14 Novels Set in Kolkata, From Colonial Calcutta to Now

Sankar wrote this in Bengali in 1962 and Arunava Sinha brought it into English in 2007, which is when the rest of India finally met it. The narrator joins the Shahjahan, an old Calcutta hotel on Chowringhee, and works his way through its floors: the receptionist who knows everything, the housekeeper, the guests running affairs and businesses and small frauds. Nothing is exaggerated for effect, which is what makes it land. You finish it feeling like you did a season of night shifts in a city that never quite tells you the truth.

The Ghoshes own a paper business and a house arranged by rank, with the most powerful family on the top floor and the least on the bottom. Around them the business is failing, the servants are watching, and one son has gone to the countryside to organise landless peasants and write letters home that nobody in the house wants to read. Mukherjee cuts between the two, so a squabble about jewellery sits next to a page about starvation, and the effect is not subtle. It is not meant to be.

Subhash and Udayan are close enough to be mistaken for each other as boys. Udayan is drawn into the Naxalite movement in Calcutta, Subhash leaves for a doctorate in Rhode Island, and one decision in the lowland behind their parents' house shapes the next forty years for everyone in the family, including a woman who never asked for any of it. Lahiri writes with almost no decoration, so the grief arrives plainly and stays. The Calcutta chapters are the strongest thing she has written about India.

Captain Sam Wyndham arrives in Calcutta in 1919 carrying a war, a dead wife and an opium habit, and is handed a murder that everybody senior would prefer to see closed quickly. He works it with Sergeant Banerjee, a Cambridge educated Bengali who has to be twice as careful and is roughly three times as smart. The mystery is solid, but the reason to read it is the city: the racial geography of White Town and Black Town, the club rules, the way the police behave in a year when Indian politics is boiling over.

Gangopadhyay's Bengali novel Sei Somoy, published in the early 1980s, goes back to the Calcutta of the mid nineteenth century, when a new English educated Bengali class was inventing modern India in one city and behaving appallingly while doing it. Vidyasagar and Michael Madhusudan Dutt appear alongside invented families, and the book moves between reform meetings, courtesans' houses, litigation and household politics. Aruna Chakravarti's translation keeps it readable without flattening the period. It is long and it wanders, in the way a nineteenth century city wanders.

The narrator grows up in Calcutta among relatives who are always half somewhere else: Dhaka, where his grandmother was born and which is now another country, and London, where a family friend lives. Memory does the work of plot, jumping decades without warning, and the book keeps circling a violent event in 1964 that the adults refuse to explain. Ghosh is making an argument about borders being drawn on maps rather than in lives, and he makes it through people you come to know rather than through speeches.

Chetna Grddha Mullick's family has been carrying out executions for generations, in a lane in north Kolkata where poverty, ritual and reputation are all knotted together. When she is named to perform a hanging, the city's media turns her into a story, and the novel becomes an argument about power: who gets to watch, who gets to profit, who is actually holding the rope. Meera wrote it in Malayalam and J Devika translated it, and the Kolkata in it is closely observed enough to embarrass a few writers who live there.

This is not a novel and I am not pretending otherwise. Choudhury grew up between New Jersey and Calcutta, came back after Princeton, and reported for The Statesman, which by then was a great paper in slow decline. The book moves through neighbourhoods, tea shops, family flats and para politics, asking why anybody stays in a city that the rest of India has written off as finished. His answer is complicated and unsentimental, and it does more for a first time visitor than any guidebook.

Sandeep visits his cousins in Calcutta and the novel simply stays with him: the afternoon light in a middle class flat, the sound of a scooter starting, an uncle's small business worries, the particular boredom of a child in someone else's routine. Chaudhuri is interested in ordinary time, so there is no crisis waiting in chapter twelve. What builds instead is a physical sense of the city in the eighties, the sort you only get from a writer who noticed the smell of a staircase.

The boy at the centre is small enough to be taken along to rehearsals and old enough to absorb what the family whispers about having an actress in the house. The novel sits in the last years of Calcutta's commercial theatre, with half empty halls, jealous relatives and a child working out that adoration and disgrace can be aimed at the same person. Majumdar writes the child's point of view without making him cute, and the ending has a cruelty that stays with you for weeks afterwards.

Ghosh takes the real story of Ronald Ross and his malaria research in India and builds a conspiracy underneath it: a hidden group of Indian assistants pursuing knowledge of their own, using the colonial laboratory as a cover. The narrative moves between a near future New York, a Calcutta of the 1890s and a present day in between, and it withholds explanations on purpose. Call it science fiction, call it a ghost story, it works as both and refuses to settle.

Ray wrote the Feluda stories in Bengali from the mid sixties, and this English collection gathers them with Gopa Majumdar's translations. Pradosh Mitter solves cases with his teenage cousin Topshe and a bumbling thriller writer called Jatayu, and while the trio travel all over India, home is a Calcutta flat and a Calcutta way of thinking. The mysteries are fair, the violence is minimal, and the appeal for an adult reader is watching a great film director build plots that never waste a scene.

The narrator grows up in the crowded margins of Kolkata, in a family that came over from Bihar without papers anyone respects, and finds that his looks are the one asset the city will pay for. Basu follows him through the trade, through the politics of the neighbourhood and through a family that needs the money and cannot ask where it comes from. It is a novel about who counts as a citizen, told from the pavement rather than the drawing room, and it is unsentimental about both.

Seth's novel follows Lata and her mother's search for a husband across a newly independent India, and it lives mostly in the invented town of Brahmpur. Calcutta arrives through the Chatterjis, a clever, unbearable, wonderful family whose son writes poetry and whose dinner table conversation is the best comedy Seth has written. The city shows up in the Ballygunge houses, the clubs and the shoe business, and it is drawn with real affection by a writer who clearly enjoyed his time there.