Chowringhee

Here, day and night were interchangeable. The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.’

Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis.

Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey’s Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters—the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others—soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is a homage to a city and its people

About The Author
Sankar (Mani Sankar Mukherji) is the author of several Bengali best-sellers, both fiction and non-fiction.

Two of his novels, Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman), were turned into films by Satyajit Ray.

Sankar also wears a corporate hat, as Chief Advisor (Corporate Relations) at RPG Enterprises. He lives and works in Kolkata

Arunava Sinha is an Internet professional by day and a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction by night. His translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee won the 2007 Crossword–Vodafone award for Best Translation. His other translations include Buddhadeva Bose’s My Kind of Girl (2009). Born and brought up in Calcutta, he lives in New Delhi.