Published on 23 May 2022.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online, 23 May 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Chicago:
Bhattacharya, Somdatta. “Amit Chaudhuri.” Indian Writing In English Online. May 23, 2022. www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/amit-chaudhuri-somdatta-bhattacharya/.
Amit Chaudhuri is an acclaimed Indian author of novels, short stories, poetry and essays. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), England, held the title of Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in England and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India. Chaudhuri is also an accomplished Hindustani classical vocalist, and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the eclectic strands of raga, blues, and jazz, with a variety of other musical traditions. In 2017 he received the Sangeet Samman from the government of West Bengal for his contribution to Indian classical music. Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta/Kolkata in 1962 and grew up in Bombay/ Mumbai, in India. In Bombay, he attended the Elphinstone College and then moved to England for his undergraduate education. He first studied at the University College, London and for his graduate studies went to the Balliol College, Oxford. His doctoral dissertation was on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. He was later Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and received the Harper Wood Studentship for English Literature and Poetry from St. John’s College, Cambridge. He has been a regular contributor of poetry, fiction and reviews to prestigious publications such as The Guardian, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, and the Granta magazine. He is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth (2017). Among his other published works are collections of short stories, poetry, and essays, as well as the nonfiction work Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013), a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, called D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (with a preface by Tom Paulin, in 2003), and a unique work that combines elements of memoir and practical and cultural criticism of Indian classical music, Finding the Raga (2021). He has also been the well-appreciated editor of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), which offers a rich selection of works both originally in English and translated to English. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He has also been a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. His music has been regularly featured on radio and television.
FICTION
Chaudhuri’s longer fictional prose, he himself agrees, is influenced by poetry. He began as a poet, and confesses to only “by accident” stepping into the shoes of a novelist, in an interview with Fernando Galván (1999). Alice Truax, in a review, says about Chaudhuri’s novels, that he is “less interested in one particular story than in all the bits and pieces of ordinary life” (The New York Times ). Chaudhuri believes that, “the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer . . . would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a city, rather than a good story. . . The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist” (A Strange and Sublime Address 48-9). Real Time: Stories and Reminiscences (2002), his collection of short stories, explores fictional meditations on the artistic process, and his characters are often poets, writers and artists. The short stories are marked by a terseness of style and bring out the master miniaturist in him.
Chaudhuri’s first novel A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) has a ten-year-old boy protagonist, Sandeep, at the centre. The novel describes his two visits to Calcutta, to his Chhotomama’s (maternal uncle) house, from Bombay, where he lives with his parents. His next novel, Afternoon Raag (1993) is about a young English Literature student at Oxford, torn between two women and two spaces of home (Bombay/Calcutta) and exile (Oxford). Chaudhuri’s third novel, Freedom Song (1998) concerns two related households in Calcutta in 1993, against a backdrop of social, religious and economic unrest. A New World (2000) is the story of Jayojit Chatterjee, an American-Indian academic with a son and a broken marriage. His fifth novel, The Immortals (2009) is a poignant portrayal of the relationship between Shyamji, a classical music teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student, Nirmalya. Odysseus Abroad (2014), more a mood piece than a novel, follows the course of a single day in the life of Ananda, an undergraduate student in London and his uncle. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (2017) is an account of the narrator (also a novelist) Amit Chaudhuri’s visit to Bombay, the city where he grew up.
James Wood, in his The New Yorker review of Odysseus Abroad, talks about the “measured, subtle, light-footed fiction” of Chaudhuri (2021). According to Wood, one of the pleasures of reading Chaudhuri comes from how little he forces on his readers – “there is no obvious plot, no determined design, no faked ‘conflict’ or other drama” (n.p.). It is, as if, his novels can be placed within the tradition of the lyrical novel, with notable predecessors such as Herman Hesse, Andre Gide and Virginia Woolf. Traditional novels are usually associated with storytelling, and a reader expects characters to be involved in action and dialogue in such a genre. On the other hand, lyrical poetry is plotless and suggests the expression of feelings or themes in musical or pictorial pattern. The lyrical novel is a hybrid form, combining essential features from both these genres. Ralph Freedman, in his study of lyrical novels, talks about how it “transcends the causal and temporal movement of narrative within the framework of fiction” (1). In so doing, it often frustrates a reader habituated to more traditional standards of a novel with a plot and character development. The symbolic patterns, borrowed from the lyric, seem “antithetical to the very method on which narrative is built” (Freedman 1). Unlike conventional novels, where the “experiencing self” is separated from the “world the experiences are about” (Freedman 1), Chaudhuri’s protagonists often abandon their traditional roles, substituting perception for action, and self-portrait for an external reality. His novels, thus, have always had the abstract beauty of a lyric novel, a rare combination of narrative and imagery. The narrator of Afternoon Raag is typical of the genre, his mind reacting to the colours in his teacher’s room, the “furniture browns and wallpaper purples and magnolias and greys, the colours that create, in afternoon light or evening shadow, the abidingness of an English interior” (182). His other novels also celebrate the beautiful ordinariness of everyday life and refuse to be tied down by a plotline and a causal/temporal structure. A Strange and Sublime Address has Sandeep, a boy-narrator with a keen eye for the quotidian who describes what he sees and hears on his visits to Calcutta. Chhotomama takes the children out for a walk in the Calcutta lanes, lined by houses giving out “smells of fish and boiled rice” (48). When the family drives through the city, past the bridge in Dhakuria, past Gol Park, past Gariahat, past Rashbehari Avenue, into Chowringhee, and finally to Park Street, Sandeep equates himself with a bird or a fish. Just as a bird or fish could “float in their chosen element”, Sandeep thought driving was the “only human equivalent of floating, of letting one’s legs rest and setting one’s body adrift” (15). The book is the winner of the 1991 Betty Trask Award. Sandeep, the narrator, is perpetually delighted with what Alice Truax in the NYT calls “the enduring allure of everyday” (n.p.). The encounters of the Bombay boy with Calcutta and the Bengali language are symptomatic of contested issues of identity, exile and home that the novel grapples with. But instead of locating these questions in a magic realist framework of a mythical India as Rushdie had earlier done, Chaudhuri places them within the domestic and the familial spaces. The city of Calcutta and his uncle’s home serve as sites of comfort and refuge for Sandeep, with their healing, therapeutic powers. Whereas in Bombay, “alone in the big apartment on the twenty-third floor, he was like Adam in charge of paradise . . . he was too much in the foreground. He hated being in the foreground” (A Strange and Sublime Address 27), in Calcutta, his experiences are cushioned by an extended middle-class family’s presence, with Chhotomama, Shonamama, Chhordimoni and the elderly couple providing a circle of protection. His father is depicted as a busy executive in corporate Bombay, who “never had the time to go anywhere”, while his uncle had more “ordinary” problems of everyday life (7). And yet, Sandeep “deserts” his more affluent parents “shamelessly” to the comforts of the Grand Hotel in Calcutta and spends the “days and nights at the old house with his cousins” (83). Purvi Shah writes about the novelist’s trait of documenting the tensions between the upper middle class and the lower middle class in a city that is witnessing significant economic changes:
Thus, while Chaudhuri examines South Asian history and post-Independence India, he does so not by charting the Independence Movement or by looking directly at partition but rather by presenting contemporary issues stemming from changes in everyday life as a result of economic liberalization and cultural transformation. (33)
In Afternoon Raag, where the rich psychological life and the romantic dilemmas of an international Bengali student at Oxford are explored, the changing landscapes of both Bombay and Calcutta are again captured by the author. While in the lane the narrator lived in, time was measured by “the conclusions and beginnings of phases of domestic routine”, on the main road, “which was only one among a family of such main roads that had joined hands to create Bombay—not the Bombay people lived in, but the one into which people emerged every day from their houses—there were cake-shops, video ‘parlours’, ‘burger-inns’ (221). Where the oldest cottages used to be, apartment buildings with “matchbox-like flats” came up, and Sindhi Hindus moved into predominantly Christian neighbourhoods. Chaudhuri compares the “floating” migrant labour community who worked at these new construction sites of the city with the Oxford student community, bringing along with them “the quality of a faraway time and place in the area” (Afternoon Raag 242). He gently stresses on the multiculturalism and the hybridity of a post-globalised world. Oxford becomes a representative composite city, and is seen through the eyes of an “outsider” Indian student, but Bombay too. On Cowley Road, in East London, the student-narrator encounters pockets of Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants. In this world of movement and flux, music has a significant role in rooting individuals, in creating a sense of identity, in preserving and transferring cultural memory and in producing a sensuous geography. When the narrator remembers his guru and Sohanlal, in the distant land of Oxford, he claims:
But when a Rajasthani sings Maand, or a Punjabi sings Sindhi Bhairavi, he returns to his homeland, which for him is a certain landscape influenced by seasons, a certain style of dressing and speaking, a web of interrelationships and festive occasions. (Afternoon Raag 258) (emphasis added)
These tensions between home and exile, belonging and non-belonging, come out in Chaudhuri’s fiction in an imagistic, impressionistic Modernist manner. He states though in an interview that he is not interested in “the disintegration of self” common to the modernists, but in the “dispersal of culture from the self into the various sides” (Galván 45). Chaudhuri sees himself as somewhat of an anthropologist, keenly observing the “drift and flow of street life” (Galván 45). In doing so, he presents snapshots of the common rituals and rhythms of daily life in his lean, elegant prose.
And though Chaudhuri is well-known to readers across South Asia, the UK and the United States, reviewers such as Barbara Liss have complained about how difficult it is to relate to his characters who seem to have “drifted into a coma”, and wander through his stories, much like “J. Alfred Prufrocks”. Though “the charms of a plotless book” have little appeal to her, she sees why the exhausting, middle class life in Calcutta may find a representation in the “lethargy” that seems a “permanent condition in Chaudhuri’s fiction”. Liss also points out the absence of detailed female characters in Chaudhuri’s novels, stating that in A New World, “We hear little of Amala, which is too bad because, despite her marital perfidy, she is Chaudhuri’s most likable character” ((Houston (TX) Chronicle). Jenny Offill, too, agrees this to be Chadhuri’s weakness, with Jayojit’s mother so self-effacing, that she is almost rendered invisible. Offill also suggests in her review that Chaudhuri lacks any semblance of drama or narrative tension in his “strangely static” novels. And though notable predecessors such as Proust, Woolf or Beckett have foregrounded the interior lives of their characters above conventional plots, she is disparaging of Chaudhuri’s plotlessness: “Chaudhuri, however, has done something much more peculiar; he has stripped his book of emotion as well as incident, leaving behind nothing but mechanical gestures and surface pleasantries. The result is a carefully written novel strangely devoid of life” (The Washington Post).
In a Guardian interview with Sophie Harrison, Chaudhuri speaks of how he fits into a tradition, “of giving a great deal of importance to space, of looking at time”, a trait which he thinks is not too valued by most of the contemporary middle class readers of India, who are “obsessed with getting things done, with making things happen” and are far from the daydreaming quality of the poetics of space and time one encounters often in him (Harrison, n.p.). Sumana Roy, in her Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Chaudhuri’s novels, tries to understand the reasons why he is not a popular anthologised novelist:
Eng-Lit pedagogy, historically grounded in seriousness, beginning as it did in England by borrowing professors from departments of divinity and law, continues to be in the service of the nation, the race, the marginalized. Chaudhuri’s writing, on the other hand, is grounded in explorations of the sensuous, the emotional, the affective—it refuses to give any of the old professorial subjects center stage or speak about them in a stentorian voice. (“The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri”)
And despite this, he retains in his fictional oeuvre a disbelief in the overtly political, and revels in the mundane, the intimate and the slow:
I believe that the arts, and art, and writing, are basically forms of addiction – you go to them again, and you read it again, re-reading. And you’re not re-reading for what the story tells you, for the plot, or illumination. This is not the addiction of what happens next. (Interview with Harrison, 2009)
NON-FICTION
The tenor of Chaudhuri’s non-fiction is less abstruse than that of his fiction. And while his fiction refuses to be easily categorised, because as Sumana Roy puts it in her Mint essay, “he has refused to be subsumed by the postcolonial machine or be an apologist for the state-of-the-nation novel” (“Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer”), his non-fiction has a more urgent function of literary activism. It constantly engages with the force of the literary, interrogating the roles of both academia and the publishing industry at a particular moment in history. His doctoral dissertation on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry was published as a monograph titled D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, by Clarendon Press in 2003. The work sees Lawrence as an “outsider” figure, removed from other Modernists and Romantic ancestors, and shows how his poetry interrogates even traditional notions of “Englishness”. The book, for its purposes, uses theoretical paradigms from Derrida and Foucault. Terry Eagleton called the work “genuinely groundbreaking and exciting”, and claimed it to be “probably the single best study of Lawrence’s poetry” (“Anti-Humanism”). It is also one of the first times that a post-colonial writer of Chaudhuri’s generation takes up a major canonical writer such as Lawrence, and scrutinises his difference. Chaudhuri’s first major volume of essays Clearing a Space (2008) brought together essays published earlier in LRB and the Times Literary Supplement. In these essays, his major preoccupation is with the state of (Indian) literature in a post-globalised world. He offers his insights about issues ranging from the post-Rushdie novel to the politics of global publishing, from readership to the language of Indian vernacular writing. In the 2001 anthology The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Chaudhuri expresses his worries about the global hype about Rushdie’s writing style, which likely obscures much that is interesting in vernacular and English writing from India. The anthology has writings from Tagore to C.S. Lakshmi, from Urdu to Kannada, and brings to fore a literary activism that marks much of Chaudhuri’s non-fictional canon. In 2014, Chaudhuri began a series of symposiums on “literary activism” to claim a space for the literary that is neglected both by academic conferences and lit-fests. Unlike writers’ retreats which are oasis-like spaces, these symposia are characterised by interaction and dialogue. In a free-market driven world, where the value of literature has radically changed, and which has been affected by the global publishing industry, Chaudhuri and his collaborators seek to discover a robust new critical discourse, outside exhausted paradigms of celebrity authors and book signings. Ashoka University, India has been supporting these annual symposiums since 2018, giving it a fresh visibility. A collection of essays titled Literary Activism, with contributions from the participants of the first symposium was published in 2017, which grappled with these issues. Also, a website www.literaryactivism.com, edited by Chaudhuri came into existence in 2020. A section of this website is titled “Magazine”, in which new writings and art from new authors and practitioners are uploaded, with the express aim of finding fresh voices from unorthodox locations. The Origins of Dislike (2019) is another book that explores similar concerns, where Chaudhuri dismantles figures of the author, the publisher and the reader and bursts some popular myths connected with the writing and reading of literature at the present moment. Chaudhuri discusses how the literary prize such as the Booker has changed from being judged by a panel of well-known novelists to now by politicians and entertainers. The reckoning force that the market is, has come to define what people read and the how and the why of it. His insights into how global capitalism has come to dictate literary tastes and humanistic values are rooted in a Marxist understanding of the publishing market economy. Chaudhuri has also carried forward his activist strain into architectural and urban conservationist campaigns, bringing to attention the need to extend the idea of “heritage” and to preserve the unique urban houses of Calcutta.
Works Cited
Primary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. Three Novels: A Strange and Sublime Address. Heinemann, 1991.
—. Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993.
—. Freedom Song. Picador, 1998.
Secondary Texts:
Chaudhuri, Amit. “Life Sentences.” Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Eagleton, Terry. “Anti-Humanism.” London Review of Books, 5 Feb. 2004, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n03/terry-eagleton/anti-humanism. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Freedman, Ralph. The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Herman Hesse, Andre Gide, and Virginia Woolf. 1963. Princeton UP, 1971.
Galván, Fernando. “On Belonging and Not Belonging: A Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri.” Wasafiri: Caribbean, Africa, Asian, and Associated Literatures in English, vol. 30, Autumn 1999, pp. 42-50.
Liss, Barbara. “Chaudhuri Excels at Nonadventure.” Houston (TX) Chronicle, 26 Nov. 2000. www.chron.com/life/article/A-New-World-by-Amit-Chaudhuri-2032148.php. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Offill, Jenny. “Life at a Standstill.” The Washington Post, 4 Jan. 2001. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/01/04/life-at-a-standstill/8ea28fa0-3ec3-49fb-9d4c-f9fb56918f33. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Roy, Sumana. “The Deeply Unserious, Important Work of Amit Chaudhuri.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 Feb. 2017. www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
—. “Amit Chaudhuri: The Writer’s Writer.” Mint, 17 Sept. 2016. www.livemint.com/Leisure/pbUc5VKjpS8MglzjF9ADIK/Amit-Chaudhuri-The-writers-writer.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Shah, Purvi. “Amit Chaudhuri.” South Asian Novelists in English: An A to Z Guide. Ed. Jaina C Sanga. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003.
Truax, Alice. “The Allure of the Everyday.” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1999. www.archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/reviews/990328.28truaxt.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.
Wood, James. “Circling The Subject.” The New Yorker. 27 Apr. 2015. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/circling-the-subject. Accessed 10 Oct. 2021.
Further Readings:
Reviews
Day, John. “Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri Review—Autofiction Examined”. The Guardian, 30 Aug. 2017. www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/friend-of-my-youth-amit-chaudhuri-review. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Eder, Richard. “A Life Like Old Postcards.” The New York Times Book Review. 22 Oct. 2000. www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/22/reviews/001022.22ederlt.html. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Haas, Felix. “Amit Chaudhuri’s Autofictive Bombay”. World Literature Today, 24 Jul. 2019. www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/amit-chaudhuris-autofictive-bombay-felix-haas. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
Interviews
Chaudhuri, Amit. Interview by Anita Sethi. The White Review, March 2013. www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-amit-chaudhuri. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Lakshmi Krishnan. The Oxonian Review, 27 Apr. 2009. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-quiet-rebel/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. Interview by Sophie Harrison. The Guardian, 14 Mar. 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/mar/14/fiction. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
—. “Twenty Questions with Amit Chaudhuri.” Interview. The Times Literary Supplement. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-amit-chaudhuri/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2021.
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