The Epic City review: Choudhury's book offers distinctive view of Calcutta

An NRI returns to the declining city of his youth and presents a distinctive if not necessarily epic picture

In seeking out and then writing about one’s roots, the memoirist can find his deeply felt passages of remembrance, often cathartic, tipping into merely skilled reportage, which wasn’t what it was meant to be. The prescient author understands this risk yet fancies his chances of growing a clear relationship between the two, as the writing moves forward, and things fall into place in the narrative structure.

Émigré writers, with some important exceptions, appear generally self-conscious in their work, as if they can’t seem to manage the space between the then and the now of their lives; the more the recognition of a new culture, the more disconcerting this severance becomes for them. Those who have understood this write about this divide by using the all too familiar metaphors of dysfunctional families, conflicts of choice, escape, the perplexities of sex, guilt and perceived redemption. Kushanava Choudhury is one exception, evidenced by his award-winning memoir, The Epic City — The World on the Streets of Calcutta, which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje literary prize for 2018 and was a Guardian pick for summer reading.

The reason Choudhury’s book presents a distinctive, yet not necessarily epic, view of Calcutta could very well be the fact that he is hardly a typecast NRI. The North Calcutta boy with clear bhadralok roots was not a wide-eyed entrant into the New World. Once in, didn’t care for his school, nor the Princeton U undergrad offer which was a “balloons and large cardboard cheque” moment for his émigré parents but not for our boy who wanted a Calcutta that could qualify as epic. But why Calcutta, everyone asked, and not Bombay or Bangalore or Delhi? They were right, of course; Calcutta had lost its wherewithal, its soul and was in the nineties no longer a happy place. Back from Princeton, Choudhury finds no revolution left to join, no ideology to adhere to, no dream left. Maybe joining a newspaper would be the right thing to do; so soon after he’s back, he joins The Statesman, little realising that it was now a ghost of itself, spent and almost rubbed out from the public mind. The book’s longish chapter on his Statesman stint, ghoulish and Kafkaesque by turn, is to me a triumph as it describes the slow death of a legendary original.

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As well as the slow death of the Calcutta dream; and of the young who kill time on the city’s streets, asking “Ki holo? Ki hobey?”, What happened? Speaking of dreams, it takes the city less than two years to ambush Choudhury’s version; he jettisons his notions and travels back to New Jersey, to secure a PhD from Yale and returns, this time with a girlfriend, Durba, who doesn’t see the point of the city being there at all. Maybe Choudhury realises that his book could tip into the commonplace, and he makes a crucial U-turn and finds The Statesman once more. As he recounts entering through the revolving door, nostalgia knocks the breath out of him. But things aren’t good. He walks past deserted cubicles with some of their partitions blown out; except one that is tightly shut and smoke filled. Mike, who had mentored him as a trainee two years ago, sits alone inside the severely chilled room, smoking and not feeling sorry for what his beloved newspaper has become. And so it goes.

By about the middle of the book, Choudhury finds it’s time to talk about Calcutta’s ravenous political appetite, driven by the Svengali-like Communists. Choudhury lines up the more obvious egalitarian excuses for their excesses, fuelled by the gherao, the bandh, class enemies and fellow travellers which have become freshly minted urban phrases; his stories are all familiar ones, and the list is terribly long. It was one of the most amazing instances of the collective ravaging of a city’s livelihood and India, and the world, turned its face away. Choudhury covers this ground with irony and pity but I feel that by choosing to paint the city’s distress with a human face more than injecting it with political doctrine the reluctant NRI passes up a clear and present opportunity to hit the culprits hard, those who had learnt their dialectical materialism backwards, and little else.

In all of this, the “boi para”, the book parish, of College Street is a breath of freshness, and he is captivated by the brave men who gamble daily with their little magazines to sustain the literary temper and Choudhury’s skills are on view in describing the Budh-Bikel adda where the literati gather on a side street behind Presidency University every Wednesday to debate and declaim.

Travelling northwards, Choudhury follows the unique profusion of Chitpur Road, Günter Grass country, to its northern end and he finds Kumartuli in larger than life swatches in the teeming confines of the sculptors’ community. The air sizzles with its consuming sights and smells and noises and he writes as if he is quite familiar with what happens there. The Hieronymus Bosch-like tableaus Choudhury finds stockpiled along the by-lanes are appallingly naked, half-done sculptures full of grisly possibilities. Choudhury exits the colony towards the river and stumbles upon an unspeakable half-done sculpture; it’s a cathartic moment for him; does he find the warped fantasies of the area given their true essence here?

But then, Choudhury can’t be denied his Calcutta story and he turns and swings right across the city in pursuit of it. In some later writing he will do well to explain why he still believes the City to be truly Epic.