Calcutta
A Cultural and Literary History by Krishna Dutta
(Signal Books, ISBN 1902669592)
In her foreword to this excellent guide to Calcutta, Anita Desai writes of the city as a place where one confronts, 'the face of reality at its most physical and ferocious'. Condemned as the 'graveyard of the British Empire', dubbed 'City of Dreadful Night' by Kipling, and long regarded as ungovernable and presenting myriad intractable problems, Calcutta in its three centuries of ...