Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri (born 15 May 1962) is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer and music composer. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and since 2020, he also teaches at Ashoka University, India as Professor of Creative Writing. 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. 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 September 2020, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

In 2013, Amit 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.'

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.

Life

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

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.

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 has 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 Chaudhuri’s 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

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.’

A Strange and Sublime Address: “Twenty-five years after its initial publication, Chaudhuri’s novel about a young boy’s view of family life and the world around him seems as elegant and exquisite and original as it did on its initial publication….. The drama comes in the phrasing, as though the book had found a melody early on which not only evoked this world of children and family and servants and the city, but represented the essence of things and then transformed them into beauty, much as a painter might, or a singer, but in ways that are oddly rare in prose narrative and all the more sublime for that.” Colm Toibin, Foreword, 2016.

Activism

In response to the marginalisation of the literary by both the market (that is, mainstream publishing houses) and by academia, Amit Chaudhuri began, in December 2014, a series of annual symposiums on what he called ‘literary activism’, thereby attempting to a 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 words like ‘literary activism’ and deprofessionalisation’. Some of his positions are contained in his mission statement (http://ueaindiacreativewritingworkshop.com/symposium-on-literary-activism/), and in his n+1 essay (https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-piazza-and-the-parking-lot/). ‘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.’ From Amit Chaudhuri’s mission statement for the first symposium on literary activism.

A collection of essays 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^th August 2020.

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:

These were the house’s features: a porch on the ground floor; red oxidised stone floors; slatted Venetian or French-style windows painted green; round knockers on doors; horizontal wooden bars to lock doors; an open rooftop terrace; a long first-floor verandah with patterned cast-iron railings; intricately worked cornices; and ventilators the size of an open palm, carved as intricate perforations into walls. (Some houses built in the 1940s also incorporate perky art-deco elements: semi-circular balconies; a long, vertical strip comprising glass panes for the stairwell; porthole-shaped windows; and the famous sunrise motif on grilles and gates.) .... What is remarkable, though, is that no two houses are identical: a house with a broad facade might stand next to a thin house, both sharing various characteristics – and there are many other ways in which each house you encounter is a fresh conjuring-up or experiment. This makes for an unprecedented, sui generis variety in a single lane or neighbourhood; a variety I have seen nowhere else (think, in contrast, of the identical Victorian houses on a London street). And the style – which can only be described as Bengali-European – is neither renaissance (hardly any Corinthian pillars, as you might spot in the North Calcutta villas) nor neo-Gothic (as Bombay’s colonial buildings are) nor Indo-Saracenic, which expresses a utopian idea of what a mish-mash of Renaissance, Hindu and Moghul features might be. It’s a style that is, to use Amartya Sen’s word, “eccentric” and beautiful, and entirely the Bengali middle class’s.

Music

Amit 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.

• Puriya Dhanashree
• Jog Bahar Drut
• Meera Bhajan
• Jog Bahar Tarana
• E parabase rabe ke, Rabindra Sangeet
• Chandrasakhi

In 2004, he began to conceptualise a project in experimental music, This is Not Fusion, released in Britain on the independent jazz label, Babel LabelK. His second CD, Found Music, came out in October 2010 in the UK from Babel and was released in India from EMI.

Awards and honours

• 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.

Bibliography

Novels

• Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 978-0-434-12349-0
• Freedom Song. Picador, 1998; Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, ISBN 978-0-375-40427-6 excerpt
• A New World. Picador. 2000. ISBN 978-0-375-41093-2.; Random House Digital, Inc., 2002, ISBN 978-0-375-72480-0
• The Immortals. Picador. 2009. ISBN 978-0-307-27022-1.
• A strange and sublime address. Penguin, 2012, ISBN 978-0-143-41944-0
• — (2015). Odysseus Abroad. Hamish Hamilton.
• Friend of My Youth, 2017, Penguin Random House India
• Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music. New York Review Books. 2021. ISBN 978-1-681-37478-9.

Collected short stories

• Chaudhuri, Amit (2002). Real time : stories and a reminiscence. Picador.

Poetry

• Chaudhuri, Amit (2005). St. Cyril Road and other poems. Penguin.

Libretto

• Sukanya, the only opera by Ravi Shankar

Non-fiction

• Chaudhuri, Amit (2003). D. H. Lawrence and 'difference' : postcoloniality and the poetry of the present. Oxford University Press.
• Small Orange Flags (Seagull, 2003) reviewed
• Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Peter Lang. 2008. ISBN 978-1-906165-01-7.
• Calcutta: Two Years in the City, Union Books (2013)

Edited Anthologies

• Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. (2001). The Picador book of modern Indian literature. Picador.
• Memory's Gold: Writings on Calcutta (2008)

Critical studies and reviews

• Hoskote, Ranjit (6 October 2014). "Homing in on Homer". India Today. 39 (40): 72–73. Review of Odysseus Abroad.
• Wood, James (4 May 2015). "Circling the subject : Amit Chaudhuri's novel Odysseus Abroad". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 91 (11): 73–75. Retrieved 3 July 2015.

Reprints

Reprint Details	Originally Published
A strange and sublime address. Minerva. 1992.	Heinemann, 1991

Newspaper Articles

• Chaudhuri, Amit (29 July 2001). "Poles of recovery: From Dutt to Chaudhuri". The Hindu. Retrieved 31 July 2017.
• Chaudhuri, Amit (2 July 2015). "Calcutta's architecture is unique. Its destruction is a disaster for the city". The Guardian. Retrieved 31 July 2017.

External links

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• Amit Chaudhuri at the Munzinger-Archiv
• Amit Chaudhuri at the Los Angeles Review of Books
• ‘Surpanakha’ story at The Little Magazine
• "An unlikely radical", The Hindu
• A date with Amit Chaudhuri, The Telegraph