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Salil Tripathi on the novelist and singer who has redefined how to be a modern Indian
As he walks across Leicester Square, Amit Chaudhuri looks as if he has stepped from one of his novels: the well-educated, soft-spoken embodiment of the Indian middle class. His coat is dark, his hair cut neatly, the sharp eyes behind his glasses observing everything, missing nothing. He hums a tune as he sits down. His concert the previous night, at the Vortex, has gone very well. Chaudhuri looks an unlikely leader of a band; he is the quintessential writer, after all. But he shakes his head: "I was writing my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, when I was also writing critical papers on Lawrence and Derrida. I am not one of those happy to do just one kind of thing as a matter of routine. I can’t be only writing. If I were to try to do that, it would lead to drying up. I have to escape from one form of art to another." In his novel Freedom Song, the Hindu wife wakes up to the muezzin's call, slightly annoyed when she finds the children awake because of the sound, saying that "They are going too far. It isn't really Indian, they sound like Bedouins." In her choice of the word "they", Chaudhuri reveals the gap that runs through India. Freedom Song appeared when Hindu-Muslim relations were at their most fragile since India’s Independence in 1947. Unlike Arundhati Roy, who might respond by writing a polemical tract, or Salman Rushdie, who would fight the fundamentalists with satire, Chaudhuri does not linger on overt politics. A prolific man of letters, he is a talented musician, trained in Indian classical singing. Tagore’s songs hum through the bathroom in A Strange and Sublime Address; the mother delicately plays raag todi on the harmonium in Afternoon Raag; in the story White Lies, the master teaches his pupil. Chaudhuri’s music results from half-remembered tunes, blended in memory, merged at the margins. It is based on the idea that the transition from one musical tradition to another is often a melody. Theirs was a prosperous home, at peace with itself. What engrosses him is "the inward character of the middle class and its inner struggles," he says. His fiction focuses on the drama within homes. These are outwardly contented families with a chauffeur-driven car and a retinue of cooks and maids. In Real Time, we meet one executive buying art without understanding why; another's wife tries to learn singing; and a man awkward about expressing grief at the home of a relative, where a daughter-in-law has taken her life. Early next spring, Chaudhuri will publish Clearing A Space, a collection of his essays from journals. He says that "I am trying to clear the space for a discussion of Indian culture in the context of modernity, as distinct from the post-colonial discourse. This is not a post-colonial response to the Empire, but a 150-year story of self-division and creative tension." Chaudhuri's interest lies in the 1860s, where he sees the origins of Indian secular, modernist traditions. "That period showed how traditions which are communal transform our secular culture, giving material for the modern artist to rework," he argues. Referring to India's best-known painter and one of his nationalist enemies, he says that this tradition "allows (MF) Husain to do his art, and this is something Bajrang Dal won’t understand The free speech argument will only take you so far," says Chaudhuri. You need to extend the argument to the autonomy of cultural space. If we look at India's erotic sculptures and say "This is us", as if it were a constant lineage, we would be ignoring the disruptions." He adds that "We cannot say that that the 13th-century tradition is still continuing. In India, if we draw too neat a line, as if we are automatic inheritors of that past, it would be wrong. By doing it we end up with versions of nationalism, some of which are unpleasant." Chaudhuri is upset about the way that nationalist Hindutva militants appropriate India's cultural space. In a recent essay, he challenged Hindutva activists for their narrow definitions of Hinduism. And in a story called An Infatuation, Lord Rama and his brother Lakshmana don’t appear as divine figures, but as macho ruffians who disfigure a demon because she has the temerity to fall in love with Rama. This political dimension is a more recent phase in Chaudhuri's writing, he acknowledges. While the first two parts of his recent collection St Cyril Road and Other Poems are personal, the third has poems about Baghdad, Gaza and Kashmir, although seen at an angle. Meanwhile, a struggle within the self describes his next novel, Journey Raag, due in early 2009. It will synthesise Chaudhuri’s love for music, the theme of the romantic artist, and his metropolitan identity. The novel is set in the Bombay of 1980s, about a family like his. There is a music teacher and an adolescent boy who is serious about music, and sees in it a quest for purity and a way to reject his family's worldliness. "The boy doesn’t renounce the world," Chaudhuri says. "His rebellion is different. He grows his hair long, and does not attend his parents’ parties... He becomes attracted to classical music through his music teacher, but he cannot understand why the teacher wants material success." This romanticisation, Chaudhuri says, is part of his own adolescence. He makes an odd rebel, but that's exactly the point. His rebelliousness lies in not doing the expected; in leaving gaps for us to imagine what’s missing. That moment in-between is also the essence of his writing. Chaudhuri has come a long way from the time I saw him first on the parapet of my college in Bombay, where he sat strumming guitar, his hair long, his jeans faded, his kurta torn. The poems, the music, the awards, were some distance away. If he was a rebel, he was a polite one. But then Chaudhuri is Bengali. To understand the passion within, think of what the painter Nandalal Bose told his student, Satyajit Ray, in the 1940s. Speaking of Fujiyama, Bose told his students that "the mountain was the essence of oriental art: calm without, fire within." —By arrangement with
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