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Tag: Calcutta

  • The City of Joy

    First published in French in 1985, The City of Joy is set in Anand Nagar, a crowded slum in Howrah across the river from Calcutta. Lapierre based his book on years of research and on real people, whose names and details he altered, and wrote it in a novelistic style that blurs reportage and fiction.

    Three main figures carry the narrative. Stephan Kovalski, a Polish Catholic priest, chooses to live among the slum's residents rather than minister to them from outside. Hasari Pal, a farmer driven from his Bengal village by drought and debt, becomes a rickshaw puller in the city. Max Loeb, a young American doctor, arrives to help run a clinic and confronts leprosy, cholera, monsoon floods and the slum's own mafia.

    The book was a worldwide bestseller and was filmed by Roland Joffe in 1992. Some Indian critics objected to its portrayal of Calcutta as a byword for misery, while admirers praised its insistence on the dignity, humour and solidarity of the poor. Lapierre donated a large share of his royalties to charitable work in the region.

    Book details

    AuthorDominique Lapierre
    First published1985
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byKathryn Spink
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)470
    SettingAnand Nagar slum, Howrah, near Calcutta, 1970s and early 1980s

    Themes

    • Poverty and resilience
    • Faith and service
    • Migration from countryside to city
    • Solidarity
    • Human dignity

    Who should read it

    Readers moved by stories of courage in hardship, with an awareness of the outsider's lens it brings to Calcutta.

  • Sister of My Heart

    Anju and Sudha are born on the same night into the Chatterjee household in Calcutta, on the day their fathers disappeared on a mysterious expedition. Raised together by three widowed women in a decaying mansion, they are closer than sisters, though they could not be more different: Anju is bookish and outspoken, Sudha beautiful and romantic.

    As they grow up, a family secret about Sudha's father threatens their bond, and arranged marriages pull them apart. Sudha marries into a traditional family in a provincial town ruled by a domineering mother-in-law, while Anju moves to California with her husband and struggles with the loneliness of immigrant life.

    Told in alternating voices, the novel draws on Bengali folk tales and explores female friendship, the pressures on women to produce sons and the different trap each life presents. Its sequel, The Vine of Desire, continues the cousins' story. It suits readers who enjoy emotional, character-driven stories of women's lives across continents.

    Book details

    AuthorChitra Banerjee Divakaruni
    First published1999
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)322
    SettingCalcutta, a town in Bengal and California, 1970s to 1990s

    Themes

    • Female friendship
    • Arranged marriage
    • Family secrets
    • Immigration
    • Motherhood

    Who should read it

    Readers who love stories of sisterhood and women navigating tradition and choice.

  • The Shadow Lines

    The narrator grows up in Calcutta idolising his uncle Tridib, a scholar who teaches him to imagine distant places precisely. Through Tridib he becomes fascinated with the Price family in London, especially May, a musician Tridib loved. In memory he travels back and forth between a 1960s childhood and student years in London, assembling a family story in fragments.

    His grandmother, a stern schoolteacher born in Dhaka, longs to bring an elderly uncle out of what has become East Pakistan. That journey, in 1964, coincides with communal riots on both sides of the border, an episode the narrator only gradually understands and that he must reconstruct from newspapers and the silences of the adults around him.

    Ghosh's second novel questions the lines drawn on maps and asks why violence on one side so precisely mirrors violence on the other. Written partly in response to the 1984 Delhi riots, it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989 and is widely studied in Indian universities.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published1988
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)252
    SettingCalcutta, Dhaka and London, 1939 to early 1980s
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1989

    Themes

    • Borders and nationalism
    • Memory
    • Communal violence
    • Imagination
    • Partition

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in Partition's long shadow and novels built from memory rather than chronology.

  • The Lowland

    Subhash and Udayan Mitra are born fifteen months apart in Tollygunge, a south Calcutta neighbourhood bordered by two ponds and a stretch of flood-prone land. Inseparable as boys, they diverge in the late 1960s: Udayan, charismatic and impatient, is drawn into the Maoist-inspired Naxalite uprising, while the cautious Subhash goes to Rhode Island to study oceanography.

    Udayan marries Gauri, a philosophy student with her own fierce intelligence, without his parents' blessing. When political violence reaches the family, Subhash makes a choice meant as rescue that binds him, Gauri and a child to one another in ways none of them can fully accept. The novel then follows its characters across fifty years and two continents.

    Lahiri's prose is calm and closely observed, and she lets long time spans reveal how a single event goes on shaping lives. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the US National Book Award, and it won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published2013
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)340
    SettingTollygunge, Calcutta and coastal Rhode Island, 1950s to 2010s
    AwardsDSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015

    Themes

    • Brotherhood
    • Political radicalism
    • Motherhood
    • Guilt
    • Exile

    Who should read it

    Readers who like slow-burning family novels that trace one choice across generations.