Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta

Kipling’s ‘city of dreadful night’, the ‘nightmare experience’ of Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘heroine of a hundred thousand loves’, a ‘pestilential behemoth’—Calcutta provokes extreme reactions in almost everyone who has encountered the city. Despite having ‘probably the filthiest climate on earth’, described by Mark Twain as ‘enough to make a doorknob mushy’, despite the doomsday predictions about it being a ‘dying city’, Calcutta throbs with a life and a vitality all its own, drawing people from all walks of life to engage with it.

This anthology brings together essays, stories, poems and memoirs of people who have shared an ardent relationship with Calcutta. From Henry Meredith Parker’s early nineteenth-century vignettes of life in the city to Ulrike Draesner’s overwrought images at the turn of the new millennium, from Tagore’s elegiac reminiscences of his childhood home to Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s hallucinogenic depictions of nights spent on the footpath, Memory’s Gold celebrates the coexistence of the sacrosanct and the blasphemous, so characteristic of Calcutta itself.