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• Introduction by Sibaji Bandopadhyay
• Chirakumar Sabha
• Glossary
• Dramatic Personae
• Translator's Note
• About the Translator.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Set in Calcutta in the early-nineteenth century, the play Chirakumar Sabha (The Bachelors' Club), originally written by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), is neatly aimed at matrimony, and against celibacy. Calcutta was the capital of British India then. Members of Chirakumar Sabha have vowed to remain unmarried throughout life. The Club is headed by Chandrababu, a professor, who lives with his niece, Nirmala and at whose house the meetings of Chirakumar Sabha are held. The coup de grace comes when the sole survivor, Purna, falls for Chandrababu's niece. A hilarious account of a group of bachelors eventually getting married in due course, this translation from the Bengali original by Sukhendu Ray captures the spirit of the original play while retaining its readability.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Friendship in form and function
• 2. Colonial friendship
• 3. Money and friendship
• 4. Standing and duty
• 5. Getting work
• 6. Friendly profiteers
• 7. Friendship's impossibility
• 8. Serving friends
• Notes
• Works cited
• About the Author
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This book describes how friendship or quasi-friendly behaviour underwrote British life and work in Calcutta before and after 1800, even between patrons and clients, and when personal relations were not amicable. Amid the uncertainties as a new town was created, the parameters of proper behaviour were defined by sociability, trust, and reputation. The book explains friendship's role in credit and debt; in town-development, securing contracts, and managing work; and in early colonial law and administration. It suggests that personal experiences and mores aided the acceptance of formal regulation, and the convenient invention of a 'virtuous' public identity for the imperial British. The book seeks to explain, secondly, why Indians were not fully integrated into the Europeans' notions and rituals of friendship, though many Europeans and Indians lived and worked very closely together. Without backing easy notions about racism or power, it illustrates mutual failures of inclusion and understanding in European-Indian relations. The book is the last of three studies based on the huge diary of Richard Blechynden, architect and surveyor. Though somewhat more broadly based than its predecessors, it still analyses rich evidence from the diary, showing how it adds to our understanding of intellectual, social, and political trends. The detailed stories provide an important pre-history of imperial rule and its justifications, and of racial distinctions and division.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Rabindranath Tagore is famous for the school and university he founded in the Bengal countryside, but he spent much of his early childhood in Calcutta. Seen through the amused eyes of a precocious young boy, Tagore's memoir describes the joint family he grew up in, the city he played in, and the school he was sent to - much against his will. Boyhood Days is an exquisite portrait of both Tagore's childhood, and his country, India, at a turning point in its history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Painted in rich, vivid colors across a vast landscape of characters and locations, this stunning new version, relocates Pip's extraordinary journey to nineteenth century India and promises a powerful and theatrical telling of Dickens' universally loved masterpiece.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. Topsia
• I. The Landscape
• II. Untreated Sickness
• III. Poverty - a Constant Companion
• VI. Women's Work
• 2 Injustice
• I. The Temptations of Injustice
• II. False Cases
• III. Aftab Alam Ansari
• 3. Beniapukur
• I. The Police Thana
• II. Government Service
• III. The Sex Trade
• VI. Muslim and Gay
• 4.Defining Slums
• I. The Poor Have No Biography
• 5. Tiljala Road
• I. Legality and Illegality
• II. The Reformed Addict
• III. The Chorus of Market Women
• IV. Modernised Poverty
• 6. Victimisation
• 7. Tangra
• I. The Tannery
• II. The Restaurant
• III. India's Gaza
• 8. Postscript: A Servant's Story
• Notes
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The West has become obsessed with Muslims, constantly classifying them as either 'moderate' or 'extreme'. Reacting against this dehumanising tendency, Jeremy Seabrook and Imran Ahmed Siddiqui show us the daily life of poor Muslims in India and sheds light on what lies behind India's 'economic miracle'. The authors examine life in Muslim communities in Kolkata, home to some of the most disadvantaged people in India, giving a voice to their views, values and feelings. We see that Muslims are no different from those of other faiths - work, family and survival are the overwhelming preoccupations of the vast majority. Although most are observant in their religion, there is no trace of the malevolence or poverty-fuelled extremism attributed to them. This enlightening and elegantly written book will be of great interest to students and practitioners of development and anyone who wants a more realistic picture of Muslim life and modern India.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• BLECHYNDEN FAMILY TREE
• GLOSSARY
• 1. The Diaries of Richard Blechynden (1759-1822)
• 2. In Search of Wives
• 3. A Concubine's Lot
• 4. Pleasure and Pain
• 5. Mary Walker: Betrayal and Passion
• APPENDIX 5.1. A NARRATIVE FROM DIARY ENTRIES RELATING TO MARY WALKER
• 6. Charlotte: Binding Conditions
• 7. Kin and Concubine
• 8. Isabella: Sensibilities and Sense
• 9. Calcutta Lives
• NOTES
• INDEX.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Richard Blechynden was a surveyor, architect, and builder in early colonial Bengal. This volume and its companion (Sentiment and Self) use 80 volumes of his diaries and other archival material along with anecdotes, extracts, and stories to recreate histories of everyday life. While Sentiment and Self explores issues like interactions between Europeans and Indians, race and tolerance, this volume focuses on the position of women, especially concubines, or bibis and their sexual and emotional relationships; the social milieu of the early empire; dynamics of household; contexts for cross-cultural contact and misunderstanding; the complexities of class, culture, and race; and the overlapping public and private life. It examines the domestic life, personal sensibilities, and private and public persona of the main diarist, Richard Blechynden. This book will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, gender studies, cultural studies, and British Imperialism, as well as those interested in biographies.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Bijou Roy's life in Washington, D.C. is not thrilling but it is steady. When she loses her father to a long illness, she travels to India to scatter his remains in the river that runs through his native city. With the weight of her grief still fresh, she leaves a career and relationship in limbo only to be thrust into unfamiliar territory. Never having fully understood why her parents severed their ties to India, she is drawn to Naveen, the son of her father's closest comrade. Naveen holds over Bijou intimate details of their fathers' past and their political involvements. Quickly, she is embroiled in the mysteries of love, grief, and family histories, questioning what happens next when the customs of neither an original nor an adopted culture provide comfort. In her quest for answers, Bijou sees how each generation must wrestle - often at great risk - with the one who came before, and, perhaps above all, comes to learn how to replace sorrow with hope.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is the Indian classic, published in English for the first time. 'Here, day and night were interchangeable. The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.'Set in 1950s Calcutta, "Chowringhee" is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta's largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bars and back rooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he reveals the unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulations and unbidden tragedies of those who work and live there - the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, and the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the glittering chronicle of a lost metropolis.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubs shoulder with coarse commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema, and music.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Contents: Introduction
• Middle-class domesticities and maternities
• Of love, marriage and intimacy
• The place of birth
• Education and the making of middle-class mothers
• Motherhood, food and the body
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

While living in the red light district of Calcutta, documenting life in the brothels, New York-based photographer Zana Briski embarked on a project by which she gave cameras to the children of prostitutes and taught them photography, awakening within them hidden talent and creativity and giving them a means to transform their lives.

• The colonial uncanny
• The limits of "white" town
• Locating mythic selves
• Telling stories
• Death in public.

"Representing Calcutta: Modernity, nationalism, and the colonial uncanny" is a spatial history of the colonial city, and addresses the question of modernity that haunts our perception of Calcutta. The book responds to two inter-related concerns about the city. First is the image of Calcutta as the worst-case scenario of a Third World city - the proverbial "city of dreadful nights." Second is the changing nature of the city's public spaces - the demise of certain forms of urban sociality that has been mourned in recent literature as the passing of Bengali modernity. By examining architecture, city plans, paintings, literature, and official reports through the lens of post-colonial, feminist, and spatial theory, the book explores the conditions of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism that produced the city as a modern artifact. At the center of this exploration resides the problem of "representing" the city, representation understood as description and narration, as well as political representation. In doing so Chattopadhyay questions the very idea of colonial cities as creations of the colonizers, and the model of colonial cities as dual cities, split in black and white areas, in favor of a more complicated view of the topography.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Two sisters return to the crumbling Calcutta home of their childhood. Family secrets are revealed and the women are forced to re-examine their relationship with their mother and the reality of their own lives in the light of a hidden past. Set in the Indian Jewish community, this funny and moving play explores conflicts between old and new, east and west, tradition and truth. Award-winning writer Shelley Silas examines how family and culture, time and distance, influence our sense of who we are. If the past is another country, where is home?"--Cover.

• Community and public culture
• Mapping community in Rajasthan and Calcutta
• Merchant houses as spectacles of modernity
• Marwaris and moral economies : from rain the ghee
• Social reform and the women's question in Marwari public life
• Sati worship and Marwari public identity in India.

-- American Historical Association.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune In a village just outside present-day Calcutta, Koonty, a young girl is squatting in pain beside the river, convinced that her agony is the result of a fish allergy. It's not -- she's giving birth and as the realisation dawns on her, she makes the connection with the encounter she had all those months ago with the swimming stranger with the golden bathing shorts...Horrified, she places the baby onto a piece of floating debris, fixes her own necklace around his neck and pushes him downriver. Several miles downstream in Calcutta, the baby is discovered by Dolly, a young married woman desperate for a child. She takes him home and brings him up as her own son, calling him Karna. And so begins a chain of events which sees Karna's initial good fortune turn to tragedy so that, years later, he's forced to seek out Koonty, now married and with a son of her own...* Great commercial literary fiction. An enriching, emotionally charged epic story, engrossing and entrancing. A dash of Homestead, a dash of Angela's Ashes. * For fans of Amitav Ghosh, Sharon Maas, Rohinton Mistry.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Rakesh, the son of an expatriate merchant, comes from Rangoon to Calcutta in search of his brother's killer. He takes the help of a friendly restaurant manager. The dancer in the restaurant's nightclub helps him to rout the villains, Pyarelal and Chiang. The superbly filmed climax depicts a nail-biting chase over Calcutta's famous Howrah Bridge.

Jayojit and his "American" son have to spend 4 months in India each year as part of his custody settlement. The author explores the post-colonial experience of Jayojit and his son as they spend time with family in Calcutta.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is the story of three generations, and of a house in Calcutta called Mandalay. Built by a British officer, it passes into the hands of the wealthy Roy family, but their fortunes fluctuate and, by the time Debendranath Roy returns to Mandalay, it has become a house full of ghosts.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Study on Subhas Chandra Bose, 1897-1945, nationalist leader and statesman, as the mayor of the municipal corporation of Calcutta, India.

Political biography of Subhas Chandra Bose, 1897-1945, Indian nationalist leader in the freedom movement; chiefly on his political career during his association with Calcutta Corporation.

• Calcutta cipher
• travellers in Calcutta
• writing Calcutta - travelling with Levi-Strauss and Gunter Grass
• cartographies
• photogenic Calcutta
• cinematic Calcutta.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

A study of the politics of representation which explores the construction of a "city of intensities" - Calcutta. The author analyzes representations of Calcutta in a variety of discourses: in the gossip and traveller-lore of backpackers and volunteer charity workers; in writing - from classic literature to travel guides; in cinema, photography and maps. The author shows how the rumours of Westerners continue to contribute to the elaboration of an imaginary city; and in so doing, circulate in ways fundamental to the maintenance of international order. The books draws on such writers as Heidegger, Marx, Spivak, Trinh, Jameson, Clifford, Virilio, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Navin Chawla's biography of Mother Teresa.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This illustrated book provides an account of the architectural and topographical history of Calcutta, which in 1990 celebrates the 300th anniversary of its foundation. Published to accompany an exhibition of the same title at The British Library, its illustrations are drawn mainly from the collection of plans, prints and drawings at the India Office Library and 25 are reproduced in colour. A work of reference for historians of India and the architecture of the Raj, it also has much to interest the general reader, print collectors and those who know modern Calcutta. J.P.Losty is curator in charge of prints and drawings at the India Office Library and the author of "The Art of the Book in India", 1982 and "Indian Book Painting", 1986.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Documentary film of the minute details of individual lives and situations of poverty in the overpopulated and impoverished city of Calcutta.

• The city of dreadful night.--Among the railway folk.--The Giridih coal fields.

First eleven photos are scenes taken from or about the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, one of the first hill passenger railways. It opened in 1881. Photos 12-22 are landscapes of Calcutta and its surrounding region. The last photo is of a Bhulia woman.