During the Raj, Calcutta was the world’s second most economically powerful metropolis. In 2019, Kolkata, eastern India’s largest city, stands at a crossroads. Unlike Delhi and Mumbai, the West Bengal Capital is anything but an economic powerhouse. Its remote eastern location and decades of communist rule have seen to this. Many young middle-class Bengalis are leaving for other cities or go abroad for lack of opportunity back home. But this stasis has also kept crime rates and pollution levels lower than in other Indian cities. It has kept American fast food out of the inner city. The sheer amount of remarkable British and Bengali architecture surviving from the early 20th century is incredible. The communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims are surely present, but have not burst into the
