Amit Chaudhuri: The Portrait of an Author who is also a Conjurer

“ In Bengal, both tamarind and babies are soaked in mustard oil, and then left upon a mat on the terrace to absorb the morning sun…….With their frantic, miniature limbs and their brown, shining bodies, they look like little koi fish caught from the Hooghly River, struggling into life.”- ‘A Strange and Sublime Address’ is liberally interspersed with such comparisons that are unusual, unexpected, startling. They are one of the myriad of factors, which make the novel what it is: a delight that is stimulating and relaxing at the same time; a tale which fills one with a sense of wonder at its author’s power of evoking brilliant imageries.
The author is Amit Chaudhuri, one of the most widely acclaimed among the Indian authors who write in English. Born in Kolkata in 1962 and brought up in Mumbai, Chaudhuri has an academic resume as impressive as his literary achievements. He graduated from University College in London, then was research student at Balliol College in Oxford and later, was a Creative Arts Fellow at the Oxford University. Yet he says- and this heightens his appeal amongst his readers- he knew no English until he entered school. In his essay on ‘Bombay’, he writes, “My Bengali parents had taught me no English, settled outside Bengal, they had longed to make me intimate with the Bengali language”. In this essay published in the Granta magazine, he reminisces with nostalgia about the Bombay of his childhood which he feels has many a trait of the American cities. “Bombay’s mixture of the childlike and the grown-up, of naivety and ruthlessness, a mixture that, as I know, is also peculiarly American.” he says. His another famous essay ‘The Tailor of Gujarat’, also published in the Granta, followed the fortunes of Ansari, a Gujarat riot victim whose picture with folded arms and tearful eyes, was widely circulated and published in the national media and had consequently, rendered him an unlikely celebrity. In the piece, Chaudhuri in a subtle yet effective way, lambastes the media, which unscrupulously and often makes a ‘breaking news’ out of human tragedies, strips a common man of his protective cover of obscurity and then, when the hullabaloo surrounding the news dies down, turns a blind eye towards him.
But Amit Chaudhuri is best known for his novels. His first novella ‘A Strange and Sublime Address’, which won the 1991 Betty Trask Award as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book, captures through the eyes of a ten year-old boy, Sandeep, the ineffable but endearing beauty of the apparently mundane, middle-class life in Calcutta. The observations, ideas and of course, the comparisons of the precocious protagonist are all so remarkable and revealing that one cannot help but resolve to treasure his copy of the novella for life. His second novel, Afternoon Raag (1993), revolves around the life at Oxford of an Indian student whose imagination is dominated by his love of Indian classical music and the memories of home and parents. His other novels are Freedom Song (1998) and A New World (2000). None of these works have action-driven plots but various facets of family-life, dreams, memories, yearnings et al are all explored and expressed with such astonishing vividness by Chaudhuri that they are most fascinating to read. Chaudhuri’s editing skills and poetic talent found expression with the publication of the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001) and ‘St. Cyril Road and Other Poems’ (2005).
Chaudhuri has been variously described as a ‘miniaturist’,-perhaps his elliptical, understated style of writing, renders his works in to some kind of miniatures- ‘a master of prose’, ‘sensual writer’ and ‘a great writer of the world’. But for the readers enamoured by his works, he is simply a conjurer whose magic-wand are his words, subtle, simple, evocative and beautiful, which leave an indelible mark on his mind.