‘Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea… — Amit Chaudhuri
‘Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room ... And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments ... but the houses and lanes in which people live.’
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More from this book
‘This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.’
‘The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.’
‘All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.’
