Calcutta: Two Years in the City
While his portrait of Calcutta reads like the work of an erudite traveler, Chaudhuri (The Immortals, 2009) is a resident, and to him, Calcutta is “one of the great cities of modernity.” A renowned novelist and essayist as well as a musician, he is also a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, where W. G. Sebald also taught. Though Calcutta is nuanced, atmospheric, and deeply preoccupied with the past, it is not Sebaldian; Chaudhuri is lively, not melancholy. Amid anecdotes and information, he interviews natives and immigrants from every sector of society, including Indians returning from the West who find that they are not necessarily at home because they have changed, as has Calcutta—irrevocably. Who knew that Calcutta/Kolkata, the major city in the province of Bengal, had a democratically elected Communist government for decades? The Communists were responsible for making Calcutta “India’s most tolerant, multicultural, multireligious metropolis.” There are many reasons to read Calcutta. Perhaps the best is to see a global citizen’s view of the effects of globalization on a complicated, well-loved city. --Michael Autrey