A novel set in a hotel and a story told through the eyes of the hotel staff? Shankar’s Chowringhee, the iconic Bengali text came immediately to my mind as I started reading this voluminous text, which is not easy to carry due to its size, and hence was read, not on the road, or on journeys, but gradually, over a few weeks, at home.
First things first. In his debut novel, The Last Jet Engine Laugh, written at the turn of the 21st century, Joshi covers a span of a century, from 1930 to 2030. In Great Eastern Hotel, with much of the thirty imagined years of the previous novel already lived and experienced, he chooses to go back farther in time, in particular, to the city of Kolkata between the years 1941 and 1946. Great Eastern Hotel therefore looks back at history again and Joshi positions himself between the future and the past. One would imagine therefore that the lens of looking at history and historical events may have shifted in this intervening quarter of a century between the two novels.