Show caption The Rabindra Sarani, formerly known as Chitpur Road and regarded as Kolkata’s oldest street. Photograph: Rebecca Conway/AFP/Getty Images Travel writing The Epic City review – a love letter to Kolkata Kushanava Choudhury’s beautifully observed account of life in the West Bengal metropolis is full of humour and wonder William Dalrymple Sun 27 Aug 2017 07.00 EDT Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email

In 1690, the East India Company established a new base in Bengal. To the evident surprise of his contemporaries, Job Charnock planted his new settlement at Kalikata between a swamp and the boggy banks of the Hooghly river, next to a temple of Kali, one of Hinduism’s most fearsome goddesses. Charnock was said to have bought the site “for the sake of a large shady tree”, an odd choice, wrote a 17th-century commentator, “for he could not have found a more unhealthful place on all the river”. It was “contrary to all reason”. Soon so many settlers died there that it “become a saying that they live like Englishmen, and die like rotten sheep”. Only a year later there were 1,000 living in the settlement, but no less than 460 burials in the graveyard.

Over the years since then, Calcutta, now known as Kolkata, has rarely had a good press. “Calcutta,” wrote Robert Clive, “is one of the most wicked places in the universe... rapacious and luxurious beyond conception.” By the late 18th century, the British bridgehead in Bengal may have become a city of palaces, but it was still most famous for its notorious black hole prison and had a reputation as an edgy city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and the constant presence of mortality made men callous: they would mourn briefly for some perished friend, then bid drunkenly for his effects.

A century later, Calcutta had become the second city of the British empire, but such was the deprivation, overcrowding and general chaos that Kipling still thought of it as the city of dreadful night, while Mark Twain remarked that its climate “was enough to make a brass doorknob mushy”. As late as 1971, the cover blurb for Geoffery Moorhouse’s Calcutta described it as “a city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease… this living hell”.

Nor have more recent post-colonial commentators been much kinder. As Kushanava Choudhury notes in his engaging prose portrait, The Epic City, “even Anita Desai and Günter Grass, who came to live here for a while, and wrote books about the city, ultimately fell back upon the trope of an urban hellhole.

“Kali became emblematic of the dark forces they felt seething here. Shocked and fascinated by Kali, whose long red tongue, black body and garland of skulls peer out from every sweet-shop calendar and taxi dashboard, they saw in her the embodiment of the soul-crushing force of the city.”

Choudhury himself admits that Calcutta is no easy place to live: “For six months of the year, you are never dry. You take two or three showers a day to keep cool, but start sweating the moment you turn off the tap.” From April until October, your clothes “adhere to your body like duct tape”.

Newly settled in the city after college in the US, “I woke up some mornings,” he writes, “feeling my chest was on fire. Breathing in Calcutta was like smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. Keeping the dust and grime off my body, out of my nails, hair and lungs was a daily struggle. Then there was the mosquitoes, which arrived in swarms at sundown and often came bearing malaria.” There was something about the climate that seemed to cause endemic “entropy… sprawling decline… There was so much which you have to react to that there is little time left to act. You arrive with grand plans and soon you are merely surviving.” It even smells terrible: “The city was simply one big pisspot,” he writes. “There are no uncontaminated piss-free zones in Calcutta”; even in the smartest offices it is impossible to escape “that unmistakable bouquet”.

And yet for all this, The Epic City is a wonderful, beautifully written and even more beautifully observed love letter to Calcutta’s greatness: to its high culture, its music and film, its festivals, its people, its cuisine, its urban rhythms and, above all, to its rooted Bengaliness. At a time when so many brilliant Indians – and perhaps particularly the hyper-educated Bengalis – are leaving India to find employment abroad, Choudhury, born in Buffalo and brought up in New Jersey, headed in the opposite direction, to the place he thinks of as his real home.

While the rest of his generation of overachieving Princeton graduates were beating a path towards Wall Street to become “corporate conquistadors”, Choudhury turns his face in the opposite direction, to Calcutta to rediscover his family roots. This is even though an entire generation there has emigrated to “Delhi, Dubai, London, Chicago and California” and Calcutta now feels like a “retirement home, or worse, a necropolis that the young had abandoned… my generation had gone missing, leaving behind a city of geriatrics”. Calcutta felt like a place whose greatest days had passed: “Our golden age was when Calcutta had been the capital of the empire, its port the conduit to the loot of Asia. With the sahibs gone, our best days were done.”

But Choudhury finds the city still has ample compensations. With witty, sharp and sometimes beautifully chiselled prose, he evokes the world of Tagore, Satyajit Ray and the Bengali poets, with their little magazines and literary gatherings, and of the secondhand bookshops of College Street (“a labyrinth made of books”) where “shopkeepers sell books the way dealers elsewhere sell crack”.

It is a world where conversation, reading and verse have not yet been overwhelmed by screens, the internet or television and where overexcited writers “derail each other’s sentences in locomotive Bengali”. In modern Delhi, he writes, no one really belongs, but in Calcutta, everyone is fiercely possessive of their city: “Ask for directions in any Calcutta street corner and half-a-dozen mustachioed men will appear out of nowhere, determined to direct you somewhere. They may offer radically different views on the subject, a street fight may break out, rival political camps may emerge and traffic be barricaded the rest of the afternoon. But it is their city, their streets, their neighbourhood.”

We hear of the beauties of Bengali women and Chaudhury’s courtship of Durba in a world where couples who wish to be alone together have to sit discretely at the back of parks, hiding behind raised umbrellas: “We just stood there, looking at each other lustfully. In Calcutta, Durba and I felt like actors who had wandered off the set of an indie romantic comedy and on to an instructional video for the Taliban.”

There is also a lot about the great landmarks of the Bengali year such as the great city festival of Durga puja, and the wonders of Bengali cooking: kochuris, luchis, “rice, dal, fritters and greens” and “14-course meals brimming with… platefuls of rich goat curry and hilsa fish in mustard sauce.”

Very occasionally, Choudhury can fall short as a guide to the deeply eccentric city he loves so much and he is notably rusty on his history and architecture. The Victoria memorial is not Indo-Saracenic, as he says, so much as a sort of Romano-Mughal, and Calcutta was the largest port in India long before the 1770s. This is overwhelmingly a book about Bengalis and I longed for more on the remarkable minorities who played such a role in the building of the city and who still, just, cling on in their own enclaves today – the Armenians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Anglo-Indians and particularly the Marwaris. But these are small complaints. This is a first book any author would be proud to have written and The Epic City clearly marks the arrival of a new star. Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta’s classic Maximum City is for Mumbai.