Release Date August 2011 HERITAGE ISBN: 978-81-89738-43-3 `2495/£45/$85 HB

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Fine publishing within reach D-78, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase-I, New Delhi-110 020, Tel: 91-11-26816301, 49327000; Fax: 91-11-26810483, 26813830 email: [email protected]; website: www.niyogibooksindia.com Title: `2495/£45/$85 HB ISBN: 978-81-89738-43-3

Size: 279 x 292mm Author: Soumitra Das 236pp, 170 gsm art paper (matt) All colour Photographs: Christopher Taylor 205 photographs Foreword: Olaf Van Cleef Hard back with jacket

The seeds of the city of Calcutta were sown only after chose a certain spot between present-day Nimtala and to estabilish the first British outpost. Subsequently, the British bought the right to take on rent the three villages— Sutanuti, and Gobindapur.

The outlines of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Bridge and About the Author: the Ochterlony Monument (today’s Shahid Minar) that once ruled Soumitra Das is a journalist from Calcutta who Calcutta’s horizon have been fast overshadowed by the jagged began his career with The Statesman and is now contours of concrete towers. By contrast, the city’s built heritage with The Telegraph. He is deeply involved with inherited from pre-Independence times may be in the last stages the visual arts and heritage issues and writes of ruination but the buildings bear traces of the glamour that once regularly on these topics. His book A Jaywalker’s won Calcutta the sobriquet of ‘City of Palaces’. Regal in their Guide to Calcutta (2007) was a bestseller. youth, the old buildings have had their grace enhanced by age. Christopher Taylor is an English photographer White & Black: Journey to the Centre of Imperial Calcutta takes a based in France. His black-and-white clear-eyed view of the changing face of Calcutta. It is this spirit photographs have sensitively captured the grey that Christopher Taylor celebrates in his superb black-and-white climes of Iceland, China’s bleak urbanscape, frames, and Soumitra Das captures in his sweeping narrative. The and colonial Calcutta. He mostly uses a studio book guides us through Dalhousie Square that is the quintessence camera or else an ancient Rolliflex. He has of Calcutta today. exhibited in many countries, including India.

The photographs also record the change these buildings have undergone with the past often overlapping with and embracing the present