Amit Chaudhuri

‘The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.’

‘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.’

‘... he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.’

‘... I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting – and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street’s ebb and flow of traffic.’

‘... the Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.’

‘Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.’

The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.

‘Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.’

‘Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.’

‘Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime ...’

(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.’

‘Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new weeks begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning.’