Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel (HarperCollins) is a good attempt at writing the Great Calcutta Novel in English. The story bookends primarily two time periods, the ’40s, but with the narrator looking back at it from the ’70s. Kedar Lahiri, the painter, Communist worker Nirupama Majumdar, and the city of Calcutta itself, which was once the transit point to everywhere else, are some of the main characters of this 900-plus pager.
Joshi, also a filmmaker, knows how to set up a scene; the book reads really well in parts. He writes good dialogues, but the characters are wooden. The length of the novel or the number of characters is hardly the problem—the weaving isn’t tight; the city, the characters and their journeys are not of a piece.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Mirror of Beauty tells the story of the Indian subcontinent—with a Delhi focus—of two centuries with several changes in time and space. Closer home, and with much fewer pages, Shankar’s Bengali novel set in Calcutta of the ’50s, Chowringhee—available in English translation—is another example of masterly storytelling dealing with multiple characters that move through the light-and-shadow world of a hotel set in the glory days of a cosmopolitan city before the shine dulls.
Calcutta-aficionados may, however, enjoy Great Eastern’s various world-buildings—sitting in it is a famine book, a World War II book, one on babu-life, the Leftist book—and plenty of conversations on art, painting, music, Calcutta’s underbelly, and even an artistic credo for writing such a book. At the launch of the book at Delhi’s British Council, author Mukul Kesavan, who is Joshi’s friend, remarked on the artistic bent of almost every character, the story of friendships in the novel, particularly between the young women, some of them flatmates, living together despite competing political affiliations. TMS caught up with the writer later; excerpts from a conversation:
Why did you name your novel Great Eastern Hotel, and how did you build the mythology of the hotel, a Calcutta landmark, in the novel?
I was fascinated by the huge labyrinthine hotel that had witnessed so many events in Calcutta's history. I was doubly fascinated by its place in Second-World-War Calcutta, where it hosted first a varied cosmopolitan crowd and then became home to high-ranking American officers. However, the book is called Great Eastern Hotel and not The Great Eastern..., this is because as you read you realise that it is the city of Calcutta that becomes the really great eastern 'hotel' during the War, with all sorts of guests, willing or choice-less and desperate, who 'check into' the city for varying durations.
You waited more than 20 years to write your second and your second Calcutta novel.
The book took the time it did due to a variety of reasons, yes.
Great Eastern Hotel sometimes seems to talk too much. This is Nirupama talking about another character,Gopal – “antisocial, some fringe lumpen, petty criminal type, some sort of assistant pimp, you know, a dalal…” when perhaps just one or two descriptors could have done. And yet in some nearby sentence, you let unoon off without an explanation. Is this by design?
If you think the novel 'talks too much' that's your opinion and you have every right to it. As for the example you've given, when people talk (as opposed to novels talking) they often don't speak in pithily economical sentences. Unoon has been explained as a clay oven earlier.
At one point in the novel, Rabindra Sangeet has been compared to the sound of a cat dying. Bengali novels do not make such observations. And yet you also have an important scene in the backdrop of Tagore’s funeral like Mrinal Sen did in his film Baishe Shraban. How does one square with the two – the irreverence and the reverence in the same book?
Lots of Bangla novels are very irreverent about things, including things held in high regard by mainstream Bengali culture. It's possible to be irreverent about someone or something and still love them or it. In this case it's one of my characters who is making that comparison, and yet, yes, he also loves Tagore.
Which was the character who gave you the most trouble and the one which just flowed? Why did you begin with Nirupama’s story?
All of them gave me the same amount of trouble and joy. As you read on into the book you realise that Nirupama's story is one of the main spines of the narrative so that scene in the Prologue was a good place to start.
We were looking at a war and now we aren’t, thankfully. Your book also had references to bombings and blackouts, what kind of research did you do for it?
I found I had embarked on writing a book about possibly the most tumultuous and event-filled period in Calcutta's history. The research led me down several rabbit holes into amazing parallel worlds that existed at that time. Some of them made it into the novel.
Please name one of your favourite anti-war books.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller which has you screaming with laughter even as it throws you deep into the full horror of war.
You have lived in Delhi for close to ten years. But what is it about Calcutta that makes you want to write about it? Is your next book too on Calcutta?
This book is about Calcutta, which is a city with a fascinating history. I have no idea what my next book will be about.
Who are you reading now?
Right now I'm reading Ann Patchett and Christian Kracht. Both are differently brilliant.