Perhaps the problem underlying Choudhury’s attempt to write a secret history of Kolkata is that he either does not know or does not want his readers to know that he knows the unsecret history of the city ... If you read Bangla and live in Kolkata, this book is not really for you. But if you lack either of these qualifications, this might be the kind of well-written, fairly humorous narrative you might want to dip into on a muggy Kolkata weekend afternoon.

History, well and freshly told, is perhaps Choudhury’s forte. He doesn’t know Calcutta’s all that well, so we get to see it with the same new eyes ... We learn, in dribs and dabs, about the genteel decline of the numinous old city. Choudhury will occasionally outdo himself in place writing ... This is not to fall prey to Orientalism, but to be observant, to stop and smell the coffee.

And yet for all this, The Epic City is a wonderful, beautifully written and even more beautifully observed love letter to Calcutta’s greatness: to its high culture, its music and film, its festivals, its people, its cuisine, its urban rhythms and, above all, to its rooted Bengaliness ... Very occasionally, Choudhury can fall short as a guide to the deeply eccentric city he loves so much and he is notably rusty on his history and architecture ... This is a first book any author would be proud to have written and The Epic City clearly marks the arrival of a new star. Witty, polished, honest and insightful, The Epic City is likely to become for Calcutta what Suketu Mehta’s classic Maximum City is for Mumbai.

...he presents a memoir of sorts, meditating on Calcutta through his own changing relationship to the city. The book interleaves his experiences as a boy brought up partly in the family’s ancestral house; as a recent college graduate working at the Statesman newspaper; and as a fledgling author who moves to Calcutta with his new, Delhi-raised wife ... The Epic City has a meandering structure, and Mr. Choudhury’s swerves from one topic or moment to another can sometimes wrong-foot the reader. His blend of memoir and reportage has the advantage, however, of letting him slip between the gates of so much writing about Calcutta—nostalgic evocations of a fading cosmopolis on one side and 'the trope of an urban hellhole' on the other.

Reading 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.

Choudhury’s prose is well crafted, but is a curious blend of emotion and detachment, as if he is trying to rein himself in. He is often unnecessarily detailed and irksome to a Bengali reader—for all his exertions, he can’t really escape the slightly superior, outside-in look, being the global citizen that he is. His observations, though, are kind and sharp, with a dry wit that fits the Bengali bhadralok to a T. But what remains with the reader is his fresh voice, painful in its honesty and sincerity, drawing the reader in to share his struggles, confusion and frustration, and which Calcuttan doesn’t know the feeling this wretched city evokes? ... In trying to piece together the hidden story of Calcutta, Choudhury may not have been successful all the way, but he manages to hurl the first axe in the hushed soil, finding the murmur of the voices of the phantoms that grew and nurtured us for ages, and who must be heeded before we can go find a new song.

Readers grow to understand Calcutta’s complexities and contradictions as Choudhury explains its history and introduces neighborhoods and inhabitants. The Epic City is most compelling when he explores his own past, taking us to his grandmother’s house for her funeral and showing us the two-room house where his father (one of 13 children) grew up. Despite Calcutta’s difficulties, Choudhury’s passion never wanes.

The Epic City is an artfully disjointed assemblage of addas, but with enough through lines to make all the sections cohere ... The author comes to accept the garbage, the bodily fluids, the raw sewage, the malaria-soaked floods, and the pulverizing humidity. Channeling V. S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, Choudhury doesn’t whitewash the filthy veneer of bodily fluids coating a particular landscape. He emphasizes the degree to which urine coats the entire Calcutta topography.

The son of immigrant parents creates a vivid, affectionate, and gritty portrait of a complex city ... A candid and often moving history of a city’s dramatic past and roiling present.

It is an enjoyable book to read with a fascinating insight into a city that is still thriving coupled together with his personal story as Choudhury rediscovers all that he loves about the chaos of his home city. A minor detail on this too is that the gold blocking on the cover makes this a sumptuous cover to look at.

Choudhury unearths Calcutta’s haunted past—exploring the Bengal famine, Partition, and the Naxalite revolution—and, in beautiful prose, he brings the city to life.