Amit Chaudhuri: Trending quotes

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Amit Chaudhuri: 188 quotes0 likes

“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)

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

Amit Chaudhuri

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“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

“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 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)