No city in India commands a greater mystique than Calcutta. No city except Varanasi has so doggedly clung to its ‘character’ as has the city of Calcutta. It fascinates as well as horrifies visitors from abroad; it inspires hatred as well as love. Till today it is man’s most unplanned metropolis; it has more people, more cattle, more filth, more poets, more politics and more pollution than any other city in India. Calcutta dominates the Bengali mind, Bengali literature, Bengali culture; it is the pathological obsession of the Bengali middle class. For decades Calcutta has been the staple of Bengali fiction. Several Bengali scholars have sought to unravel the mystique of the city. But none more diligently than Benoy Ghosh. For three years, as a research fellow of Calcutta University, Benoy Ghosh sought to unravel the city’s social history. He found that there was little social history in the official documents and papers, apart from trade and commerce, civic construction and economics. More rewarding were travelogues, memoirs, personal letters of Englishmen and women as well as Indians, especially the memoirs of William Hickey (1749-1809) in all their four volumes and the letters of Eliza Fay (1780-1782). Benoy Ghosh has put together his translation of Hickey’s memoirs and Eliza Fay’s letters together with a number of essays he has himself published from time to time on Calcutta’s social culture. The result is one of the most gripping volumes ever printed on India’s most controversial metropolis.
October 1976, volume 1, No 4