Book description
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, Gnter 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 both India's capital during the Raj and the second
city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its grand
neo-classical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings,
Macaulay and Curzon. It 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 exquisite refinement rubs
shoulders with coarse commercialism and savage 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. Calcutta is a City of
Artists: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of Tagore, Ray and
Jamini Roy; College Street and the annual book fair; a city of learning
and books. 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, Gnter 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 both India's capital during the Raj and
the second city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its
grand neo-classical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings,
Macaulay and Curzon. It 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 exquisite refinement rubs
shoulders with coarse commercialism and savage 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. Calcutta is a City of
Artists: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of Tagore, Ray and
Jamini Roy; College Street and the annual book fair; a city of learning
and books.
