Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture

by Amit Chaudhuri

"This extraordinary and wide-ranging collection, through a series of highly-focussed apercus, puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern 'modernism' and 'post-modernity', for instance; and this from the standpoint of an insightful observer who has moved between more than one Indian and several Euro-American vantage points. The book offers among other things a fascinating insight into the specificity of certain Indian itineraries within the multiple modernities we inhabit today; including that of a largely unrecognized 'secular spirituality'. This and much else make this book a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions."--Charles Taylor, McGill University

"Amit Chaudhuri's collected essays and reviews constitute an intellectual autobiography of the first importance."--Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU

"Amit Chaudhuri's career as a novelist has proceeded in tandem with an ongoing engagement as a robust critic and thinker and musician. In these essays breadth of knowledge and the fluency of thought are held in perfect balance. Clearing a Space is a compendious, quietly passionate, rigorous and unfailingly eloquent collection."--Geoff Dyer

"In this thought-provoking and compelling set of essays Amit Chaudhuri teases out the implications of polarities that may seem fixed and suggests new ways of exploring the narratives of Indian modernity. He asks hard questions of himself as well as others, and he engages us as readers with the warmth and acuity of his observations across a wonderful range of writing."--Gillian Beer

"The essays of Amit Chaudhuri are really a wonderful key to the understanding of the vitality and specificity of Indian modernity . . . a fascinating contribution to the understanding of this great civilization and its modern transformations. They are worth the serious attention of scholars in the social sciences as well as the humanities."--Shmuel Eisenstadt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The essays assembled in Clearing a Space, written over the last fifteen years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The writer treats himself as a specimen for an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. Personal memoir gives readers a glance into a nation's history; his relationship to the West provides insight into India's national relationship to the West; and his struggle to define 'Indianness' for himself becomes a paradigm of searching for Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which the author has become known, Amit Chaudhuri writes anecdotally in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture; travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta, and Berlin; empire and nationalism; Indian and Western cinema, music, art, and literature; politics; race; cosmopolitanism; urban landscapes; Hollywood and Bollywood; Anglophone India; internationalism; globalization; the Indian English tradition that pre-dates Rushdie; post-colonialism; and much more.

Amit Chaudhuri was one of the London Observer's Twenty-One Writers for the Millennium. His criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, and he contributes these days mainly to the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Granta. His criticism, essays, and journalism have also appeared in The New Republic, the Guardian, The Observer, the Spectator, and The New Yorker.

He has written four novels. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won the first prize in the Society of Authors' Betty Trask Awards for a first novel and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. The second, Afternoon Raag (1993), won the Society of Authors' Encore Prize. Both books were shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. All three of his novels were published in a single omnibus volume, Freedom Three Novels, by Knopf in America in 1999. This omnibus volume was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an Independent bestseller in America, and was one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember, 2000. His fourth novel, A New World, won the Sahitya Akademi award 2002, India's highest literary honor for a single book.

Table of On Clearing a SpacePart Towards a Poetics of the Indian ModernPoles of RecoveryIn the Waiting-Room of On Provincializing EuropeThe Flute of Tagore and the Middle ClassThe East as a On 'Strangeness' in Indian on Amartya Sen and the Deferral of an Indian ModernityThis is Not The Emergence of the Domain of 'Culture''Huge Baggy Monster': Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel after RushdieTwo Giant Tagore's Revisionist 'Orient'Travels in the Subculture of ModernityThoughts in a Hinduism in the Free MarketOn the Nature of Indian Goth...

Genres: Nonfiction, India

330 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.

He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

[Sanjay]

In this collection of essays formerly published in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, among others, Chaudhuri attempts to locate an alternative history of Indian writing, one that steers a course between the idea of India as a mystical, exotic land and the postcolonial, polyphonic torrents of Salman Rushdie and those who followed him. Carefully thought-through and insightful, but two concerns: many essays use the language of postcolonial studies, making them heavy going for the layman; and second, there's a faint, dated air about quite a few pieces. Yes, Midnight’s Children did cast a gigantic – and well-deserved – shadow, but those that came after Rushdie have by now have emerged into their own light, with Vikram Chandra and Amitav Ghosh being merely two examples.

[Chaitra]

Spectacularly insightful, if you are able to immerse into it... Not a light read... Cant grasp the depth of the issues discussed over a casual read... However if you do manage to get yourself on the same wavelength as Amit Choudhary, its a deliciousy joyous read....
Try at your own risk :)