Change and decay | 17 August 2017

Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated from the occasion, ‘I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world’. It’s Choudhury’s longing to be back in this centre, which might have seemed less than obviously central to a metropolitan American, that takes him to Calcutta after he graduates from Princeton. He spends a few years working at the Statesman, Calcutta’s most venerable English newspaper, and later returns to the city, eventually getting married to his girlfriend, who happens also to be an American of Bengali origin.

Such returns aren’t unheard of, but they are unusual, though they also often seem to be associated with literary production — Suketu Mehta’s 2004 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, for example, followed the author’s return to his birthplace. At the start of The Epic City, Choudhury’s return seems less purposeful or directed. He wonders what he is doing in Calcutta, a city apparently well past its prime — indeed, when he’s at the Statesman, he becomes so depressed he goes to see a psychiatrist, who asks why he’s come back to Calcutta: ‘I wasn’t sure any more.’

The book begins in a fragmentary, slightly disjointed way. At times the chapters can feel like newspaper pieces. The earlier part of the book is sometimes too condensed. Writing of expeditions with a Statesman colleague, to whom the book is dedicated, Choudhury says:

Soumitro and I had walked the city’s streets, discovering airy Sephardic synagogues, Armenian churches, and temples to the Jain saint Mahavir. In the old Black Town, we had mingled with the deity sculptors among the lanes of Kumortuli, communed at the annual chariot festival at the Marble Palace and witnessed clandestine human hook-swinging during the Raas festival.

The city here alluded to, rather than evoked, made me think of other books that do invite a reader into Calcutta life, among them Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in the City; Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others; the world of popular Bengali theatre in Saikat Majumdar’s novel The Firebird; Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary).