Category: Calcutta

Review of Barry O’Brien, The Anglo-Indians: Portrait of a Community’, Aleph Book Company, 2022), Cover of the Book…

Review of Chidananda Dasgupta, Collected Prose, Vol 1 (Ed. Samik Bandyopadhyay). Dey’s Publishing.

T-shirts with images of Mamata Banerjee, Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and logo of CPI (M). Reuters/Rupak De Chowdhuri The party has virtually no opposition in West Bengal. This has led to an entrenchment of violent elements.

St Xavier’s College. Pic courtesy, college website. Twenty years ago, I am sure, we lived in a better world. Provocations to planetary violence were limited, the earth was cooler, technological vigilantism that we have come to have made a natural disposition of being human was absent. In short, it was a naïve, innocent and doubtlessly a friendlier planet. In the vast continuum of history, twenty years is nothing, not even a speck. But it seems that modern history has so…

The iconic march in Calcutta in support of the #Hokkolorob movement, September 20, 2014 . Photo by author. Last summer I found myself at the annual Critical Theory Summer School at Birkbeck College, University of London. The primary attention and energy of the lectures and discussions at the summer school was to find a lexicon for the many modes of resistances that have been sweeping across the world in the last few years. Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas, Slavoj Zizek, the…

Reflections of a typical neighbourhood in Calcutta’s south. Photo by author. Farewell, my city…show us the way Asian women, show us the way to bitter exile. Agave in Euripedes’ The Bacchae                                                The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained…

Facsimile of published article A new exhibition on the visual history of Calcutta opens a large window to the heterotopia of itsglorious past and forces us to stand by it in awe, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury One only has to open one’s eyes to understand the daily life of the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory, to return the same way in the evening…

Calcutta on a winter morning. Photo by author. After years of being on the wrong side of history, Calcutta must take advantage of the fact that similar political factions now govern the city, state and the centre, and press for a genuine make over, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury “Hüzün does not just paralyse the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them a poetic license to be paralysed.” — Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City) “Through the churning of work, the…

Recent logo of the Kolkata International Book Fair. Image for representative purpose only When the Book Fair burnt in January 1997, it did not smell of authentic Bengali cuisine. Or of any of the many subliminal ‘snake foods’ (purported snacks) that were being cooked inside the fairground, one of whose stalls had been that very Prometheus who handed over fire to an undiscerning congregation of millions. Inside a stall, around 5 in the evening, I was browsing through a book…

LPs for sale at the iconic footpath store near Calcutta’s Wellington crossing, 2010. Photo by author. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who while nurturing a deep distaste for everything Christian and worthy of appreciation in the Western world had reserved a keen ear for music, famously said: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Though it is not known, this author of A Case for Wagner must have heard his music in LPs. Technologically it’s unlikely because LPs came later than Nietzsche’s descent…