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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
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
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.
India.com
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
Remember Roopa Ganguly who played 'Draupadi' in Mahabharata? Worked with Ranbir Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Anil Kapoor, 34 years later she is now...
Roopa Ganguly from BR Chopra's Mahabharata (screengrab) Television, TV shows, films, were a luxury in the days of yore. Not everyone had a TV set, maybe 1 in 5 families in the colony owned a personal TV where neighbours would gather maybe on a weekend to watch a movie etc. That was the hype. In addition to it, there weren't alot of option either. Not so many channels or shows. Hence, few shows that aired on DD became the talk of the town and one of them was BR Chopra's 'Mahabharata'. This show still holds a special place in hearts of several Indians. The actors and characters are still reminisced with touch of that nostalgia. Do you remember the actress who essayed the character of 'Draupadi'? Well, today she boasts of working with some of the contemporary stars. Roopa Ganguly rose to fame with her character in the Indian mythological epic. Ganguly first stepped into the acting field with a Hindi telefilm 'Nirupama' in 1986 that was based on a Bengali short story written by Rabindranath Tagore. Slow and steady she carved a niche for herself. She worked in different shows and movies too and became pan-Indian face after her character of Draupadi. Roopa Ganguly Was Not First Choice For Mahabharata Not many people know that Roopa Ganguly was not the first choice for Draupadi. BR Chopra was impressed by her work and decided to offer her the role after actress Juhi Chawla declined the role. Ganguly was hailed for her performance in the show. Despite the success and fame, her career in Hindi films was not as great but she did a few films even in south cinema. Late, she also joined politics and became a member of Bhartiya Janta Part in 2015. She was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha when former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu resigned. Personal Life Roopa Ganguly had married Dhrub Mukherjee in 19992 and welcomed a baby boy later. However, the relationship witnessed the test of time and crumbled under it. After 15 year of marriage they decided to part ways. Later, the 'Sachch Ka Samna' actress was allegedly in a relationship with singer Dibyendu, who was 13 years younger than her. But, reportedly, it culminated in separation which affected her mental health gravely. In old interviews she had accepted of trying to attempt suicide. She worked in popular Hindi shows such as Kanoon (1993), Chandrakanta (1994), Love Story, Karam Apnaa Apnaa (2007), and Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Hi Kijo (2009). The star also made her Bollywood debut in the 1985 film Saheb , opposite Anil Kapoor. She has also worked in blockbuster 'Barfi' along with Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra. she essayed the character of Illena D'Cruz's mother. Almost 35 years after Mahabharata aired, Roopa Ganguly exudes a charm and grace in her own right!
