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(From left) Krishna Bose and Amit Chaudhuri at the book launch. (Sanat Kumar Sinha)
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Calcutta, March 4: Amit Chaudhuri does not like parts of this Calcutta. His relationship with the city is a little complicated. He is not the usual resident.
At the launch of his book Calcutta — Two years in the City (Hamish Hamilton) recently in the city, he spoke about how he would visit Calcutta as a boy in the 70s, on holiday from Bombay where his father was a well-placed corporate employee. Bombay life was “quotidian”; Calcutta was rich.
The exuberant children’s literature, the bright illustrated covers of the children’s magazines, and Tagore: these froze into a “holiday from his own culture”. “This was an education in what the modern city was,” he said at the Oxford Bookstore, where former parliamentarian Krishna Bose launched his book.
The book is an account of the years 2009-11 in the city. The writer, an onlooker, visits its many streets, especially Park Street, its many pasts, and meets numerous people. He may not like parts of this city, but then he loves it. Love is difficult. After his studies abroad, he came back to the city as a young man. “I made a choice to come back,” he said. The older city had passed away, which was inevitable: no place can be revisited. But the city had lost something. As an itinerant writer, who visits many places in the world, he keeps leaving and coming back to the city, and he still feels that excitement when coming back. And then it goes.
Walter Benjamin talks about two types of memories, Chaudhuri says. Memories you put together and destructive memory, things you can’t help. The second kind of memory, destroying the narrative, strikes like splinters. Memory of another Calcutta strikes Chaudhuri like these splinters.
The change started in the seventies and worked its way through the eighties, culminating in the recent upheavals.
So now, if Delhi is about power and Mumbai, formerly Bombay, about money, the most important question in Calcutta is: “Are you going to eat at home tonight?”
Chaudhuri comes down heavily on the “static versions” of the city’s past that feed the nostalgia-industry. In the same breath he mentions “static versions” of Tagore, especially of his songs. They are dead things. “Tagore has turned into what Buddhadeb Bose said of Sanskrit, ‘a venerated corpse’,” said Chaudhuri.
Visva-Bharati’s stress on the skeletal versions of Tagore’s music while he was still in copyright helped such attitude to crystallise.
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