Return to Calcutta

AS RABINDRANATH TAGORE’S massive funeral cortege sweeps through the grief-stricken streets of Calcutta in 1941, Ruchir Joshi introduces the first few characters in his sprawling and ambitious new novel. Soon, there is a further onrush of characters, prompting a bit of cheeky, almost self-deprecating meta-narrative, in which one of them wonders why readers—unlike those who listen to music—“freak out” or at least “become anxious when a bunch of characters are introduced in a book”. After all, he points out, music lovers don’t get jittery when a whole jungle of instruments comes at them from the first moment.

But Joshi quickly demonstrates there is no cause for the reader to be deterred either by the length of his book (900 pages) or the abundance of characters in Great Eastern Hotel, a remarkable beast of a novel that seduces you to dwell leisurely inside it and lose yourself in its capacious embrace. During World War II, at a time when the Raj feared (mistakenly) that Japan was planning a full-scale invasion, a diverse set of characters are pulled together by the tug of those frenzied times and by unforeseen encounters. This array of disparate people—including the somewhat staid but courageous young communist (Niru), her curious English friend (Imogen), the foppish Cezanne-admiring painter (Kedar), the legendary French Chef (Bonnemaison) and a pickpocket-turned-blackmarketeer (Gopal)—are woven together through coincidence and hidden connections, allowing the narrative to cleverly bridge seemingly unrelated storylines.

Although it is firmly tethered to the events of that time—the fall of Singapore, the exodus from Calcutta, the failure of Cripps, the call to Quit India, and the dreadful famine—history is wrapped lightly around the novel, as it should be in all good historical fiction, more as loosely draped shawl than tightly fitted bandhgala. The demands of fidelity rarely if ever overwhelms a narrative that is replete with engaging little meditations on such things as music, food, politics and of course art. As Kedar looks out on the bright green tropical landscape in the sharp and shuffling light, he concludes that Impressionism could have only been born in a temperate climate where the light remains constant for most of the day. “There’s nothing here for a painter because the vegetation and light are already doing it all, and there is no honest channel through which a painter can add to it.”

There is a forceful and robust beauty to Joshi’s prose, an exuberance that makes dialogue come alive, captured in the cantankerous exchanges between Kedar and Imogen and the hectoring paternalism of Gopal’s boss Ustad. Here and there, and this is more cavil than criticism, one couldn’t help wishing that there was a little less focus on that enduring trope of cultural dissonances between East and West (a few passages on the conversations between Niru and Imogen are a case in point). Then again, given the socio-political milieu of the time, it is arguable it would have been impossible to completely ignore such things as the gulf that language creates or the misunderstandings that emerge from ingrained or reflexively held beliefs.

A hotel is a hotel, goes another piece of meta-narrative… “half the fun is peering through doors left ajar and trying to decipher what’s going on inside”. Even so, the Great Eastern Hotel of course is more than “one of the best hotels in the world”; it is also a metaphor for Calcutta, the “much greater Great Eastern Hotel”. Joshi’s city teems with stories and he peoples it with a riotous assortment of personalities clashing and conjoining as they engage with a Calcutta that is trapped in a terrible turbulence but is determined to be audaciously, even joyously, alive.

booksCalcuttafictionIndian societyJapannovelRuchir Joshi