Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi

Ruchir Joshi’s Great Eastern Hotel is a 900-page expansive and immersive novel that reconstructs Calcutta in the early 1940s, when imperial authority was fraying under the pressures of war, famine and political awakening. Set largely in and around the eponymous hotel, the book treats this grand colonial institution as both a social crossroads and a symbol of a city, and a nation, poised on the edge of transformation.

The story opens during the Second World War, as global conflict reshapes everyday life in Bengal. Calcutta is crowded with soldiers, refugees, activists and opportunists, all moving through a city marked by anxiety and possibility. The Great Eastern Hotel provides a focal point where lives intersect, secrets circulate and alliances are formed and broken. Joshi does not offer a single, tightly wound plot. Instead, the novel unfolds through a web of interconnected narratives that collectively chart the city’s political, cultural and emotional weather.

Among the most compelling figures is Nirupama, a young woman drawn into communist activism, whose idealism is tested by both personal loss and the brutal realities of history. Her journey is echoed and refracted through other characters, including Kedar, a privileged artist struggling to reconcile aesthetic ambition with social responsibility; Imogen, a British woman whose growing unease reflects the moral exhaustion of empire; and Gopal, whose rise from street-level survival to wartime profiteering exposes the ethical compromises demanded by scarcity. These characters are not presented as symbols or moral lessons, but as people shaped by conflicting desires, loyalties and fears.

Joshi’s prose is richly textured and sensuous, attentive to the rhythms of speech, the press of crowds, and the charged atmosphere of cafés, drawing rooms and streets. Bengali words and idioms are woven into the English with confidence, grounding the narrative in place without turning it opaque. The novel’s scale is undeniably demanding, yet its pleasures lie in accumulation rather than speed. Scenes linger, conversations sprawl, and historical moments are allowed to unfold obliquely through personal experience rather than official record.

A recurring concern of the book is how history is remembered, distorted and retold. The narrative frequently shifts perspective and timeframe, suggesting that the past is less a stable account than a mosaic assembled from fragments, memories and invention. War, famine and political struggle remain ever-present, but they are filtered through art, love, ambition and survival. Music, painting, food and literature appear not as decoration, but as ways of resisting erasure and asserting meaning amid upheaval.

At times, the novel’s ambition risks overwhelming its emotional focus, and some figures inevitably feel more fully realised than others. Yet this excess is also part of its achievement. Great Eastern Hotel refuses neat resolution or narrative economy, choosing instead to honour the messiness of a city and a historical moment too large to be contained by a single voice.

As a work of historical fiction, Joshi’s novel stands out for its intensity of vision and its refusal to sentimentalise either empire or resistance. It is a demanding book that rewards patience with a vivid portrait of a society in flux, and confirms Joshi as a writer willing to take risks in pursuit of scale, depth and historical truth.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

HarperCollins