Author : Clark Blaise
Publisher : Saint Paul, Minn. : Hungry Mind Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 21,72 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.
Author : Hemendra Kumar Roy
Publisher : Niyogi Books
Page : 109 pages
File Size : 43,2 MB
Release : 2020-01-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9389136458
Calcutta nights (Raater Kolkata) is the real-life story and memoir of the enigmatic ‘Meghnad Gupta’, pen name of famed Bengali fiction writer Hemendra Kumar Roy. Translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri almost a century after the first publication of Raater Kolkata in 1923, Roy reveals to contemporary readers The darkest secrets of an earlier Calcutta. The first two decades of the last century, the backdrop for this book, were politically turbulent times. Those days, Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of British India, was teeming with people from different parts of the country besides Europeans and other foreigners. It was a city of sin, pleasure and suffering. Indians who arrived and settled here mingled with locals, some of them picking up dress, manners and the wanton lifestyles of the Bengali ‘Babu’, while others kept their identities intact. All this created a unique cosmopolitan setting, coloured with shades of debauchery, darkness and crime that this first-hand account brilliantly recounts. Written in an age very different from ours, certain views of the author could be jarring for the present times. However, these need to be tempered by the understanding of the sociopolitical contexts and the distance of a century separating us from Meghnad Gupta’s Calcutta. Calcutta nights is the hootum pyanchar naksha (published in 1862 and penned by kaliprasanna Sinha) of the early twentieth century, a book that will help anyone understand the contrasts and colours of a unique Indian metropolis.
Author : Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 44,67 MB
Release : 2013-09-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0307962172
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity. Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Author : Kushanava Choudhury
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 36,15 MB
Release : 2018-01-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 163557157X
Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
Author : Mircea Eliade
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 46,33 MB
Release : 1995-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0226204197
A semi-autobiographical romance between a French engineer and the daughter of a Hindu family with which he stayed in India. A case of East meets West with all the joys and woes that such encounters bring. For her version of the story see her novel, It Does Not Die.
Author : Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 17,78 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0618646531
Taken under the wing of an expat teacher for her ambition and talent, Anjali Bose hopes to escape unfavorable prospects and falls in with a crowd of young people in Bangalore, where she endeavors to confront her past and reinvent herself.
Author : Swati Chattopadhyay
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 22,86 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Calcutta (India)
ISBN : 9780415343596
Exploring the politics of representation and the cultural changes that occurred in the city, this post colonial study addresses the questions of modernity and space that haunt our perception of Calcutta.
Author : Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher : Grove Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 19,75 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780802136305
After the assassination of her husband, seventeen-year-old Jasmine leaves India to live with a middle-aged banker in a small Iowa town, only to retain some of the traditions and memories of the past.
Author : Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 16,66 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780449912706
Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return -- seething with strikes, riots, and unrest -- is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world -- that of her father, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger -- and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in. In this, her first novel, Mukherjee claimed as her subject the shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformation that are part of the immigrant experience -- a theme she has masterfully woven into her subsequent novels, Wife and Jasmine, and into The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Author : Ashok Mitra
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 12,6 MB
Release : 1977
Category : History
ISBN : 9780714630823
First Published in 1977. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
