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Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
This wandering odyssey through the city's pullulating backstreets 0and serpentine byways reveals a Calcutta rarely glimpsed by western travellers. Arranged as a series of journeys on foot through the older quarters of the city seldom trod by outsiders, the narrative chronicles the topography, social and historical background and the vibrant street life and characters which give Calcutta its uniqueness. Complete with detailed directions and street maps for the areas explored, the book provides a storehouse of indispensable information for the intrepid traveller.
Becker is a British traveler in trouble. Madhurima is a rising star police officer. In these three explosive tales, the two join forces to investigate the city's crooked high society. On the way, they take on deluded would-be messiahs in search of Mother Teresa's stolen millions, encounter fanatics, circus freaks and cannibals, fall in and out of love and pay homage to one of the world's most beautiful and toughest cities. Amidst passion, murder and mayhem, is there room for two lovers driven by justice and compassion? Tom Vater's 'Kolkata Noir' is a riveting crime fiction cycle of three novellas set in the past, the present and the future.
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.
In the popular imagination, Calcutta is a packed and pestilential sprawl, made notorious by the Black Hole and the works of Mother Teresa. Kipling called it a City of Dreadful Night, and a century later V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass and Louis Malle revived its hellish image. This is the place where the West first truly encountered the East. Founded in the 1690s by East India Company merchants beside the Hugli River, Calcutta grew into India's capital during the Raj and the second city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings, Macaulay and Curzon. It was also home to extraordinary Bengalis such as Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, and Satyajit Ray, among the geniuses of world cinema. Above all, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubs shoulders with coarse commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema and music. CITY OF ARTISTS: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of
What are the effects of employment on women’s well-being and social position in a Third World city? Until recently before publication, Calcutta (now Kolkata) had been notable for having one of the lowest rates of female employment in India. This had been largely determined by strong cultural beliefs that a woman’s place is in the home. However, in recent years, the growth of ‘female’ jobs in the small-scale industry and service sectors, combined with an increase in male unemployment had resulted in a sudden increase in the numbers of women entering the labour force. Originally published in 1991 and based on Hilary Standing’s extensive fieldwork within Bengali households, Dependence and Autonomy considers the effects of women’s employment on the labour market, the household, and the women themselves. Particular attention is paid to the role of the life cycle and of class position in determining the impact of employment, and the work is set within a historical perspective on gender and employment in Bengali society. This book is a re-issue originally published in 1991. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.
Here, Day And Night Were Interchangeable. The Immaculately Dressed Chowringhee, Radiant In Her Youth, Had Just Stepped On To The Floor At The Nightclub. Set In 1950S Calcutta, Chowringhee Is A Sprawling Saga Of The Intimate Lives Of Managers, Employees And Guests At One Of Calcutta S Largest Hotels, The Shahjahan. Shankar, The Newest Recruit, Recounts The Stories Of Several People Whose Lives Come Together In The Suites, Restaurants, Bar And Backrooms Of The Hotel. As Both Observer And Participant In The Events, He Inadvertently Peels Off The Layers Of Everyday Existence To Expose The Seamy Underbelly Of Unfulfilled Desires, Broken Dreams, Callous Manipulation And Unbidden Tragedy. What Unfolds Is Not Just The Story Of Individual Lives But Also The Incredible Chronicle Of A Metropolis. Written By Best-Selling Bengali Author Sankar, Chowringhee Was Published As A Novel In 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey S Hotel By Three Years, It Became An Instant Hit, Spawning Translations In Major Indian Languages, A Film And A Play. Its Larger-Than-Life Characters The Enigmatic Manager Marco Polo, The Debonair Receptionist Sata Bose, The Tragic Hostess Karabi Guha, Among Others Soon Attained Cult Status. With Its Thinly Veiled Accounts Of The Private Lives Of Real-Life Celebrities, And Its Sympathetic Narrative Seamlessly Weaving The Past And The Present, It Immediately Established Itself As A Popular Classic. Available For The First Time In English, Chowringhee Is As Much A Dirge As It Is A Homage To A City And Its People.
This book examines the politics behind, and the socio-economic and ecological repercussions of, the making of a new township, variously called New Town, Megacity or Jyoti Basu Nagar, in Rajarhat near Kolkata. Conceived by the West Bengal state government in the mid-1990s, in pandering to the vision of urban planners of creating a hi-tech town beyond an unruly, crowded Kolkata, and feeding the hunger of realtors and developers, the city is built on the foundations of coercive, even violent, land acquisition, state largesse and corruption — and at the cost of erasing a self-sufficient subsistence economy and despoiling a fragile environment. Yet, after its completion and departure of construction labour, the new town appears as a necropolis, a ghost city, that belies its promised image of an urban utopia, even as the displaced locals lead a precarious, mobile existence as ‘transit labour’, engaged in odd and informal jobs. Written on the basis of intensive fieldwork, government documents, court records, and chronicles of public protests, this book broadly analyses the politics and economics of urbanisation in the age of post-colonial capitalism, particularly the paradoxical combination of neoliberal and primitive modes of capital accumulation upon which the global emergence of ‘new towns’ is based. Departing from the dominant styles of urban studies that focus on cultural or spatial analysis of cities, the authors show the links between changes in space, technology, political economy, class composition, and forms of urban politics which give concrete shape to a city. It will immensely interest those in sociology, political science, economics, development studies, urban studies, policy and governance studies, and history.