Tag Archive for ‘Amit Chaudhuri’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Amit Chaudhuri'

Amit Chaudhuri: ties that bind

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on March 1, 2010

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Amit Chaudhuri has earned acclaim for his novels about family and belonging. Helena Frith Powell visits him in his home base of Kolkata, the focus of his next work. From The National:

Amit Chaudhuri does not much like travelling. He finds the day before he is set to leave particularly difficult.

“I feel I am neither here nor there,” he says in an interview at the Kolkata home he shares with his wife, 11-year-old daughter and his octogenarian parents. “I am a soul in transit. You would think after 20 or 30 years of travelling it would get better, but it doesn’t.”

Chaudhuri, a youthful-looking 47-year-old with a charming, boyish smile, is the author of five novels, all of which have won literary prizes, a musician in the Indian classical tradition and an academic.

He has been based in Kolkata since 1999 after a childhood spent in Bombay (he refuses to call Indian cities by their new names, “Why should I call it Mumbai just because someone says it is called Mumbai? They might change it again next year”) and student years in London. More:

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

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on February 28, 2010

in Health, Science and Technology

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From TED:

At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

Back with a bang: Jaipur Lit Fest

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on January 18, 2010

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Posted by Namita Bhandare

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, the DS Jaipur Literature Fesival is back with Season V (Jan 21-25), with more international writers, more Indian writers and certainly a bigger anticipated audience than previous years.

Writers who’ve confirmed attendance include Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle and Amit Chaudhuri, widely regarded as India’s best-known writer of his generation.

To pretend that there is a hierarchy or even a social pecking order at the fest would be misleading. There are no tickets; entry is free to all. Everybody queues up for lunch and dinner — everybody including Salman (Rushdie), Pico (Iyer) and Vikram (Seth). Writers and readers lounge in the winter sun, signing books, drinking coffee and gossiping (oh, the gossip).

The Lit Fest is the baby of writers William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale. Writing for The Guardian recently, Dalrymple said: “Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India.”

And so, began India’s quest for a fest. Starting with 17 writers over three days, the fest will this year include 160 writers and performers. [See the complete programme and list of writers attending here.]

This year’s festival is set once again in the charming, heritage Diggi Palace, the haveli of the Thakurs of Diggi, a small princely state. The Durbar Hall with its Venetian mirrors and framed portraits of venerated gods and ancestors seats about 300. Over the years, however, as the number of writers descending on Jaipur has gone up, Diggi Palace has sprouted new venues. There’s the Mughal Tent (which seats about 100 people), Baithak (about 75) and the front lawn (can easily take upwards of 1,000).

It was at the front lawn, last year where Vikas Swarup received news that Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film based on his book Q&A had received 11 Oscar nominations. The crowd erupted in a roar as Swarup made his hasty departure for the film’s Mumbai premiere. Jai Ho.

Every fest has its own little gem, its highlights: Salman Rushdie ticking off ‘hostile’ journalists for what he saw as unfriendly reports in the press. Vikram Seth getting ticked off by a local newspaper for sipping a glass of wine while speaking to his moderator Sonia Faleiro.

This year’s showstopper could well be a controversial, woman writer and thinker. Her name is not up on the official programme yet, because she is yet to get a visa. But, do watch this space. If she comes, fireworks.

Previously on AW

The greatest literary show on earth

Slumdog glory

Rough Guide to the Fest

Song of India

Published

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on October 25, 2009

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Review of Amit Chaudhuri’s The Imortals in the New York Times:

Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, a comedy of manners set in 1980s India, centers on the teenage scion of a corporate family who neither dresses nor acts the part. Instead, Nirmalya Sengupta, in his uniform of faded kurta and jeans, a copy of Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy” as totem, takes the bus home from school while his father’s Mercedes follows at a discreet distance.

A devotee of Indian classical music, the boy is intent on defending this tradition against the threat of commercialism. As it happens, ragas run in the blood of both the protagonist of “The Immortals” and its author. Chaudhuri is not only a devotee of Hindustani music, but also a professional musician with several releases to his credit. (He sings his own compositions on a recent experimental album cheekily titled “This Is Not Fusion.”) Like his main character, Chaudhuri was tutored by a songstress mother and a beloved Rajasthani guru. And the biographical symmetries don’t stop with the music. Chaudhuri lends Nirmalya his own health condition (a heart murmur), his own cosmopolitan identity (as a Bengali raised in Bombay – now Mumbai – and schooled in London) and the addresses of his own youth (the Senguptas retire from a luxury high-rise in downtown Bombay to Bandra, which at the time was on the frontier of the feverishly growing city, a suburb of churches and gulmohar trees where the Chaudhuris also lived). More:

Amit Chaudhuri’s everyday music

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on April 4, 2009

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In The Times Literary Supplement, Ronan McDonald reviews The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)

There is an abiding notion that novels written from the postcolonial “margins” tend towards experimentation, magic realism, fabulism, the quirky and the avant-garde. In the case of Indian literature, the work of Salman Rushdie, with whom Amit Chaudhuri is most often contrasted, has come to embody this tendency. However Rushdie’s dominance has been yielding to a new generation, heralded by Vikram Seth, and including Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Pankaj Mishra and Kiran Desai, as well as Chaudhuri. These writers,” midnight’s grandchildren”, have a less troubled relationship with realist forms and their fiction is less dedicated to the ebullient unmaking of history and nation. At the same time, their fiction often stages unexpected reversals of traffic between margin and centre, India and the West, vernacular and English languages. More explicitly than any of these others, Chaudhuri has rejected, or sought to reformulate, the” postcolonial” models through which modern Indian writing, in the shadow of Rushdie, is often understood.

Also read Sanjay Sipahimalani’s review at his blog antiblurbs

Life sentences

In The Guardian, an interview with Amit Chaudhuri:

The Immortals is Chaudhuri’s first novel for nine years, an interval he largely devoted to another of his passions, music. This is the kind of gap that editors find distressing, and indeed, as Chaudhuri points out with a tiny hint of pride, he has been described in this paper as a “publisher’s nightmare”. “I reacted against this professionalising of the author, in India and in Britain,” he says. At one time he wanted to be a singer, and trained in the north Indian classical tradition. He has performed in India, Britain and America, and recently released an album, This Is Not Fusion, that explores the junctions between Indian classical and western popular traditions to frequently startling effect. As well as writing and performing music, he spent some time since A New World editing The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), a huge project featuring 38 authors, including 20 translated from Indian languages into English. A short-story collection, Real Time, was published in 2002. Meanwhile, his first three novels – published in a single edition in the US under the title Freedom Song – won the Los Angeles Times book prize in 2003.

The city of extremes

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on January 24, 2009

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Edited by novelist Amit Chaudhuri, Memory’s Gold is a lavishly produced volume, an anthology from a wide range of writers. A review in Mint Lounge:

At last, an anthology of writings on Kolkata, and not a moment too soon. Edited by novelist Amit Chaudhuri, Memory’s Gold is a lavishly produced volume into which love and labour seem to have gone in equal measure. From the cover photograph of a rooftop under darkening skies to the elegant Venetian typeface, the look and feel of the book affords quiet pleasure. But with that also comes apprehension. It is so easy to get this kind of book wrong. Cities, and especially a city like Kolkata, are contrary beasts: they do not take kindly to being reduced to a set of exhibits. Then there is the added nuisance of your average Coffee House aantel (an intellectual) who can be counted upon to pounce on the slightest infraction of fact or judgement.

Happily, the collection strikes the right notes from the beginning. In his lucid and thoughtful introduction, Chaudhuri positions himself as an outsider who did not grow up or go to school in the city, and who therefore did not pass as “an authentic member of the community” of a city “that lives and writes through its friendships”. Perhaps it is this distance which allows Chaudhuri to anthologize from a wide range of writers and not favour any one coterie, always a danger in books of this kind. Of the 55 pieces in the book, roughly half were written originally in English, starting with the tongue-in-cheek Henry Meredith Parker on the Bengal Civil Service and ending with an Indlish novelist who debuted this year.

Mumbai: The city I love

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on November 29, 2008

in India

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The novelist Amit Chaudhuri finds it impossible to think about his childhood home without a quickening of excitement and pleasure. But this week’s terror attacks have highlighted the other side of Mumbai – a society riven by poverty and despair. From the Guardian:

Children playing in the rubbish of a shanty town at Nariman Point, just down the beach from the city

My parents moved to Bombay from Calcutta in 1965, when I was an infant – they stayed at the Taj for two weeks while the company found them a flat. This was the beginning of Calcutta’s decline, companies and professionals fleeing labour trouble, and relocating at this optimistic seaside metropolis in western India. It was a charmed life – from at least two of the flats we lived in when my father was finance director and then chief executive of Britannia Biscuits, flats in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, the city’s two richest localities, you could see a skyline that, with its lissom, tall buildings (Bombay is the only Indian city to have had an obsessive romance with the vertical, the skyscraper), approximated Manhattan in some ways; in its sunniness, its palm trees, its disguised but obvious carnality, it echoed what we knew of California from films; and the gothic buildings were remnants of the old history that had first brought together these seven fishing islands.

From different windows and balconies in those two flats, at different points of my life until 1982, when my father retired, the dome of the Taj (the “old” Taj, as it came to be known after the arrival of its neighbour, the Taj Intercontinental) was visible, grey, as seemingly and deceptively stationary as a low cloud. Like Calcutta, and unlike Delhi, with its Moghul and Sultanate lineage, Bombay had no really great historical or religious monuments; its landmarks, in keeping with the fact that it was the progeny of an almost innocent-seeming colonial modernity, were secular ones – hotels; cinema halls, such as the Eros, the Regal, the Metro; grand, untidy railway stations such as the Victoria Terminus. To call the Taj the “old” Taj was to deliberately indulge in a flagrant misnomer, and a reminder of Bombay’s willingness to rewrite history in terms of the urban, the kitschy, the comic: it was as if the “real” Taj Mahal in Agra had never existed except in those most incredible of objects – school textbooks.

India’s writers tell Aids stories

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on August 17, 2008

in Books and Health

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Some of India’s best-known writers have come together in a unique anthology — Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India — of writing which tells the human stories behind HIV/Aids in the country. From BBC:

Salman Rushdie with one of his subjects (Photo: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)

They include Booker Prize-winners Sir Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai; Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy; and internationally-acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple. Other contributors include novelist Amit Chaudhuri, leading Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, historian-writer Mukul Kesavan and popular novelist Shobhaa De.

[...] Sir Salman, for example, spends a day with eunuchs in the western city of Mumbai (Bombay) to write up a piece called The Half-Woman God.

“India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s. Yet… the third gender of India still need our understanding, and our help,” he says.

Kiran Desai travelled to the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh to meet its sex workers. The state has one of the highest rates of infection in India.

“What I had seen, really seen, were lives lived with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled,” Desai writes.

“The emotions of love and friendship, you’d assume would be missing or rotten, in these communities – existing even more so for their being sought amidst illegality, fragmentation and betrayal.

HIV/AIDS and the ethics of responsibility in India

An extract from Amartya Sen’s foreword to “Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” From The Telegraph:

The ethics of responsibility has been a big subject in analysing the social aspects of AIDS. The point has been made, with considerable influence, that since HIV infection is primarily contracted through voluntary acts, such as unsafe sex, it is the individual rather than the society that should take responsibility for avoiding the disease and accepting the consequences of irresponsible actions. This way of seeing the social ethics of AIDS would have vast implications for what an afflicted person can or cannot expect the state to do for the ill…..

The idea that somehow the afflicted person bears the responsibility for his or her own unfortunate condition, since the infection could have been avoided through changing personal behaviour, is indeed quite prevalent – not just in advanced countries like the United States of America, but also in India. There is certainly an element of narrow plausibility in this general outlook. Many of the actions that may lead to the infection are certainly within the person’s own control, and the role of personal responsibility is indeed an important connection to bear in mind in planning strategies for prevention, through greater availability and use of information and more social education and advocacy. And yet to see this as an ‘open and shut’ case of just personal responsibility also misses the nine-tenth of the iceberg that lies below the water, hidden from view.

India, literature and culture

Published

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on June 21, 2008

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In The Telegraph, UK, Ivan Hewett reviews Clearing a Space by Amit Chaudhuri:

He values the novelist R K Narayan because in his fictional town of Malgudi “he presents a small India of material desires and ambitions, and gently mocks the transcendentalism of… the Orientalists’ vision of India with its grand spiritual heritage”.

There’s a sweet earnestness about Chaudhuri’s tone that strikes a charmingly old-fashioned note, though he hasn’t entirely resisted the infection of jargon terms from post-colonial theory such as “subaltern” and “binaries”.

He can be trenchant, castigating the Hinduism pedalled by the Bharatiya Janata Party as “kitsch”, and saying it has embraced capitalism “a little too well”. And he’s not too high minded to give a proper “close reading” to Bollywood. He points out that the way it uses locations from Windsor Castle to California as backdrops for songs mirrors “strangely but compellingly, the world of conspicuous excess and extreme poverty we now live in”.

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