Calcutta: Two Years in the City

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. 

Amit Chaudhuri has been consistently 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 chronicle of two years in which he made Calcutta his home. In a mesmerizing narrative he takes us into the heart of a metropolis relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a "self renewing way...of apprehending life." The narrative moves through the city's vibrant avenues and its derelict alleyways, introduces us to its homeless and its well-heeled, describes its architecture and food, its sounds and smells, its past and present politics, and makes abundantly clear the complex reasons for the author's passionate attachment to the place and its people. It is an unusually beguiling, eye-opening journey that evokes all that is most particular and extraordinary about the city.