Reprise: Chowringhee by Sankar

Celebrating its 60th year, this classic novel about the goings-on in an exclusive Calcutta hotel in the 1950s is a tribute to a dying city

It’s the 60th year of Bengali writer Sankar’s best-selling novel,  Chowringhee, and thereby hangs many tales. After the success of his first book,  Koto Ajanare ( The Great Unknown) in 1955, on the workings of the High Court, Mani Shankar Mukherjee or Sankar, as Bengal knows him, began to scout for material for his second novel, if only to shed the one-book wonder tag. That took seven years and  Chowringhee, a novel about the goings-on inside a hotel, pre-dating Arthur Hailey’s  Hotel by three years, came out in 1962.

Sankar (b. 1933) loves to talk about his Chowringhee epiphany; how he stood at a corner of Calcutta’s famous street by that name waiting for the rain to stop and picked up a book from a tiny stall. There his eyes fell on these words by A.C. Maffen: “Our life is but a winter’s day:/Some only breakfast and away/ Others to dinner stay and are full-fed;/ The oldest man but sups and goes to bed:/ He that goes soonest has the least to pay.” When he looked up, the rain had cleared and in the distance he saw the Grand Hotel, one of Calcutta’s landmarks. He decided to write about life in a hotel. However his story, he clarified subsequently, was set in a grander and older space, Spence’s Hotel, which was pulled down.

Set in 1950s’ Calcutta,  Chowringhee is spun around the lives of managers, employees and guests of Shahjahan Hotel. The narrator, Shankar, is a new recruit and recounts the stories of people he encounters. Meticulous research went into the making of  Chowringhee. Sankar spent time at the city’s bars and walked the streets extensively to give us a rich history of the houses, roads and neighbourhoods of Calcutta. The hotel, teeming with guests from all over the world, becomes a microcosm of the city with its variety of cultures, languages and its cosmopolitanism.

Treating the front office as a “window to the world” is the dapper receptionist Satyasundar Bose, his name shortened to Sata Bose. “I have seen passports of a hundred countries at this counter. Except for the cannibals of the jungles, there’s no race on Earth whose members Sata Bose of Shahjahan hasn’t met,” he tells an incredulous Shankar on his first day. But Sata also hands out an important lesson: “Beware! You’re just allowed to observe, not ask questions — the latter only leads to unhappiness.” Sankar carefully outlines the class system and entrenched hierarchies of a hotel — and society: privileged hotel employees have rooms, for instance, but on the terrace which is not air-conditioned; others have their meals at Little Shahjahan behind the big hotel for that’s what they can afford.

The rich and the famous who flock the hotel for lavish parties with overflowing food and drink — the Agarwallas and the Chatterjees, the businessmen and the politicians — have a rhythm all their own, their wealth never a guarantee of peace and happiness. The linen master, Nityahari, provides a perspective: “Everyone in this country has become an Englishman… When Gandhi was leading the freedom struggle, when people were going to jail… wearing khadi, we used to be scared that our hotel jobs wouldn’t last long.” But Indians, he grumbles, embraced everything English as soon as they left — from cricket to cabaret.

“The novel was an instant hit and has been translated into many languages, and made into films”

Sankar, the astute observer, ensures that the reader deeply feels the loss of the beautiful hostess Karabi Guha or hopes that the enigmatic manager Marco Polo (who is called Markapala sahib by employees) finds some happiness. A host of English/ Anglo-Indian characters, trapped in the currents of history, also put in an appearance. The novel was an instant hit and has been translated into many languages, and made into films. It was translated into Hindi soon after its release, and into English by Arunava Sinha in 2007.