The Epic City - The World on the Streets of Calcutta

When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved again, back to the world that his immigrant parents had abandoned: a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown.

Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by the twenty-first century Calcutta was past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely he could have moved to booming Delhi, Murnbai or Bangalore, where life was improving for people like him?

Taking a lob at a newspaper, Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged. Shouting hawkers still overran the pavements; fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; and politics still meant barricades and bus burnings. Nothing had changed, not even the impassive expressions on the faces of clerks. The city was in its own time zone.

Choudhury started sifting through the chaos of this city of fifteen million people for the stories that never make the papers. The Epic City is his soulful, compelling and often hilarious account of going home again — and of the everyday lives that make Calcutta.

Kushanava Choudhury grew up in Calcutta and New Jersey. After graduating from Princeton University he worked as a reporter at the Statesman in Calcutta. He went on to receive a PhD in Political Theory from Yale University before returning to Calcutta to write a book about the city. The Epic City is his first book.

**Book's Contents and Sample Pages**