Calcutta
Amit Chaudhuri
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0307454665
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this vividly drawn and deeply personal portrait, acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri chronicles the two years he spent revisiting Calcutta, the city of his birth. A mesmerizing narrative, the book takes readers into the heart of a metropolis relatively resistant to the currents of globalization. Moving through the city’s vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways, Chaudhuri introduces us to the homeless and the high society, describes its architecture and food, its sounds and smells, and its past and present politics. With rare candor and clarity, he combines memoir, reportage, and history to evoke all that is most particular and extraordinary about the city—and to explain his own passionate attachment to the place and its people.
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Have missed him when he descended into the melee. He handed us two pink cards. We proceeded a few steps to the small lift with collapsible gates, which looked, implausibly, as if it had twenty-five or thirty people striving to enter it. Sripati, despite his unprepossessing looks, ushered us in with a decisive gesture, because he knew the ways of Bombay and Massachusetts weren’t respected in these parts. But the liftman too was impressive, and knew how to spot a Massachusetts type, and was.
Quoted in these pages, can be found in her critical study of poetry in nineteenth-century Bengal, The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere (OUP). This book and her work in general have been an invaluable, irreplaceable resource. The book was written roughly between August 2009 and December 2011, and is a personal record of that time. Needless to say, whatever has happened in West Bengal and its capital since then is, given the period Calcutta covers, beyond.
Ramayan Shah, and, glanced at by the beady-eyed magazine-sellers opposite and the slinky college kids who always gather here, taking stock of the situation or romancing, began to scribble Shabnam’s replies. Her brother – whom she’d left alone, daringly, in front of the bookshop – was called Nasir; she earned between ten and forty rupees each day; she (who was just ten) didn’t like her parents so much, preferring her grandparents, with whom she lived on the pavement outside Forum. Our conversation.
Liberalised its economy in 1991, my father was acquainting himself with ‘industrial reconstruction’ and the remnant of Lily Biscuit. He was not going to dip into the booty of the new economy; he draws a monthly pension of Rs 6000 from Britannia, less than what a retired government schoolteacher gets, because the new capitalists feel no philanthropic pang towards the private sector’s old guard. In a way, I’m almost relieved he was born fifteen years too late to be where the big money is today.
Proving difficult to contact them now. Neither the watchman at the shop nor the boy nor any of those who hung out on the pavement had any idea how to, nor saw it necessary to have any idea. Someone on the site finally gave me a mobile number and a name – not a Bengali name – and told me to call this man if I wanted a window. He was neither the builder nor the contractor, but had something to do with the construction of the new building. At least two kinds of migration have shaped Calcutta in the.