The world’s at war, and inside Calcutta’s swankiest hotel, there’s champagne, swing music and scandal. It’s 1941, and while war drums echo across continents, the Great Eastern Hotel clinks

with cutlery and whispered secrets, oblivious to the disasters hurtling towards it. Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel isn’t so much a book as it is a maximalist epic that grabs you by the

collar, drags you through the smoke and sweat of 1940s Calcutta, and dumps you out 900 pages later, exhilarated, slightly disoriented and desperate for a drink. This isn’t a polite

historical fiction that gently takes you by the hand and shows you the major events of the time. No. This one roughs you up in the alley behind New Market, introduces you to a pickpocket, a

Eastern Hotel, the kind of establishment where the empire’s elite drank their gin even as the world outside started to crumble. It’s a hotel in the best narrative sense: a crossroads where

revolutionaries, artists, street urchins and expats collide, seduce, betray and pontificate. Joshi doesn’t just give you Calcutta as backdrop; he gives you Calcutta as accomplice, as

unreliable narrator, as the city that’s constantly rewriting its own story before your eyes. Advertisement The prose is gleefully dense, playful and often riotous. Joshi has a magpie’s ear

for dialects. The novel’s dialogue crackles with period slang, street patter, snob drawl and the earthy rhythm of 40s’ Calcutta. There’s joy in the way characters talk, mispronounce and

curse. They speak not like characters in a book, but like people you might overhear at a dockside tea stall or behind the curtained-off section of an old colonial club. One of the sly

recurring players in this orchestration is The Statesman. Joshi uses it not just as a period prop but as a sharp narrative device. It turns up first as the bringer of daily war maps,

fuelling overconfident armchair Soviet defeat predictions among college boys. Then it doubles as a ledger for the performative patriotism of rajas and maharajas, who splash out half-page ads

pledging men and munitions to His Majesty’s cause. Later, it becomes the medium for social one-upmanship in death, with characters fretting over the size and placement of obituaries,

debating whether family legacies deserve a front-page farewell or a discreet classified note. Yes, Great Eastern Hotel tackles heavy stuff: colonial anxiety, gender politics, class warfare

and how cities remember (or forget) themselves. But it does so through characters you’d actually want to have a drink with, or avoid in a dark alley. This is historical fiction with dirt

under its fingernails and poetry in its bones. The book grabs a moment when the world held its breath, turns it inside out and rummages through the bits of politics, passion, betrayal and

art we’d rather not admit still matter. Ambitious, irreverent and alarmingly timely, this is a novel that reminds you how quickly a city’s laughter can curdle — and how every generation

thinks it’s the last one before the storm. It’s easy to assume Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel is cut from the same linen as Shankar’s Chowringhee. But where Chowringhee keeps its drama

neatly pressed within hotel walls, Joshi’s hotel is more of a narrative traffic island — everything whirls around it, and most of the good trouble happens well beyond the lobby. Great

Eastern Hotel isn’t just a love letter to a lost city — it’s a lusty, brawling, cigarette-stained, gin-soaked declaration that history belongs as much to the pickpocket in the shadows as to

the statesman in the ballroom. Ruchir Joshi speaks to The Statesman about Great Eastern Hotel, a novel where Calcutta teeters on the edge of war, revolution and reinvention. Following are

the excerpts: Q. THE NOVEL TREATS CALCUTTA NOT MERELY AS A SETTING BUT AS A PALIMPSEST OF CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SENSORY IMPRESSIONS. IN YOUR RENDERING OF THE CITY, HOW DID YOU APPROACH THE

ACT OF LAYERING THESE COMPETING REALITIES—FROM THE IMPERIAL TO THE SUBALTERN—WITHOUT FLATTENING ANY ONE PERSPECTIVE? The thing is, you don’t start like that. You get involved in the period,

start thinking about the characters who might be alive then and follow their stories as they come to you. Then you try to do justice to each of them. You ask — if this character is walking

down a street, living in a house, entering a hotel, or caught in a crowd, how would they behave? What would they know, what wouldn’t they know? What would their expectations be, given the

limitations of their time? What would their cultural hardwiring be? You work with all these layers, read, reread and rewrite until it feels right. And if someone later says, ‘You managed to

cover everything from the grand imperial to the subaltern without flattening it,’ well, that’s lovely to hear. But really, you’re just trying to do justice to the scale of the story. Some

novels live inside a single apartment or one village, and those are beautiful too. This one, though, was always meant to be expansive — and it needed to live up to that. Q. THE NOVEL HAS A

DELIBERATELY FRAGMENTED STRUCTURE—MULTIPLE VIEWPOINTS, TIME-HOPS, LINGUISTIC PLAY. WAS THIS FORMAL FRAGMENTATION A WAY TO MIRROR THE POLITICAL DISSONANCE OF 1940S CALCUTTA? OR DOES IT

REFLECT A BROADER DISTRUST OF SINGULAR NARRATIVES IN INDIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY? Well, my first book, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is being reissued now — it’ll be back in bookstores shortly. And

if you look that up, you’ll see it also has a fragmentary narrative. I think, as a writer and filmmaker, I naturally prefer a fragmentary narrative over a neatly unified storytelling

structure. That’s one thing. And the second is — since Great Eastern Hotel has multiple characters and settings, to do justice to that and create a kind of multi-voiced, polyphonic

experience, a broken-up narrative felt like the right choice for me. Q. WHAT DREW YOU TO USE A HOSPITALITY SPACE AS THE NOVEL’S NARRATIVE AND MORAL FULCRUM? Well, I don’t know if it’s the

novel’s moral fulcrum. What fascinated me was the Great Eastern Hotel, the Grand Hotel and these big imperial-era establishments in Calcutta. They were, in a sense, strange, extravagant

objects — symbols of extreme wealth in a city marked by poverty and hardship, surrounded by struggling countryside. These hotels, along with places like the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Bombay,

were among the finest in the world — the food, the service, the luxurious suites — and yet they existed in this very charged context, in one of the Empire’s most important cities, where

disparity was everywhere. What interested me was how the hotel wasn’t just home to the rich and government officials, but also to sex workers, waiters, petty criminals supplying stolen goods

— all these intersecting lives under one roof. And the hotel as a metaphor fascinated me too. You have guests living beside each other without knowing one another. Some check in, some check

out, some stay long, others for a night. Some arrive for pleasure, others because they have no choice. In that way, the hotel started standing in for the city itself — for Calcutta. Which

is why the book’s called Great Eastern Hotel, not The Great Eastern Hotel. It’s both the hotel and the city — especially in that wartime moment, when Calcutta turns into a strange, sprawling

hotel of its own. People pour in: villagers seeking refuge, thinking it’s temporary, some dying here, some staying forever. Later, refugees from East Pakistan come in the same way.

Meanwhile, the soldiers, the Americans, the Australians, the African regiments — they arrive, stay for a while, and leave. That dynamic fascinated me. Q. SO, CALCUTTA BECOMES A CHARACTER IN

YOUR STORY?  It’s impossible to call Calcutta a character, because it’s so vast, and it has so many facets. The city develops a kind of presence in the book, which is akin to that of a

character. Yes, perhaps you could say that. There are so many aspects of Calcutta that, you know, I’m not trying to cover in this book. I’m not attempting one of those all-encompassing,

everything-about-the-city books. People have done that — written sweeping books on Calcutta, Bombay or Delhi. But this isn’t meant to be that. There’s a lot about Calcutta that isn’t in this

novel, because it’s really a book about this particular set of characters and this particular story. Q. YOUR FEMALE CHARACTERS—ESPECIALLY THOSE MOVING THROUGH PUBLIC AND SEMI-PUBLIC

SPACES—OFTEN SUBVERT THE EXPECTED MORAL CODES OF THEIR TIME. IN A CITY THAT WAS ON THE BRINK OF POLITICAL RUPTURE, HOW CONSCIOUS WERE YOU OF RE-INSCRIBING GENDER INTO THE CITY’S HISTORICAL

MEMORY? It was absolutely central to me, because I felt that was one story that hadn’t really been told — at least not in English fiction from India. It has, of course, appeared in Bangla

fiction, and many of the women activists from that time wrote their own autobiographies and gave extensive interviews. My friend, Dr Kavita Panjabi, has done an entire dissertation and book

on the Tehbaga movement, preserving memories from that period. So yes, the record exists, and we know about these women and their remarkable, heroic efforts. But in fiction — especially

English-language fiction — I hadn’t come across it. I was very conscious that, for me, this was the first time I was writing their story in this way, and it felt important to keep that

thread central to the book. As the writing progressed, it naturally moved to the heart of the novel. I was primarily drawn to these characters because, in their own ways, each one breaks

from the norms and expectations of their class, gender or background. Even a criminal like Gopal — without giving anything away here — does something by the end that defies the usual

gangster script. A wealthy boy like Kedar steps out of line in an unexpected way. A young Englishwoman like Imogen doesn’t behave like a typical colonial memsahib of the time — she chooses

differently. And then, of course, characters like Imogen, Nirupama, Roma — they begin defying conventions from the very start, setting up their own home, carving out new ways of living.

That’s what became compelling to me about these characters as they developed — this shared instinct to push against the limits placed on them. Q. THE NOVEL IS DEEPLY ATTENTIVE TO HOW PEOPLE

SPEAK—SLANG, SYNTAX, SHIFTS IN REGISTER. WHAT WERE THE ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC CHALLENGES IN VENTRILOQUISING SUCH A WIDE SPECTRUM OF VOICES, ESPECIALLY WHEN CLASS AND CASTE PLAY SUCH AN

AUDIBLE ROLE IN INDIAN SPEECH? Ethics, for me, means trying to put myself as vividly and in as much detail as possible into the shoes of that person. It’s based on people I’ve met,

experiences I’ve had — I’ve done some work in villages, some in the city with working-class people, and I’ve listened to recordings, read accounts. All of that comes into play when I’m

writing about someone from a background or class different from mine. And there’s a double challenge — because it’s not just about capturing that character’s voice and speech, it’s about

placing them in their time. This is 70, 80 years ago. You have to be very careful not to let contemporary language or ideas slip into their dialogue. A petty criminal or waiter today would

sound entirely different from their 1940s counterpart. Take Kedar, for instance. His English is very anglicised — but anglicised from the 1940s, not the ’60s or ’70s. I knew people, most of

them gone now, who spoke in a particular way shaped by a certain kind of received upper-class pronunciation. That had to be reflected in Kedar’s register, which would be distinct from

Imogen’s. And when Imogen and Nirupama talk, there’s another layer — Nirupama is learning English, Imogen is trying to grasp Bangla culture and its nuances. That dynamic needed to be marked

in their conversations. Of course, people in the streets and certain situations would be foul-mouthed — and that comes through too. But I paid close attention to cadence and tone, trying to

render it all as vividly, accurately, and imaginatively as I could. Spotlight Great Eastern Hotel By Ruchir Joshi HarperCollins, 2025 920 pages, Rs 1,499/- Advertisement