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El Dorado in the mist The name of the city in the title of this delectable book is as significant as it is deliberate. Author Amit Chaudhuri insists that he calls Calcutta by its old name when the language is English. It automatically becomes Kolkata when he speaks in Bengali. That is actually the way it has historically been. The official renaming of the city (in 2001), he believes, is probably one of the factors that has hastened its decline.
Chaudhuri, novelist, classical musician and academician, writes that “out of the remnants” of the great city and “through a single act of renaming, eventually arose a new one – without pedigree or history; large but provincial; inhabited but largely unknown – called ‘Kolkata’.”
Death and rebirth; decay and the hope of regeneration; and multiple departures and returns – those are the broad themes that the author tackles in this part memoir, part social analysis centred on a city that exercises an almost difficult-to-define hold on the mind and heart of the writer.
An elegiac air hangs over the mesmerisingly episodic book, which reveals various facets of Calcutta and presents a deeply observant and sympathetic portrait that does not flinch from identifying the snapping points that led to the marginalisation of what was, a little over a hundred years ago, the “second city” of the Empire.
The lamentation is loud and clear, but it never becomes baleful – it is elegant, shot through with genuine emotion, and bewitchingly lyrical. Chaudhuri tempers his hard-nosed look at the many distortions that have crept into the city’s soul in the last 30 years with an unflinching sense of belonging that facilitates total candour.
Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay and was educated in England. The eastern metropolis was only a city of vacations for him until, in the late 1990s, he decided to gravitate towards Calcutta.
Why did he move to the city? The answer: “Because I’d been rehearsing that journey for years: as a child, in trips from Bombay in the summer and the winter; and later – in my continual search for a certain kind of city – in my reading. And Calcutta would make its way back to me, unexpectedly, through Irish literature and Mansfield and Eudora Welty and the writing of the American South.”
But while Chaudhuri continues to live intermittently in the city and draw sustenance from it, he feels that, like “the career of poetry in the globalised world”, Calcutta is near extinction. “I could still tap the magic of its neighbourhoods when I wrote my third novel, Freedom Song, in the mid-nineties; but, after that, I felt I couldn’t do so any longer – just as a teenager might outgrow a ‘phase’ of writing poems…”
But in this book, the idea of which he resisted for three years, he brings “the drama of the place” alive through varied vignettes of life on Park Street, bustle of humanity outside the Sealdah station, and in the more rarefied homes and clubs of the ‘ingabanga’ (Anglicised Bengalis who still revel in the mores of the colonial past), besides a host of other settings.
Rarely has a book about a city been so personal in nature yet so expansive in scope. Chaudhuri guides the reader into and through parts of the city that he particularly likes – Park Street is high on that list. “Park Street,” he writes, “is neither Oxford Street nor the Champs-Elysee, but here, in the stretch between Chowringhee and the junction of Free School Street and Middleton Row, it has an energy comparable to no other downtown district that I know.”
He also describes, with not a little horror, the inability of the city to protect the historic colonial and “genteel bourgeois” structures that define its character. He holds up Berlin as a contrast. “When I was last in Berlin three years ago, the memorialisation of the past was relentless, but the attempt, by Berliners, to embrace and re-inhabit the city’s troubled post-War history was striking too. Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”
He infers: “If Calcutta suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.”
He clearly does not love the Calcutta of today, a city that is “neither moored to its past nor part of a definite future”. The book obviously dwells at length on contemporary politics in Calcutta and Bengal but, since it covers only two years (2009-2011), it stops just short of the ouster of the Left Front government.
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