With dwindling attention spans and addictive social media posts, should the garden-variety reader commit to a novel of over 900 pages? In the case of Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel, which arrives with a thud more than two decades after his The Last Jet Engine Laugh, the reward is worth the effort.
What makes this doorstopper compelling is the way it is both expansive yet focused, sprawling yet precise. This duality reminds one of Isaiah Berlin’s division of writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who view the world through a single central vision, and foxes, who pursue many ends at once. Here, Joshi shows that he can do both.
The great city of Calcutta
Primarily set in Calcutta during the early 1940s, Great Eastern Hotel illuminates, among other things, that though all ordinary cities are alike, every great city is great in its own way. Like the Hooghly river, the novel twists and turns between locales and landscapes to encompass a diverse set of characters in the interplay between individual fate and collective history.
Chief among them is the privileged art-loving Kedar Lahiri, who is believed to have a “delicate and over-sensitive flower at the core of his soul”. Then, there’s Nirupama, a student and ardent communist, making efforts to free the proletariat; Imogen, a sprightly young Englishwoman from a colonial family; and Gopal, an enterprising pickpocket whose amoral, Fagin-like ustad gives him a “promoshon” to black-marketing and other nefarious activities. Orbiting around them are others such as squadron leader Jeremy Lambert, tasked with gathering war intelligence, irascible French chef Paul Bonnemaison, and two sex workers who frequent the titular hotel.
To contain the sprawl, these intertwined lives are framed by a first-person narrator who, some decades later, sets out to record their experiences and catalogue Kedar’s paintings for a proposed exhibition. The relationships between all of them unfold unhurriedly: as one character puts it, “pennies take their time to drop…and from the moment they start to drop, they sometimes take an inordinate amount of time to hit the ground”.
These individuals shed light on the complex and often contradictory nature of India’s tangled public affairs during the Second World War years. Anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, communism and nationalism rub against each other, and woven into the narrative are discussions on the nature of the Raj, the Congress, and the Muslim League, along with figures such as Bose, Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi.
The novel is anchored in actual events, starting with the death of Rabindranath Tagore on August 7, 1941, and “a great churning river” of mourners who accompany the bier from the Jorasanko thakurbari to the crematorium at Nimtala Ghat. Soon, the miasma of the Second World War starts to hang over the city, with concerns over what the events in the Asia-Pacific theatre meant for India, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the invasion of Singapore. It goes on to incorporate the violent Quit India protests, the Tebhaga Movement, and signs of the tragic Great Bengal Famine.
Yet, it never feels like a dry historical document, largely because of its exuberant prose. In particular, the dialogue sparkles, capturing the intonations of characters from different backgrounds, be it matey British locutions or orotund Bengali variations. There’s much linguistic playfulness: a shady duo is called Aurangzeb and Gaurangzeb; a family factotum is nicknamed Rasko, short for Raskolnikov; a “be-knighted” individual and his lackey are described as “Sir and Sir-vant”; and a British team of Currie and Rice discuss the food supply situation in Bengal.
Though the city’s storied Great Eastern Hotel plays a significant part in the proceedings, it is not the prime location of events, as with the hotel in Sankar’s Chowringhee. Instead, the novel ranges all over Kipling’s city of dreadful night, with its wide avenues and choked streets, its colonial mansions and local habitations, its horse carriages and Bentleys. As we’re told, Calcutta is “the much greater Great Eastern Hotel”.
James Joyce famously remarked that if Dublin were to be destroyed, Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick. Given the amount of ground- and air-level detail contained in Great Eastern Hotel, one is tempted to make the same comment about Calcutta in the 1940s. The characters pass by and frequent several colonial-era landmarks: Whiteaway and Laidlaw, Bourne and Shepherd, the under-construction Howrah Bridge, and the Victoria Memorial, which was covered in cow dung to ward off Japanese bombers.
Old Kolkata hands will perk up at other locations such as Firpo’s, Flurys, Dum Dum airport, the Hastings riverside, and the bar at the New Empire Theatre, once the longest in the city. In addition, the clothing and cuisine of the time are impressively delineated, bringing the city to life in a vivid and tangible manner.
A big-band jazz piece
Admittedly, the ambition and structure of the book can pose problems. When characters like Imogen or Gopal, for example, return to the stage, it can take a while for the unwary reader to pick up the threads. Others, such as Lambert, can come across as relatively underdeveloped, and the ups and downs of British reactions to the Japanese advances can make the eyes glaze over.
Joshi seems to be aware that this is the price to pay for having bigger hilsa to fry. As the character who is recording the others tells us: “I start worrying about novelists’ problems, such as introducing too many characters and not being able to render them properly.” He compares it to the experience of listening to a big-band jazz piece where multiple instruments enter the mix, suggesting that readers should allow the story to unfold organically instead of being jittery about tracking individual characters.
Another metaphor relates to the construction of a house, where each story element is introduced as a “room,” in the hope that everything fits together harmoniously. “I’d like to guarantee the plumbing won’t leak, that the wiring won’t short circuit,” he admits, “but we have to be realistic”.
The novel invites yet one more meaningful comparison: it can perhaps best be read as a series of interlocking set pieces linked to the subjects of Kedar’s paintings, a progression of canvases that enable him to rise above Western influences. These range from the abandoned chappals he sees on the day of Tagore’s death to the British clampdown on street protests to the varied textures and interiors of the Great Eastern Hotel, and many more.
Great Eastern Hotel, then, is large and contains multitudes, stuffed with “these foundlings, these unwanted, miscegenated infants of tales, this long, badly itemized, unpaid hotel bill of stories”. It’s not for the faint of heart or weak of wrist. Mute those cell phone notifications, flex the muscles of attention, and allow yourself to be immersed in this Great Calcutta Novel that captures both the sweep of history and the pulse of individual lives.
Great Eastern Hotel, Ruchir Joshi, HarperCollins India.
