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= Amit Chaudhuri =
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Introduction
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Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May 1962) is a novelist, poet, essayist,
literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.
He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East
Anglia from 2006 to 2021, Since 2020, he has been at Ashoka
University, India, as Professor of Creative Writing and, since 2021,
is also Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical,
Ashoka University.
Life
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Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata) in 1962 and grew
up in Bombay (renamed Mumbai). His father was the first Indian CEO of
Britannia Industries Limited. His mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, was a
highly acclaimed singer of Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrulgeeti, Atul Prasad
and Hindi bhajans. He was a student at the Cathedral and John Connon
School, Bombay. He took his first degree in English literature from
University College London, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on D.
H. Lawrence's poetry at Balliol College, Oxford.
He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Professor of Cultural Studies and
Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
(CSSSC). They have one daughter.
Chaudhuri began writing a series for 'The Paris Review' titled 'The
Moment' from January 2018. He also wrote an occasional column,
"Telling Tales", for 'The Telegraph'.
Fiction, non-fiction, poetry
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'Fiction'
'A Strange and Sublime Address', Chaudhuri's first novel, published in
1991, was republished by Penguin Random House India in 2016 as a 25th
anniversary edition, with a foreword by Colm Toibin.
'Afternoon Raag', his second novel, interleaves experiences of Oxford
with memories of Bombay. It was published in 1993 and won the Encore
Award. The 25th anniversary edition was published by Penguin Random
House India in 2019 with a foreword by James Wood.
'Freedom Song', his third novel, was published four years later. Set
against the background of the post-Babri Masjid demolition, it is a
record of both the artificial quiet that such a socio-political
situation creates as well as the evocation of a Calcutta winter where
everyday life must go on. Published in America with the first two
novels, in 2000 it won the 'Los Angeles Times Book Prize'.
'A New World' (2001), Chaudhuri's fourth novel, tells the story of
Jayojit Chatterjee, who returns after a divorce with his
seven-year-old son Vikram (“Bonny”) to Calcutta to visit his aging
parents. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award.
'Real Time', Chaudhuri's collection of short fiction, was published in
2002. The title story, "Real Time", is prescribed reading for English
in the GCSE syllabus in the UK.
'The Immortals', his fifth novel, published in 2009, follows Nirmalya
and his music teacher, Shyamji, as they learn and practice Indian
classical music in a changing world.
'Odysseus Abroad', Chaudhuri's sixth novel, appeared in 2014-15. It
unfolds over the course of a single day, in July in 1985 London,
following the student protagonist, Ananda.
'Friend of My Youth' is Chaudhuri's seventh novel. It was published in
the UK and India in 2017 and in the US in 2019. It is an account of a
narrator and novelist called Amit Chaudhuri who visits Bombay, a city
where he grew up, for a book event.
'Sojourn', Chaudhuri's eighth novel, was published in 2022. Here, an
unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. His growing
absorption in his surrounding is accompanied by a loosening of his
grasp on memory.
'Non-fiction'
Chaudhuri's D.Phil. dissertation at Oxford was published by Clarendon
Press as a monograph titled 'D.H. Lawrence and Difference' in 2003. It
was called a "classic" by Tom Paulin in his preface to the book, and a
"path-breaking work" by Terry Eagleton in the 'London Review of
Books'.
Chaudhuri edited the influential anthology 'The Picador Book of Modern
Indian Literature' in 2001.
He also edited 'Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta' (2008)
His first major work of non-fiction, 'Calcutta: Two Years in the
City', was published in 2013 as was 'Telling Tales', his second book
of essays.
'On Tagore', a collection of Chaudhuri's essays on Rabindranath
Tagore, was awarded the Rabindra Puraskar in 2012.
'Origins of Dislike', a third collection of essays, was published in
2019.
'Literary Activism', a collection of essays by a variety of
participants at the first symposium of the same name (see below), was
published in 2017 by Boiler House Press in the UK, and by OUP in India
and the US.
'Finding the Raga', an exploration of Hindustani classical music, was
published by Faber in the UK, NYRB Books in the US and Penguin in
India in 2021.
'Poetry'
'St. Cyril Road and Other Poems', Chaudhuri's first collection of
poems, was published in 2005 by Penguin in India.
'Sweet Shop', his second book of poems, appeared from Penguin Random
House India in 2018, and from Salt (UK) in 2019.
'Ramanujan', his third collection of poems, was published by Shearsman
Books in the UK in 2021.
Critical responses
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James Wood, writing about Chaudhuri in 'The New Yorker', said: "He has
beautifully practiced that 'refutation of the spectacular' throughout
his career, both as a novelist and as a critic. ... how little
Chaudhuri forces anything on us — there is no obvious plot, no
determined design, no faked 'conflict' or other drama ... The effect
is closer to documentary than to fiction; gentle artifice — selection,
pacing, occasional dialogue — hides overt artifice. The author seems
to say, Here he is; what do you think? The literary pleasure is a
human pleasure, as we slowly encounter this strolling, musing,
forceful self."
'Afternoon Raag:' "It is a meditation, a felicitous prose poem." Karl
Miller, 'The Independent'.
'A New World': "The condition of a stranger in a familiar land is
dramatized with beguiling simplicity and tact in this deeply moving
fourth novel…. A pitch-perfect analysis of repressed and stunted
emotion, and another triumph to set beside those of Desai, Rushdie,
Roy, and especially (the Chekhovian master Chaudhuri most closely
resembles) R.K. Narayan." 'Kirkus Reviews'
'The Immortals': "Amit Chaudhuri, himself a composer and musician,
excels in the passages devoted to music, "the miracle of song and its
pleasure". Steven Poole, 'The Guardian'.
'Odysseus Abroad': "Chaudhuri is a singular writer. He defies form;
instead he has perfected an observational fiction based on insight and
memory." Eileen Battersby, 'Irish Times'.
'Telling Tales': "Chaudhuri's intellectual project is not so much to
cross academic boundaries as to remove the sign that says: "No playing
on the grass". Like Barthes (and Lacan), he sees merit in
concentrating less on the meaningful and more on the apparently
meaningless." Deborah Levy in the 'New Statesman'
'Friend of My Youth': "With the publication of 'Friend of My Youth',
Amit Chaudhuri is now the author of seven novels, greatly admired,
especially by his peers... The drama of the self, spun from
Chaudhuri's meditations and recollections, is artfully composed and
utterly absorbing." Kate Webb in the 'Times Literary Supplement'.
'Sojourn': "Chaudhuri is one of the most consistently interesting
writers working today. You get the feeling that with each book he has
to begin again to reconfigure from the ground up what he wants the
novel to be and to do. It's this radical questioning that makes him
such a consistently engaging writer, and what makes this novel so
memorable."
Activism
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Literary activism
In response to the marginalisation of the literary by both the market
(that is, mainstream publishing houses) and by academia, Chaudhuri
began, in December 2014, a series of annual symposiums on what he
called "literary activism", thereby attempting to create a space akin
neither "to the literary festival or the academic conference",
bringing together writers, academics, and artists each year. One of
the features of Chaudhuri's initiative has been a resistance to
specialisation, or what he calls "professionalisation". The project
has involved the fashioning of a new terminology by Chaudhuri, in
which he creates terms like "market activism", and assigns very
particular means to terms like "literary activism" and
"deprofessionalisation". Some of his positions are contained in his
mission statement, and in his n+1 essay. "So there may well be in
literary activism a strangeness that echoes the strangeness of the
literary. Unlike market activism, whose effect on us depends on a
certain randomness which reflects the randomness of the free market,
literary activism may be desultory, in that its aims and value aren't
immediately explicable."
A collection of essays titled 'Literary Activism: A Symposium' from
the first symposium was published in 2017 by Boiler House Press in the
UK, and by OUP in India and the US. A new website for literary
activism, www.literaryactivism.com, edited by Chaudhuri, came into
existence on 4 August 2020.
Architectural activism
In 2015, Chaudhuri began drawing attention to Calcutta's architectural
legacy and campaigning for its conservation. Writing about these
houses made in the twentieth century, he lists their characteristics:
Music
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Chaudhuri is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, who has
performed internationally. He learned singing from his mother, Bijoya
Chaudhuri, and from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the
Kunwar Shyam gharana. HMV India (now Saregama) has released two
recordings of his singing, and a selection of the khayals he has
performed on CD. Bihaan Music brought out a collection called 'The Art
of the Khayal' in 2016. A selection of classical recordings:
* "Puriya Kalyan khayal"
* "Jog Bahar khayal and tarana"
* "E parabase rabe ke" (Rabindra Sangeet)
* "Chandrasakhi bhajan"
In 2004, he began to conceptualise a project in experimental music,
'This is Not Fusion', released in Britain on the independent jazz
label, Babel Label. His second CD, 'Found Music', came out in October
2010 in the UK from Babel and was released in India from EMI. It was
an allaboutjazz.com Editor's Choice of 2010. Songs from 'This is Not
Fusion' include "Berlin" and "The Layla Riff to Todi". His version of
"Summertime", incorporating the notes of raga Malkauns, was featured
in BBC 4's documentary, 'Gershwin's Summertime: the Song that
Conquered the World'.
In 2015, Chauhuri was invited to write the libretto for the opera
composed by Ravi Shankar, 'Sukanya'. It had its world premiere at the
Royal Festival Hall, London, in 2017.
In 2022, he created a new raga as part of a project that sees the raga
as experiment and based on his feeling "that the 'raga' in North
Indian classical music is primarily a reshaping of what Marcel Duchamp
called "found material". That is, tunes and melodies aren't set to
ragas; instead, ragas are a slowing down of, and minute investigation
into, particular tunes and melodies, with their characteristic
clusters of notes and progressions." Basing it on the Western song, 'O
Sole Mio', he calls the composition "Khayal: O Sole Mio". He performed
it for the first time at Holywell Music Room, Oxford, in July 2022.
As part of this ongoing experimental exploration, he created, in the
year of Raj Rammohun Roy's 250th birth anniversary, a raga called
Rammohan, combining ragas Mohankauns and Ramkeli to do so. He
performed a short version of this at Smith College, Massachusetts, on
17 September 2022, and the complete version, including slow and fast
khayal compositions, in Calcutta on 5 December 2022.
Awards and honours
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*1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First
Book for 'A Strange and Sublime Address'
*1994 Encore Award and Southern Arts Literature Prize, 'Afternoon
Raag'
*1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 'Freedom Song'
*2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, 'A New World'
*2012 Rabindra Puraskar, 'On Tagore'
*2012 Infosys Prize for the Humanities in Literary Studies
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the
Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award.
'Finding the Raga' (2021) won the James Tait Black Prize at Edinburgh
in August 2022. Dr. Simon Cooke, one of the judges in the Biography
category, called 'Finding the Raga' “a work of great depth, subtlety,
and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about
music, place, and creativity. Folding the ethos of the raga into its
own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece
in the art of listening to the world.” He received the Rabindra
Puraskar from the Government of West Bengal for his book 'On Tagore'.
He was also given the Sangeet Samman by the Government of West Bengal
for his contribution to Hindustani classical music. He is an honorary
fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
In 2022, he was awarded the James Tait Memorial Prize for his book
'Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music'.
In September 2020, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern
Language Association (MLA).
In 2013, Chaudhuri became the first person to be awarded the Infosys
Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in Literary
Studies, by a jury comprising Amartya Sen, Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia
University), Homi Bhabha (Harvard), Sheldon Pollock (Columbia), former
Indian chief justice Leila Seth, and legal thinker Upendra Baxi
(Warwick). In his prize-giving address, Amartya Sen said: "He
[Chaudhuri] is of course a remarkable intellectual with a great record
for literary writing showing a level of sensibility as well as a kind
of quiet humanity which is quite rare. It really is quite
extraordinary that someone could have had that kind of range that Amit
Chaudhuri has in terms of his work and it could be so consistently of
the highest quality."
Novels
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*'Afternoon Raag'. Heinemann, 1993,
*'Freedom Song'. Picador, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1999,
[
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0599/chaudhuri/excerpt.html
excerpt]
*; Random House Digital, Inc., 2002,
*
*'A strange and sublime address'. Penguin, 2012,
*
* Friend of My Youth, 2017, Penguin Random House India
*
Libretto
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* 'Sukanya', the only opera by Ravi Shankar
Non-fiction
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*
*'Small Orange Flags' (Seagull, 2003)
*
* 'Calcutta: Two Years in the City', Union Books (2013)
*
Edited anthologies
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*
*'Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta' (2008)
Critical studies and reviews
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* Review of 'Odysseus Abroad'.
*
Reprints
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!|Reprint details !|Originally published
| |Heinemann, 1991
See also
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* List of Indian writers
External links
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*
*[
https://twitter.com/AmitChaudhuri Amit Chaudhuri] at Twitter
*
*[
https://www.munzinger.de/search/go/document.jsp?id=18000000569 Amit
Chaudhuri] at the Munzinger-Archiv
*[
https://lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/amit-chaudhuri/ Amit
Chaudhuri] at the 'Los Angeles Review of Books'
*[
http://www.littlemag.com/mar-apr01/amit.html "Surpanakha"], story at
'The Little Magazine'
*[
https://web.archive.org/web/20031116103501/http://www.hindu.com/lr/2003/11/02/stories/2003110200200100.htm
"An unlikely radical"], 'The Hindu'
*[
https://web.archive.org/web/20040314033740/http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040116/asp/calcutta/story_2787444.asp
"A date with Amit Chaudhuri"], 'The Telegraph'
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