Calcutta

May 27, 2013
The “two years” in the title of this eloquent work of noblesse oblige is misleading, since the Indian-English author, musician, and professor of literature (The Immortals) was born in Calcutta in the early 1960s and spent much time there in the decades since. Chaudhuri draws on mostly tender, impressionistic memories of his hometown—descriptions familiar to readers of his fiction trilogy Freedom Song (collected in one volume). He felt compelled to write about Calcutta because of the city’s down-on-its-heels modernity, edgy diversity, and Marxist politics; he was taken by Calcutta’s crumbling colonial glory and architecture, its Bengali bourgeois class that aped the English ways, its literary and artistic inheritance (Tagore, Shankar), and its enormous number of destitute immigrant workers. The twice-partitioned Bengali capital became a kind of exotic mistress that the author, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, could not quit, and while his impressions are astute, his considerations of the lower classes, including the servants in his house, can seem patronizing. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary.