The Flux of Calcutta in 'Great Eastern Hotel'

I’ve always been fascinated by the war years in Calcutta and what happens to the city in the period leading up to Independence. At the start of the war in 1939 Calcutta is a city of about 2.3 million people. Very soon the war forces people from all corners fo the world to congregate to the city — factory workers from north India; soldiers from Britain, Australia-New Zealand, Africa and the United States; wealthy refugees in the shape of White Russians and Jews fleeing Europe; Indians who escape Burma after Rangoon falls; peasants from rural Bengal as the famine starts to bite; and, finally, the waves of Partition refugees from East Bengal. By 1949, even after most of the the foreign soldiers leave, the population of the city has almost quadrupled and the new Calcutta that emerges is very different from the pre-war one.   

 

What happens in the novel is that the narrative toggles back and forth between the characters’ points of view and an overarching description by a voice that zooms out and joins historical dots. I settled upon this double mode of story-telling as I got deeper and deeper into possibly the most tumultuous four or five years in Calcutta’s three-hundred-year-long history. Though the history is fascinating and often horrifying, I was far more interested in what happens to my four young characters as they face the sudden, unexpected challenges the rapidly churning events fling at them.  

 

As I tried to get inside each character’s head, it became clear that language played a central part in how they perceived and processed the reality unfolding around them. The internal language of each of the main characters gets split open as they enter into dialogue with the realities — and speech — of others who are very different from themselves. As always, when 'writing India' in English, one challenge was to catch the cadence and spirit of the non-English tongues* as well as how each different person spoke their English. A conjoined challenge was to make sure all speech and described thought stayed within it’s time, to make sure ideas, words and jargon from later in history didin’t make their way into someone thinking or doing something in, say, November 1942. (*for me English is very much one of India’s languages, so I try not use the word ‘vernacular’ when talking about other, older Indian languages) 

 

The novel took me around two decades from first starting the research. I went through different hoops while writing the book, all of them constrained by what the period allowed me to do in terms of writing and playing with language. The book is just out — I will begin to understand my evolution as a writer only after I have some quantum of response from readers. 

 

There are and always will be many different Calcuttas that exist simultaneously — it’s the nature of great cities. Though the city in which I’ve spend much of my life is very different from the one I describe here, there are still connections and traces which are recognisable. My relationship with Calcutta is, no surprises, a kind of a love-hate one, and I’m sure it manifests itself in this book and the previous one The Last Jet-Engine Laugh. 

 

As we know, lots of people have used hotels at the centre of their novels and films, some eponymously titled, some not. For me the Great Eastern Hotel, a.) symbolised what the ruling classes could get away with in the middle of this throbbing city of great economic contrasts  b.) provided a beautiful plaform-maze in which people from very different backgrounds unexpectedly come up against each other . c) As I was writing the novel it became clear that Great Eastern Hotel (without the The) was actually a perfect metaphor for the city as it starts to receive and shelter unwanted but unavoidable guests across 1942-43. It is, finally, Calcutta that was the much greater eastern hotel, with its lakhs of diverse guests, in ‘rooms’ or zones hidden from each other, paying all sorts of prices in order to be able to stay.