupees and clean drinking water, but through meetings with government ministers; dinners at top-of-the-range new Italian restaurants; upheavals issuing from the unreliability of hired helps: ‘Sometimes,’ writes Chaudhuri with the merest hint of self-parody, ‘when I’m in Norwich during the Pujas, I hear that some of the help have gone missing for more than a week, and the house is in disarray.’
Certainly, if you came to ‘Calcutta’ straight from Boo’s gut-wrenchingly desperate account of daily life in a Mumbai slum, you might consider such an observation worthy of some contempt, though Chaudhuri later clarifies: ‘it’s the machinery – cheap labour – on which India, even the world, runs today. I say this not to exculpate myself, but to point out that I’m complicit not in a local mode of exploitation, but in a global arrangement.’
In fact, Chaudhuri’s different perspective is precisely what makes ‘Calcutta’ so engrossing, and so enrichingly unique. It’s not a travelogue, as such, and it could certainly not be classed as a form of autobiography. Chaudhuri uses his own experiences as the framework to gauge the health of a modern city which rose to prominence on fiery left-wing politics and culture, yet now finds those same qualities a hindrance as it flounders in the wake of a thrusting Mumbai and the seat of political power in Delhi.
Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta but brought up in what was then Bombay. He was educated in England and currently divides his time between Norwich – where he is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia – and Calcutta, a city to which he has returned in order to care for his ailing, ageing parents: an all-too-common occurrence in the city, according to Chaudhuri, who muses: ‘Bombay’s main preoccupation is money, and Delhi’s is power.. Calcutta’s preoccupation is, ‘will you be eating at home tonight?”
Chaudhuri ruminates on the gradual crumble of the city’s long-time leftist government, the influx of Italian eateries and chefs driven to make quick exits by what they see as the city’s culinary intransigence, and the way big money and western razzmattazz is eroding its traditional values: on the introduction of the Kolkata Knight Riders cricket team, Chaudhuri observes: ‘[Its] cheerleaders were met with grave reproach by both cricket purists and common-or-garden puritans, and then – as is the case with so much in Indian public life – lazily accepted and secretly looked forward to.’
Perhaps it is precisely that kind of inertia which has seen Calcutta slowly cede its power base to thrusting cities elsewhere. Chaudhuri’s story is very much one of a city whose best days have passed. And yet for all his evident concern for the direction in which the place he can no longer bring himself to love is heading, the gentle , evocative way in which Chaudhuri charts its slow decline makes the place, like the book itself, nothing short of beguiling.
While the western appetite for what one might glibly label slum-lit shows no sign of abating, it’s evidently not the whole story from a nation seeking awkwardly to establish itself as an increasingly significant economic super-power.
Amit Chaudhuri’s invigoratingly genre-defying 'Calcutta', then, stands out as a book about a city from an unapologetically upper-middle class perspective: its opinions evolved not by the daily scrabble for spare rupees and clean drinking water, but through meetings with government ministers; dinners at top-of-the-range new Italian restaurants; upheavals issuing from the unreliability of hired helps: ‘Sometimes,’ writes Chaudhuri with the merest hint of self-parody, ‘when I’m in Norwich during the Pujas, I hear that some of the help have gone missing for more than a week, and the house is in disarray.’
Certainly, if you came to ‘Calcutta’ straight from Boo’s gut-wrenchingly desperate account of daily life in a Mumbai slum, you might consider such an observation worthy of some contempt, though Chaudhuri later clarifies: ‘it’s the machinery – cheap labour – on which India, even the world, runs today. I say this not to exculpate myself, but to point out that I’m complicit not in a local mode of exploitation, but in a global arrangement.’
In fact, Chaudhuri’s different perspective is precisely what makes ‘Calcutta’ so engrossing, and so enrichingly unique. It’s not a travelogue, as such, and it could certainly not be classed as a form of autobiography. Chaudhuri uses his own experiences as the framework to gauge the health of a modern city which rose to prominence on fiery left-wing politics and culture, yet now finds those same qualities a hindrance as it flounders in the wake of a thrusting Mumbai and the seat of political power in Delhi.
Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta but brought up in what was then Bombay. He was educated in England and currently divides his time between Norwich – where he is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia – and Calcutta, a city to which he has returned in order to care for his ailing, ageing parents: an all-too-common occurrence in the city, according to Chaudhuri, who muses: ‘Bombay’s main preoccupation is money, and Delhi’s is power.. Calcutta’s preoccupation is, ‘will you be eating at home tonight?”
Chaudhuri ruminates on the gradual crumble of the city’s long-time leftist government, the influx of Italian eateries and chefs driven to make quick exits by what they see as the city’s culinary intransigence, and the way big money and western razzmattazz is eroding its traditional values: on the introduction of the Kolkata Knight Riders cricket team, Chaudhuri observes: ‘[Its] cheerleaders were met with grave reproach by both cricket purists and common-or-garden puritans, and then – as is the case with so much in Indian public life – lazily accepted and secretly looked forward to.’
Perhaps it is precisely that kind of inertia which has seen Calcutta slowly cede its power base to thrusting cities elsewhere. Chaudhuri’s story is very much one of a city whose best days have passed. And yet for all his evident concern for the direction in which the place he can no longer bring himself to love is heading, the gentle , evocative way in which Chaudhuri charts its slow decline makes the place, like the book itself, nothing short of beguiling.
September 14, 2017
In my opinion, we could have enjoyed reading this nine-topic book more if we had been familiar with some key political, social and linguistic contexts in which Calcutta was the focal point of the author's narration with interesting viewpoints and sense of humor. Notably, this hardcover's format presentation is finely designed due to its generous blanks between each subtopic marked by three rhombus-like shapes, thus, it was a bit relieving when I could pause for a while after, say, a lengthy debate of the mentioned issues there. In other words, it was all right to read and know some episodes related to the people living in the city provided that they were satisfactorily concise and inspiring to those having not been or visited Calcutta before as well.
Impressed by his fearlessly newly-coined adjectives, I found these excerpts wittily amusing:
In April 1999, almost as soon as my fellowship in Cambridge in England came to an end, I transferred what worldly possessions I couldn’t ship back to India – mainly studenty things, plates from a Latin American shop, posters, a CD player – into the damp New Court cellars at St John’s College. (p. 147)
Reviewing is often a form of thuggery in Anglophone India, territorial, threatening, a way of roughing somebody up; and the Books pages are a bit like a lawless part of a town, from which you have to be thankful to slip away with your writerly life – not to mention your dignity – intact. (pp. 147-148)
Or a few unthinkable adverbs, for instance:
The women come wearing saris meant for the journeys workward and then homeward later in the evening … (p. 256)
Incidentally, I would like to share some ideas and information on Bengali which is Greek to me. However, each Bengali word/phrase/line was clearly italicized so that I could compare it to some Thai words in which many words have adopted/adapted from Sanskrit (Their evolution in the Thai language is possibly worth writing an academic article or a dissertation). For instance, whenever I come across this word, "mrityu" (p. 227) and “danta” (p. 227), instantly I recall each of its Thai equivalent, "มฤตยู" (death), and “ทันต” (teeth) respectively. Furthermore, these Bengali words “manush” and “amanush” (p. 87) are the equivalents of “มนุษย์” and “อมนุษย์” in Thai.
Impressed by his fearlessly newly-coined adjectives, I found these excerpts wittily amusing:
In April 1999, almost as soon as my fellowship in Cambridge in England came to an end, I transferred what worldly possessions I couldn’t ship back to India – mainly studenty things, plates from a Latin American shop, posters, a CD player – into the damp New Court cellars at St John’s College. (p. 147)
Reviewing is often a form of thuggery in Anglophone India, territorial, threatening, a way of roughing somebody up; and the Books pages are a bit like a lawless part of a town, from which you have to be thankful to slip away with your writerly life – not to mention your dignity – intact. (pp. 147-148)
Or a few unthinkable adverbs, for instance:
The women come wearing saris meant for the journeys workward and then homeward later in the evening … (p. 256)
Incidentally, I would like to share some ideas and information on Bengali which is Greek to me. However, each Bengali word/phrase/line was clearly italicized so that I could compare it to some Thai words in which many words have adopted/adapted from Sanskrit (Their evolution in the Thai language is possibly worth writing an academic article or a dissertation). For instance, whenever I come across this word, "mrityu" (p. 227) and “danta” (p. 227), instantly I recall each of its Thai equivalent, "มฤตยู" (death), and “ทันต” (teeth) respectively. Furthermore, these Bengali words “manush” and “amanush” (p. 87) are the equivalents of “มนุษย์” and “อมนุษย์” in Thai.
dnf
June 22, 2019I gave it 50 pages, and have given up on it for now.
Perhaps it is a case of the wrong book at the wrong time, but it is just too slow for me. The blurb states "author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women." which is accurate - the writing is very good, but it may be too subtle and slow for me to get hold of - perhaps in general, but perhaps just for now.
Perhaps it is a case of the wrong book at the wrong time, but it is just too slow for me. The blurb states "author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women." which is accurate - the writing is very good, but it may be too subtle and slow for me to get hold of - perhaps in general, but perhaps just for now.
June 9, 2013
In the course of many an idle day dream, I have wondered how it would be to write about Trivandrum from a different point of view. The term different here needs to be qualified as : One tempered by extended time of living in a different part of the world and coming back to stare with wonderment, consternation and nostalgia at the place of one's early years. The tone of this book is along these lines but the backdrop is not Kerala, it is a place that has attracted and irritated me in equal measure : Calcutta. I have written in quite a bit of detail about this wonderful place in my review for Dan Simmon's Song of Kali and I do not intend to repeat it here. But while Simmon's captures Kolkata in cinematic ambience, Chaudhuri does so in the stark shades of a documentary.
The author looks at the city through various lenses : politics, the impact of globalization, the fall from grace of the intellectual class, the Indian renaissance, plight of the working class to name a few. To know about the history of politics in Kolkata and Kerala is to know about the history of the Communist Party in India. The rise and fall of this ideology can be captured by looking at the way these states have been built and unbuilt over the decades. The adeptness and control that Chaudhuri displays in his writing is captured well here when he looks at the transition of power from the Communist party to the Trinamool Congress in Benagal through the eyes of the working class. From politics we move to the mark that globalization has made in this sprawling city. I saw this first hand when to one side of the road was a deteriorating shamble of ramshackle slums while the other side sported a swanky, glittering shopping mall. Yes, it is a city of contradictions and has every ingredient to surprise a first time entrant. The Bengali's love for food, music and literature are touched upon in quite vivid detail and peppered by personal anecdotes. What touched me most was the story of the couple Anita Roy and Samir Mukherjee who hail from a high borne family ( think Boston Brahmins ) and who with the passage of time deteriorate slowly to a middle class life with admirable dignity. Chaudhuri captures this change in life extremely well and to me it constituted some of the best written passages in the book.
All considered, it is a thougtful, playful and at times scathing book about India's first metropolis. I would recommend this strongly if you have been to Kolkata at least once !
The author looks at the city through various lenses : politics, the impact of globalization, the fall from grace of the intellectual class, the Indian renaissance, plight of the working class to name a few. To know about the history of politics in Kolkata and Kerala is to know about the history of the Communist Party in India. The rise and fall of this ideology can be captured by looking at the way these states have been built and unbuilt over the decades. The adeptness and control that Chaudhuri displays in his writing is captured well here when he looks at the transition of power from the Communist party to the Trinamool Congress in Benagal through the eyes of the working class. From politics we move to the mark that globalization has made in this sprawling city. I saw this first hand when to one side of the road was a deteriorating shamble of ramshackle slums while the other side sported a swanky, glittering shopping mall. Yes, it is a city of contradictions and has every ingredient to surprise a first time entrant. The Bengali's love for food, music and literature are touched upon in quite vivid detail and peppered by personal anecdotes. What touched me most was the story of the couple Anita Roy and Samir Mukherjee who hail from a high borne family ( think Boston Brahmins ) and who with the passage of time deteriorate slowly to a middle class life with admirable dignity. Chaudhuri captures this change in life extremely well and to me it constituted some of the best written passages in the book.
All considered, it is a thougtful, playful and at times scathing book about India's first metropolis. I would recommend this strongly if you have been to Kolkata at least once !
February 13, 2013
I found this recently released book at a shop in Fulham, London. As I read the first chapters, I found myself on a nostalgic trip to Calcultta - a city that was British Empire's capital until 1911 - the metropolis now dilapidated that once shaped India's modern national identity. Without its artists, philosophers, scientists and social-reformers the modern India as we know today would have never existed.
This period of Renaissance however was neither complete nor strong enough to survive in modern India. The vast swathes of uncivilized Orient - the rural India that "Renaissance" thinkers represented have been excluded from "new" India and are reduced to extreme poverty, humiliated because of their funny tongues while Indian nationalists hypocritically embrace a history belonging to this wretched hinterland. Reading the book, it is unfortunate to see, as I had in my own trip to Calcutta, that the city which we know of in the books had somehow vanished. The dilapidation of its colonial buildings is not the kind you see in Italy or South America, probably a deeper decay and withdrawal from these colonial artifacts had taken place.
Mr Chaudhari’s accounts are beautiful not for the social commentary, nor for the fluid economic history he tells us but for the character sketches of derelict Calcutta - its people (esp the Ingabanga community) and its colonial buildings. He talks repeatedly of the connection of a city with its rural outskirts that its life rested upon. However imperfectly, the paraphernalia of British Empire - its clerks, officials and colonial buildings - communicated with the world around Calcutta. This is the relationship celebrated in the best of Bengali literature and was crucial in the making of Bengal's aristocracy - an elite that after much turmoil chose the communist ideals over the rest and was then crushed mercilessly by India’s central government. Bengalis had no history, Mr Chaudhari quotes, they had built it all during the relationship with the British in the empire. With the departure of British and that of the industries they had built, all sorts of connections with the world around the city were severed.
However, politics is hardly the subject that the book concerns itself with. Mr Chaudhuri talks only of the aftermath of politics in Calcutta's culture, commenting on the heavy costs that Calcutta has paid in its battle to preserve the connection with its outer world - a battle which it has finally lost. The modern poverty of Calcutta is indeed the unfortunate unwinding of this disconnection. In a somewhat magical fashion he reminds us that none of us are living in a world too different from Calcutta. We've all witnessed a sort of aftermath of globalization - towns of great histories reduces to obsoletion, and merged into of a world flattened by supermarkets and chains connected only through highways and internet.
Chaudhari finds that a sort of disconnection is what globalization is selling to all of us. He talks at length with Italian chefs - about Italy and failure of Italian food in Calcutta. Urban Indians don’t appreciate fresh olives and tomatoes, a restaurant owner points out to him, because they want to spend on something further away from them. Would the property boom in Calcutta preserve the sense of colonial architecture? Would India’s consumerism savor a local cheese? Is there a more serious aftermath of such a disconnection still waiting to occur? I was left with many such questions after reading the book.
The book is going to be divisive but it is the kind of book that modern India desperately needs. I myself found the book a bit devastating but was relieved to observe that Mr Chaudhuri’s writings don’t package the mysticism and Bollywood pomp that most Indian writing survives upon. For those reasons this may not be the ideal travel book on Calcutta but the poignant realism of Chaudhari’s writings seems a far better technique to understand India than what books on India generally seem to employ.
This period of Renaissance however was neither complete nor strong enough to survive in modern India. The vast swathes of uncivilized Orient - the rural India that "Renaissance" thinkers represented have been excluded from "new" India and are reduced to extreme poverty, humiliated because of their funny tongues while Indian nationalists hypocritically embrace a history belonging to this wretched hinterland. Reading the book, it is unfortunate to see, as I had in my own trip to Calcutta, that the city which we know of in the books had somehow vanished. The dilapidation of its colonial buildings is not the kind you see in Italy or South America, probably a deeper decay and withdrawal from these colonial artifacts had taken place.
Mr Chaudhari’s accounts are beautiful not for the social commentary, nor for the fluid economic history he tells us but for the character sketches of derelict Calcutta - its people (esp the Ingabanga community) and its colonial buildings. He talks repeatedly of the connection of a city with its rural outskirts that its life rested upon. However imperfectly, the paraphernalia of British Empire - its clerks, officials and colonial buildings - communicated with the world around Calcutta. This is the relationship celebrated in the best of Bengali literature and was crucial in the making of Bengal's aristocracy - an elite that after much turmoil chose the communist ideals over the rest and was then crushed mercilessly by India’s central government. Bengalis had no history, Mr Chaudhari quotes, they had built it all during the relationship with the British in the empire. With the departure of British and that of the industries they had built, all sorts of connections with the world around the city were severed.
However, politics is hardly the subject that the book concerns itself with. Mr Chaudhuri talks only of the aftermath of politics in Calcutta's culture, commenting on the heavy costs that Calcutta has paid in its battle to preserve the connection with its outer world - a battle which it has finally lost. The modern poverty of Calcutta is indeed the unfortunate unwinding of this disconnection. In a somewhat magical fashion he reminds us that none of us are living in a world too different from Calcutta. We've all witnessed a sort of aftermath of globalization - towns of great histories reduces to obsoletion, and merged into of a world flattened by supermarkets and chains connected only through highways and internet.
Chaudhari finds that a sort of disconnection is what globalization is selling to all of us. He talks at length with Italian chefs - about Italy and failure of Italian food in Calcutta. Urban Indians don’t appreciate fresh olives and tomatoes, a restaurant owner points out to him, because they want to spend on something further away from them. Would the property boom in Calcutta preserve the sense of colonial architecture? Would India’s consumerism savor a local cheese? Is there a more serious aftermath of such a disconnection still waiting to occur? I was left with many such questions after reading the book.
The book is going to be divisive but it is the kind of book that modern India desperately needs. I myself found the book a bit devastating but was relieved to observe that Mr Chaudhuri’s writings don’t package the mysticism and Bollywood pomp that most Indian writing survives upon. For those reasons this may not be the ideal travel book on Calcutta but the poignant realism of Chaudhari’s writings seems a far better technique to understand India than what books on India generally seem to employ.
December 11, 2015
A bit of a frustrating experience at first as you try to figure out what Chauduri's up to and wait in vain for him to come to the point. And yet as you read on you find yourself getting comfortable with those digressions, bits of dialogue, name dropping and nostalgia about his cousin's puja annuals (he mentions them three times!). As Blue says so well he is a mood-setter and not a plot-mover. Keep that in mind and you'll be fine.
Before reading this I'd been to Italy and had been reading a few novels in translation. I had thought it was finally time to read about something else but it was not so easy to move on since Calcutta includes many references to Italian literature (Bassani, Levi) as well as a whole chapter devoted to interviewing a transplanted Italian chef! On the topic of similarities between Italians and Bengalis there's this: “Family oriented, cost oriented— they are not into spending too much.” Another similarity he mentions in passing, both languages have formal second person pronouns: aapni in Bengali and lei in Italian.
Before reading this I'd been to Italy and had been reading a few novels in translation. I had thought it was finally time to read about something else but it was not so easy to move on since Calcutta includes many references to Italian literature (Bassani, Levi) as well as a whole chapter devoted to interviewing a transplanted Italian chef! On the topic of similarities between Italians and Bengalis there's this: “Family oriented, cost oriented— they are not into spending too much.” Another similarity he mentions in passing, both languages have formal second person pronouns: aapni in Bengali and lei in Italian.
November 7, 2024
4.5/5
All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.This is a book that has parts that are full fathom five stars and others that are a measly two. However, the former occupies around 85% of the page real estate, so the balance definitively veers towards a more adulatory appreciation. It's not something I would have expected going into this book: more pressing than the low rating was my own autodidactic relationship with South Asia, where I'll happily read an out of the way biography of Rabindranath Tagore but be completely out of touch with any of the well vetted, authentic works of nonfiction that have come out of the area in the last five years. My knowledge, than, is piecemeal, and Chaudhuri spends little time on anyone who doesn't have a baseline familiarity with both 19th c. Bengal culture and early 2010s global neoliberalism. In some ways, you could easily call him a snob, as while his education and his social circles certainly allude to a fair amount of trust fund-esque fiscal stability, his cavalier namedropping and fine dining hobnobbing are as emphatically elitist as they are meant to be. And yet? And yet.
"Indians don't like fresh olives," says chef Mukherjee, making it pretty clear he doesn't like them himself. "They're extremely salty." Briefly at a loss, he breaks into Bengali—"Ki rokom ekta kash achhe na?" ("Don't you think they have an acidic aftertaste?") It's an aside: as if we are sharing a little-conceded but incontrovertibly plain fact.The yet is the analytically vast viewpoint the author takes of the sometimes delicious, sometimes horrific, always provoking integration/contortion/parasitism of 'East' with 'West', a thought process that takes in the 18th century as easily as it does 2011 and has forever enhanced the way I wrangle with that side of the world, both in the deep history and the portending future. There's also Chaudhuri's willingness to traverse the class strata in both directions in order to talk about Calcutta, which doesn't wholly save him from being an absolute prat at times about certain less than upper class-shored up demographics, but does force him to candidly acknowledge his privilege while musing on the colonial/postcolonial structures that unevenly distributes said privileges to this day. It's grim at times, but such moments tended to enhance the pleasure of the rest of it, as it reassured my paranoid brain that, yes, certain less Michelin-star-rated realities were being acknowledged alongside the 21st century glitz and glamor. Also, did I mention how funny Chaudhuri can be? It's the sort of dry borderline skeletal humor that requires a healthy dose of knowledge and an appreciation for biting wit, which explains my lack of enthusiasm for most of comedy and perhaps this work's low rating.
I was struck that it was possible to have a brief exchange on the role of the writer approximately twelve hours before what people had once predicted would surely be a violent election.All in all, if you aren't a white English major with aspirations towards historical/political knowhow who grew up in an area of the US where the schools' student bodies are around 50%-80% East/South Asian, there's a high chance this won't be your cup of tea. I personally would've given this five stars if the last section hadn't been so lacking in quality both in writing and in tone, so it obviously worked for me. Not sure I could handle the author in fiction where there's less of a need to demonstrate the thinking that I so adored here, but never say never, especially with this promising of a start.
And Calcutta would make its way back to me, unexpectedly, through Irish literature and Mansfield and Eudora Welty and the writing of the American South.
Whoever devised the six Indian seasons took into account this nuance and play; they knew the year, like a day, is not only a progression, a movement from one phase to another, but a passage through echoes, reminiscences, and expectation, through intermediary periods that recall one another, as dusk and twilight do in the day's twelve hours.
July 25, 2013
I have never read Amit Chaudhuri's novels, but I can see that he is not a plot-mover; he is rather a mood-setter. Even in his essays about Calcutta, or Kalkota, there is a strong sense of moods shifting, memories languidly slipping through time, objects standing still, and people observing; not much happens other than conversations. Chaudhuri is at times an eager journalist, doggedly questioning everyone from Italian chefs (not to be confused with executive chefs!) to the very poor people who live on the streets. What I liked about most of his discourse is that he is not apologetic. He talks about "the help" and the difficulties of maintaining good help, the rocky relationship households have with the help, and never is he apologetic about having help, nor is he unaware of the thousand and one ethical and moral issues that surround the facts of belonging to a class that employs such help. He tries endlessly to understand the classes, and the history of Calcutta that he dissects is very much the history of classes. Very much aware of his own class, he is fixated on the middle class, its past, its present, and its image. At times very funny, at times very insightful, and sometimes a bit bitter, he recounts his memories of Calcutta as well as his interviews and experiences living in the city between 2009 and 2011.
Chaudhuri writes very much like an academic, and as a result, some discourses are a bit too "academic" for a casual book of essays, especially his long discourses about modernity and modern Calcutta. However, his essays "Universal Suffrage," "High Tea," "Italians Abroad," and "Study Leave" capture a very good balance, and manage to almost entirely escape the lofty academic discourse in favor of the hilarious, curious, melancholic, and the present.
Recommended for those who like history, cosmopolitan cities, and the mysteries of the middle class.
Chaudhuri writes very much like an academic, and as a result, some discourses are a bit too "academic" for a casual book of essays, especially his long discourses about modernity and modern Calcutta. However, his essays "Universal Suffrage," "High Tea," "Italians Abroad," and "Study Leave" capture a very good balance, and manage to almost entirely escape the lofty academic discourse in favor of the hilarious, curious, melancholic, and the present.
Recommended for those who like history, cosmopolitan cities, and the mysteries of the middle class.
December 31, 2013
My first Amit Chaudhuri novel was 'A New World', a novel I didn't enjoy at all. But the author's reputation persuaded me to give him a second chance, as every reader should give a writer he isn't entirely convinced with the first time.
And I wasn't disappointed. Not at all.
The book starts slowly, slowly gathers pace, becomes terrific reading in the middle parts, and slows down again at the end. When I say slow down, I mean that the author deftly makes you, the reader pause to think and take it all in. It's very nicely done.
The ideas, landscapes and history he conjures up of this city aren't entirely describable, but it might suffice to say that Bengal's history is given ample space, and so is its literary tradition and legacy, of which the author himself is a part. I expected this, since the author is a highly acclaimed critic and teacher.
And Calcutta, well, what a city! I've always been enamored by it, and with my leftist leanings, have found cause to lament the decline and eventual fall of the last great bastion of the Reds. Amit Chaudhuri sets out to describe and explain the fallen city, and in doing so, gives us a kind of slow, meandering history lesson, which, I must say, are the best kind.
And I wasn't disappointed. Not at all.
The book starts slowly, slowly gathers pace, becomes terrific reading in the middle parts, and slows down again at the end. When I say slow down, I mean that the author deftly makes you, the reader pause to think and take it all in. It's very nicely done.
The ideas, landscapes and history he conjures up of this city aren't entirely describable, but it might suffice to say that Bengal's history is given ample space, and so is its literary tradition and legacy, of which the author himself is a part. I expected this, since the author is a highly acclaimed critic and teacher.
And Calcutta, well, what a city! I've always been enamored by it, and with my leftist leanings, have found cause to lament the decline and eventual fall of the last great bastion of the Reds. Amit Chaudhuri sets out to describe and explain the fallen city, and in doing so, gives us a kind of slow, meandering history lesson, which, I must say, are the best kind.
April 29, 2013
Globalisation has changed, and is changing, our cities beyond recognition. Because of our still colonial education, which downplays our past, most of us are not even aware of what is being lost. This finely wrought book is a kind of personal history of Calcutta, its people and its epiphanies. Amit Chaudhuri is clear that Calcutta, the grand city of Bengal Renaissance, colonial splendour and Marxist yearnings, is quite dead or only lives on in the memory of those from that time who are still among the living. While what is taking its place is not yet clear, it may yet turn into the hustlers' haven that it was in the early 19th century, with grand passions and striving thoughtlessly undone in quick time. An elegy in elegant prose, sung not through abstractions but in the narratives of the city's geography and architecture, and through the lives lived here, both past and present.
Read
August 18, 2015I am grateful for this book's existence. My future sister-in-law is from Calcutta and I was to learn about the city's culture. This book introduced me to the bhadrolok and the Bengali Renaissance. I read about Durga Puja and I learned that lots of Bengali names come from the word for light. I learned a bit about the geography of the city, and about how people interact with their servants. The prevalence of disease among the poor broke my heart.
On the other hand, the author is a terrible snob who drips scorn on the people around him. He labels Oxford, England a redneck town. He makes odd pronouncements about large swathes of people. He declares a wealthy friend does not live in reality because he is confused by Chaudhuri's aversion to spending time in Europe. The author assumes his friend enjoyed Europe due to the local luxuries. He cannot see that his friend's approach to life is valid (and much more agreeable). The irony is that the author occasionally betrays his own ignorance, which he would mock in anyone else. He discusses "continental cuisine," which he insists is full of made-up dishes you can't find on any continent. The example he serves up is chicken tetrazzini. Turkey tetrazzini is a dish Americans commonly make to use up Thanksgiving leftovers.
On the other hand, the author is a terrible snob who drips scorn on the people around him. He labels Oxford, England a redneck town. He makes odd pronouncements about large swathes of people. He declares a wealthy friend does not live in reality because he is confused by Chaudhuri's aversion to spending time in Europe. The author assumes his friend enjoyed Europe due to the local luxuries. He cannot see that his friend's approach to life is valid (and much more agreeable). The irony is that the author occasionally betrays his own ignorance, which he would mock in anyone else. He discusses "continental cuisine," which he insists is full of made-up dishes you can't find on any continent. The example he serves up is chicken tetrazzini. Turkey tetrazzini is a dish Americans commonly make to use up Thanksgiving leftovers.
September 12, 2020
I've been to India a few times, though never Calcutta. I would say if would help to have spent time in an Indian city to fully appreciate the book.
One of the strongest points made by the author has to do with the "old" Calcutta having pretty much disappeared around the time of the Kolkata renaming. As with many world cities, today there is basically a vestigial historical facade, but most of the territory consists of modern innovation. He was at his best when he portrayed examples of various residents, both wealthy and poor. I skimmed through the sections dealing directly with electoral politics which meant nothing really to me.
I would recommend the book for folks with a strong interest in Indian history (and politics!), but as a general interest reader, not so much.
One of the strongest points made by the author has to do with the "old" Calcutta having pretty much disappeared around the time of the Kolkata renaming. As with many world cities, today there is basically a vestigial historical facade, but most of the territory consists of modern innovation. He was at his best when he portrayed examples of various residents, both wealthy and poor. I skimmed through the sections dealing directly with electoral politics which meant nothing really to me.
I would recommend the book for folks with a strong interest in Indian history (and politics!), but as a general interest reader, not so much.
July 24, 2016
I tried. I ordered a used copy of this book, hoping it would provide (as per the jacket) a 'intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta', a city about which I'd love to learn more. Instead, it offers a kind of peevish memoir, full of uncharitable sketches of people the author has met at various stages of his life. This might be of great interest to someone who has read Chaudhuri's fiction and wants insight into the author himself, but it doesn't fit the bill as an introduction to, or history or social analysis of, Calcutta. Having made it through six of the nine chapters, I've moved on to other books.
October 29, 2018
It should have been either funnier or meaner
December 28, 2019
This book is full of masterful essays, rich in language and intellect. I now really want to re-visit Calcutta and eat at Flurys and write a similar book about my Mumbai.
April 20, 2021
Lacks grit. Maybe wrong time to read it.
March 30, 2022
I read Chaudhuri’s last book back in 2017 and fell in love with his writing. Since then all his other books, including this one, had been on my mind but I never got around them. Finally, with the need to read more on my city to further my research, I picked up this non-fiction, his ode of the city in which he hadn’t grown up but had grown to being attached with age. The book comprises nine chapters, each looking into the fabric that makes Calcutta what it is- from history to present (2011, when the book was written). I don’t think this book will interest those who do not know the city, or have not lived in the city for a year, at least. No wonder readers outside have left the book in between or gave it such a low rating. To me, I was into the book, into each chapter and I was waiting for Chaudhuri to roll his dice in a direction that’d make me see my city differently. Unfortunately, I felt his dice kept rolling in a direction that has been written and spoken repeatedly in sociology for years. All his chapters kept holding on to the debate of capitalism and liberalisation, or Kolkata destroying the ‘real’ (traditional) Calcutta. The question is whose city is this Calcutta? Is it the Bengalis? Bengali UCs? Lower Castes? Muslims? Leftists? Bihari migrants? Marwaris? Somehow in mourning the death of the Calcutta he had seen on his visit as a child, he misses out in answering this question because he describes each one of these communities and their histories but ends his chapters often at a cul-de-sac. One thing I really liked about this book was the non-romanticisation of the city. I think the city’s ugliness, poverty and limitations are often garbed under the veil of the emotional, romantic nature of the city. Mostly it’s done by those who have consciously left the city, and those who live in the city and want to give it some credit for being unable to move out. This self-serving romanticism is intolerable and I liked how Chaudhuri has highlighted this. I wish I could say I loved the book because I really wanted to when I read the premise but the alienated nature of his writing failed to make me fall in love with it. I’d recommend this book to you if you are interested in Kolkata, its history and the change it has witnessed both politically and culturally. I like his fiction more though.
April 29, 2013
Just after this book was released, I heard Amit Chaudhury talk about his years in Calcutta, first when he used to spend his childhood vacations and then when he stayed there for two years. I got fascinated and bought the book. He beautifully describes his two years (2009-2011) in the city, after living in Bombay and London, in first person.
Not only has he mentioned about the famous places of Calcutta like the Park Street, Flurys, New Market, Mocambo, Oxford Book Store, the clubs and Melody, he has also touched on various topics like the homeless, the migrants from adjoining states, the domestic helps, watchmen and people who run small establishments like Ramayan Shah of Chandan Hotel on Free School Street. He talks about the lengths at which he went to purchase a Green French Window (karkharis) from a derelict house. In one of the chapters, he has mentioned about the political scenario in the city. In High Tea, he talks about the lives of Samir and Anita Mukherjee and the exquisite sandwiches they serve at high tea. In Italians Abroad, a chef tells him, “The Indians want things prepared in their way. It was too much for the Italians to take. It drove them mad”, which is an exact description of a chef at a restaurant being told how to cook a particular thing.
I particularly liked Study Leave possibly because it had described Durga Puja and its preparations in the paras, and the stories that surround the Puja. He even mentions about his family, how he wants his daughter to have a Calcutta childhood. He has very beautifully described the bond between the grandfather and the granddaughter.
The green French windows are so Calcutta. His description of Park Street, Flurys, New Market made me feel very nostalgic. I remembered Flury’s (famous confectionery on Park Street) pastries, the Chinese shoe shops in New Market and bookstores on College Street.
The simple language that he has used in the book has made it more interesting. His use of words like Ingabanga (Anglo-Bengalis), Marwaris, bhadralok, conti (continental), makes the book more interesting. Using suffixes like da and di, in the traditional way, makes us relate to the characters more. Bengali terms like keu ache, mojor chehra, have made it more enjoyable.
There are parts of the book that I liked much and at places felt that he was very cynical about certain things. More like a thesis. Overall, a nice book, but the icing on the cake is the cover, the pink colour is very attractive, it actually makes anyone pick the book off a shelf and read it.
Not only has he mentioned about the famous places of Calcutta like the Park Street, Flurys, New Market, Mocambo, Oxford Book Store, the clubs and Melody, he has also touched on various topics like the homeless, the migrants from adjoining states, the domestic helps, watchmen and people who run small establishments like Ramayan Shah of Chandan Hotel on Free School Street. He talks about the lengths at which he went to purchase a Green French Window (karkharis) from a derelict house. In one of the chapters, he has mentioned about the political scenario in the city. In High Tea, he talks about the lives of Samir and Anita Mukherjee and the exquisite sandwiches they serve at high tea. In Italians Abroad, a chef tells him, “The Indians want things prepared in their way. It was too much for the Italians to take. It drove them mad”, which is an exact description of a chef at a restaurant being told how to cook a particular thing.
I particularly liked Study Leave possibly because it had described Durga Puja and its preparations in the paras, and the stories that surround the Puja. He even mentions about his family, how he wants his daughter to have a Calcutta childhood. He has very beautifully described the bond between the grandfather and the granddaughter.
The green French windows are so Calcutta. His description of Park Street, Flurys, New Market made me feel very nostalgic. I remembered Flury’s (famous confectionery on Park Street) pastries, the Chinese shoe shops in New Market and bookstores on College Street.
The simple language that he has used in the book has made it more interesting. His use of words like Ingabanga (Anglo-Bengalis), Marwaris, bhadralok, conti (continental), makes the book more interesting. Using suffixes like da and di, in the traditional way, makes us relate to the characters more. Bengali terms like keu ache, mojor chehra, have made it more enjoyable.
There are parts of the book that I liked much and at places felt that he was very cynical about certain things. More like a thesis. Overall, a nice book, but the icing on the cake is the cover, the pink colour is very attractive, it actually makes anyone pick the book off a shelf and read it.
April 28, 2018
This book came to me very serendipitously. I had walked into the Oxford book store on Park Street looking for a book on Kolkata,not a detached historical narrative but more of a novel of manners. Kolkata is where I was born and has played a large role in my childhood memories.After some 16 odd years I had reconnected with the city and was ready to take off my rose tinted,foggy with nostalgia glasses and rediscover it as an adult.
Amit Chaudhuri moves to Calcutta in 1999 and ' Calcutta - 2 years in the city' is a bricolage of a novel with essays created through a series of intense conversations had with citizens from diverse walks of life to understand the irreparable change to his beloved city of childhood memories.
The essays oscillate between bewitching details (a whole chapter on the ubiquitous slatted windows!)to unraveling how present day Calcutta (he refuses to call it Kolkata) "a hazy provincial metropolis" is still living under the shadow of the great Bengal Renaissance without really being bothered to continue the legacy and is in the throes of finding a new brash identity. His voice as a harsh critic comes across as jarring as it is too far removed from the sensitive and nuanced voice which is an absolute pleasure to read.
I had read an excerpt from his novel 'A Strange and Sublime Address' which was one the most enchanting narratives I had read about spending your childhood vacays in the city. He is absolutely right when ( speaking on a childhood in Kolkata ) "It's a city that lends itself to make- believe,if you are open to make-believe and to the kind of illusions precious to children" and goes on to say that it has "ample space for day dreaming".
The biggest let downs were a) his perspective of the socio-economic landscape and the effects of globalisation on the city.He strives to understand the aspirations of the people of the street and of modern Kolkata but there is a dissonance and those chapters get too pedantic. b) He packs too much information in a chapter making the read a bit ponderous.
I am glad I read the book though, there are some incredible bits on the "Ingabanga" ( Blue blooded Bengali Elite families ) ,the fabulous 19th century satirical poet Ishwar Gupta, the siren call of Park Street on Christmas, the chant for 'Paribartan' (change) which defeated the Left Front and brought in Trinamool Congress,the allure of North Calcutta and many more vignettes from this city of myth and mystery.
Amit Chaudhuri moves to Calcutta in 1999 and ' Calcutta - 2 years in the city' is a bricolage of a novel with essays created through a series of intense conversations had with citizens from diverse walks of life to understand the irreparable change to his beloved city of childhood memories.
The essays oscillate between bewitching details (a whole chapter on the ubiquitous slatted windows!)to unraveling how present day Calcutta (he refuses to call it Kolkata) "a hazy provincial metropolis" is still living under the shadow of the great Bengal Renaissance without really being bothered to continue the legacy and is in the throes of finding a new brash identity. His voice as a harsh critic comes across as jarring as it is too far removed from the sensitive and nuanced voice which is an absolute pleasure to read.
I had read an excerpt from his novel 'A Strange and Sublime Address' which was one the most enchanting narratives I had read about spending your childhood vacays in the city. He is absolutely right when ( speaking on a childhood in Kolkata ) "It's a city that lends itself to make- believe,if you are open to make-believe and to the kind of illusions precious to children" and goes on to say that it has "ample space for day dreaming".
The biggest let downs were a) his perspective of the socio-economic landscape and the effects of globalisation on the city.He strives to understand the aspirations of the people of the street and of modern Kolkata but there is a dissonance and those chapters get too pedantic. b) He packs too much information in a chapter making the read a bit ponderous.
I am glad I read the book though, there are some incredible bits on the "Ingabanga" ( Blue blooded Bengali Elite families ) ,the fabulous 19th century satirical poet Ishwar Gupta, the siren call of Park Street on Christmas, the chant for 'Paribartan' (change) which defeated the Left Front and brought in Trinamool Congress,the allure of North Calcutta and many more vignettes from this city of myth and mystery.
August 18, 2017
Calcutta: Two Years in a City, Amit Chaudhuri
In 1903, Lord Curzon, the man who proposed to partition Bengal, wrote: "Calcutta is in reality a European city set down upon Asiatic soil, and that it is a monument – in my opinion one of the most striking extant monuments, for it is the second city to London in the entire British Empire – to the energy and achievements of our race." The British empire no longer exists and Curzon's Calcutta has metamorphosed itself into Kolkata-a city that has slowly embraced modernity with a strange longing for its past. The past, as Chaudhuri perceives, injects the necessary vitality and life in present day Kolkata. But the past is not the present. Perhaps this inspires the homeless woman in the opening section of the book to comment, "We may be beggars but we aren't mad". Chaudhuri more often than not goes begging and collects, in the process, the multifarious responses of citizens who have made Calcutta their home. The paths of Park Street, Mirza Galib Street, Esplanade, Gariahat and Ballygunj become his hunting ground from where he gathers memories of people who have conditioned themselves with the mixture of unpredictability and hopelessness of an urban city. On the one hand, Chaudhuri delineates the gradual fall of the Left Front government and on the other, focuses on the growing eccentricities of the shopping complexes and malls. He is seen spending time, interviewing people from the pavements of Calcutta; at the same time, he devotes a considerable part of the book to the quintessential Bengali bhadralok couple of Samir and Anita Mukherjee. To portray the self-renewing milieu of the city, Chaudhuri resorts to describing the restaurants of Calcutta. His exact detailing of the foods that he had tasted, and the breeding of new 'modern' restaurants where often he confronts disappointment in the dining table coalesce to qualify his argument that a city which changes continuously survives well.
Chaudhuri is a good writer but not a powerful one. At times, his episodes are too prosaic to leave an impression. One is left gnawing at the bits of brilliance presented suddenly in a paragraph.
After all, if you want to know Calcutta, you have to spend a little more than two years.
It is a city that you fall in love with. It is also the city that loves you back. Chaudhuri's romanticism seems unrequited, otherwise.
In 1903, Lord Curzon, the man who proposed to partition Bengal, wrote: "Calcutta is in reality a European city set down upon Asiatic soil, and that it is a monument – in my opinion one of the most striking extant monuments, for it is the second city to London in the entire British Empire – to the energy and achievements of our race." The British empire no longer exists and Curzon's Calcutta has metamorphosed itself into Kolkata-a city that has slowly embraced modernity with a strange longing for its past. The past, as Chaudhuri perceives, injects the necessary vitality and life in present day Kolkata. But the past is not the present. Perhaps this inspires the homeless woman in the opening section of the book to comment, "We may be beggars but we aren't mad". Chaudhuri more often than not goes begging and collects, in the process, the multifarious responses of citizens who have made Calcutta their home. The paths of Park Street, Mirza Galib Street, Esplanade, Gariahat and Ballygunj become his hunting ground from where he gathers memories of people who have conditioned themselves with the mixture of unpredictability and hopelessness of an urban city. On the one hand, Chaudhuri delineates the gradual fall of the Left Front government and on the other, focuses on the growing eccentricities of the shopping complexes and malls. He is seen spending time, interviewing people from the pavements of Calcutta; at the same time, he devotes a considerable part of the book to the quintessential Bengali bhadralok couple of Samir and Anita Mukherjee. To portray the self-renewing milieu of the city, Chaudhuri resorts to describing the restaurants of Calcutta. His exact detailing of the foods that he had tasted, and the breeding of new 'modern' restaurants where often he confronts disappointment in the dining table coalesce to qualify his argument that a city which changes continuously survives well.
Chaudhuri is a good writer but not a powerful one. At times, his episodes are too prosaic to leave an impression. One is left gnawing at the bits of brilliance presented suddenly in a paragraph.
After all, if you want to know Calcutta, you have to spend a little more than two years.
It is a city that you fall in love with. It is also the city that loves you back. Chaudhuri's romanticism seems unrequited, otherwise.
August 11, 2025
The writing felt like a stream of consciousness, moving from italian chefs in Calcutta to the problem of having a consistent kajer lok (domestic help). This book is not for people who have not lived in the city. It is not a portrait of the city. Instead it offers moments of solace and reminiscence. The author is very self-awareness, especially of his class position, and doesn't bore you with unnecessary pretence of being able to know what an urban poor feels about the city. I particularly liked the way he has integrated his random inklings (it doesn't feel like random at all).
Overall, a good memoir for someone who knows the city and is willing to join the author in his discovery of the city.
Overall, a good memoir for someone who knows the city and is willing to join the author in his discovery of the city.
February 23, 2019
I absolutely loved this book -- and you can tell Mr Chaudhuri loved writing it. This is the second book on Calcutta/Kolkata this year, and it's full of the depth, nuance, and insight I want to see in any book about a metropolis. Highly recommended for anybody with connection to or interest in this incredible -- and often very misunderstood -- city.
May 20, 2024
***
This is not a travel book but a deeply personal exploration of Kolkata. If you've had an experience of Kolkata that’s even fleetingly similar, you’ll enjoy it. It will make you smile and frown and sigh, sometimes all at once. If Kolkata is foreign to you, the book will feel unfamiliar.
***
It feels surreal to be able to transpose so many of Amit Chaudhuri’s deeply personal experiences of rediscovering the city of his youth straight onto my own. I envy Chaudhuri for having had his experience of rediscovery with this strangely enigmatic city. I also thank him for providing me with the perfect blueprint for charting my own path back towards it.
I grew up in cities distinctly different to Calcutta, both in pace of progress and lack of character and like Chaudhuri, I’d only ‘encountered Calcutta during the summer and winter holidays — as a place of freedom from school and as a realm of childish anarchy.’ He speaks of not being able to connect with the city in an emotional and intellectual way and I partially understand. For me, being in Calcutta meant being on a continuous activity rollercoaster, shuttling between Dadubhai/Amma (paternal grandparents) and Bua/Mimi (maternal grandparents). I did not know when or why things were happening and I don’t think I cared. The adults would take care of the practicalities and all I had to do was eat and be merry. There was no space or need for intellectual exploration here. This was 100% emotional.
For someone with such similar experiences, albeit generationally spread apart, Chaudhury does a wonderfully uncanny job of pulling out images from the deepest recesses of my childhood memory. The green, slatted French windows, so quintessential to older Calcutta buildings, were everywhere in the house my Dadubhai & Amma lived in and where I spent half of my holidays. In my mind, these windows were Calcutta itself and even today, whenever I encounter similar windows, be it in a sleepy town in the south of France or in a derelict building on a forgotten Caribbean island, it takes me back to late afternoon naps in Dadubhai’s house. Chaudhuri himself seems to have been so enamored by these windows or what they represented that he goes to great lengths to recover a few from a freshly demolished South Calcutta house to display in his apartment. He manages to play some apartment tetris and find a place for them that is ‘always in shadow and obscured by an inner door’, the disembodied symbol of an old Calcutta, waiting for a visitor to notice.
Chaudhuri of course comes back to Calcutta in the middle of the historic 2011 West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections where the Left Front government, ruling for the last 34years was uprooted by the up-and-coming Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by Mamata Banerjee. The opinions and reactions of many characters in the city, from politicians to street-vendors to foreign chefs are all captured in a time-capsule of this historic moment. Ironically, the same frustratingly trite state of affairs that he describes the city being in right before the power change seems to be repeating itself with TMC now having been in power for 13yrs. Stagnation in Kolkata seems not to take any sides.
Chaudhuri’s recollection of his Mini and Shanti Mashi coming to his Uncle’s house with a pot of Bhim Nag yoghurt, as if in a rehearsed dance, with the expectation of doing this many more times in the future, yet again feels like something very personal. I cannot recall when the last time was that I was sitting at the dining room table with Bua and someone came in with a pot of mishti doi that I couldn’t wait to dig into. There must have been a last time but the lack of awareness is the irony.
William Dalrymple writes of Delhi as the City of Djinns, but some Djinns are personal, and mine are likely sitting somewhere on the Metro between Dumdum Cantonment and Masterda Surya Sen. Chaudhuri has brought many of these Djinns to life with his excellent exploration of a city in flux. The magnificent heyday of where it came from, we all know, but where it is ultimately going is the answer we’re all searching for. For now, there are many metro lines still to be built.
This is not a travel book but a deeply personal exploration of Kolkata. If you've had an experience of Kolkata that’s even fleetingly similar, you’ll enjoy it. It will make you smile and frown and sigh, sometimes all at once. If Kolkata is foreign to you, the book will feel unfamiliar.
***
It feels surreal to be able to transpose so many of Amit Chaudhuri’s deeply personal experiences of rediscovering the city of his youth straight onto my own. I envy Chaudhuri for having had his experience of rediscovery with this strangely enigmatic city. I also thank him for providing me with the perfect blueprint for charting my own path back towards it.
I grew up in cities distinctly different to Calcutta, both in pace of progress and lack of character and like Chaudhuri, I’d only ‘encountered Calcutta during the summer and winter holidays — as a place of freedom from school and as a realm of childish anarchy.’ He speaks of not being able to connect with the city in an emotional and intellectual way and I partially understand. For me, being in Calcutta meant being on a continuous activity rollercoaster, shuttling between Dadubhai/Amma (paternal grandparents) and Bua/Mimi (maternal grandparents). I did not know when or why things were happening and I don’t think I cared. The adults would take care of the practicalities and all I had to do was eat and be merry. There was no space or need for intellectual exploration here. This was 100% emotional.
For someone with such similar experiences, albeit generationally spread apart, Chaudhury does a wonderfully uncanny job of pulling out images from the deepest recesses of my childhood memory. The green, slatted French windows, so quintessential to older Calcutta buildings, were everywhere in the house my Dadubhai & Amma lived in and where I spent half of my holidays. In my mind, these windows were Calcutta itself and even today, whenever I encounter similar windows, be it in a sleepy town in the south of France or in a derelict building on a forgotten Caribbean island, it takes me back to late afternoon naps in Dadubhai’s house. Chaudhuri himself seems to have been so enamored by these windows or what they represented that he goes to great lengths to recover a few from a freshly demolished South Calcutta house to display in his apartment. He manages to play some apartment tetris and find a place for them that is ‘always in shadow and obscured by an inner door’, the disembodied symbol of an old Calcutta, waiting for a visitor to notice.
Chaudhuri of course comes back to Calcutta in the middle of the historic 2011 West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections where the Left Front government, ruling for the last 34years was uprooted by the up-and-coming Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by Mamata Banerjee. The opinions and reactions of many characters in the city, from politicians to street-vendors to foreign chefs are all captured in a time-capsule of this historic moment. Ironically, the same frustratingly trite state of affairs that he describes the city being in right before the power change seems to be repeating itself with TMC now having been in power for 13yrs. Stagnation in Kolkata seems not to take any sides.
Chaudhuri’s recollection of his Mini and Shanti Mashi coming to his Uncle’s house with a pot of Bhim Nag yoghurt, as if in a rehearsed dance, with the expectation of doing this many more times in the future, yet again feels like something very personal. I cannot recall when the last time was that I was sitting at the dining room table with Bua and someone came in with a pot of mishti doi that I couldn’t wait to dig into. There must have been a last time but the lack of awareness is the irony.
William Dalrymple writes of Delhi as the City of Djinns, but some Djinns are personal, and mine are likely sitting somewhere on the Metro between Dumdum Cantonment and Masterda Surya Sen. Chaudhuri has brought many of these Djinns to life with his excellent exploration of a city in flux. The magnificent heyday of where it came from, we all know, but where it is ultimately going is the answer we’re all searching for. For now, there are many metro lines still to be built.
January 4, 2018
A mere 87 pages in and I'm moving on, perhaps to be given a second chance when I travel to Calcutta. While I have never read Chaudhuri's fiction, based on the awards he's received this book may be proof that it's very difficult to write both fiction and nonfiction well.
I generally enjoy observations of cities, narratives that give on a sense of place. That sense can be of daily life, history, architecture, smells, impressions; 87 pages in I have no sense of Calcutta. Perhaps a fault of my own imagination.
I find the writing pompous, not in the sense that it's through the lens of an upper middle-class author who clearly fancies himself as an academic. I'm an upper middle-class academic, and think my perspective is as legitimate as anyones. The problem is, if this makes sense, the observations are SO CLEARLY simply what's happening in the author's brain.........a pure description of this........prompted by his observations vs then translating those 'happenings' in a way that bring out the beauty and/or chaos and/or 'fill in the blank' of the city in a way that the reader feels it. Not to mention the plethora of references in the 3rd chapter greatly narrows the type of readers who have an inkling of understanding what he's getting at.
Disappointing.
I generally enjoy observations of cities, narratives that give on a sense of place. That sense can be of daily life, history, architecture, smells, impressions; 87 pages in I have no sense of Calcutta. Perhaps a fault of my own imagination.
I find the writing pompous, not in the sense that it's through the lens of an upper middle-class author who clearly fancies himself as an academic. I'm an upper middle-class academic, and think my perspective is as legitimate as anyones. The problem is, if this makes sense, the observations are SO CLEARLY simply what's happening in the author's brain.........a pure description of this........prompted by his observations vs then translating those 'happenings' in a way that bring out the beauty and/or chaos and/or 'fill in the blank' of the city in a way that the reader feels it. Not to mention the plethora of references in the 3rd chapter greatly narrows the type of readers who have an inkling of understanding what he's getting at.
Disappointing.
July 28, 2018
A haphazard beginning gradually settles into an enjoyable narrative about the city of Calcutta (or Kolkata as its spelled these days). The writer, Amit Chaudhuri, a descendant of Sylheti migrants to the city, was born in Calcutta but grew up in Bombay (Mumbai now) and got his education in England and holds a profession there as a teacher. He, therefore, always looks/looked at Calcutta as one would see a city in a holiday mood, a break from the regular, mundane features of life. He digresses repeatedly, sometimes the digressions obfuscating the original point somewhat. He talks of the Bengali nature - culinary habits, behavior patterns, politics, philosophy of life, the much-touted Bengal Renaissance, about domestic help etc. He remains ambivalent about whether he likes the city more than he dislikes many of its aspects. The look at the city is full of his nostalgic love for it - the good along with the bad. He comes out as a typical 'bhadralok' in the end with bits of snobbery looking down upon the alleged 'crudeness' of his forebears who had come from East Bengal. It could have been a shorter book.
February 1, 2021
I did not understand much. Maybe a few chapters? I understood the words but I could not really make sense of the pages. Why? I'm not sure myself. I find the writing style confusing.
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The book is about Chaudhuri's experiences living in Calcutta. He covered many things revolving his bourgeois existence. A lotttt of politics. Calcutta is one of the few places in India where the leftists are dominant. Also mentioned a lot are families. Rich families. Well-to-do famiilies. The one chapter I enjoyed is about the friends who were struggling financially but pretendee they were doing okay.
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2/5. I suppose it is an interesting book? If you are into Indian literature written in English, you would love this. I have always struggled with Indian writers. I find their writing styles to be so verbose and complex that I am unable to grasp what they are trying to say.
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The book is about Chaudhuri's experiences living in Calcutta. He covered many things revolving his bourgeois existence. A lotttt of politics. Calcutta is one of the few places in India where the leftists are dominant. Also mentioned a lot are families. Rich families. Well-to-do famiilies. The one chapter I enjoyed is about the friends who were struggling financially but pretendee they were doing okay.
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2/5. I suppose it is an interesting book? If you are into Indian literature written in English, you would love this. I have always struggled with Indian writers. I find their writing styles to be so verbose and complex that I am unable to grasp what they are trying to say.
January 6, 2019
Not everyone will like this book. I did. My reason, it brought back memories from childhood visits to my extended Bengali family and friends. The book read like the many socio-political conversations I overheard as the family 'elders' casually chatted (gup-shup) over some cha and shingara, everytime we visited India during the summer.
I dinged two starts because I found the book difficult to read with it's many digressions, some completely unrelated to the topic and others too ranty. Also, I don't think most people will relate to this book, you need to be from Calcutta or have some deep connection to its history and culture to appreciate this book.
I dinged two starts because I found the book difficult to read with it's many digressions, some completely unrelated to the topic and others too ranty. Also, I don't think most people will relate to this book, you need to be from Calcutta or have some deep connection to its history and culture to appreciate this book.
February 8, 2020
This is a well written and interesting account of the author's perceptions of the Calcutta that he remembers from his youth and that he sees now from both the inside and as an outsider. Some portions of the book were more interesting than others and some of his stories seem to be forced, but it never reached a point where I lost interest. I'm somewhat unclear as what his intent was in writing this book, however, and it seemed that he seemed to change purposes a few times as the book progressed. Regardless, it is an interesting portrait of a city, a (few groups of) people, and culture in general.
February 21, 2024
He's such a knowledgeable writer, but unless it intersects with what you are interested in, it goes over the head or is missed in the reading. But when he gets on a string and connects, his writing is terrific. I read about everything I can on Calcutta, and I like that he doesn't hold back, even if its a trivial opinion that might get shot down, why not put it down. And I agree about what he says about saying only Calcutta in English, that Kolkata is for Bengali, I wouldn't say it any other way.
November 22, 2017
A refreshing view of Calcutta
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