Ruchir Joshi's Great Eastern Hotel is a Calcutta novel of too muchness but a good experiment
Why did you name your novel Great Eastern Hotel, and how did you build the mythology of the hotel, a Calcutta landmark, in the novel?
I was fascinated by the huge labyrinthine hotel that had witnessed so many events in Calcutta's history. I was doubly fascinated by its place in Second-World-War Calcutta, where it hosted first a varied cosmopolitan crowd and then became home to high-ranking American officers. However, the book is called Great Eastern Hotel and not The Great Eastern..., this is because as you read you realise that it is the city of Calcutta that becomes the really great eastern 'hotel' during the War, with all sorts of guests, willing or choice-less and desperate, who 'check into' the city for varying durations.
You waited more than 20 years to write your second and your second Calcutta novel.
The book took the time it did due to a variety of reasons, yes.
Great Eastern Hotel sometimes seems to talk too much. This is Nirupama talking about another character,Gopal – 'antisocial, some fringe lumpen, petty criminal type, some sort of assistant pimp, you know, a dalal…' when perhaps just one or two descriptors could have done. And yet in some nearby sentence, you let unoon off without an explanation. Is this by design?
If you think the novel 'talks too much' that's your opinion and you have every right to it. As for the example you've given, when people talk (as opposed to novels talking) they often don't speak in pithily economical sentences. Unoon has been explained as a clay oven earlier.
At one point in the novel, Rabindra Sangeet has been compared to the sound of a cat dying. Bengali novels do not make such observations. And yet you also have an important scene in the backdrop of Tagore's funeral like Mrinal Sen did in his film Baishe Shraban. How does one square with the two – the irreverence and the reverence in the same book?
Lots of Bangla novels are very irreverent about things, including things held in high regard by mainstream Bengali culture. It's possible to be irreverent about someone or something and still love them or it. In this case it's one of my characters who is making that comparison, and yet, yes, he also loves Tagore.
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