The Shahjahan Has No Vacancy; Remembering Sankar, Who Wrote Calcutta Before It Forgot Itself

There is a scene early in Chowringhee, Sankar's 1962 novel and the book that made him immortal, where the narrator, Shankar, arrives at the Shahjahan Hotel for his first day of work and is overwhelmed by the sheer accumulated human drama of the place: the bearers, the managers, the foreign guests, the quiet negotiations happening in every corner of every corridor. It is a portrait of Calcutta at its most electric, a city still convinced of its own grandeur, still wearing its cosmopolitan history like a well-pressed suit. His depiction of Calcutta's nightlife, bars and street culture turned out to be an attractive attribute of the book, which, reportedly, drew tourists to visit the city.

Sankar conceived that world on a rain-soaked afternoon in 1962, standing at the waterlogged crossing of Central Avenue and Dalhousie, watching the neon of the Grand Hotel flicker against the colonial facades of Chowringhee Street. He knew those buildings. He knew the gossip inside them. And he knew, with a writer's instinct, that this world would not last. 

He was right, of course. Today, over 2,500 buildings in Kolkata have been declared dangerous by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, and the great ancestral baris of North Kolkata, the 'thakurdalan' courtyards, the crumbling Italianate facades, the mansions that once hosted the Bengal Renaissance, are being quietly surrendered to inheritance disputes, developer pressure, and simple, grinding neglect. The walls come down, brick by brick. Heritage is but a buzzword thrown around by hoteliers. The city that Sankar mapped in prose is being unmapped in concrete and glass.

Mani Shankar Mukherjee, pen name Sankar, drawn from his own middle name, and eventually the only name that mattered, died on February 20, 2026, at the age of 92, following a fortnight's illness at a Kolkata hospital. He is survived by his two daughters and by a readership too large to count.

The Clerk Who Built a Hotel from Memory

Sankar's life was, before anything else, a story about survival in a city designed to humble the newcomer. His father died while he was still a teenager, forcing the young Mukherjee out of Howrah's Debdoot Sheet Nagar and into the machinery of Calcutta's working world. He scrubbed typewriters, tutored children, hawked goods on the street, and eventually found a steady footing as a clerk to Noel Frederick Barwell, the last British barrister practising at the Calcutta High Court.

Barwell died in 1953, mid-argument in a Madras courtroom, and in the grief that followed, Sankar discovered what he was for. In a quest to dedicate something to him and unable to afford a statue or dedicate a street's name to the barrister, he wrote about him instead, and from that obligation emerged Kato Ajanare (The Great Unknown), serialised in the magazine Desh in the early 1960s. The pen name was born alongside the novel. He never looked back.

Beyond writing, Sankar occupied the city's professional life with the same curiosity he brought to its fiction. For years, he served as corporate communications advisor at Victoria House, the headquarters of CESC, the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation, run by the RP Goenka group, bringing to that corporate world the same sharp, amused intelligence that animated his novels. He was, colleagues recalled, far less interested in corporate messaging than in the remarkable people the corridors kept producing: the self-made industrialists, the ambitious young managers, the Bengali businessmen whom, as he once noted with some sadness, other Bengalis never quite took seriously enough. 

In 2019, completing a circle that felt almost too perfectly plotted for fiction, he returned to the Calcutta High Court, where he had first arrived as a teenager in search of a job in 1951, to take the oath of office as the 245th Sheriff of Kolkata, a largely ceremonial post he wore, by all accounts, with characteristic lightness and delight.

His politics were subtler and more candid in private than in public. He was not an ideological writer; he chronicled the political without becoming polemical. Yet those close to him recalled moments of illuminating honesty. When asked, late in life, to approve publication of a piece by a young Muslim scholar documenting the quiet, insidious difficulty of renting a flat in Kolkata, he declined, confessing, with disarming directness, that at 82 he had no appetite for a fight with Mamata Banerjee. It was not cowardice; it was the wariness of a man who had spent a lifetime watching institutions, and who understood precisely what they were capable of.

A Trinity, a Trilogy, a World

For Bishan Samaddar, editor and director at Seagull Books, Sankar's passing marks the recession of an entire moral universe, one in which his own family was steeped. "During my growing-up years in Kolkata, Sankar formed, alongside Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, a loose trinity of Bengali middle-class writers. It was my parents' generation that devoured his novels, many of them serialised in weekly magazines in a manner reminiscent of nineteenth-century British fiction. That mode of publication made Sankar part of everyday life; his realism mirrored the aspirations, anxieties, and moral negotiations of his readers. For me, with his passing, it feels as though that particular moral universe, and the stories it generated, recede further into history, just like my parents' generation has." 

Samaddar also recalls a conversation on the very day of Sankar's passing with Seagull publisher Naveen Kishore, who remembered that in the 1970s Sankar had persuaded his Bengali publishers to promote his books in mainstream newspapers and magazines in lieu of conventional royalties. It was a canny manoeuvre, one that prioritised reach over remuneration, and that tells you everything about what he cared for most. 

His stories did travel widely. Satyajit Ray telephoned Sankar directly, hours after finishing 'Seemabaddha' in a Puja annual, to claim the film rights before anyone else could. The resulting films, 'Seemabaddha' and 'Jana Aranya', swept international festivals and brought the bhadrolok's quiet moral compromises to audiences far beyond Bengal.

That same reach endures today, in ways Sankar himself relished. Each year at the Kolkata Book Fair, the largest book fair in Asia, drawing over two crore visitors to the Milan Mela grounds, his titles hold their ground in Bengali alongside the new voices.

Agnibhu Ghosh, a Masters student at Jadavpur University's Department of English, frames that connection across generations, "My first interaction with Sankar's literature was through my mother. She used to read his works ardently alongside Suchitra Bhattacharya and I would pick them up and find myself immersed into a world of the middle-class intelligentsia which was otherwise inaccessible to me as an 11-year-old and helped me shape who I am as a person. However, I think my mother reading these authors tells us something more crucial about the worlds these stories inhabit. They portray the mundane lives of the working class while simultaneously offering us a glimpse into the scandalous. Take The Middleman for instance; on one hand it is the story of how power and ambition ruins a young man and an innocent prostitute, but on the other it is an anatomy of survival in a capitalist economy. They read as recognisable worlds which exposes the fragility of middle-class morality." That the novel can be read this way by a student today, and still feel urgent, is the surest measure of Sankar's endurance. That it first arrived through a mother's bookshelf is the surest measure of how he travelled.

The People's Writer, Finally Claimed

Saikat Majumdar, professor of creative writing at Ashoka University and a writer whose own formation owes something to this Bengal, captures what made Sankar's achievement so distinctive, "The unemployed young man and his many travails, including some deeply romanticised ones, cast a long shadow on Bengali literature of the second half of the twentieth century, the last decades of which nourished my early making as a writer. But no one knew the worlds of labour, success and precarity became strangely conjoined in a slowly decaying and stagnating Bengal through these decades in the way Sankar saw and brought them to life."

Sankar wrote over 70 books across a career spanning more than seven decades: novels, biographies, memoirs, and chronicles of the city he refused to abandon. He wrote about lawyers and accountants, about hotel managers and corporate strivers, about Swami Vivekananda and about his own astonishing life. He received the Bankim Puraskar in 1993, the Sahitya Akademi Award, belatedly, at 87, in 2021 for his autobiographical Eka Eka Ekashi, and the ABP Ananda Sera Bangali Award in 2022.

The story of how Sankar crossed languages is itself a small publishing legend, and it begins with a fax. Diya Kar, the editor and publisher who first pushed and commissioned translator Arunava Sinha to bring Chowringhee into English, recalls what made the 2007 translation a runaway bestseller, the story was universal and resonant, the paperback was priced competitively, the translation was superb, and Vikram Seth, who had read the novel years earlier in Hindi and been deeply moved by it, agreed to send a cover quote. By fax. It was, Kar notes, a first: Seth did not blurb books.

The cascade that followed was remarkable. Kar tells us, “At Salon du Livre the following year, I gave a copy to Jean Mattern, at Gallimard at the time, telling him it was the one book he should buy. It took up to a year but he did buy French rights. Once French rights were sold, Neri Pozza bought Italian rights and Spanish rights were sold to Salamandra. Ravi Mirchandani, at Atlantic UK then, bought ‘rest of the world’, published it in the UK and sold Chinese rights. Boyd Tonkin reviewed the book inThe Independent and it got a lot of attention, putting the spotlight on Indian fiction in translation and the need for more. Sankar loved the publicity, the fame and limelight, the many interviews and articles. He was thrilled that his novel had travelled and was eager to have more published in foreign languages. Even as recently as 2022, Sankar was recommending a list of his works, both fiction and non-fiction, that he wanted translated and sold.”

That hunger never left him. It was, in many ways, the animating force beneath the surface of a career that could easily have stayed local and comfortable. The rediscovery, when it came, felt less like a revelation than a long-overdue correction, the world catching up to what Bengal had known for forty years.

For Anurag Mazumdar,an assistant professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, that correction carries its own quiet injustice, "Sankar was an every person's writer in the sense that it felt like he was writing in an accessible style, about the humdrum urban life. However, that is a deceptive way of looking at Sankar, because underneath that quotidian quality, there's so much in terms of social and political upheavals he manages to cover. It was only towards the later part of his life, regrettably, that the literary establishment took him seriously as an author, along with being a people's writer." 

The crumbling baris of North Kolkata will keep falling. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation will keep issuing its notices. The city will keep replacing its grand, complicated, morally saturated past with glass towers that have no memory. Sankar wrote against that forgetting for seven decades, not in rage, but in the steady, limpid, deeply human prose of a man who believed that the lives of clerks and receptionists and middle managers deserved the same attention as kings.

On a rain-soaked afternoon in 1962, a young man stood at a Calcutta crossing and looked up at a hotel's neon sign. He thought: I know what goes on in there. He was right. He wrote it all down. The Shahjahan is full, and the light is still on.