Great Eastern Hotel is a novel of gargantuan proportions. Set in Calcutta of the 1940s and reconstructed from the perspective of 1970s, author Ruchir Joshi has Saki (aka Robi Nagasaki Jones-Majumdar, a scholar of architecture), put together the life and times of Kedar Lahiri, an artist of zamindar (landowning, feudal) origins, paint critical moments in Indian history from the day of the funeral procession for Rabindranath Tagore to the catastrophic famine of Bengal, the Dharamtolla Street procession for the Quit India movement, the Tebhaga movement among the peasants, and the Naxalite movement. There is no coherent story for the life stories Saki traces about related characters: Nirupama Majumdar, a party worker for the Communist Party; Imogen, a Britishwoman witnessing and living the times; and Gopal, a pickpocket who gets involved in the black marketing of goods such as rice. Saki wants to put together a catalogue of Lahiri’s works and finds his story entangled with everything that was happening in the city.
Great Eastern Hotel, today known as The LaLiT Great Eastern Kolkata, is in its own way a luxurious colonial era monument. Founded a century before the novel’s 1940s, it was known as the “Jewel of the East”. It is a place where almost all characters meet each other at least once but the hotel is a stand-in for Kolkata itself, thus turning Great Eastern Hotel into a Calcutta novel. It offers snapshots of people walking from miles away to Calcutta in search of food, people dying of hunger, aerial views of city surveillance against the looming danger of the Japanese attack, and communal riots. There are sensational bits about a pilot looking at the shining dome of the Victoria Memorial, followed by the covering of the monument with cow dung to protect it from becoming the site of attack. The attack itself, when it happens, is more about some pamphlets being released to the local population about joining hands against the British.
As Saki puts it, his account is only a “tessellation of stories” about a “convoluted time” and akin to an “origami of time”. It is better described as a jigsaw puzzle that provides a granular account of Calcutta in bits and pieces: its food as suicidal for the British, its humid weather that turns wine into vinegar, or the many confounding names for the Ganges, far too many for the British to keep track of amidst the Japanes threat. The local communists are colourfully described: daughters in law of Moscow. Here is an image of the famine, narrated by Niru to Saki:
Their eyes were one thing, huge, almost popping out of the head, and the older one already had a distended stomach. At first, I thought she was pregnant, but then I saw her white hair. Their eyes were one thing, but when the younger one opened her mouth, some strange sounds came out which I could not recognize. Rather, I could almost recognize them as Bangla speech but then again, not quite … What did you say? I asked. The woman repeated something. Then Roma asked. Food? Hungry? Then a shopkeeper’s boy passing by started laughing. Arre didi, they are from Comilla, close to where I’m from! They haven’t eaten for a week, that’s what they are saying. Go down towards Kalighat, there are many more of them, all looking for food! They are everywhere, but I haven’t seen anybody else from Comilla. Comilla. You know, geographically it’s two hundred and fifty miles east from Calcutta, but those two hundred and fifty miles are all river delta, so you have to double that, and then… the two-fifty miles of those days are very different from the two-fifty miles of today, you understand?’ … A few days after that encounter near Bijoli, around Shyambajar I again heard very different accents, which I later understood were from Mednipur and Purulia, all the way in the west. It was as if all of Bengal was arriving to collect their dues from Calcutta. I took a while to realize this is what the British had done to us, them and the black marketeers, the middlemen who were – and in the Party study groups, we were taught never to forget this – very much Indian. Marwaris, Bhaiyas and Bengalis. Both Hindus and Muslims, and very much Indians.
Joshi interweaves such images and moments with the ethos of storytelling. As one character puts it, knowing Calcutta of the period is like looking at an onion; there are layers and layers held together by some core but not in the sense of a beginning and an ending. Another moment puts it even better: every storyteller, especially when telling a story about a historical moment, must confront the question of the difference between accuracy and truth.
Great Eastern Hotel needs to be approached with a sensitivity towards storytelling practices. There might be many Partition novels, novels about the Calcutta of the freedom movement, or stories about the 1940s in general. But what makes it a great city novel is that talks about things that concern with “unmapped corners of that time”, “something that fills in some other gaps”: for instance, the struggle in Calcutta in the 1970s is against the Emergency imposed by the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. Perhaps there are more dots to be connected and imagined as connected in different ways till date. Towards the end of the novel, Saki hasn’t quite finished the story; he is merely on a break. Perhaps these connections will open up how the 40s are concerned with other recent moments in Calcutta’s history.
Given the many plotlines and characters in the story (to which a reviewer may not pretend to do justice without some spoilers), one must think of a better way to capture the novel for readers to decide if they want to pick it up. To put it in terms they may understand, Great Eastern Hotel is a sort of union between Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games and Amitav Ghosh’s classic The Shadow Lines: it is like Chandra’s novel in terms of scale and it is like Ghosh’s novel in terms of the non-linear storytelling and its concern with memory and Calcutta’s history. It goes into the minutiae of Calcutta the way Chandra’s novel does about Bombay while concerning itself with questions of memory, silence, and reconstruction the way Ghosh’s novel does. Fans of either or both will have something to take away from Ruchir Joshi’s experiment.
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