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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Kushanava Choudhury grew up in Calcutta and New Jersey. After graduating from Princeton University he worked as a reporter at the Statesman in Calcutta. He went on to receive a PhD in Political Theory from Yale University before returning to Calcutta to write a book about the city. The Epic City is his first book.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This vibrant memoir evokes the many paradoxes of Calcutta-it's a place of food stalls and colonial mansions, as well as roaming cows and urine-stained streets. Choudhury's family left Calcutta when he was 12 years old, and it wasn't until after he graduated college in 2001 that he returned. Leaving behind his family in New Jersey moored to the "treacherous shoals of the lower middle class, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart," Choudhury arrives in Calcutta with his wife to work at the Statesman, one of the city's English-language newspapers. In luminous prose, Choudhury describes a Calcutta where "a century-old portico could fall on your head," and the town of Dalhousie, where vendors sell "big fish heads" that point "upward like Aztec pyramids to the sun." On College Street in Calcutta, "shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack." He and his wife often disagree on such things as whether they should patronize the corner tea shops that employ 10-year-old boys, and, at times, their marital fights come on like the monsoon. Choudhury unearths Calcutta's haunted past-exploring the Bengal famine, Partition, and the Naxalite revolution-and, in beautiful prose, he brings the city to life. (Jan. 2018) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Kushanava Choudhury has written a wonderfully vivid and personal account of life in this teeming and troubled city Choudhury trained to become a "corporate conquistador" at Princeton and yet he always longed for the city in which he grew up: Calcutta. His book is a love letter to the city that many young Indians leave for more successful ones such as Mumbai or Delhi. He admits it's a place that "grinds you down". Mark Twain said its weather "was enough to make a brass doorknob mushy". Built between a river and a swamp, during the monsoon it's often flooded and in the dry winter the air is so polluted it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. For westerners, it became the epitome of an urban hell, a city of squalor and death. And yet Choudhury's memorable, evocative book reveals its rich culture, offering a wonderfully vivid and personal account of life in this teeming and troubled city, from adda (the "sweet Bengali pastime of aimless digressive conversation") and its addictive street food, to the bibliophile delights of College Street, "not just a street but a labyrinth made of books ". - PD Smith.
Booklist Review
Calcutta today is a far cry from the proud center of commerce and society it represented in centuries past. Now, up-and-comers like Delhi have left Calcutta in their dust as India reinvents itself for the modern economy. But for Choudhury, whose family moved from Calcutta to New Jersey when he was 11, the city of his childhood exerts an irresistible pull that brought him back, first to work for the city's flagship newspaper and then to begin his life as a married man. With a deep sense of history and tradition, Choudhury uncovers the treasures that are contained in the fabric of the city, from the freewheeling intellectual conversations known in Bengali as adda to the connections that bond residents to their neighborhoods. Choudhury himself seems to be searching for the reasons he would trade his comfortable life in America for the chaos of a city that all but the oldest members of his family left long ago. As he vividly describes, the Calcutta he discovers is by turns exasperating and exhilarating, but always fascinating.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
