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Quotes from Calcutta: Two Years in The City — Amit Chaudhuri

born 1962 India

← All quotes by Amit Chaudhuri

8 quotes

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

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

‘This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.’

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

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

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

‘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.’

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

‘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.’

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

‘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.’

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

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

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

‘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.’

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Amit Chaudhuri (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.