The idea of Kolkata

Chhetria Patrakar's first sighting of Kushanava Choudhury at the Galle Lit Fest is of him belting out a song along with the lead singer of the Bangladeshi band Chirkutt, whom he had encountered only the previous day. Choudhury has recently published a book on Kolkata to critical acclaim, and at a discussion at the Lit Fest he discussed his book, his own journey back to Kolkata (he and his family had left for the U.S. when he was a child of 12), and what Kolkata means for modern democracy.

At the public forum, Choudhury traced the unlikely origins of Kolkata as a capital; the city's anguished witnessing of deaths due to the famine engineered by the diversion of food to the British war effort; the violence of partition and its absorption of refugees after 1947, when 50 years of growth of population was crammed into five years; and its post-Independence emergence as a city of complex and finely calibrated social relationships, different in many ways from India's other large urban centres.