Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri
Born	15 May 1962  (age 62) Kolkata
Language	English language
Notable awards	Sahitya Akademi Award
Website
www.amitchaudhuri.com

Amit Chaudhuri

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

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.

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."

His first three novels were reissued in 2024 in the New York Review Books Classics imprint.

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."

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."

Finding the Raga: Dr. Simon Cooke, Chair of the judges in the Biography category of the James Tait Black Prize, 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."

Activism

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:

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

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. His Master's Voice 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, Chaudhhuri 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

• 1991 Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for A Strange and Sublime Address The book was republished by Penguin Random House India in 2016 as a 25th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Colm Toibin.
• 1992 Creative Arts Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford
• 1992 Harper Wood Award for Creative Writing at St John's College, Cambridge
• 1994 Encore Award and Southern Arts Literature Prize, Afternoon Raag
• 1997 Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, Cambridge University
• 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Freedom Song
• 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, A New World
• 2005 Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship for Literature, Freie University, Berlin
• 2009 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
• 2012 Rabindra Puraskar, On Tagore
• 2012 Infosys Prize for the Humanities in Literary Studies
• 2017 Sangeet Samman by the Government of West Bengal for his contribution to Hindustani classical music
• 2018 Inaugural Fellow, Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris, Columbia University
• 2018 Annual Visiting Fellow, Department of English, University College London.
• 2019 Honorary Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford
• 2020 Honorary Fellow, Modern Language Association (MLA)
• 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Biography, Finding the Raga.
• 2022 IAS Creative Fellow at University College London.

Bibliography

Novels

• Afternoon Raag. Heinemann, 1993, ISBN 978-0-434-12349-0 The book 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. 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
• Sojourn. Faber & Faber. 2022. ISBN 978-0-571-36036-9.

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)
• Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music. New York Review Books. 2021. ISBN 978-1-681-37478-9.

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. Vol. 91, no. 11. pp. 73–75. Retrieved 3 July 2015.

Dissertation

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.

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.

See also

• List of Indian writers

External links

• Official website
• Amit Chaudhuri at Twitter
• Amit Chaudhuri at British Council: Literature
• 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