A review by manish25
Tamarind City - Where Modern India Began by Bishwanath Ghosh

adventurous funny informative reflective relaxing medium-paced

5.0

Bishwanath Ghosh’s Tamarind City is a rich, meandering love letter to Chennai—still called Madras in the memory of many—and a masterful blend of reportage, memoir, and historical storytelling. Ghosh does not simply report on a city; he wanders through it, absorbing its essence in slow, meditative sips like a perfectly brewed filter coffee. The result is a book that isn’t just read—it’s lived.

What makes Tamarind City phenomenal is Ghosh’s ability to treat Chennai not as a postcard or a headline, but as a deeply layered human being. He peels back the surface of its sun-beaten streets and reveals the delicate, often contradictory rhythms of a metropolis shaped by tradition and modernity. His writing is quietly lyrical, conversational without ever being casual, and marked by a deep affection for the people and places he encounters.

One section that stood out—and stayed with me—was Ghosh’s encounter with the late historian and chronicler A. Muthiah. Through this meeting, we glimpse not just the personality of Muthiah himself, but also his lifelong relationship with the city he documented so meticulously. That vignette acts like a bridge between the modern city Ghosh explores and the historical Madras that Muthiah so loved to rediscover. It’s a beautifully woven thread of reverence, passing the baton of storytelling from one chronicler to another.

In fact, reading about Muthiah in Tamarind City has made me pick up his own Madras Rediscovered next. If Ghosh maps the heartbeats of today’s Chennai, then Muthiah traces the bones of the old Madras that still pulses beneath. The promise of moving from one city chronicler to another feels like continuing an intimate, intergenerational conversation about place, memory, and identity.

Tamarind City is not just for those who know Chennai, or even those curious about it. It’s for anyone who understands that cities are living, breathing entities—and that their true stories are often found in side streets, second-hand bookstores, and late-night tea stalls. Ghosh captures all of that and more, with grace and warmth. A truly phenomenal read.