Review | The Epic City, a Princeton graduate’s love letter to Calcutta

“Calamity could befall you at any moment in Calcutta,” Kushanava Choudhury writes of the crumbling city of his childhood. And yet it continued to exert its pull, years after he had emigrated, with his family, to the United States. A newly minted Princeton graduate in 2001, he returned to a city festering from neglect and eclipsed by others, such as Delhi. But unlike the urban hellhole many reduced his home­town to, he looked for its high culture, in the form of, among other things, “Bengali all-stars”, Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das and Satyajit Ray, murals of whom were reminders of the greatness of the former capital of the British Raj.