The 1990s were a vibrant decade in Indian literature. In the wake of the success (and controversy) that surrounded Salman Rushdie’s 1980s output, several of the country’s authors found Western readership with scintillating English-language works that nonetheless regarded the country’s unique concerns of modern identity. Among them was Vikram Seth’s satirical portrait of post-partition India, the nearly 1,500-page magnum opus A Suitable Boy; Rohington Mistry’s A Fine Balance a dramatized examination of the Emergency, a period of unprecedented political strife; Arundhati Roy’s debut The God of Small Things, zoomed inward, taking into account the different life paths of two fraternal twins affected by draconian caste laws. It would go on to win the Man Booker Prize.
These are among the more popular examples. But as happens within any literary milieu, some of its best writers enjoy a small but loyal fanbase upon first appearance, only to be rediscovered and appreciated by a wider readership many years later. Amit Chaudhuri—a Kolkata-born, Mumbai-raised, and, for a long time, residential British author—first appeared on the Indian literary scene with A Strange and Sublime Address, a bildungsroman/roman à clef that tells of an upper-class Indian boy discovering the cities of his birth and childhood without prejudice.
Chaudhuri often draws on autobiographical elements for his work. His father was the first Indian CEO of a famed British biscuit company, and his mother a singer trained in Indian classic music. Chaudhuri came from enough privilege to matriculate at University College London and receive a PhD in English at Oxford. Kolkata and Mumbai were never far from his mind, and several of his works are set within them as well as Oxford—disparate landscapes and cultures that seem to imbue his writing style with the heightened awareness of the perpetual traveler able to consider his homeland from a distance.
Chaudhuri published two more novels in the 1990s that reflected both the Chaudhuris’ life as well as the events back home. His deceptively serene landscapes are founded upon deeper and occasionally darker subterranean layers below the deceptively serene landscape of Amit Chaudhuri’s work. Afternoon Rag, about an Indian student’s experiences at Oxford, reflected Chaudhuri’s Western emigration and education, if not the phenomenon of such passages afforded by the cultural and economic boon of 1990s India. But a period of national upheaval also defined the decade, which saw a rise militant Hindu nationalism staining it. Freedom Song, Chaudhuri’s third novel, captures the events surrounding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a mosque also reputed to be the birthplace of Rama. In 1992, it was demolished by Hindu extremists, and the country was riven with religious violence in the aftermath. It has only grown under Modi’s prime ministry, who has steered extremist behavior toward the mainstream with his politics of hatred toward the country’s minorities, especially Muslims. It includes this year’s opening of a new Ram temple built on the ruins of the mosque, a history of erasure coming full circle (an exclusionary circle it is frightening to be out of and odious to be in).
It is then a significant, if not timely occasion, for Amit Chaudhuri’s first three novels to be reissued by New York Review Books, currently his primary publisher in the U.S. Their dedication to his work has included the publication of two contemporary novels, a collection of poetry, a study of Indian Raga music (a polymath, Chaudhuri is also an accomplished singer and composer) and several introductions to NYRB’s acclaimed Classics series. In return, his readership, particularly with his lauded latest novel Sojourn, a meditative narrative of an Indian writer’s stay in Berlin, has significantly increased.
What Chaudhuri best demonstrates in these early works are his formidable abilities as a storyteller. In A Strange and Sublime Address, two mischievous boys fighting are elevated into an unforgettable image: “Sandeep and Abhi silently wrestled with each other, looking vaguely like the two angry, rumpled pillows at the head of the bed.” Later on, Sandeep feels the economic chasm between his own family and his uncle’s “whose problems were more ordinary and also more difficult to solve, loved listening to the remote complaints of his sister’s life, objecting to or agreeing with, now and then, a phrase. Sandeep, an only child, felt the shared background of brother and brother, and brother and sister, thrown upon him a shade as that of the cool, expansive branches of a rooted banyan tree. He wandered in the shade, forgetting it was temporary.”
In his introduction to A Strange and Sublime Address, Colm Tóibín calls Chaudhuri a “born noticer” and celebrates the dexterity with which the gaze of the book’s child protagonist is crafted. There’s a sensorial opulence produced by such attentiveness in a wonder-struck child that deepens into insightfulness without being portentous, presenting truths that seem immediately resonant but have been long taken for granted. For instance, in Afternoon Rag, the unnamed narrator expresses gratitude for his friendship with a fellow Indian student at Oxford, noting that they are “two Indians who might never have met in India.” This is a familiar sentiment for any foreign student living abroad: the opportunity a new country gives not just for meeting people from around the world but people from your own country who you might not have met otherwise, bound by geography, socioeconomic barriers, or the simple fact that being foreign together forms a bond even when there is little else in common. But Chaudhuri pays keen attention to these seemingly self-evident truths, articulating what we think we know but keep forgetting. By doing so, he also urges us to pay attention and preserve the gaze of the child protagonist, perpetually in awe of the world we are jaded to.
Chaudhuri “dares for the mundane,” as James Wood writes in his introduction (the parade of introducers is a testament to his standing as “a writer’s writer”), and in so doing alchemizes what others take for granted into the subject of literature. “He notices things you might have missed but also bothers to explain things that another writer might consider beneath his notice, as simply not amenable to literary representation.” Chaudhuri is also an attentive listener to the cadences of his milieu: just as his characters seem uncannily similar to people one encounters in Indian life, his dialogues ring so true you can’t help but feel you’ve heard them before in everyday conversation. His gentle wit is often drawn from observation, moments that elicit the laughter of recognition, and the whimsy of familiar Indian idiom translated into English, can tip a scene from drama to comedy with serene ease. Take this scene in Freedom Song when a mother named Didimoni scolds her quarreling young sons:
‘I know very well you’re the one who starts it . . . this other one’s an idiot, but you . . . you’re a mischievous devil!’ ‘What did I do?’ Bhaskar would wail, wiping his eyes and about to cry. ‘And look at your face… Every day it’s getting longer, till it’s begun to look like a slipper!’
Freedom Song, in its portrait of Indian grappling modernity and militancy is also the most dynamic of these three novels. In one scene, when Didimoni decides to make a Chinese dish, Chaudhuri shows how the foreign world has been seeping into India, albeit with interpretations that would be suitable for an Indian palate and a kitchen with limited ingredients: “She would, before going to the doctor’s with her husband, prepare a snack—Chinese noodles with bits of vegetable and perhaps chicken in it—to amuse Piyu and Bhaskar and make herself happy. She called it ‘chow mein.’” In the same passage, we see her urge her relatives to visit and partake of the dish: “You two come today for chow mein at my house.” This loving imperiousness and the permeability of individual homes—anyone can drop in at any time—would be familiar to those with Indian relatives.
Pair this with the political ugliness climbing like ivy up the walls of Didimoni’s little world. Chaudhuri’s portrayal of vehement Islamophobia that defines one character along with the revolutionary pulse felt by character who becomes involved with the Indian Communist party (branded these days by those in power as a suspect inclination) is unsparing but delicately rendered, and his political concern is a subliminal but substantive part of the book throughout. In her introduction to Freedom Song the American Indologist Wendy Doniger captures Chaudhuri’s expert harmonizing of this false dichotomy between the personal and political. She writes:
True freedom may lie in the art that can express, deeply embedded in ordinary family life, the political attachments that shape and misshape that life, chronicling them glancingly but always tellingly. And Chaudhuri shows us that, in looking at them, we have it in us to look beyond them.
While Chaudhuri’s focuses might at first seem distinctly Indian and British, there is a reason that his work has resonated with American readers. With his gentle but sure flow of prose, Chaudhuri documentation of quotidian lives of middle-class Indians—a slow, tranquil world seemingly primed for nostalgia (photo albums, now filled with printouts of digital pictures, remain popular)—begins to sound familiar when Chaudhuri disturbs them with the prevalence of social injustice that erupts from differences in religion, class, caste, and gender. Disturbs because in Chaudhuri’s fiction, the Indian middle class is cloistered away from these broad and abrasive realities, existing only in a hothouse world where the maintenance of family affluence and the academic rigor that will see them off to the West, are the preoccupying concerns.
Neither critique nor endorsement are to be found in these three works, but rather powerful faculties of observation with a lens that lets all the colors seep through. It can at times read as deceptively simple in the way To Kill a Mockingbird is easy enough for a highschooler to follow. Indeed, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to compare Chaudhuri with Harper Lee, at least in the tone of this early work. This is what makes his work singular among his contemporaries: Chaudhuri sees the beautiful and ugly of his country without authorial comment (unlike Arundhati Roy, who traded writing fiction for penning firebrand political essays) or exuberant imagination (stylistically, these early works are a rebuke to Rushdian maximalism) or scope (slim in comparison to the more capacious Vikram Seth).
Chaudhuri’s plane of everyday realism—where the preparation of food for visiting relatives is an event, as is an afternoon nap on a winter’s day, or even the menace hiding just out of sight—approaches something closer to the lyrical richness of poetry. His use of dialogue (never rising beyond the believable), and his painterly details (which dazzle the ordinary) make even microcosms of Indian society quake on monumental scales.
