The Epic City

Starred review from September 25, 2017
This vibrant memoir evokes the many paradoxes of Calcutta—it’s a place of food stalls and colonial mansions, as well as roaming cows and urine-stained streets. Choudhury’s family left Calcutta when he was 12 years old, and it wasn’t until after he graduated college in 2001 that he returned. Leaving behind his family in New Jersey moored to the “treacherous shoals of the lower middle class, a world of chronic car trouble and clothes from K-Mart,” Choudhury arrives in Calcutta with his wife to work at the Statesman, one of the city’s English-language newspapers. In luminous prose, Choudhury describes a Calcutta where “a century-old portico could fall on your head,” and the town of Dalhousie, where vendors sell “big fish heads” that point “upward like Aztec pyramids to the sun.” On College Street in Calcutta, “shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack.” He and his wife often disagree on such things as whether they should patronize the corner tea shops that employ 10-year-old boys, and, at times, their marital fights come on like the monsoon. Choudhury unearths Calcutta’s haunted past—exploring the Bengal famine, Partition, and the Naxalite revolution—and, in beautiful prose, he brings the city to life.

October 1, 2017
The son of immigrant parents creates a vivid, affectionate, and gritty portrait of a complex city.Born in America to Indian scientists who felt "torn between nation and vocation," Choudhury grew up in New Jersey, taken twice for stays in India. Those experiences planted a seed of yearning, and in 2001, after graduating from Princeton, he went back to Calcutta to work as a reporter at the Statesman. Although he had planned to stay forever, enduring two monsoons changed his mind: he returned home and enrolled in a doctoral program in political science at Yale. Calcutta's draw was seductive, though, and for his doctoral dissertation, he embarked on a yearlong study of the city. That study informs his literary debut, an insightful melding of family memoir, autobiography, and history that illuminates the politics, society, and culture of "dirty, disorderly, teeming" Calcutta. Until the 1970s, Choudhury writes, Calcutta was India's largest city, an impressive manufacturing hub in the nation's wealthiest state. But in the ensuing decades, the city declined drastically: silt piles made its river unnavigable, and unions killed manufacturing, leaving 45,000 acres of rusting factories. Yet what others deem "an urban hellhole" the author sees as a rich palimpsest of cultural memory, "an infinite regression of experiences of longing and loss." Besides describing Calcutta's thronging, cacophonous daily life, the author examines the dire consequences of British colonialism. "The lasting legacy of the British in Bengal was famine," Choudhury reveals. In 1943, 3 million starved to death. The British mandate of partition incited fierce religious wars between Hindus and Muslims, forcing Bengals from their ancestral land. His own family suffered in the upheaval; millions were uprooted, arriving as refugees in Calcutta. Colonial rule left India deeply demoralized, believing itself doomed to "failure upon failure": "failure to not spit and piss everywhere," "failure to cover our drains, to provide clean drinking water or clinics or schools or the basics of a dignified life."A candid and often moving history of a city's dramatic past and roiling present.

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November 1, 2017
Calcutta today is a far cry from the proud center of commerce and society it represented in centuries past. Now, up-and-comers like Delhi have left Calcutta in their dust as India reinvents itself for the modern economy. But for Choudhury, whose family moved from Calcutta to New Jersey when he was 11, the city of his childhood exerts an irresistible pull that brought him back, first to work for the city's flagship newspaper and then to begin his life as a married man. With a deep sense of history and tradition, Choudhury uncovers the treasures that are contained in the fabric of the city, from the freewheeling intellectual conversations known in Bengali as adda to the connections that bond residents to their neighborhoods. Choudhury himself seems to be searching for the reasons he would trade his comfortable life in America for the chaos of a city that all but the oldest members of his family left long ago. As he vividly describes, the Calcutta he discovers is by turns exasperating and exhilarating, but always fascinating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)