Calcutta

Calcutta has a double significance in Devdas: it is the center of the literary world that brought Saratchandra Chattopadhyay to fame, and the city to which Devdas repeatedly travels as he leaves home and changes. Its presence is registered through particular routes and rooms—a return from Burma, a shared lodging, and a hired buggy stopping in Chitpore—rather than through an extended description of the city. In both the author’s history and the novel’s plot, Calcutta marks a threshold between one life and another.

Literary and Biographical Center

Calcutta entered Saratchandra’s career as the destination for stories and novels he sent from Burma to its journals. After his father’s death, he had left for Burma in 1903; he returned to Calcutta in 1916, following a childhood spent in poverty and youth in Bhagalpur and Muzaffarpur. By then, readers had encountered work including Charitraheen and Srikanta in serial form. Some initially believed that writing of such quality could only be by Rabindranath Tagore. Once Saratchandra’s authorship became known, he rose to fame with remarkable speed.

In 1917, the year Devdas appeared in Bengali, Saratchandra settled in a comfortable house in Samtabed, on the outskirts of Calcutta, and devoted himself to writing. Samtabed is not presented as the city itself, but the account places his new home and working life in relation to Calcutta. That distinction suits the city’s broader role in the novel: it is a destination and a point of reference, a place associated with opportunity and change, even when the action takes place elsewhere.

Devdas’s Education and Return Visits

For Devdas, Calcutta first signifies departure for study and the long absences that follow. After several months away, he returns home; Parvati runs out excitedly to meet him. They talk, though she has little to say, while much of what he says concerns Calcutta. When the summer holidays end, he goes back to the city, and Parvati’s tears fall again, weaker than before. The scene makes Calcutta part of their separation: his journeys there repeatedly interrupt their shared life at home.

Across the four years that follow, the city’s influence becomes visible in Devdas’s appearance and tastes. Parvati privately grieves at how much he has changed. The rustic traits she knew have disappeared; he now wears foreign shoes and bright clothes, carries a walking stick, and values gold buttons and a watch. He no longer wants to stroll by the river and would rather take a gun hunting. Even his idea of fishing has shifted from tiny minnows to big fish. These details make his transformation concrete, while his repeated movement between Calcutta and home supplies its chronology. The city is not simply a backdrop to his education: it is the place associated with the tastes and habits that set his altered self apart from the boy Parvati remembers.

Lodgings and Encounters in the City

Calcutta also provides the setting for Devdas’s independent, unsettled life after he leaves his uncle’s place. He lives in a mess, or shared accommodation, and the young man in the adjoining room is Chunilal, who has stayed there for nine years while trying unsuccessfully to pass his BA examination. Their proximity gives the city a domestic scale: rather than a grand urban panorama, the narrative presents neighboring rooms, an absent companion, and a maid arriving to light the lamps. The mess is a place where Devdas is separated from his family but not alone; Chunilal’s presence makes their friendship possible within the routines of shared lodging.

A different urban setting appears when Chunilal takes Devdas out one night. At nine o’clock, a hired buggy stops before a two-storied house in Chitpore. Chunilal pulls his reluctant friend inside, where the owner, Chandramukhi, comes out to greet them. Devdas responds with revulsion. The encounter brings him into contact with a world he did not intend to enter, and his hostile reaction exposes how intensely he has come to hate the very shadow of womankind. Chitpore thus matters not as a general portrait of city life but as the precise setting for a charged meeting: the buggy, the house, and Chunilal’s insistence carry Devdas across a boundary he resists.

A City of Movement and Contrast

The episodes give Calcutta several connected functions. It is a center of print and literary recognition in Saratchandra’s career; in Devdas’s story, it is a destination for study, the setting of years of absence, and the site of lodgings and consequential encounters. The novel links the city to change through repeated departures and returns, but does not treat that change as simple progress. Devdas gains new clothes and habits, yet the distance between his altered city self and his earlier bond with Parvati becomes more apparent. Calcutta’s significance lies in this contrast: it enables new lives and encounters while making visible what departure has unsettled or left behind.