Calcutta: Two Years in the City
Amit Chaudhuri
Calcutta: Two Years in the City is an exceptionally written and extremely insightful personal history of one of the least known – but greatest – cities of our time by one of our leading novelists. Having been born in Calcutta but brought up in Bombay and England, Amit Chaudhuri moves back to the city as an adult with his wife and daughter. But what does ‘move back’ mean when you’ve only lived there as a child? At once an insider, yet also a kind of tourist, Chaudhuri’s experience of re-settling in a place so changed by revolution and capitalism is incredibly funny, extremely moving, and provides an accessible entry into a city whose lost history as an erstwhile centre of culture and modernity is suggestively captured with great originality in this account of two and a half years in Chaudhuri’s life.
