I am so enjoying the Aleph series of city biographies. Naresh Fernandes must have had his work cut out for him, given that Bombay has been chronicled so often and so well. However, ` City Adrift,` is a very good read, leaving you feeling sad for the city in its present reduced avatar.
For the Delhi monograph Perpetual City, David Davidar has got Malvika Singh, one of the old haute monde, (with the emphasis on high living rather than high fashion, of course!) to sift through her rich memory bank of Dilli past and Delhi present (New New Delhi, as Singh calls it), and the result is a handsome tribute to Power City. If it was anyone else but the child of the late Raj and Romesh Thapar, Malvika Singh’s recollections would sound like perpetual name-dropping; just about everyone who was anyone walk through these pages. But this is the publisher of that iconic magazine Seminar, the perceptive child of parents who entertained the intellectual, the glamorous, the rich and powerful of the capital of India.
The pace is largely political; Singh presents Delhi without flourish, without bothering to explain why things are the way they are. She also articulates what I felt when I visited Rome : that these are two cities where you stumble upon beautiful monuments at virtually every turn of the road. Of course, it is another matter that the monuments are (mostly) protected and well kept in the Eternal City, and criminally neglected and in ruins in Delhi. `It is disappointing to live in such an unusual city with layers of cultures, traditions and patterns of life and living, and have to contend with unimaginative municipalities and their sterile regulations…which deny us entry into our legacies, ` as Singh puts it.
The undertone of wistful nostalgia for a Delhi past and forever lost sometimes tends to overwhelm the account. Then again, that was a Delhi of grace and elegance, now it is the city of politicians and bureaucrats.
This is the fourth of the city monographs I have read and this is the only book which contains quite a few sins of (editing) omission and commission. The all too frequent use of quotes, mostly entirely unnecessary, makes for much visual clutter. Sample this: It was a bring a bottle- and- a- laugh party, without an `invitation card.` Then, too many commas mar the flow of prose.
This, I know, is not a brief review…sorry, but Delhi is a city close to my heart.
The Calcutta Reader
And here comes what is, so far, the best in the Aleph cities` monographs: Grand Delusions, a short biography of Kolkata by Indrajit Hazra. The style is wry, the tone is affectionate and the text neatly encompasses all the different Kolkatas: the Bridge (cap B deliberate, of course!); the politics; the mishti; Bengali cinema of the arthouse and the mainstream variety; Park Street and its eateries; the idiosyncracies of the City of (debatable) Joy as well as its denizens, all under the gauzy veil of shonskriti (culture) and oposhonskriti (decadent culture…ooh, I love this!). In fact, Hazra pulls off a Julian Barnes with a witty list of all things considered oposhonskriti, which quite cracks one up.
Right at the start, Hazra says he can`t write a history of the city in the empirical objective sense, he can only write a biased, coloured, palimpsestic story…` and that’s what makes this one racy, fun read. Touching on the Naxal wave that swept this region in the early Seventies, Hazra asks : would Kolkata’s youngsters have avoided the madness if they had malls, multiplexes, television and career paths to chart? And you wonder…
This is his description of the Kalighat deity : its expansive golden tongue streaming out of an anthropomorphic black face with fiery orange eyes, is a post-modernist structure of near abstraction, a Jamini Roy reshaped by Kandinsky. Elsewhere, he says Pujo is Oktoberfest without the booze.
Hazra uses a familiar touch for his portrait of a well-loved city. Kolkatans, I daresay, will enjoy it muchly, almost as much as someone (read me) who does not know the city too well and moreover, who found it hot, airless and overcrowded as hell. Cities really ought to be deconstructed like this: with heavy doses of irony, humour, a light touch to a heavy topic.
On a related note, I read some reviewer commenting on how much he liked the way the page numbers figure on the outer margins of every page in these city biographies from Aleph. I’m afraid I find it a distraction; each time the page numbers drift into my vision, I’m sure some small, long-legged insect has found its way there and instinctively try to dislodge it!
I'm all over the place, via the books I'm reading right now. The Madras book is a nostalgic read (Nirmala Lakshman's Degree Coffee By The Yard), the Patna book (Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats) is an evocative telling of a city's tale.