LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:3 March 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Calcutta (Kolkata) -- the City of Pulsating Lives:
A Critical Study of The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre

Dr. Dhananjoy Roy, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.


City of Calcutta

Since its earliest days, the city of Kolkata (Calcutta) has always been a target for derogatory remarks especially by the Western or European tourists, diplomats, and rulers. R. P. Gupta in the “Introduction” to Raghubir Singh’s Calcutta: The Home and the Street (1988) notes how a British ruler in India like Robert Clive criticized the city of Calcutta by calling it “the most wicked place in the universe,” and how Winston Churchill expressed his aversion for the city by saying to his mother: “I shall always be glad to have seen it . . . for the . . . reason . . . that it will be unnecessary for me ever to see it again,” and even how a great writer of the West like Gunter Grass in The Flounder (1977) commented upon the city thus: “. . . this crumbling, scabby, swarming city, this city that eats its own excrement. . . It wants its misery . . . People . . . have daily diarrhea: white shirted maggots in a shit pile with Victorian excrescences, a shit pile that dreams up new curlicues every minute” (Gupta 1).

Dominique Lapierre and Calcutta

Though being a European himself, Dominique Lapierre, however, does not have any favour for such European or Western personalities, nor even for those Western tourists who visit the city of Calcutta and criticize it with unkind words before or after leaving the city. He makes clear his feelings about the opinions of such visitors to Calcutta from the West in the “Introduction” to Raghu Rai’s Calcutta (1989), a collection of photographs of Calcutta when he states that to know the city of Calcutta is “to attempt an adventure” for which one needs “courage and perseverance” (Raghu Rai 8), and not a feeling of aversion towards the city. The way he speaks about Western visitors who make bitter comments about the city of Calcutta without knowing the city fully well is significant:

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dhananjoy Roy, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor (English)
Central Agricultural University
College of Agricultural Engineering & Post-Harvest Technology
Ranipool
Gangtok 737135
Sikkim
India
danjoy74@gmail.com
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