Amit Chaudhuri is perhaps the best contemporary example of a multi-gifted artist excelling in different fields. Novelist, essayist and musician, Amit the visual artist is being exhibited for the first time and recently showcased at Asia House.
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He has written seven novels, the latest of which is called Friend of My Youth. The work, like so many of his creations, has received much critical acclaim.
Amit has won several awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution in the Humanities in Literary Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
We have observed Amit Chaudhuri's remarkably consistent output of outstanding literature over the past 20 years so it is a privilege to write about him today.
About the Genesis of Amit Chaudhuri's Current Work as a Visual Artist. About the recent launch of one of his avatars at Asia House, Amit told us, “I have long been interested - more than ‘interested’, intellectually and artistically formed, maybe - by the visual arts and cinema. There was a time, when I was in my early to mid-twenties, when I seriously considered becoming a filmmaker. However, I doubt if I have any talent at all in painting; nor do I have any hubris about my skills as a photographer. Nevertheless, I have had ideas for art projects for years, ideas I have treated with diffidence because of my lack of talent - and, as importantly, of having any public definition as an artist - but which still don’t go away. I’m led to art because I’m a bricoleur - a person who likes reconfiguring inconsequential things - and a loiterer. The project that premiered briefly at Asia House, London, is called The Sweet Shop Owners of Calcutta. I began to notice at some point how extraordinary the pictures of the founders, some of them from the nineteenth century - that hung on the walls of the shops - how striking they were, as striking as the portraits of the great Bengali men of letters and scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who were the contemporaries of these owners. They embody a new age, sweet shop owner and great novelist alike. I wanted others to confront these portraits - their demeanour and their pictorial tones and historical moment, the way they continue to look upon us. I took the photos on two days in April on my iPhone.”
Amit Chaudhuri has several streams to his artistic work. Watching him at his musical performances, it is hard to believe that he is as gifted a writer as he is a musician. We can think of no other artist to compare him to in this respect. How does he nurture his twin talents of music and writing while maintaining a stable home life?
He says; “It is exhausting - physically as much as mentally. I owe much to my wife. I also owe a lot my late parents, and to a small circle of friends. My day is divided between music practice, which I have to keep up with as a sportsman has to keep with their sport, and different kinds of writing. The evening is reserved for TV.”
About the Clever Bengali Image- Fact or Myth?
It seems that many Bengalis are prodigiously clever and that a disproportionate amount achieve highly. They may be writers or from other disciplines. Amit Chaudhuri considers this idea.
“Are they really clever? I know they used to be, and that they still do well at exams. The traditional explanation for this, among Bengalis, was that they ate large quantities of fish. I think their creativity had to do with the fact that they are a relatively new race, the Bengalis. They had to make their own history.
”Success comes from consistency, and Amit Chaudhuri continues his disciplined schedule; writing whenever (he observes wryly) he's “not practising music or watching TV”. This, it appears, is one of the keys to the high standard of his creative output.
Long PedigreeLooking back on his writings from, say, 15 years ago, how does he feel about them? “15 years ago? That time flies. The 25th anniversary edition of my first novel came out last year with a new preface by Colm Toibin. I’m surprised I’m still around. It’s not my writing from 15 years ago that surprises me as much as the world of publishing and writing and reading today.”
