麻豆约拍

In 1999, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri moved from England back to Calcutta. It was a place he had loved in his youth and the place he made his name writing about.

Growing up in Bombay, Amit Chaudhuri used to feel a charge of anticipation on visiting Calcutta. For him, it was his first taste of modernism, of a completely contemporary city.

"This is what I must have had an intuition of, even as a child. And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the monuments - there aren't many of those - but the houses and lanes."

That Calcutta was one of the great cities of modernity for Amit. He found himself changed by his encounters.

"By modern, I don't mean new or developed, but a self renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life."

A colleague of Amit's told him that he loved the city because "you can feel that something happened here".

Amit takes us on a guided tour of the city, and explores whether that city of his childhood still exists or is just a realm of his imagination.

Producer: Rachel Hooper

A Falling Tree production first broadcast on 麻豆约拍 Radio 4 in February 2014.