'The reader no longer wants to see himself portrayed, he wants to occupy the space of the artist.'
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri negotiates the relationship between teacher and pupil, and the blurring of the lines between audience and artist. He talks to Viola Fort.
'These relationships have to do with desire - genuine yearning - but also power; the powerful and the helpless.'
Amit Chaudhuri defies neat categorisation. He is both poet and novelist, writer and musician, a devotee of Indian classical music who tours a contemporary musical project called This is Not Fusion; he looks younger than he is (47), and his humour and quickness to laugh belies the seriousness and intellectual rigour of his conversation.
The Immortals is Chaudhuri's first novel for nine years. Its chief preoccupation is music, and its changing status in a commercially progressive society. The book's style echoes its subject. It is a symphonic, rhythmic book, one richly peopled. Minor characters, intricately drawn, enter and withdraw throughout the story, enriching every chapter with the shadow of other lives. Chaudhuri's writing is built from the minutia, from the small, exquisite details drawn from domestic lives rather than the grand, swirling, spice-scented narratives that have become a shorthand for Indian literature. This gives his writing a much slower pace, which takes some getting used to. He has been criticised in the past for writing books in which nothing much happens. Rather, there is stillness in his writing, which requires an adjustment in the reader's expectations. What we have come to expect from novels - pace and story and tightly plotted twists and turns - are absent from The Immortals. This is not a page-turner; there are no pay-offs awaiting the reader at the end of every chapter. Reading Chaudhuri is perhaps more akin to listening to a piece of music; he expects his reader to listen closely for the detail instead of dishing it up with a flourish. It's a different mode of reading, but those who can acclimatize are richly rewarded.
The story centres around the Senguptas, a privileged Bengali family who live in a wealthy district of Bombay, newly built on land reclaimed from the ocean: "Upon it had appeared Thacker Towers and its sister skyscrapers: a whole family of tall siblings that didn't seem to know one another." Mr Sengupta is a successful businessman. His wife, Mallika, hosts the gatherings and parties important to her husband's career and status. She also sings; she has a voice that could have made her famous had she been willing to make the compromises necessary to the serious pursuit of art. She carries this missed opportunity with her, but when she considers her life as it is, weighing her blessings, she decides "it would be madness to exchange these things that so filled up her day for the fulfilment of some grand personal ambition - she had neither the courage nor the desire to do it." Nevertheless, she continues to practise her singing, guided by her teacher Shyam Lal, the son of a famous guru and 'heavenly singer' whose legacy he attempts to protect and advance.
Nirmalya, Mallika's teenage son, is sensitive to these conflicting demands of art and life. He carries around with him a copy of The Story of Philosophy and shuns lifts in his father's Mercedes (which sometimes followed him, "twenty paces behind him, discreet, trying absurdly to merge with the background, while he walked on, apparently nonchalant") in favour of the local bus. He wears his hair long, dresses in khadi kurtas and churidars, plays guitar and writes poetry. His appearance and manner exasperates his father, who considers "he had the unmistakable air of one who was drifting, of one who'd probably lost his bearings." He owns a copy of Being and Nothingness which, despite failing to make it past page three of the introduction, awakens him to some indistinct yet fundamental truth: "He'd recently become aware that he existed; and he wanted to get to the bottom of the fathomless puzzle of this new, undeniable truth." Chaudhuri admits that much of the novel - aspects of Nirmalya in particular - is based on his life, down to the long hair and the guitar. However, he insists that it's not an autobiography: "the reason I am recounting these experiences is not to talk about my life. I could do that in another project," rather, it is to "explore within a framework of fictions and ambiguities the relationship between the teacher and the pupil, and the relationship between the material world and the transcendental world; of music, of art. These relationships have to do with desire - genuine yearning - but also power; the powerful and the helpless."
It is this relationship between teacher and taught that interests Chaudhuri. At the age of 16, he started to turn from guitar playing - which he did with adolescent seriousness - and western music to Indian classical music. Part of the reason for this was the entry in to his life of a teacher, "a great virtuoso", who had a defining influence on him. "I had a kind of ideological turn around", he recalls, "I thought, 'this is my music'." He laughs, "I had the kind of romantic certainty you have at sixteen."
The role of the musician in India, once central and revered, has changed much in the last century. In the wake of Indian independence and the disappearance of the old princely states, the traditional sources of patronage ceased to exist. The middle class stepped in to fill that role, fundamentally altering the relationship between patron and artist. "Suddenly", Chaudhuri explains, "people from the middle class were themselves wanting to be musicians, wanting their moment in the musical world, and using their teacher as a facilitator." The gurus' position in society was fundamentally altered to one of necessary obeisance, undermining their status and artists and placing them in deference to commerce. "People like Mrs Sengupta were drawn to teachers like Shyam Lal because of their talent. They would give them the respect and reverence due to a teacher, but at the same time were really dominating them because they were in a position of power." At one point in the book, Shyam Lal puts on a conference in memory to his father in which many of his students take part. The event becomes a kind of talent show; people are interested only in their own performance. His disciples - "from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen's wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold" - have paid him as a teacher for the right to perform in public.
This, of course, is something depressingly familiar to us now; how we expect to find our stars on reality TV, but it's a trend Chaudhuri traces back much further: "The German critic Walter Benjamin talks about how, in the 19th century, something changed in the crowd; suddenly people wanted to see themselves in novels, and you can see how painting, portrait, cinema were all suddenly giving to the ordinary person a representation of himself." This seeded the audience's appetite for participation in culture, and ultimate cannibalism of the artist. "I think that something new began to happen at the end of the 20th century, in that the reader no longer wanted to see himself portrayed, he actually wanted to occupy the space of the artist," he says.
So if the reader has overwhelmed the writer, and the pupil has dominated his master, where does that leave the arts? Is the author dead, as Barthes so triumphantly claimed in the late 60s? And who will replace him? (The bloggers, no doubt). It is a strange time, agrees Chudhuri. New modes of dissemination and representation, and the sheer interconnectedness of both the internet and the market, have compromised artistic endeavour and empowered the average man on the street. There are those who lament the democratisation of culture, arguing that it undermines quality and seriousness in the arts, and there are those, equally vociferous, who champion this new era of audience participation. Whatever the truth of it, Chaudhuri is sure of one thing: "In the midst of all that complexity and the dismantling of who is the artist and who is the listener, there is talent, yearning for beauty, and there is beauty."
Tuesday, 7 April, 2009
In Interviews
- Dave Eggers
- Richard Flanagan
- John Banville
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Amit Chaudhuri
- Rana Dasgupta
- Edmund White
- Tobias Hill
- Christmas Books
- Russell Hoban
- Will Self
- Aleksandar Hemon
- Kate Summerscale
- Philip Gourevitch
- Simon Gray
- Aravind Adiga
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