 "Calcutta & Kolkata")
Calcutta, as anyone who has followed his career will know, has been Chaudhuri’s muse, and he’s mined its sights, sounds and smells in all his novels, much like Orhan Pamuk has Istanbul or Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, Paris, and James Joyce, Dublin. But then Calcutta is a difficult muse, its present squalidness a perplexing contrast to its rich past, frustrating any uncomplicated attempt at romanticisation. In this, a “personal record” covering “roughly” the period between August 2009 and December 2011, Chaudhuri attempts a reconciliation of the two Calcuttas, excavating the city that was beyond the city that is.
Its structure is meandering, quite like Chaudhuri’s novels, explicating his own ambiguous feelings for the city he was born in, was seduced by as a child on his bi-annual vacations, and chose to make his home in 1999. There are also bits of personal history; an overview of the city’s history over the centuries signposting major events such as the Naxal violence of the 1970s; random reflections on the city’s dominant communities such as the Bengalis, Marwaris and Biharis; the Bengal “renaissance”; and recent developments in politics — the time period of this book being a momentous interregnum that saw the end of the 34-year-old Left Front regime and the ascendance of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Interspersed through these are accounts of encounters with people — the Ingabanga couple Samir and Anita Mukherjee, who keep alive their obsession with Englishness through the exquisite “high teas” they host in their apartment; Ramayan Shah, Nagendra and their shanty “hotel” along Free School Street; Lakkhi, the Chaudhuris’ cook, and her grandson Raja. There’s insight, pathos and empathy in Chaudhuri’s account of this disparate cast of characters, along with a luminous attention to detail that is the hallmark of his prose. But what brings them alive is wry humour, an element of self-deprecation that is as much alive to the ridiculousness of Chaudhuri’s own stance as “disinterested” observer, as it is to the absurdities of the people or situation he describes.
Calcutta becomes, in the process, a meditation on life in the city, of how the quotidian reality of the city abuts, or crashes into the “city of the mind”. But it is not just his own imagination that lends colour to the city, Chaudhuri implies, but that of the many poets, painters, novelists, painters, musicians and filmmakers who lived here and made it their life work that imbues its people and its buildings with a cumulative magic. In a liminal passage, Chaudhuri speaks of the generation of his mother and her friends who had “an immense breadth of knowledge of Bengali literature, of its classical names, like Bankimchandra and Saratchandra and Bibhutibhushan…and also its slightly less canonical ones, like Manoj Basu and Premankur Aturthi….”, and how this made them “like some kind of new genre that had emerged in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century — like a film by Ghatak or Renoir, or a painting by Paul Klee, or a poem by Jibananda Das, or a song by Cole Porter or Himangshu Dutta” (italics mine). It was, he writes, a quality of “newness” and modernity, a “dimension of the strange and delightful” that drew him to them and, by extension, to the city and the culture that made them possible.
This is Chaudhuri’s central thesis— that Calcutta is “one of the great cities of modernity”. It’s a startling claim that Chaudhuri hastens to qualify — “By modern, I don’t mean ‘new’ or ‘developed’”. What Chaudhuri has in mind and finds abundantly in Calcutta is, in essence, an “aesthetic” modernism, articulated memorably by Baudelaire as, “By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
Not surprisingly, Chaudhuri invokes Baudelaire in his epigraph, and almost echoes the French poet when he writes, “By modernity I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life…”, and elsewhere, “By ‘modern’ I also mean whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful.” All of us who have been bewitched, and alternately bedevilled by the city, will agree.
CALCUTTA, TWO YEARS IN THE CITY
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 308
Price: Rs 599