Calcutta: Two Years in the City

Novelist, essayist, and musician Chaudhuri (The Immortals) writes, "Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding…the city today." This work is a social history and personal account of the author's two years in the city, from 2009 to 2011, at a time when it was on the cusp of change and the defeat of a 30-year Marxist government by the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The book offers meandering, idiosyncratic musings on various topics: the "Ingabanga" (Westernized Bengalis), Christmas in Calcutta, the Bhadralok and the Bengal Renaissance, Italian restaurants, city malls, and domestic servants. Unlike Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta, which deals more with the city's history, this work is an account of what it means to live there today.