Every great city deserves to have its own bookshelves of novels written about it. Chowringhee, by Bengali novelist ‘Sankar’ (Mani Sankar Mukherji), is one such novel of Calcutta. Sankar’s novels Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman), from his trilogy Swarga Martya Patal, were adapted for film by Satyajit Ray, along with Sunil Ganguly’s Pratidwandi, for Ray’s own superb Calcutta series. Seemabaddha is a story of corporate Calcutta. Jana Aranya, which Ray described as the only bleak film he had made, is about an idealistic young man compelled to become corrupt in a changing city.

Chowringhee, Sankar’s much-loved 1962 novel set in 1950s Calcutta, was also made into a film. Pinaki Bhushan Mukherji’s 1968 adaptation had Bengal’s great heartthrob Uttam Kumar playing the reception clerk, with Utpal Dutt, Shubhendu Chatterjee, Supriya Choudhary and Biswajeet in the cast. Despite the success of the film, the stage adaptation and translations into several other Indian languages, Arunava Sinha’s lively English translation, completed in 1992, had to wait 15 years for publication.

The novel begins on what is formally known as Esplanade, which “people like us”, says our narrator, simply call Chowringhee. Shankar, a boy from Howrah who earlier worked as clerk to an English lawyer, is struggling to survive as an itinerant vendor of wastebaskets. An acquaintance from happier days, an optimistic private detective poetically named Byron, finds him a job at the city’s grand old Shahjahan Hotel. Here young Shankar enters a new world, “a city in itself” — where the doorman matches his salute to the lineage of the car; where the carpets are so fine you sink in them and then rise again; where 300 banquet guests means 300 napkin flowers; where the menu and wine cards are typed out afresh and cyclostyled for every meal; where the “list of precedence” of the city’s rich and famous is strictly observed; where the building bears “the stamp of ancient aristocracy” and isn’t so much a hotel “as a framed picture”.

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