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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi review – a panoramic view of India in flux
The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you 'can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin' runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India's former capital. There's no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that 'what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow'. Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as 'an undertaking'. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today's sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours. The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters – confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations. The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India's modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city's name to Kolkata, a wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn't enough – it never is. The hotel isn't as central to the plot as it was to that other great novel about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar's Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there's none of the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles's hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, 'skeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta', first a trickle, then a flood. The hotel isn't just a model of the city by the end, it is 'alive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else' – a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries. Joshi has a vast canvas to play with here, and it's heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases. Doors are 'like two lovers parting in a puppet opera', the British are 'dried‑up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire', a character's eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There's a slight relentlessness to the English and Banglish wordplay – a 'be-mansioned and be-knighted' character and his employee are 'Sir and Sir-vant' – with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty. Despite its panoramic approach, the novel does often stray into the hotel genre's greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There's a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as 'an architect-engineer' constructing a 'story-hotel' 'room by room', and that there is 'no way that I … could have forged a proper narrative, but it was useful to try'. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel's weakest – too knowing, too wry, too pat. But Joshi's ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I've not read a book by an author this year who so clearly loves what he's writing about. There's an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every page. We can only hope that having taken 25 years to write his second novel, he'll be back sooner with his next. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Rahul Raina is the author of How to Kidnap the Rich (Little Brown). Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi review – a panoramic view of India in flux
The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you 'can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin' runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India's former capital. There's no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that 'what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow'. Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as 'an undertaking'. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today's sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours. The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters – confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations. The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India's modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city's name to Kolkata, a wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn't enough – it never is. The hotel isn't as central to the plot as it was to that other great novel about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar's Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there's none of the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles's hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, 'skeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta', first a trickle, then a flood. The hotel isn't just a model of the city by the end, it is 'alive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else' – a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries. Joshi has a vast canvas to play with here, and it's heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases. Doors are 'like two lovers parting in a puppet opera', the British are 'dried‑up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire', a character's eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There's a slight relentlessness to the English and Banglish wordplay – a 'be-mansioned and be-knighted' character and his employee are 'Sir and Sir-vant' – with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty. Despite its panoramic approach, the novel does often stray into the hotel genre's greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There's a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as 'an architect-engineer' constructing a 'story-hotel' 'room by room', and that there is 'no way that I … could have forged a proper narrative, but it was useful to try'. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel's weakest – too knowing, too wry, too pat. But Joshi's ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I've not read a book by an author this year who so clearly loves what he's writing about. There's an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every page. We can only hope that having taken 25 years to write his second novel, he'll be back sooner with his next. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Rahul Raina is the author of How to Kidnap the Rich (Little Brown). Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Mint
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Planner: 4 events that make this a jazzy week
Colombian jazz musician Jesus Molina is back in Mumbai after his 2023 performance. This time, he will be performing with an ensemble, which includes guitarist Rock Choi, Alex Polydroff on bass and Cain Daniel on drums at the National Centre for the Performing Arts. A graduate from the Berklee College of Music and winner of the Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation, Molina combines many musical talents—he is pianist and a vocalist with a keen interest in technology, who brings together jazz, Latin beats and Middle Eastern influences in his harmonies. Some of his other inspirations include Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, Bill Evans. At the Tata Theatre, NCPA, Mumbai, 5 June, 7.30pm. A diptych by photographer Shahid Datawala for 'Jhalak'. Gallery Espace is hosting a solo show of images, Jhalak, by photographer Shahid Datawala. The photos were taken over a year from 2018-19 and 'offer fleeting glimpses—jhalaks—of Mumbai's teeming humanity,' as the gallery note states. Datawala took these images while walking and cycling from his home in Dadar to different neighbourhoods. 'Datawala arranges the images into diptychs creating connections through similar colour palettes, aligned shapes or related concepts—for instance, a man in blue-shirt and with an orange lolly paired with a woman in blue sari…,' states the note. At Gallery Espace, Delhi, till 14 June, 11am-7pm, closed on Sunday. Musician Lala Tamar is of Brazillian-Moroccan descent. A FUSION OF THE PAST & PRESENT Lala Tamar, vocalist, dancer, and guimbry player from Morocco is in Bengaluru to perform with her pop quartet. As a Sephardic jew of Amazigh heritage, Tamar reinterprets the musical legacies of north Africa with an intensely personal and modern voice. The global performer's music fuses gnawa trance, flamenco, Berber rhythms, and Ladino song traditions with contemporary pop, jazz, and electronic elements. For her live act, Tamar will be joined by Ofer Ronen on flamenco Guitar and palmas, Oussama Menay on bass and vocals and Habib Baychou on drums and vocals. At Windmills, Bengaluru, 31 May, 9.30 pm onwards. Tickets on An archival photo of The Great Eastern Hotel, Kolkata in 1865. City Scripts by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements is hosting an online conversation where writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi will be discussing his latest novel, Great Eastern Hotel, with Rupleena Bose. Set against the backdrop of World War II, the novel unfolds within the opulent Great Eastern Hotel, where lives of revolutionaries, artists, spies, and colonial officials collide, reads a press note about the book. This session is part of City Scripts' year-long curation Planting Gardens of Public Memories. On 4 June, 6.30pm. For details and registration, visit
New Indian Express
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
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.
The Independent
09-04-2025
- Business
- The Independent
London Liverpool Street station to be transformed as part of multimillion-pound development
A multimillion-pound plan to redevelop London's Liverpool Street has been proposed by Network Rail to make the station 'fit for the future'. Britain's busiest station currently serves more than 118 million people a year from London, East Anglia and the east of England. Network Rail Property has applied to transform Liverpool Street into a 'landmark gateway to the City of London' that can accommodate over 200 million annual passengers. The proposal includes eight new lifts, six new escalators, a wider concourse and step-free access across the station to enhance accessibility at Liverpool Street. A public consultation with 2,000 responses found step-free access, new lifts and escalators and new toilet facilities were the three top priorities for the station. Increased ticket barriers, family toilets, cycle storage, cafes and pedestrian routes are also listed among the plans. The transformation of Liverpool Street station will cost 'hundreds of millions of pounds', with the investment covered by private sector partnerships and new office spaces, said Network Rail. Time for Liverpool Street says new retail, leisure and work spaces in the station will help to deliver the City of London's plans to secure long-term economic growth – boosting the local economy by £107 billion and creating over 250,000 jobs by 2035. According to the proposal, the scheme was submitted with a 'thorough understanding of the operational needs of the station and its historic significance'. Robin Dobson, group property director for Network Rail Property said: 'Investing in transport infrastructure is essential to unlocking future economic growth for London and beyond. This investment will ensure Liverpool Street remains a landmark gateway to the City of London for generations to come. 'Following extensive consultation and engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, our plans put passengers first whilst respecting and retaining the station's Victorian features, including the iconic train shed and the Great Eastern Hotel.' New entrances on Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate and Exchange Square, better signage, a roof in line with original Victorian architecture and a dog-friendly area are all part of the design plans. Friedrich Ludewig, founding director of ACME, the scheme architect, said: 'Liverpool Street is one of London's great Victorian stations and our proposals will make the station accessible, permeable and celebrate its function as the gateway into the City of London. We have embraced the challenge to design new entrances reflecting its position as the UK's busiest train station, and roof structures that speak to the original 1875 structures and the 1990s extension.'
