Tag: Calcutta

Sayandeb Chowdhury spends a day with maestro Nikita Koshkin. Calcutta, in more agreeable times, hosted global superstars and their work with abandon and discerning deliverance. From Marlon Brando to Loise Malle, from Marcel Marceau to Pete Seeger, from Pele to Maradona, from Che Guevara to Fidel Castro, this city has been the unlikely host of some the planet’s biggest names in arts, politics and sports. The city’s legendary enthusiasm, more than made up for its lack of cosmopolitan niceties.  But…

Still from Anjan Dutta’s Ranjana Ami ar Ashbona, 2011. Anjan Dutt’s new rock musical is low on cultural memory and high on imagined nostalgia, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Can five ageing rockers, none of them stars but charismatic individuals, drifters and iconoclasts and dedicated to music in their real and reel life, make for successful Bengali cinema? Is the rock music scene in Calcutta that important to sustain a prolonged narrative about its many trails? Is the making of a female…

When a famous, globetrotting writer writes a book describing in commanding detail the decaying mansion whose limestone peels were scattered across your own childhood, about urban legends that fluttered in your youth, the imposing porches above crawling footpaths that you manned at night or the sweating streets from your summers past, you are bound to be momentarily carried away. But the reverie does not last long because in A Dead Hand: A Crime in Kolkata, Paul Theroux is only occasionally…

Mani Shankar Mukherjee alias Shankar talks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about the jump he has made from being a Bengali bestselling writer to an Indian one The fear of becoming obscure after his first novel, Koto Ajanare (The Many Unknowns) haunted Mani Shankar Mukherjee alias Shankar. So what if it became an instant bestseller? “I was about 19 or 20 and had already fallen out with the mandarins of Bengal’s premier literary magazine where the novel was serialised. They spread the rumour that…

Those were wonderful wonderful times. The middle of the 18th century. Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, was an extension of the first city in many ways — in its riches, its arrogance and its excess. Except that in Calcutta these great imperial values included even the despondent native elite who, flushed with wealth, invented the most absurd and obnoxious ways to get rid of it. Sarnath Banerjee’s second graphic novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers has many…