‘Great Eastern Hotel’: A sprawling, precise novel about Calcutta’s people and big historical moments

With dwindling attention spans and addictive social media posts, should the garden-variety reader commit to a novel of over 900 pages? In the case of Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel, which arrives with a thud more than two decades after his The Last Jet Engine Laugh, the reward is worth the effort.

What makes this doorstopper compelling is the way it is both expansive yet focused, sprawling yet precise. This duality reminds one of Isaiah Berlin’s division of writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who view the world through a single central vision, and foxes, who pursue many ends at once. Here, Joshi shows that he can do both.

The great city of Calcutta

Primarily set in Calcutta during the early 1940s, Great Eastern Hotel illuminates, among other things, that though all ordinary cities are alike, every great city is great in its own way. Like the Hooghly river, the novel twists and turns between locales and landscapes to encompass a diverse set of characters in the interplay between individual fate and collective history.

Chief among them is the privileged art-loving Kedar Lahiri, who is believed to have a “delicate and over-sensitive flower at the core of his soul”. Then, there’s Nirupama, a student and ardent communist, making efforts to free the proletariat; Imogen, a...

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