I reread Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Amit Chaudhuri during a visit to Istanbul, coincidentally while reading Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), books with a shared purpose. Each book matches childhood recollection and affection with a report on the city now, through anecdote, set pieces with a cast of characters, and external narratives such as the fate of political elections as they happen. Both authors describe themselves as privileged, middle-class players in their cities and from that vantage point are afforded a brilliant freedom to obsess and be frank about their subject.

If you haven’t read Chaudhuri’s fiction, you are missing out on some great treasures. Calcutta – his birthplace but not childhood place – comes through these novels as a golden site for yearning and nostalgic power. If you haven’t visited Calcutta, you may be captive to the image of Mother Teresa and her institutions: these have cast a long shadow over the city for decades. Chaudhuri’s book does a great service by reanimating Calcutta, giving us a taste of what was involved in the Bengal Renaissance (which ran from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century) and the numerous cultural, political, and reformist products it yielded. If you don’t know about this revelatory movement, look it up.

It is a magnificent city, in ruins. The vibrancy of its street life is too little known. Chaudhuri recounts stories of Bengali policemen’s reputations as intellectuals. One policeman told him at the polling booth: ‘Literature is a mirror to society’, and film-maker Louis Malle gained permission to film a political demonstration in 1968 from a policeman who ‘had watched Zazie [dans le métro] a week ago … barely a stone’s throw away from the protest’.

Chaudhuri tells us he took on this book commission reluctantly: since moving to Calcutta in 1999 (he didn’t want to die in Britain), his ambivalence about the city has grown, and he lays out these concerns throughout. He is puzzled, always, when visitors and people he knows declare Calcutta to be their favourite Indian city, a great city, a claim he cannot understand with his knowledge and hunches of what the city had once been. Much of his dissatisfaction follows the global changes evident in many world cities over recent decades: gated communities, malls, the market pressures of real estate and opportunity for global capital.

One seemingly trivial global thread he follows involves the celebrity-chef phenomenon, and it is hilarious: the concept is a complete mismatch for non-compliant Indian customers who want things (especially Italian cuisine) prepared according to individual preferences, resulting in a swift demise for these chefs, and the trend generally. Chaudhuri does the fieldwork, visiting numerous battlegrounds of al dente and the Italian use of the fresh, barely cooked, tomato, an unsatisfactory method for many clients.

Chaudhuri conducts deliberate interviews and muses on a range of subjects in his preparation for Calcutta. He traces earlier steps across the city, and spends time on the streets observing people. The result is a narrative of discovery. Street encounters capture some of the vibrancy of Calcutta. He describes Calcutta as one of the great cities of modernity: ‘By “modern” I also mean whatever alchemy it is that changes urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even beautiful.’ New York City before Mayor Giuliani sanitised it is the closest comparative modern city for the author.

Chaudhuri circles around an image, and a memory: Christmas in Calcutta. The marks of a cosmopolitan city; and the fakery of the shiny bristles of those alien trees:

Until, say, 1969, Calcutta had the most effervescent and the loveliest Christmas in India – probably, I’d hazard, based on my experience later of Christmas in England, the loveliest in the world … I was reminded of this Bengali type when walking through the Jewish Museum in late 2005 in Berlin, a striking building ... Our straggly bunch had followed the guide irresistibly until we came, on the first floor, to a rather sparse reconstruction of an educated Jewish household from the twenties with a piano at the centre. On a sort of noticeboard was a newspaper cutting from the time, with a satirical cartoon recording the stages through which a Hanukkah transmogrified into a Christmas tree – clearly meant to poke fun at the new secular Jew. Although I’d been silent so far, I couldn’t help interjecting at this point (the guide encouraged dialogue): ‘This was happening in other parts of the world as well – It was happening in Bengal.’

The author returns on a number of occasions to observe a scene on Free School Street (now Mirza Ghalib Street, after the Urdu poet), where a man named Ramayan Shah runs a pavement stall selling food, alongside Nagendra, a man with an ironing board and big steel iron doing casual jobs for passing trade. He never meets the third entrepreneur, the unnamed owner of the Chandan Hotel, a six-by-six-foot area of the pavement protected by tarpaulin. It is a squalid and languid scene, with bodies sprawled under the tarp.

Overall, it is a most interesting little street community in the centre of this metropolis of nearly five million residents (and 14.5 million in its urban sprawl); Chaudhuri visits each time he goes to more salubrious establishments nearby. He describes the economic base of working people; of migration into West Bengal and the families being supported back in Bihar and other states with bigger problems than Calcutta has. Chaudhuri explains the prehistory of the Maoist Naxalite movement and the Left Front that had governed West Bengal for an unprecedented thirty-four years, the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They were swept out in the 2011 election, which Chaudhuri uses as another filter to tell Calcutta’s story.

At times the book is repetitious, a result of the collection of shorter pieces written for other purposes. But this is a minor complaint. Chaudhuri’s prose is delicious, his humour wry.

Around the time of Calcutta’s release, two other books drew on the same Elizabeth Bishop poem ‘Questions of Travel’ for epigraphs (the authors were Michelle de Kretser and Drusilla Modjeska). ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ Amit Chaudhuri muses on what home is, ever more pertinent in our age of extraordinary relocation. He writes, ‘For isn’t the idea of home premised upon departure, and travel upon the possibility of return, and the foreclosing of that possibility?’

Calcutta is a splendid read; an introduction to a city, or confirmation of it; a meditation on expression and on his own development as a writer; an insight into the paradoxical or perhaps playful way that the Bengali sensibility conducts itself in daily life.

The author returns on a number of occasions to observe a scene on Free School Street (now Mirza Ghalib Street, after the Urdu poet), where a man named Ramayan Shah runs a pavement stall selling food, alongside Nagendra, a man with an ironing board and big steel iron doing casual jobs for passing trade. He never meets the third entrepreneur, the unnamed owner of the Chandan Hotel, a six-by-six-foot area of the pavement protected by tarpaulin. It is a squalid and languid scene, with bodies sprawled under the tarp.

Rickshaw in Calcutta

Overall, it is a most interesting little street community in the centre of this metropolis of nearly five million residents (and 14.5 million in its urban sprawl); Chaudhuri visits each time he goes to more salubrious establishments nearby. He describes the economic base of working people; of migration into West Bengal and the families being supported back in Bihar and other states with bigger problems than Calcutta has. Chaudhuri explains the prehistory of the Maoist Naxalite movement and the Left Front that had governed West Bengal for an unprecedented thirty-four years, the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They were swept out in the 2011 election, which Chaudhuri uses as another filter to tell Calcutta’s story.

At times the book is repetitious, a result of the collection of shorter pieces written for other purposes. But this is a minor complaint. Chaudhuri’s prose is delicious, his humour wry.

Around the time of Calcutta’s release, two other books drew on the same Elizabeth Bishop poem ‘Questions of Travel’ for epigraphs (the authors were Michelle de Kretser and Drusilla Modjeska). ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ Amit Chaudhuri muses on what home is, ever more pertinent in our age of extraordinary relocation. He writes, ‘For isn’t the idea of home premised upon departure, and travel upon the possibility of return, and the foreclosing of that possibility?’

Calcuttais a splendid read; an introduction to a city, or confirmation of it; a meditation on expression and on his own development as a writer; an insight into the paradoxical or perhaps playful way that the Bengali sensibility conducts itself in daily life.