Product Description

Classic history of the Victorian seat of the British Raj, setting for the notorious Black Hole where 2 score English settlers diedin an 18th century uprising, and today the 4th largest city in the world. Kipling called it the city of dreadful night - a city of unspeakable poverty, of famine, riot and disease. Yet Calcutta, once the seat of the Raj, is the 2nd city in the commonwealth, the 4th city in the world. Geoffrey Moorhouse's history come travel book, 1st published by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson in 1971, remains the classic account.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94330 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 407 pages

Review
Calcutta, the festering "city of problems" brilliantly evoked from the days of Lord Curzon and the glories of the Raj to the fall of the Congress Party in the 1967 elections in West Bengal and the birth of the Naxalites whose agrarian rage has already contributed a new word to the lexicon of Communism. Moorhouse, formerly chief feature writer for the Guardian, has a journalist's sharp eye for the grotesquely squalid details of daily life in the world's most congested city. Located in the "Ruhr of modern India," with a climate which Mark Twain dubbed "enough to make a brass doorknob mushy," Calcutta by the author's estimate has 400,000 jobless, 30,000 to 70,000 homeless who sleep and squat on the sidewalks, 40,000 lepers, and a vast population of beggars deliberately maimed so they can more successfully ply their trade. "In a sense, Calcutta is a definition of obscenity" says Moorhouse who manages to compress the story of British rule - "something between benevolent despotism and hurt reproach" - into a single ironic chapter. Studding his urbane narrative with the terrifying statistics of destitution, Moorhouse moves from the temples of Kali, the vengeful Hindu goddess, to the butcheries of the Hindus and Moslems which broke out in the wake of the British announcement of withdrawal. The stupefying dimensions of famine receive a close-up (in 1943 three million perished while the British deplored the "tendency in some quarters to over-dramatise the situation"). The ongoing breakdown of housing, sanitation, and transport of the city which seems imminently destined for metropolitan collapse is documented in all its harsh particulars from the marauding bands of kangali (the street-children who run protection rackets) to the inundation of Pakistani refugees, to the pollution of the Hooghly river, the city's chief source of water. As a portrait of the tooth-and-claw chaos of the world's most putrefying urban jungle this is remarkably well-informed, free of histrionics, and parenthetically an excellent layman's introduction to the history of modern India. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Geoffrey Moorhouse is 'one of the best writers of our time' (Byron Rogers, The Times), 'a brilliant historian' (Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph) and 'a writer whose gifts are beyond category' (Jan Morris, Independent on Sunday). He is the author of eighteen books, which have won prizes and been translated into several languages. In 1982 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His To the Frontier won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of its year in 1984. He has recently concentrated on Tudor history, notably with THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE and, in 2005, GREAT HARRY'S NAVY. He lives in a hill village in North Yorkshire.

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly spotted. A well-crafted narrator.
This books is one of the most realistic portrayals of Calcutta. The author Geoffrey Moorhouse is narrator that is one of its kind. I certainly enjoyed it very much.

very interesting
Whether this is good for you depends on what you are looking for. It is dated, and is good or bad for that reason, which is why I give it three stars. If you're looking for history, it's excellent. If you're looking for current information, it's not helpful.