PositiveColdnoon JournalReading The Epic City is an ambivalent experience for someone who has grown up in and around Calcutta for a significant amount of time. This is precisely because the differences generated between the author and the reader’s subjective perceptions of the city, separated by regional specificities, identitarian positions and sociocultural experiences. The Epic City shows promise as the author’s first book in its momentary historical expositions and its insider’s accounts of the city-space but fails to carve out a place for itself as an irreplaceable narrative. Perhaps, Choudhury could have opted to focus more extensively on his project of interviewing people victimized by the decline in industrial developments and municipality’s plans of forceful spatial eviction and segregation. Or he could have expanded the data accumulated from some ethnographic research. In that case, his book would have perhaps garnered more fondness and relatability, while succeeding simultaneously to interrogate and resolve the questions revolving around diasporic belongingness and identity in a historically battered city like Calcutta—more endearingly.