I’VE reached the city in time for the 33rd Annual Kolkata Book Fair, the largest book fair in Asia and the best attended in the world. Over a 10-day period, millions of are due to form an island of books within the heart of the city. Hundreds of stalls promoting literature in Bengali and English, on everything from Marxism to Java programming, will be on display to local residents, rural Bengalis and book lovers from across India and the world.But my first morning in the city begins with bad news. The Kolkata High Court has suddenly announced that the book fair cannot take place at its scheduled central Kolkata location near Park Circus, on the grounds that the fair would further suffocate a heavily congested residential and commercial area. Publishers, decorators and organisers stand to lose millions of rupees. Some residents see the absence of the book fair in Kolkata’s centre as a significant blow to the city’s traditional cosmopolitanism and cultural vibrancy. “The Book Fair was a typical modernist Bengali cultural space,” says novelist Amit Chaudhuri, who has lived in Mumbai and the UK but returned to his birthplace of Kolkata nine years ago. In contrast with the indoor book fairs in Frankfurt and Delhi, Kolkata’s, he suggests, was “a kind of temporary illusory city within a city defined by the predominance of walking, bonhomie, conversation, eating — urban activities that have always been integral to the production of culture.”Finding myself in Kolkata with no book fair on the horizon, I decide to tour the city to seek out the roots of Bengal’s rich literary past and to discover if, despite the court’s decision, book culture is still flourishing here.Kolkata’s intellectual and artistic legacy came of age during the 19th-century Bengal Renaissance, which can be traced to north Kolkata (known as “Black Town” during colonial times). The Renaissance writers thrived in a city inhabited by Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as Marwaris, Armenians, Chinese and Europeans. The city continued to thrive as India’s literary and publishing capital throughout the first part of the 20th century, producing writers such as Sukumar Ray and his son, the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray. While wandering around this amiable metropolis, it’s impossible not to notice that history, dissent, and metropolitan energy — essential ingredients for great writing —echo through its streets. Although the fate of the book fair seems uncertain, the city remains an integral part of the Indian literary landscape.Excerpted from Hirsch Sawhney’s ‘Reading around Calcutta’ in The Guardian, February 27
