| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £4.25
Trade in Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £4.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Product Description
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Early European navigational maps of the Bay of Bengal, such as Thomas Bowrey's of 1687 and George Herron's of 1690, do not show Calcutta or the fishing village of Kolikata, but they do show neighboring Satanuti (Chuttanuty/Soota Loota), a weavers' village, on the eastern bank of the Hugli, and Gobindapur (Govindpore). Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
It is not a book that you read from cover to cover at one sitting, and I doubt if it was intended to be so, but one that you dip into with curiosity. So you read one part and then you want to go on to read the bit before or the bit after, or perhaps another relevant section, still discovering other interesting things.
This is not a dry, factual guide book but rather someone walking beside you as you go along, telling you snippets of interesting information. In her Foreword to the book, Anita Desai says of Krishna Dutta: ‘This guide cannot be a foreigner who does not know the city intimately from within, yet it cannot be a local citizen who knows no other and has no standards of comparison or breadth of vision.’ I totally agree with this. It is an insight into a fascinating city, rich in culture, history, politics and, above all, the story of people and their lives, past and present.
I particularly enjoyed the small windows in the text where personal descriptions take you right there, to the place in question. For example, ‘The coffee house itself is fairly dark, with windows on only one side. Beneath rows of gently revolving antiquated ceiling fans sit small groups of men and women around wooden tables, lingering over cups of quite good coffee and snacks, while turbaned waiters rush around replenishing their supplies.’ Feel as if you are there?
Or perhaps the description of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the end of which you read: ‘Sit for a while in the beautifully carved pews and you may briefly forget that you are in post-colonial Calcutta – until you spot the pictures in the Chapel of the Holy Name showing Christ in Bengali folk style with the elongated eyes popularized by the painter Jamini Roy.’ Not the usual boring ‘on the left you see … ‘ found in so many guide books.
Thank you and well done, Krishna Dutta, for giving us your insight into and love of such an amazing and fascinating city; truly a ‘city of the imagination’.
If you are planning to visit Calcutta then this is the book to take with you. If you are not lucky enough to be able to go, then read this book and you will feel you have been.
It is not a book that you read from cover to cover at one sitting, and I doubt if it was intended to be so, but one that you dip into with curiosity. So you read one part and then you want to go on to read the bit before or the bit after, or perhaps another relevant section, still discovering other interesting things.
This is not a dry, factual guide book but rather someone walking beside you as you go along, telling you snippets of interesting information. In her Foreword to the book, Anita Desai says of Krishna Dutta: ‘This guide cannot be a foreigner who does not know the city intimately from within, yet it cannot be a local citizen who knows no other and has no standards of comparison or breadth of vision.’ I totally agree with this. It is an insight into a fascinating city, rich in culture, history, politics and, above all, the story of people and their lives, past and present.
I particularly enjoyed the small windows in the text where personal descriptions take you right there, to the place in question. For example, ‘The coffee house itself is fairly dark, with windows on only one side. Beneath rows of gently revolving antiquated ceiling fans sit small groups of men and women around wooden tables, lingering over cups of quite good coffee and snacks, while turbaned waiters rush around replenishing their supplies.’ Feel as if you are there?
Or perhaps the description of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the end of which you read: ‘Sit for a while in the beautifully carved pews and you may briefly forget that you are in post-colonial Calcutta – until you spot the pictures in the Chapel of the Holy Name showing Christ in Bengali folk style with the elongated eyes popularized by the painter Jamini Roy.’ Not the usual boring ‘on the left you see … ‘ found in so many guide books.
Thank you and well done, Krishna Dutta, for giving us your insight into and love of such an amazing and fascinating city; truly a ‘city of the imagination’.
The book is well organized, and the text is lucid. The book spans the history of the city since it was a small village to Satyajit Ray - the Oscar winning film maker from the city. And though, throughout, the book is about people and events that shaped the city into what it is today, the author never losses sight of the fact that the book is not about any of them in particular, but what they meant to the city they lived in.
It is also a book of strife and struggle, of fascination with a foreign culture, of assimilation, of unlikely but not untimely great men. It is a book of nuances, of idiosyncrasies and of little forgotten by lanes in a big city. It is a book, too, of cowardice and indifference, and of hatred.
The details that the book captures can definitely be captured about any other place in any other part of of the world. However, the particular combination and degree to which these commonalities apply in the context of a place make that place a differentiated, not necessarily special - for that requires a personal identification - place, & this book, in my opinion, captures the 'flavour' of the city.
And, just by the way, I do not like the city myself so much, fascinated as I was by its cultural and literary history.
S!
She has done extensive research and the results are gratifying. Her writing is erudite as well as down to earth. That is not surprising, as we read when Macaulay introduced English as the official language, it was embraced the City's intelligentsia. Calcutta also produced some of the most virulent opposition to the British Raj as spirit of Independence took hold of the country. Of course the City is famous for its Literary figures and of the Performance Artistes. The author gives us a good review of those. A book worthy of being read by Indians and non-Indians but it will be specially cherished by Bengalis. For them, I would make it a must read.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
