Though I mostly picked books centered around Calcutta, these are my recommendations for all things Bengal, including many Bengali language stories I read set in rural Bengal. For both fiction and non-fiction, the state is a goldmine, with Bengali literature being among India's finest and Calcutta is possibly India’s best city when it comes to books. My limited reading hardly scratched the surface and my recommendations should be seen as a mere starting point. Please share with me your recommendations! I also encourage everyone to check out my recommendations for Bengali films and other films set in the region, as well as my post on Bengali music.
My first section is on non-fiction books, mostly about Calcutta, the second section is on Bengali literature, and the third section is on English books set in Calcutta.
Non-Fiction
Beginning with non-fiction, I read a great history book on the city called Calcutta: A Cultural And Literary History by Krishna Dutta. I wish more cities had books this good. It’s short and to the point without feeling flimsy and frivolous, and I like how it is written in a way that is personal and opinionated and not academic while also staying on topic and not going into the writer’s own life. It is full of great detail on the city’s history and culture, and there’s something interesting in probably every paragraph. It’s great for a trip as you can pick up and read it easily, as much as you want in a given sitting, rather than something you need the time and space to delve into, and you can skip ahead to a part about a part of the city you’re visiting or anything you’re interested in learning. I almost always wanted more detail, but I still always got a lot out of it, and there were occasionally sections where I could have done with less info (say, a certain type of architecture or the excerpts from contemporary literature) but the way the book is structured keeps it moving quickly and the clearly delineated sections mean you can easily skip ahead without missing anything you care about. A great introduction to the city and I think it would also be valuable to the average person who lives there.
I also read Epic City by Kushanava Choudhury, which I enjoyed, though it’s more memoirish and less informational than I would have liked, and many parts felt like they could have taken place anywhere in India (the house hunting journey, the difficulties of young couples finding private spaces, etc). It’s all good though, a fun and short read, and much of it is specific to the city (his stories of working at the Statesman, interviewing communists, and just walking through old neighborhoods and talking to people), and it brought me closer to the city and Bengali culture. I also liked his musings on the value of living in a deeply rooted place like Calcutta compared to living in the U.S. It’s no Maximum City (the burden of expectations from the William Dalrymple quote on the cover does it no favors), but I recommend it. As I said, I prefer reading more informational books, but it was good to balance that with something more personal. One of my favorite parts, and I think a good look at what you’re in for: “Stop and ask for directions in Delhi and no one knows, because no one is truly of the city. Ask for directions on any Calcutta street corner and a half-dozen mustachioed men will appear out of nowhere. They may offer radically divergent views on the matter, a street fight may break out as a result, rival political camps may emerge, and traffic may be barricaded for the rest of the afternoon. But it is their city, their streets, their neighbourhoods.”
There are countless other non-fiction books on Calcutta I want to read. Countless! My list includes The Bengalis by Sudeep Chakravarti, Longing Belonging by Bishwanath Ghosh (I really liked his Chennai book Tamarind City which I felt was a good blend of history and present day culture and being mostly informational while having an easy reading, memoirish, conversational feel to it so that it feels like you’re learning with him), Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Amit Chaudhuri, various food books (Calcutta on Your Plate seemed like the best, there’s also A Taste of Time and a bunch of cookbooks), Heritage Retailers of Calcutta: 1785 to 1950, Krishna Dutta’s Tagore bio, Andrew Robinson’s Satyajit Ray bio, the Geoffrey Moorhouse book, maybe something about Bose, and really many many more! Spoiled for choice here.
I also recommend reading about The Calcutta Key, a guide for American troops stationed in the city during WW2. Fun read!
And my life was greatly enriched by reading about Gaganendranath Tagore’s satirical art. See more here.
Fiction
Bengali Fiction
For fiction, I would definitely recommend reading something written in Bengali (whether the original works or in translation, as I did), even though there are a lot of great English language works about the city. I didn’t read any Bengali language novels, but I read dozens of short stories. I’m not the biggest short story fan, I much prefer larger works, but short stories were a good way for me to get a survey of many major Bengali writers. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I was still impressed by how much talent there was in Calcutta in the mid-20th century (I couldn’t find dates on many of the stories I read but I think most of them were from that era) and by how modern and cynical many of the stories were. I do wish I read a few Bengali novels, though, and I hope to soon (highest on my list is Chowringhee by Sankar).
A lot of short stories can be found online, and while I generally don’t like reading from my phone/computer, I usually found these stories short enough that it was fine.
The most prolific Bengali translator is Arunava Sinha, and many of his translated works can be found on his website.
Sinha also translated and curated the collection The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told which I’ve read many stories from, though there’s only one story from each author in there and I preferred doing 3-4 per author and then moving on to another author.
Another good online source for Bengali short stories is here.
You can search by author on that link, while on Arunava Sinha’s website they are tagged by author but there is no search function, so google “arunavasinha.com [author’s name]” to find what you want to read, though this doesn’t always work since there are numerous spellings of people’s names. Also, many authors have short story collections which have a few stories available in the free samples on Kindle, so that’s a good way to sample their works.
Some of my favorite Bengali writers that I read, written in some order of preference:
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay - Probably best known for the books that were adapted into the Apu trilogy, but he has a wide range and I would love to read more. His short story Heeng Kochuri was one of my favorites (this was made into multiple films). I really liked everything I read from him, these two short and sweet ones are good fun, and this one is longer and quite good. I didn’t get a good sense of his style based on what I read, they all seemed different. Much of his work seems fairly serious but he even has the super famous kid’s adventure Chander Pahar (translated as The Mountains of the Moon, curious how this is for an adult to read).
There’s also a collection of his horror stories called Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales From the Supernatural. The first two stories are the two stories he wrote for his Taranath Tantrik character (written in the 1940s, and his son continued the series decades later), and then there are seven standalone stories. I read Taranath stories, about a Calcutta based astrologer who in his younger years engaged in black magic in rural Bengal. Fun, quick reads, if a bit too drawn out without much payoff, and I like the world they create. Unlike most pulpy Indian genre stories I’ve read or watched, which have transplanted foreign genres into an Indian setting, this feels wholly Indian. It’s a bit unsatisfying, though, as the stories basically act as an origin story, but then you don’t get to see where the character goes. Well, unless you read his son's stories, but I don’t believe those have been translated, and in any case I’m more interested in Bibhutibhushan’s work. That said, reading this made me want to watch the TV series adaptation by the director Q, here is an interesting interview with him that made me appreciate the stories more. I would love to read a juicy, literary take on this. Unfortunately I didn't like the next story in the collection, Maya, much at all. A lame, overly straightforward ghost story. Reviews I saw named this as one of the best in the collection, and that did not compel me to read more. Maybe this is good for kids.
Ashapurna Devi - I read all of her stories in here and a few others, really great, deliciously cynical stuff! (Jhumpa Lahiri did her thesis on Devi, I can’t say I see a connection with their works, though if you told me Gillian Flynn was a fan I’d believe you!)
Banaphool - He has a mix of normal short stories and very short stories (1-2 pages), they’re all fun and clever, some are brilliant, many are cynical. I believe most of his stories were written while he was a practicing doctor in Bihar. I read all of them in the free sample here, there are a few here that aren’t in the free sample (I loved the longer Nawab Sahib), all of the ones here (see the column on the left of the screen) are very fun, and save A Funny Story for last, it is a great one to end on.
I want to read more from Sunil Gangopadhyay, I really liked his story Wonderworld. I liked the other stories of his on the site as well. Curious about his kid’s adventure stories. I also want to read more Premendra Mitra, I really liked his story The Tale of a Coward, I actually preferred it to the Satyajit Ray adaptation which I found dull but the short story made me want to rewatch it.
I really enjoyed the 20 or so stories I read from Satyajit Ray, who is apparently the most popular modern writer of Bengali fiction and I’ve heard many Bengali kids grow up to discover that their favorite writer also directed movies (this can’t be true, can it?). I will say I preferred the works by the other Bengali writers I read more. Ray’s stories were often lighter reads, more intended for all ages, more plot driven, with less intimate detail (though they still have good, memorable characters) and local color. None of this is necessarily a bad thing, though, and they are good pulpy fun and quite different from his films.
Many of his stories were written for his children’s magazine Sandesh while many others were written for the literary magazine Desh, but I don’t know the breakdown. I do know the early Feluda stories were written for Sandesh before mostly transitioning to Desh. I only read the first four stories Feluda stories which were published in Sandesh and I found them a bit too lightweight and kiddy but I wonder if they improve from there. My wife read one later Feluda story and said that Feluda reminded her of me, interpret that as you wish.
I’ve read that Ray wrote stories for money while his interest in films was purely artistic and he wouldn’t do a film just because he needed the money, but I haven’t found the source for this. (How much did one really make from writing Bengali short stories? Also, this of course doesn’t mean he wasn’t passionate about his prose writing, and everyone else on this list also wrote for money, so I’m not sharing this as any sort of criticism.) Still, his stories that I’ve read are nearly all very fun and clever, and many have great twists. I recommend them!
None of my favorites are online, but I do like this one, and if I had to give a top five from what I’ve read so far I’d pick The Pterodactyl's Egg, Bipin Chowdhury’s Lapse of Memory, Khagam, Barin Bhowmick’s Ailment, and Chameleon. Another favorite is Stranger, the basis for the film Agantuk, but I think I recommend going straight for the film, which is one of my favorites. I will periodically continue to read from the 700 page short story collection of his that I got, and the Feluda collection as well (though I think Sarabindu’s Byomkesh stories will be more my thing). This collection seems good if you want a greatest hits. If you are up at night asking yourself “Which Indian language short story collection should I gift to my 10-15 year old niece/nephew” or whatever, I nominate Ray’s, I will gift these to my niece and nephew when they are older (I wouldn’t say these are just for younger audiences, though, and even the kiddy stories are more mature than they initially seem). I really wish the collections featured more of his artwork, which is largely absent from the translated versions.
Also, I will point out that some of my favorite of Ray’s films are based on his own short stories, and reading many of his stories I’ve thought “I wish he could have adapted this!” It’s fun to see various themes of his pop up again and again, and it’s interesting to note that many of these stories feel less like small slices of life/episodes that many short stories feel like and more like big stories that have been compressed into 15 pages. I think the wholeness they have accounts for some of their appeal.
I’m also curious to read Sukumar Ray (Satyajit’s father) and Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (Sukumar’s father who also started the magazine Sandesh which Satyajit later revived). This collection has works from all of them, and there are separate collections from them as well. I did see a history book on the Ray family, focusing on the older Rays whose work I am unfamiliar with, and that would be interesting to read though now I can’t find the link. Also for Satyajit Ray fans, this collection has stories that Ray adapted.
As for Tagore, Kabuliwala made me cry (I read the Sinha translation), but generally my reaction to his stories was often “that was a really nice story” and “hmm, impressive, very ahead of its time” rather than finding his stories especially gripping and interesting. This may have been somewhat a function of most of them being from the 1890s and I admittedly never read stuff from that period and my sensibilities are probably more modern. I liked the stories I read during my Santiniketan visit more than everything I read after that, so it’s somewhat contextual. I will say I liked the translations (and consequently the stories that were translated) by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson in this anthology more than the famous translations by William Radice, which I found to be… I don’t know, maybe too flowery?
By the way, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay is popularly known for his romantic stories, but his story Mahesh (I think the only thing I read of his) is about a destitute laborer and is the bleakest shit ever.
There were more, and they were nearly all good, and I would like to read more by these authors and other authors as well!
English Fiction
As for English language fiction set in Calcutta, the one book I loved was The Lowland, though only around one quarter or one third of it takes place in the city. Still, the parts that take place there bring it to life really well, and they give a good portrait (if limited, as the focus is on the characters) of communist era Bengal. In general I love and recommend Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, though this is the only one where Calcutta/Bengali culture plays a very significant role (though they certainly are a big presence in the bulk of her pre-Italian work).
I also read The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh (the only book of his I’ve read), which was very entertaining, but just a so-so Calcutta book, a very surface level treatment, like a few parts take place around the city, a few scenes involving cooking fish, but other than a plot device involving the city’s history it could have taken place anywhere. Still, I liked it, a good mix of high and low brow, a quick read and a kinda heady mix of sci-fi and pulpy thriller and historical fiction with different writing styles to suit different sections (there’s a fun gothic horror chapter). I kept wishing for more depth, and it left me unsatisfied, but it was a unique, fun ride. Maybe, upon further reflection, all of the book’s disparate elements and weirdness is very Calcutta. I would accept that.
I also read the more recent A Burning, which is one of the most highly acclaimed Indian books of recent years and was surprisingly mediocre. Even if you don’t believe me and still want to read it, though, take my word for it that it’s a bad Calcutta book, it could have taken place in any Indian city, so at least give it a miss if you’re looking for a Calcutta book. The only Bengali thing about it is that the characters eat sweets every three pages.
Of course, this all is just a small taste of what the city, state, and language have to offer! I hope to update this regularly as I read more.
A bonus recommendation, from neither English nor Bengali, that I am curious to read: Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata.
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