Memory's Gold: Writings On Calcutta

"Kipling’s ‘city of dreadful night’, the ‘nightmare experience’ of Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘heroine of a hundred thousand loves’, a ‘pestilential behemoth’—Calcutta provokes extreme reactions in almost everyone who has encountered the city. Despite having ‘probably the filthiest climate on earth’, described by Mark Twain as ‘enough to make a doorknob mushy’, despite the doomsday predictions about it being a ‘dying city’, Calcutta throbs with a life and a vitality all its own, drawing people from all walks of life to engage with it.

This anthology brings together essays, stories, poems and memoirs of people who have shared an ardent relationship with Calcutta. From Henry Meredith Parker’s early nineteenth-century vignettes of life in the city to Ulrike Draesner’s overwrought images at the turn of the new millennium, from Tagore’s elegiac reminiscences of his childhood home to Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s hallucinogenic depictions of nights spent on the footpath, Memory’s Gold celebrates the coexistence of the sacrosanct and the blasphemous, so characteristic of Calcutta itself.

This sumptuous collection, edited and meticulously put together by Amit Chaudhuri, one of India’s foremost novelists and writers, addresses almost all aspects of life in the metropolis. While Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s letter talks about the city’s extraordinary literary acumen—a shopkeeper who reads the Meghnadvad Kabya and engages the poet in a discussion on blank verse—Nirad Chaudhuri’s account introduces us to the ‘natives’ and mansions of Calcutta. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s realistic ‘Canvasser Krishnalal’, dealing with an occupation typical to Calcutta, offers a striking contrast to Utpalkumar Basu’s surreal take on office culture in the magical city. Buddhadeva Bose’s classic treatise on that quintessential Calcuttan contribution to high culture, the adda, the essays on Durga Puja—when the city resembles an unreal pageant—and Moti Nandi’s piece on football, provide glimpses of the many passions that rule the city.

Essays by Günter Grass and V.S. Naipaul, the chronicles of the Krittibas generation of poets and writers—Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay, among others—Sasthi Brata’s loving ode to College Street and the Coffee House and Jug Suraiya’s equally nostalgic take on Park Street, bring to the fore various perspectives on the city—the visitor’s, the inhabitant’s and the exile’s—all of which celebrate Calcutta with as much gusto as the fervour with which they often despair of it.