Reviews for Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History

The average rating for Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-28 00:00:00 Luis M Lubian Gonzalez A good overview of the history of Calcutta. I wish it had a little more focus on the post-independence period, but it still prepared me well for my visit to the city.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-11 00:00:00 Michael Persico This is supposedly not a history book or a travel book, but something about its "spirit". I wonder if the other books on the series (I saw the promo of one on Tokyo) are also about the "spirit" of those other cities. The history of the city as well as of its luminaries is not any different from a few thousand other books written on the same; unless one considers the clever language a virtue of its own. I was hoping for some perspective on the prospect of a renewal or revival of the city that lost its two reasons for existence. The city was created out of the necessity to provide a center for colonial rulers and the various leeches feeding on it, and to channel the resources supplied from the hinterlands. The achievement in education, literature and culture was truly impressive, and was also a direct result of the easy surplus generated by these two sources of status. The decline was inevitable when both its status as a colonial capital and its hinterlands were gone. The stagnation that set in in the next half-century is a result of the city and the state's failure to reinvent itself and to develop a culture of production, to replace the historical preoccupation with rent-seeking. It is no wonder that the city has fallen to a third-tier status in India, whereas other previously parochial towns have surged ahead with their grit and enterprise. This stagnation seems to have eroded even Calcutta's natural endowments, which is evident in the decline of the Hoogli Port despite the life support it received at the cost of drying off an entire nation downstream. When there is nothing else, the default is to fall back on old glory, namely Tagore and Ray and Sandesh and colonial architecture. It would be great to read in some other work, which is not so soaked in the "Calcutta Spirit", whether the oversupply of culture and sophistication is capable of giving the city a newer identity and purpose, or if the self-gratification is a means and an end to itself.