A strange and sublime longing: Looking back at childhood in Calcutta in A Strange and Sublime Address and The Blue Bedspread

Abstract

Childhood is a universal trope in literature, where the figure of the child engenders feelings of pity, affection or horror in readers. This article will examine two novels — A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri ([1991] 2016) and The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha ([1995] 2009) — in order to explore how narratives about childhood in the city of Calcutta, one nostalgic and the other traumatic, deploy the figure of the child within the bhadralok milieu, to convey a nostalgic mood for the idea of Bengali middle class identity. This article engages with the possibility of how nostalgia for an apparently declining middle class is glossed by a seemingly interiorized reflection of bhadralok domesticity juxtaposed with a bleaker self-aware representation, seen through the eyes of children.