Amit Chaudhuri: Trending quotes

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Amit Chaudhuri: 188 quotes0 likes

“… 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)

“To the far left, above your shoulder’s gentle/curve, like golden pods, the sodium vapour/lights in the naval dockyard … And before us,/a continuous, unreal flare of fire defined/the horizon’s extremity, a stain on a brow.”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Steamer
St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“The eye covers distances in a second. It lusts for freedom. Looking out, I often wanted to be free - not of home, but of the city. The eye (if it's gazing upon something it's unhappy with, as I was) might see nothing. Looking up is different. I have the freedom I then wanted.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island.”

Amit Chaudhuri

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

“Some books I buy for their title, others for brevity. I love short books - the way you know from the first page that it's going to end.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“There has been writing for 10 days now”

Amit Chaudhuri

Poetry

“I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Real Time (2002)

“The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children’s literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children’s literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high’ literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction.”

Amit Chaudhuri

Clearing a Space (2008)

“… a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi.”

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals (2009)

“‘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)