India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 350

In 1946 there were the Hindu-Muslim massacres. They marked the beginning of the end for the city. The next year India was independent, but partitioned. Bengal was divided. A large Hindu refugee population came and camped in Calcutta; and Calcutta, without a hundredth part of the resilience of Europe, never really recovered. Certain important things were in the future - the cinema of Satyajit Ray, especially - but the great days of the city, all its intellectual life, were over. And it could appear that the British-built city - its grandeur still ghostly at night - began to die when the British went away.