Amit Chaudhuri Explores the New Indian Middle Class in "Real Time"

The Denver Post

May 5, 2002

By Dylan Foley Special to The Denver Post

In 2000, the Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuri was awarded the Los Angeles Times Prize for "Freedom Road," his trilogy of novellas that told lush and sensual stories of life in modern India. Chaudhuri is back with a new collection of short stories called "Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 182 pages, $22).

Chaudhuri's stories explore the India after independence from the British in 1947 and chronicle the urbane middle class and their Westernized children. He shows the corporate culture of India, where the upwardly mobile are divorced from the small villages they came from and face a society undergoing radical changes.

The new stories move from the 1960s to the present. "The time frame is partly because I am going into my parents' early life, their old reminiscences about starting out in India after they came back from (studying in) England," said Chaudhuri from his home in Calcutta.

"They entered a completely different bourgeoisie life after they came back to an independent India. They lived a cosmopolitan and isolated life and were no longer speaking the Bengali language." What interests Chaudhuri is the changing India of the 1960s. "The main religion at the time was the building of industrial India."

Chaudhuri captures the vibrant life of the Indian middle class. From the sophisticated business executives and their sari-clad wives going to their 1960s cocktail parties to the young boys embracing the 1970s disco craze in anticipation of their first school dance, Chaudhuri shows a mirthful eye for catching the human spirit.

In "Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social," young Gautam ponders the terror of dancing with girls: "He could not see himself, as much as he would have liked, wantonly positioning himself a few inches away from a girl, and then with aplomb, shivering and shaking ecstatically before her."

Many of these stories take place in Calcutta. "I was raised in Bombay, but I was born in Calcutta," explained the 39-year-old Chaudhuri. "Calcutta is the cultural capital of India. The political consciousness that came to India first came to Bengal and Calcutta. (Gandhi's) Indian National Congress was born in Calcutta. The first great modern Indian literature was also born here in the Bengali language in the 1850s."

Chaudhuri's father was a Bengali executive at a British biscuit company, and his mother was a classical Indian singer. Chaudhuri was educated at University College London and Oxford, where he completed a Ph.D. on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence. He has published four previous works of fiction and is an accomplished classical singer.

Chaudhuri makes Calcutta come alive. He develops full-blooded characters with desires and often thwarted dreams. Many of the stories are told looking back on the past, with men viewing their youthful hopes.

One of Chaudhuri's most compelling stories is the title piece "Real Time," where a couple goes to a memorial for a woman who has committed suicide. "The story came partially from something I'd heard about a suicide," said Chaudhuri. "The family was a fairly well established, Westernized family in decline."

Chaudhuri turns an awkward memorial service into a way of looking at the fractured Bengali society: "I wondered what the ceremony would be like for a suicide, and what it would mean to a family like that and in the present history of the Bengali middle class. (This group) is not sure where it is. This particular culture is dispersed all over the world and has outlived its moment of definition.

"A shraddh ceremony in Hinduism, which is like a wake, is often quite a joyful situation where people eat and talk," Chaudhuri said. "In this case, there is a garrulousness of people trying not to talk about the person who has died. That was the tension that interested me."

For Chaudhuri, the goal of these stories is to focus on the new India. "I was trying to approach India as it is now and what it used to be, to explore those areas of experience, growing up in a secular, corporate society," he said. "In these stories, I became interested in describing the many facets of life thrown up over the last 30 years - the commercialized Indian existence, the one-day cricket matches or an average woman writing her memoirs."

Even with the popularity of young Indian writers in the United States, such as Vikram Seth with "A Suitable Boy" and Rohinton Mistry with "A Delicate Balance," Chaudhuri wants to focus on the neglected roots of Indian writing. In June, an anthology Chaudhuri edited called "The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature" will be published. Some of the anthology's writers are being translated into English for the first time. The book includes famous Indian writers like the 19th century poet Rabindranath Tagore and others who have received less Western attention, such as Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee.

"The anthology is from the 1850s to the present," he said. "I do have Tagore, as well as writers you have not heard of, in conjunction with Vikram Chandra and Salman Rushdie. (The anthology) throws up interrelationships (like) the encounters between the genteel middle-class sensibility and the small-town Indian life, and how that sensibility breaks down or is put under duress."

Chaudhuri admitted that putting together the anthology was partly a selfish pleasure. "As much as I admire the contemporary Indian writers," he said, "I know the place where my mind lives as a writer is not only composed of my contemporaries. A lot of this place is composed of my relationships to European writers and Indian writers from the past." The anthology exposes the influences on the modern writers.

"I feel that I am filling a gap, and "righting' a skewed idea of Indian literature," he said.

Amit Chaudhuri on Classical Indian Singing, Social Turbulence and "The Immortals"

(This interview originally appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger in October 2009)

In his lush novel “The Immortals”(Knopf, $26), the Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri uses the intense relationship between a singer of classical Indian music and his teenage pupil to explore the social turbulence in 1980s India as it moves to a liberalized economy, changing the country forever.

Mr. and Mrs. Sengupta in Bombay are paragons of the New India, where he is a the director of the Indian subsidiary of a large British company, and she is a glamorous woman and a talented amateur singer. The family hires Shyam Lal, a virtuoso singer who makes his living teaching music to wealthy women to teach Mrs. Sengupta. Shyam’s lessons provide for his extended family at the expense of pursuing his music career. The Senguptas’ 16-year-old son Nirmalya is a sheltered rebel in torn jeans who then takes vocal lessons with Shyam as his guru, raising questions of the tensions between teacher and pupil, class in modern India and studying music solely for art’s sake. Using some of his own autobiography, Chaudhuri has written an enchanting novel on the place of traditional music in a modernizing India and what it means to be an artist.

Chaudhuri, 47, was raised in Bombay, is the author of six books of fiction and is an accomplished classical Indian singer. Chaudhuri spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley from his home in Calcutta.

Q. What is your own relationship with classical Indian music?

A. When I was 12, I began to learn how to play the guitar, gradually moving into rock and blues. I was taken by the idea of the singer-songwriter. At the age of 15 or 16, I started to listen to more Indian classical music, ironically because of the enthusiasm for certain Western rock bands like the Beatles for Indian music. I became interested in Indian vocal music. I started taking lessons with a teacher who was a great virtuoso himself, and continued studying with him, even after I went to England in 1983.

Q. So this novel has been percolating in you since 1983?

A. Elements of the story were there from 1988, when my teacher died. I began to revisit the story in my novel “Afternoon Raag,” which has fragments of memories of my teacher and my encounters with Indian music. My story “White Lies” is also about a virtuoso singer and teacher of upper-middle-class women. The questions I wanted to address included what does a traditional musician do now that historical sources of patronage, such as the royal courts, are now gone. By the late 1970s and ‘80s, India was changing into the India we now know. The austerity of (the Indian leader) Nehru was giving way to a free enterprise India. How would a traditional Indian musician and his music fit into the new world? I wanted to write about how one man coped and failed to cope with that change.

Shyam is both a guru and an employee who is benefitting from his arrangement with the Senguptas. His pupil, Nirmalya, has a romantic sense of art and artists and refutes the materialism of his father’s world while not giving up any of the privileges. He has no understanding of what an artist must do to survive. I had this picture of this boy who belongs to a wealthy family in a torn kurta (a traditional Indian shirt), ripped jeans and expensive footwear, sitting with his teacher who is wearing a spotless white kurta pajamas, both of them looking at each other with a degree of indulgence, with an undercurrent of exasperation and bafflement. Nirmalya yearns for something that is not of his father’s world, while his teacher is perplexed that a boy who comes from wealth would dress like he is poor.

Q. Nirmalya is a rebel with an indulgent mother. Were you like Nirmalya as a teenager?

A. There are significant differences between myself and Nirmayla, but we have things in common. It is only after many years that I realize what a symbolically rich period the 1980s were for me and for Bombay. Everything was changing, and the line between art and commerce was beginning to blur. I look at the person that I was thirty years ago and I see that person I was as a peculiar and interesting character, full of yearning, convictions and prejudice. I have so much distance from the boy that I was that he seems like a fictional character. It makes him quite fascinating to me.