Calcutta (Cities of the Imagination) [Paperback]

Krishna Dutta (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2003 | Series: Cities of the Imagination

In the popular imagination, Calcutta is a packed and pestilential sprawl, made notorious by the Black Hole and the works of Mother Teresa, Kipling called it a City of Dreadful Night, and a century later V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass, and Louis Malle revived its hellish image. This is the place where the West first truly encountered the East. Founded in the 1690s by East India Company merchants beside the Hugli River, Calcutta grew into India's capital and the second city of the British Empire during the Raj. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta was also home to extraordinary Bengalis such as Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, and Satyajit Ray, among the geniuses of world cinema. Above all, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where refinement rubs shoulders with commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema, and music.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dutta depicts Calcutta's many faces in this erudite guide to the city, which is part of the Cities of the Imagination Series. The author, who was born and raised in Calcutta and who has translated Bengali literature, divides her book into nine chapters, each one examining a different facet of the varied Indian metropolis. Her section on "Company Calcutta" identifies Calcutta's founder, Job Charnock, and pinpoints August 24, 1690 as the "beginning of Calcutta." She goes on, in that chapter, to discuss cultural mixing (between the colonizers and the colonized) in the 1700s. Another chapter, entitled "City of Strife," addresses Calcutta's longstanding image of poverty and portrays Mother Teresa as having "an uncanny understanding of the psychology of charity." Wide-ranging if dense, Dutta's work presents an in-depth portrait of one of India's most intriguing cities. A list of suggested reading, which ranges from V. S. Naipaul to Jhumpa Lahiri, along with indexes of important Calcutta people and places add to the book's value. B&w illus., maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Signal Books Ltd (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1902669592
• ISBN-13: 978-1902669595
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,988,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Travel > Asia > India > Calcutta

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A welcome introduction to a much maligned city, January 20, 2004

By 

Ashutosh Chatterji (Sterling, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination) (Paperback)

Krishna Dutta does tremendous justice to a city that has quite unjustly, although, giving the perpetrators the benefit of the doubt, perhaps unwittingly been cast as an icon for poverty or human suffering, by media, some authors who have not yet given up Kipling's notion of the "white man's burden" and certain celebrities like the late Princess Diana, whose "acts of compassion" have caused many guilt-stricken people to spend a few thousand dollars apiece to fly out to Calcutta and donate a dozen shirts to the "dying and the poorest of the poor", when they could probably do a greater service to humanity by going to the underbelly of their own respective cities and spend that money on the poor and needy closer home. Krishna Dutta brings out the true image of Calcutta, complete with its history, heritage, culture and warts (all of which contribute to make it special, something that is true for all cities in the world). I sincerely hope that the book makes it to every reader who has been dazed by the sensationalism of Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy in the last few years. As an outsider who migrated to Calcutta. lived and worked there for a few years (and fell in love with the place) and then migrated away from there, I can say that people would be better off reading this book as an introduction to Calcutta, than they probably will from any other, least of all the works of Lapierre and Gunter Grass.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read, better if you're a Bengali, June 3, 2005

By 

Souvik Mitra "S!" (Bangalore, India) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination) (Paperback)

One of the best aspects of this book, in my opinion, is that it is definitely not a celebration of the city and its ways. In fact, at times, Dutta is blatantly unsympathetic towards what has been - but by and large, it is an unbiased work, grand in its scope, addresses intangibles like culture, and threads together events, perhaps inconsequential in terms of political history, but definitely meaningful in making the city a little bit more than the sum of its history and people.

The book is well organized, and the text is lucid. The book spans the history of the city since it was a small village to Satyajit Ray - the Oscar winning film maker from the city. And though, throughout, the book is about people and events that shaped the city into what it is today, the author never losses sight of the fact that the book is not about any of them in particular, but what they meant to the city they lived in.

It is also a book of strife and struggle, of fascination with a foreign culture, of assimilation, of unlikely but not untimely great men. It is a book of nuances, of idiosyncrasies and of little forgotten by lanes in a big city. It is a book, too, of cowardice and indifference, and of hatred.

The details that the book captures can definitely be captured about any other place in any other part of of the world. However, the particular combination and degree to which these commonalities apply in the context of a place make that place a differentiated, not necessarily special - for that requires a personal identification - place, & this book, in my opinion, captures the 'flavour' of the city.

And, just by the way, I do not like the city myself so much, fascinated as I was by its cultural and literary history.

S!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History Illuminated, February 22, 2006

By 

R. Mitra "mystery writer" (Long Island, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination) (Paperback)

The book starts off with a short but very enjoyable foreward by Anita Desai. And then Ms. Dutta takes over. It is obvious Ms. Dutta, does not live in Calcutta any more (she is a resident of London). For she has that detached enjoyment given to those who look back and decide what is enjoyable while the unpleasant parts fade into memory.

She has done extensive research and the results are gratifying. Her writing is erudite as well as down to earth. That is not surprising, as we read when Macaulay introduced English as the official language, it was embraced the City's intelligentsia. Calcutta also produced some of the most virulent opposition to the British Raj as spirit of Independence took hold of the country. Of course the City is famous for its Literary figures and of the Performance Artistes. The author gives us a good review of those. A book worthy of being read by Indians and non-Indians but it will be specially cherished by Bengalis. For them, I would make it a must read.