"We can also imagine how … a few tantric Brahmins, pilgrims and votaries furtively penetrated the jungles from time to time to make their offerings to the dread goddess, who, black and bloody, and decked in her necklace of human skulls, with set teeth and protruded tongue, triumphantly trampled upon the white Aryan prostrate at her feet."
Despite the best efforts of Ray and the Bengal Secretariat Press to return to the safety of footnotes and bullet points, Kolkata-Calcutta's colourful history rampaged through the officialese.
A talented minstrel known as Anthony Saheb, the naming of Dingabhanga from the sound of the breaking of boats, the tiger-haunted jungle now known as the Maidan, the scheming of the Setts, raiyats, nawabs and talukdars along with officials of John Company, the worthlessness of the 100 Armenians hired for a gun battle - all of these insisted on breaking in on Ray's dry history of deeds of purchase and revenue figures.
And that is half the trouble of trying to write about Kolkata - more than with almost any other Indian city its surreal, bloody, bawdy rich past threatens to hijack any attempt to set it in the present. The other half of the problem is that those who know Kolkata well, or at least know their part of Kolkata well, write about it through a permanent haze of nostalgia. The steady emptying out of the city in the last two decades has meant that only a very few who still have a connection there - the novelist Alka Saraogi, the writer/film-maker Ruchir Joshi, a handful of redoubtable Bengali writers from Sankar to Sirshendu - write about Kolkata with clarity and force. None of them have yet attempted a city biography, though Mr Joshi chronicled a shifting, turbulent Bengal in his account of the elections, Poriborton.
Amit Chaudhuri, by instinct a collector of the ordinary and the everyday, resisted writing about Kolkata for a very long time. There is a certain kind of city biography that Mr Chaudhuri - an accomplished novelist, and a sharp critic possessed of a well-stocked mind - would by temperament find unbearable to write, even if he might perhaps read it.
That's the large, baggy holdall biography, spilling over with the history of the many travellers who found their way to Calcutta - the Armenians, the Chinese, the Baghdadi Jews, the Greeks. As with previous city histories, by Geoffrey Moorhouse or H E Busteed, this hypothetical history would reveal the untold chronicle of the new city divisions - not between the Black Town of the Bengali natives and the Angrez sahebs, but the flickering twilight world of today's Bengalis and the rising influence of the city's Marwari community.
There would be jazz, and memories of Calcutta's legendary theatre groups, the mandatory histories of Bengali food, the obligatory memories of Satyajit Ray and perhaps an account - missing in most histories so far - of the many artists and painters, of the world of Kolkata's coffee houses.
Mr Chaudhuri, instead, wrote Calcutta: Two Years In The City in real time, and his approach is exemplified in the way he takes visitors around the city. He avoids the monuments; instead, he takes them to see the old, crumbling houses of the bhadralok, from which people like him might salvage perhaps a green louvred shutter, in a city that does not preserve or cherish its own past. He writes about Kolkata's fascination with Italian food, despite the despair of chefs forced to over-boil their pasta; about stray encounters with the homeless that bring him to a better understanding of their office hours, the importance of sanity as a claimable possession.
Mr Chaudhuri is not a Dickensian or Coleish walker: both Teju Cole, another great city chronicler, and Dickens were impelled to discover their cities on foot, on walks that lengthened imperceptibly, inexorably. Mr Chaudhuri's pace suits the city he has warily made a home in: an ambling pace, a stop-and-start approach that allows him to understand why Kolkata is no longer modern. He introduces a key debate on what modernity means in India - but for that, you must read his book.
"The Calcutta I'd encountered as a child was one of the great cities of modernity," he writes. But the Kolkata he returns to is a city sliding, as Mr Chaudhuri says in the context of his father's declining health, into the early stages of gentle dementia. This is not the harshness of Alzheimer's, the insanity of delirium; just a slow, and apparently unstoppable, slippage. Other writers might be better chroniclers of Calcutta's crowded past; few could be more suited to catch its present than Mr Chaudhuri, with his honesty, and his eye for the irrelevant detail that turns out, on closer inspection, to be the whole picture.
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