Amit Chaudhuri > Quotes

“Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime Address

“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

“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

“The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“History is not the annals; it’s what happens around us when we’re unaware it’s history.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“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

“the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“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

“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

“When one remembers a scene from the past in which one is with a loved one who is now dead, it is not like a memory at all, but like a dream one is having before his death, a premonition. In this dream which preceded death, the person is tranquil and happy, and yet, without reason, you know he is to die. When we recall the dead, the past becomes a dream we are dreaming foretelling death, though in our waking moments we cannot properly interpret it or give it significance.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag

“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

“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) n Iswrchandra 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 these 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

“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: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture

“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

“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

“[T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“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

“I treat vegetarianism as a phase that might any second end without warning.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of My Youth

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Internationalism’ is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture

“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

“Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Odysseus Abroad

“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

“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

“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

“Hinduism" and the "mainstream"; how frequently are these words juxtaposed, and made synonymous, with each other by the ruling political party! "Mainstream": the word that would mean, in a democratic nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority; and those who don't belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and suggestion, anti-democratic, and breakers of the law. Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream. Saffron, "gerua": its resonances are wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, "vairagya", the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point, and how, did the colour of renunciation, and withdrawal from the world, become the symbol of a militant, and materialistic, majoritarianism? "Gerua" represents not what is Brahminical and conservative, but what is most radical about the Hindu religion; it is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of Hinduism, and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture