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Amit Chaudhuri Quotes

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer and music composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.

James Wood, writing about Chaudhuri in The New Yorker, said, ‘He has beautifully practiced that “refutation of the spectacular” throughout his career, both as a novelist and as a critic. ... Chaudhuri has made the best case for his aesthetic preferences in his own measured, subtle, light-footed fiction. It is rich with hanging vignettes of domestic and urban life; the atmosphere is impressionistic, poetic, softly comic. ... As a literary critic , Amit Chaudhuri has strived to identify and analyze his own kind of postcolonialism—one marked by entanglement, self-division, and mild appropriation, rather than by decisive political opposition or confident theoretical skepticism. ... how little Chaudhuri forces anything on us—there is no obvious plot, no determined design, no faked “conflict” or other drama ... The effect is closer to documentary than to fiction; gentle artifice—selection, pacing, occasional dialogue—hides overt artifice. The author seems to say, Here he is; what do you think? The literary pleasure is a human pleasure, as we slowly encounter this strolling, musing, forceful self.’

Will Self, introducing Chaudhuri at the Hillingdon Literary Festival in October 2016, said, 'This is not work that comfortably sits in the ‘postcolonial thing’ or anything like that. What I think his work represents – and he’s a very fine novelist indeed and an extremely fine essayist and thinker about literature – what his work exemplifies is somebody who views the canon as everything; that there isn’t a form of canonical literature that makes you cleave to one culture or another. There’s a marvellous fragment by Borges called ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, and I think Amit is a writer like that – Amit is a writer who emerges with such force and power in his thought about ‘here’ and ‘there’, about the ‘other’ and what ‘identity’ is, that he creates an affinity between other writers that you weren’t aware of having existed before. So he’s a kind of primus inter pares'.



✵ 15. May 1962
Amit Chaudhuri photo

Works

A New World
A New World
Amit Chaudhuri
A New World
A New World
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit Chaudhuri: 94 quotes0 likes

Famous Amit Chaudhuri Quotes

“… he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“History is always lying before you, unnoticed: till you suddenly see it, as we do now.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“The grown-ups snapped the chillies (each made a sound terse as a satirical retort), and scattered the tiny, deadly seeds in their food.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“He has a traditional shopper's DNA, an eye for freshness and appearance, and a consistent sense of a home to go back to.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Amit Chaudhuri Quotes about time

“I'm undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“Years ago, my mother and I fell in love with Busybee’s voice, its calm, even tone, and a smile which was always audible in the language. My father, meanwhile, is clipping his nails fastidiously, letting them fall on to an old, spread-out copy of the Times of India, till he sneezes explosively, as he customarily does, sending the crescent-shaped nail-clippings flying into the universe.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“It seemed there was no democracy among children – always an aristocracy based on strength, intellect and seniority. But seniority counted most, because a boy of ten is bound to be stronger and cleverer than a boy of nine, having spent an extra year in the world, at a time when each year is like a precious deposit in a newly opened bank account. Among boys of the same age, there would be a silent tussle, a clean, honourable contest. Once a leader emerged, however, no elections were held.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. … In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion – both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried – a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Freedom Song (1998)

“Afternoon’s the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime …”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“… the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Amit Chaudhuri Quotes about light

“Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

“And the old homelovingness/of light falling and touching the black/utensils …”

Amit Chaudhuri

Kitchen
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains”

Amit Chaudhuri book A New World

A New World (2000)

“This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight.”

Amit Chaudhuri book A New World

A New World (2000)

“a speck of dust hanging/in a vertical wall of light.’ ( Letter from the Hills )”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“‘By the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of light and space as both metaphors or, and habitations for, the human self, or “the substance called the mind”, is absolute, especially with Tagore, who, in a letter in 1894 to his niece, would demand, not political freedom … but “more light, more space”.’”

Amit Chaudhuri

Clearing a Space (2008)

Amit Chaudhuri: Trending quotes

“The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

“… "shagging" - a quasi-comical activity, like belching or farting, except it was more taboo and more necessary than these.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“Photographers are the new Brahmins: we have no volition when they rule us.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Amit Chaudhuri Quotes

“History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

“These small freshwater fish”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“There must be other leaps in life - as momentous as the "mirror stage" - that Lacan didn't mention. Some are universal; others, culturally particular. To understand that your parents are human (and not an element of the natural world), that they're separate from you, that they were children once, that they were born and came into the world, is another leap. It's as if you hadn't seen who they were earlier - just as, before you were ten months old, you didn't know it was you in the mirror. This happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Not long after - maybe a year - you find out your parents will die. It's not as if you haven't encountered death already. But, before now, your precocious mind can't accommodate your parents' death except as an academic nicety - to be dismissed gently as too literary and sentimental. After that day, your parents' dying suddenly becomes simple. It grows clear that you're alone and always have been, though certain convergences start to look miraculous - for instance, between your father, mother, and yourself. Though your parents don't die immediately - what you've had is a realisation, not a premonition - you'll carry around this knowledge for their remaining decades or years. You won't think, looking at them, "You're going to die". It'll be an unspoken fact of existence. Nothing about them will surprise you anymore.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. … The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri

citation needed
On Modernity

“… the menu’s a delirious poem/on which the names of Moghlai and Punjabi and Parsi/”

Amit Chaudhuri

Real Time (2002)

“There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of Ganashakti were fellow-travellers of the Communist party, they believed in its necessity and vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Freedom Song (1998)

“Her hair is troublesome and curly … It falls in long, black strands, but each strand has a gentle, complicated undulation travelling through it, like a mild electric shock or a thrill, hat gives it a life of its own; it is visually analogous to a tremolo on a musical note.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“Frame after aluminium frame had replaced the casements. The gesture by which you push a window open was now unnecessary. … It was as if a part of us that was air and breeze had been denied entry.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“Mahadev Govind Ranade. Leaving aside his air of self-importance, he looks marginally foreign, as all statues do.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“I’m uncomfortable beginning at the beginning. It’s not because I’m clever, but because it’s a difficult thing, writing.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Real Time (2002)

“While reading the Times of India each morning, my father spares a minute for the cartoon by R. K. Laxman. While my mother is, like a magician, making untidy sheets disappear in the bedroom and producing fresh towels in the bathroom, or braving bad weather in the kitchen, my father, in the extraordinary Chinese calm of the drawing-room, is dmiring the cartoon by R. K. Laxman, and, if my mother happens to be there, unselfishly sharing it with her. She, as expected, misunderstands it completely, laughing not at the joke but at the expressions on the faces of the caricatures, and at the hilarious fact that they talk to each other like human beings.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“At the conclusion of Hollywood disaster movies and epics, time moves backward, piecing together like a jigsaw the elements that had come apart. The Titanic resumes its journey; Russell Crowe is reunited with his murdered wife and son. It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them.”

Amit Chaudhuri book A New World

A New World (2000)

“Internationalism’ is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership …”

Amit Chaudhuri

Clearing a Space (2008)

“I … take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“As the sun came up, we/saw the leaves peer out, shivering.’ ( Letter from the Hills )”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“‘… the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’”

Amit Chaudhuri

Clearing a Space (2008)

“Calcutta, for me, was a particular idea of the modern city, and I found it in many forms, works, and genres. … by ‘modernity’ I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. … if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new – that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child. I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of modernity. … modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature – in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself.”

Amit Chaudhuri

citation needed
On Modernity

“The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Odysseus Abroad (2014)

“Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“Fantasists aren't natural readers. They grow restive easily.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep’s mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crab-like postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes … hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Freedom Song (1998)

“The city was still …. Soon the machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Freedom Song (1998)

“All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“… the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving.”

Amit Chaudhuri book A New World

A New World (2000)

“Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“Water begins to boil in the kettle; it starts as a private, secluded sound, pure as rain, and grows to a steady, solipsistic bubbling.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“This is what's beautiful about staying in a club or hotel: you're invisible, as is your neighbour.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims.”

Amit Chaudhuri book A New World

A New World (2000)

“… the floor was a stone slab of coolness, an expanse of warm ice that would not melt.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“… invisibility was one of Bengali modernity’s prerequisites and cardinal achievements.”

Amit Chaudhuri

citation needed
On Modernity

“Never to have lived is best. And the second best/is to grow old with the morning into/afternoon, and then to evening, when sundry shadows and gestures marry/like the vanished divisions of a shut fan.”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road Sequence
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“Tagore claims that the first time he experienced the thrill of poetry was when he encountered the children’s rhyme ‘Jal pare/pata nare’ (‘Rain falls / The leaf trembles') in Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer Barna Parichay (Introducing the Alphabet). There are at least two revealing things about this citation. The first is that, as Bengali scholars have remarked, Tagore’s memory, and predilection, lead him to misquote and rewrite the lines. The actual rhyme is in sadhu bhasha, or ‘high’ Bengali: ‘Jal paritechhe / pata naritechhe’ (‘Rain falleth / the leaf trembleth’). This is precisely the sort of diction that Tagore chose for the English Gitanjali, which, with its thees and thous, has so tried our patience. Yet, as a Bengali poet, Tagore’s instinct was to simplify, and to draw language closer to speech. The other reason the lines of the rhyme are noteworthy, especially with regard to Tagore, is – despite their deceptively logical progression – their non-consecutive character. ‘Rain falls’ and ‘the leaf trembles’ are two independent, stand-alone observations: they don’t necessarily have to follow each other. It’s a feature of poetry commented upon by William Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral: that it’s a genre that can get away with seamlessly joining two lines which are linked, otherwise, tenuously.”

Amit Chaudhuri

On Tagore: Reading the Poet Today (2012)

“… my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Afternoon Raag (1993)

“Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact …”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“‘And his talent became a problematic responsibility he did not know what to do with; it was as if, having given so much to his gift – hard work, practice – he wanted something in return; and not having got that “something”, whatever it might be, he had decided to punish both himself and everyone around him.’”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room … And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments … but the houses and lanes in which people live.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“Light shafted obliquely on it.’ ( The Steamer )”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“(Tagore is) 'making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare’; rain falls/the leaf trembles) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“… I sensed that Park Street is, essentially (even for the destitute), a place of brief acquaintances and meetings no one has too much time for anyone else, you yourself are part of a web of motivations that are fading and resurrecting – and you must be on the move constantly to be in the street’s ebb and flow of traffic.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

“In the oldest, bunched houses with tottering stairs”

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“Shaped by student life in England, my wife and I are aghast at this frenetic sociability before the new weeks begins, this almost philistine uncaringness for the idea of Monday morning.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

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