Firefly Games captures the various facets of Bengali culture, both in erstwhile Calcutta and of Bengalis in exile in the heart of India in the States of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The intricacies of growing up, friendships and heartbreaks, corruption in government offices, relations between parents and their off-spring—Chakraborty touches on these themes and more.
The plot is woven around four main characters: Aurobindo, Manorama, Brajarani and Ajit. Aurobindo’s sister Saratsashi also plays an important part in the web of relationships among these characters, but is not directly affected by their fortunes, whereas the four main characters are affected by each other’s actions. Of course, the person whose character and power drives the plot dies when the narrative begins, but the shadow that he casts on the future course of action never disappears. He is Aurobindo’s father, who decrees that his legatee, Aurobindo, expel his wife Manorama and son, Ajit, and marry a second woman, Brajarani, the daughter of a rich man on account of his social prestige and a handsome dowry that she will bring. Manorama’s father belonged to a lower social class and could not afford any worthwhile dowry.
Interestingly, in the novel, some of the ‘abnormal’ characters say more logical things than the ‘intellectuals’, who are guided by an unbridled desire to consume things offered by the market. Though these individuals are psychic patients in the eyes of ‘mainstream’ society, they uncover the truth behind the normal and efficiently working market system. One character, for example, underlines the absence of dreams in his life, and questions those who laugh at him: ‘I don’t have any dream left, you know. I haven’t had a dream in months.
Indian towns and urbanism (by Helen Millar and AG Krishna Menon) is a synoptic view of colonial planning in the city of Calcutta (Partho Datta). Ranjeeta Dutta takes us back to the early modern Srirangam, via a text called the ‘Koil Olugu’ (‘The Koil Olugu and Srirangam in the Tamil Region’), more properly a temple history. Other accounts of pre-colonial cities and urbanisms include a discussion of Agra (Shailaja Kathuria), Jalandhar (Indu Banga) and a comparison of Calcutta and Delhi (Atiya Habeeb Kidwai).
Historical scholarship on Kutch is rather scanty. Although some aspects of the history of the region in the modern period have received the attention of scholars, there is hardly any work that deals with the colonial and postcolonial period as a whole. The colonial administrator LF Rushbrook Williams who held several important positions in the bureaucracy, and also wrote on historical subjects, penned a book on Kutch titled The Black Hills: Kutch in History and Legend which was published in 1958 shortly after the erstwhile State became part of Bombay Province in Independent India.
Piecing together evidence from their memoirs, newspapers, various journals and magazines, advertisements, burial records, building histories and street directories, the author has woven the tales of figures like Harry Hobbs, the piano tuner, raconteur and businessman; Robert Reid, the police detective; and Shirley Tremearne, ‘Law Officer—Media Moghul—Businessman in Kolkata’. The life-stories of Henry Thoby Prinsep reveal the issue of slavery and indentured labour in the city. Another figure, the American civil war hero,