Many of Bengal’s most creative talents do not find a place in this collection—Sukumar Ray, for instance, or that great storyteller Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, or even the more contemporary Shankar. There’s also virtually nothing about cinema, in a tribute to the city that was home to three of India’s best film directors, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen. Besides, Calcutta has also always had plenty to offer theatre-goers and this collection fails to capture that world too. But apart from these disappointing omissions, this anthology is quite a treat. Writer Amit Chaudhuri has put together a kaleidoscope of stories, poems and essays, the writings spanning the last hundred and fifty years, and it’s wonderful to relive all those times through the accounts of so many accomplished writers. The translations are excellent—it’s never easy to translate prose and poetry’s probably harder—but those who have read the originals will have little to find fault with. What’s also nice is that not all the contributors are Bengalis and even though the majority may be, not all of them have lived in Calcutta all their lives; many like Nirad C Chaudhuri or Amitav Ghosh have spent much of their lifetimes away from the city.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Calcutta is shaped by the city. Each writer explores a new theme, has his own tale to tell and his unique way of telling it and each captures one or more of the city’s many moods. The result is a panorama of perspectives. V S Naipaul may have written: “Like every newspaper-reader, I knew Calcutta as the city of tram-burners and students who regularly ‘clashed’ with the police.” But this collection offers many more glimpses of the city and its people: life on its pavements and drawing rooms, in middle class homes and mansions. Kaliprasanna Singha’s pieces on the railways and Rabindranath Tagore’s “My Childhood,” take us back to 19th-century British India.
Among all the accounts of the good life, there are also some reminders that Calcutta too harboured regressive and unjust social practices before reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy or Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar stepped in. The extract from Saikat Majumdar’s Silverfish, a heart-rending story on the plight of young girls becoming widows, is one such account.
Many of the more famous writers and poets of Bengal were originally from Bangladesh and moved to the city closer to Partition, when, in perhaps the biggest instance of human displacement, eight million Hindus are estimated to have crossed the national border of East Pakistan to settle down in Calcutta and adjoining districts. Manas Ray’s Growing up Refugee is an autobiographical account of the time. Ray grew up in one of the several refugee settlements that sprung up when the exodus from Bangladesh took place. He wrote: “The landowners’ goons would come regularly towards the evening, the men resisted as the women blew the conch, though the fights were seldom bloody.”
Offering a completely different perspective on the city of the bhadralok, some five or six decades back, is chronicler Nirad Chaudhuri. The extract from his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is all about Calcutta society, its different classes and their ways: “The people of Calcutta were placid and quiet. They were soft-spoken and generally courteous.” The other erudite contribution is that of historian Ramachandra Guha.
But the soul of this anthology is in the poetry of which one wished there had been more. All the works selected are superlative, particularly the two pieces by the master himself, Rabindranath Tagore: “The Dark Girl” and “Green Mangoes”. Surprisingly, there is just one poem from one of Bengal’s most popular poets, the Sahitya Akademi Award winner Shakti Chattopadhyay who, with Sunil Gangopadhyay, was instrumental in bringing out the influential Krittibas magazine in 1953. Also associated with Krittibas was Sandipan Chattopadhyay, whose “Coming Home” is a chapter from his Kolkatar Din Ratri. Some of Chattopadhyay’s tales are simply about going home late at night after a drinking session—one time he went home on a circus elephant—but they are wonderful as are his contemplations of spending the night on a footpath. For good measure, there’s an extract from The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers by India’s first graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee.
Five hundred-odd pages isn’t really enough to capture every nuance of Calcutta, or any big city for that matter, but Memory’s Gold is not short on variety—the long pieces are interspersed with some lovely short stories. The collection whets the appetite and leaves you wanting to read more. In that sense, it is more than worth its not-inconsiderate cover price.
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MEMORY’S GOLD
WRITINGS ON CALCUTTA
Ed Amit Chaudhuri
Penguin Viking
534 pages; Rs 699
