Sometimes called the city of joy and on other occasions the city of palaces, Kolkata has had several names. During the final days before the British left India, it also altered into the city of the dead. Sujata Massey’s book, The City of Palaces, is a tale of a young girl in search of her identity. Opening in the 1930s the novel continues in a linear fashion, as the girl searches for her family in a precarious world, wondering if she will be able to transcend caste after she’s orphaned and adrift to build a new life by herself.
Young Pom’s life changes forever when her family is wiped out in a devastating flood. She becomes a maidservant in a British boarding school where she discovers her gift for languages. Amidst the drudgery of her duties, she finds unexpected friendship and experiences the stirrings of first love. However, tragedy soon strikes, and she is forced into hiding. Alone and desperate, she makes a dangerous journey from the secretive, decadent world of an exclusive brothel to the grand metropolis of Calcutta. Swept into the rising tide of Indian freedom struggle, she creates a new life for herself, until her past returns to haunt her. Massey has written several stories set in Japan and United States since 1997, but her place of origin always called out to her. And certainly nothing could have been a better backdrop than India’s struggle for freedom for her latest novel. “I have always wanted to write about India but I couldn’t until I had a specific story in mind. For years I kept trying different stories about Indian-Americans in the United States but they weren’t very inspiring,” she said.
Drawing parallels between India’s rutted ride to Independence and the setbacks in Kamala’s struggle for dignity, she said, “I researched what was happening in India each year and realised I could not possibly leave it out of the story. The 1930s were the turbulent end years of British rule. Some of the big events Kamala would have known about were Gandhi’s salt march, the hunger strikes undertaken by political prisoners in the Andaman Islands, the rise and fall of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Bengal famine. The biggest event of all was the World War II because Indians really had to struggle to decide whether they wanted to back Britain in the fight or consider a new world order with Japan.” A collection of books from British colonial India and the National library in Kolkata were the chief sources of research for Massey’s book.
Kolkata is the city that reeks of elegant history acquired by India but as it strives hard to keep pace with the surrounding economics and development, the architectural treasures stamping the city’s elegant character are being gradually lost. “I wrote this book to help preserve my own memories of a landscape I love. If I’d waited any longer to write, I fear that I might not have had any of these charming old streets to walk through and would have struggled to paint any sort of picture of the late colonial period,” Massey said.
One of the unique things that you will come across as you read on is that the author has religiously incorporated epigraphs before beginning every chapter. The author said that these epigraphs were an attempt to bring the reader closer to Kamala — what she read and how she felt. “These epigraphs are not crucial to understanding the novel but are a way of reading along with Kamala. One can zip past them or dwell on their connection to the emotions or action within the chapter. Perhaps a reader might be intrigued enough by the quotation to seek out the entire original source,” she said.
While a lot of these epigraphs include meanings of words from the dictionary and lines from Tagore’s works, one of the epigraphs which deserves a mention is the one that is present before the novel begins. Fragment of a letter found by the Arjun Cleaning Agency was created by the author to “give an immediate indication of forthcoming suspense and also hint that the little girl whose voice narrates the first chapter, will grow into a woman of some controversy. Readers will find this letter mentioned within the story’s text, so its sender and recipient will ultimately be revealed,” she added. (Published in The Pioneer)
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