The Epic City. The world on the streets Calcutta

Häftad bok. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2017. 237 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. Storpocket 135x220 mm. Språk: engelska, English.
Kushanava Choudhury’s beautifully observed account of life in the West Bengal metropolis is full of humour and wonder. 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”.


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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.