In book stores, it is quite probable that you might find “Midnight’s Children” seating next to“Freedom Song” under the shelf, Indian Fiction. If these two starkly different objects were to talk to each other, I fancy an antagonism. The former revealed Salman Rushdie’s magical genius putting him in the company of a Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez, while the latter is Amit Chaudhuri’s most defining work. Both these writers however not only have differences in styles and sensibilities, but hold dissimilar views as to the use of the ‘English’ language in describing India, its Indianness – the term holding a certain amount of irony for Chaudhuri.
Chaudhuri’s fiction also does not showcase an overt attempt for ‘discussions on’ and ‘concerns about’ nations, ethnography, science and technology - that distinction would go to Amitav Ghosh.
In terms of prose quality and its inherent beauty, he is often compared to Vikram Seth; both of them seem to have a musical quality in their prose, almost poetry in prose.
Of the Indian writers, writing in English staying in India (Chaudhuri is now settled in Kolkata), he shares with Geetha Hariharan, the absence of any great resolutions taken by characters throughout the novel as also in the palpable lack of any great apocalyptic or climactic endings. The differences between the two do exist, but the one of greater significance would be that Chaudhuri believes even more in the “act of understating”, there is a conscious effort on his part for creating a lack of dramatic moments in his novels.
Chaudhuri found the address of his first novel “A Strange and Sublime Address” to be a house in Calcutta (most of his fiction has been on the city, three novels and a collection of short stories,barring ‘Afternoon Raga’ which was on the life of an Oxford student), its setting partly inspired by Sir V.S Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas”, where a school boy from Bombay, Sandeep, is visiting his relatives and here itself Chaudhuri through his very young protagonist, who also wants to be a writer someday, lays down the defining point of story-telling - “The 'real' story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.” The story will be about deviations and digressions, and so it was, following which Chaudhuri has with great linguistic preciseness, immense discipline, poetic subtlety, and an even greater courage in one novel after another demonstrated this obsession with digressions, echoing perhaps Italo Calvino’s assertion “Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.” As far as my reading of Chaudhuri is concerned, he hasn’t uptil now, till his last fiction “A New World” ‘denied’ it.
Lets take up the story of “Freedom Song” – an elderly couple in their sixties Khuku and her husband Shib, Khuku’s younger brother Bhola’s family members especially his wife whom we know as Bhaskar’s mother, and Khuku’s childhood friend from Sylhet, Mini, make up the main cast. What happens over a wintry month following the Babri Masjid demolition, in Calcutta – Khuku and Mini spend a few days together in Khuku’s house which are a holiday for Mini who is a school teacher; Bhola’s household is planning to marry off their son Bhaskar. Ending notes – Bhaskar does get married and prepares to go to Darjeeling with his wife for a honeymoon, Mini resumes teaching and Khuku lying in bed thinks of golden old days, and yet “Freedom Song” has so much life to offer.
Is there any great drama – well there certainly were chances created but – Mini’s arthritis pain could have gone worse, could have made her bed-ridden, but after the vacation she is walking again with that usual pain and struggle. In the arranged marriage-setting scenario, Bhaskar could have been smitten by a girl and would have left his home for that girl, he infact does have some feelings for a particular girl but the girl’s mother feels a bit averse about Bhaskar’s socialistic leanings, his commitments for the party and so Bhaskar does not get the girl of his first choice, he is sad only for a day and relents as regards choosing the second one. In the wake of Bombay riots following the demolition, one could have expected a heated discussion between Khuku and Suleiman, Khuku’s tabla accompanist, but there is only a blush of shyness and embarrassment.
Authors are intuitive beings, they love to gamble. In Franz Kafka’s stories there is an obsession with the pursuit of a greater thing, the story mirroring life seems to be a ‘process’ of finally realizing something, the digressions there point to obstacles in addition to problems of communication. In Chaudhuri’s elliptical most befittingly realized prose in “Freedom Song” the digressions serve as distanced observation. There is an obsession here too, if Kafka’s gamble is to bank on a possibility to achieve the end, Chaudhuri’s is to observe and describe “lived experience” of unfolding lives.
In ‘Freedom Song’ he has worked with a greater number of characters than “A Strange and Sublime Address” or “A New World” bringing with it a sense of chaos and delineating the layers of middle class existence. The latter two have a tendency of being pushed into describing a more sheltered existence – a house or an apartment flat.
Sometimes characters move and as they move an evening in a locality gets described, as they get up from their bed a morning Azaan is interpreted. While peeping into the lives of his characters,Chaudhuri mentions musical maestros Tagore and Nazrul littered here and there are their lyrical compositions, adda and street theatre, saris and colors, the experience of living in cramped flats and servants, streets and the state of public sector undertakings, their drawing-room conversations hinting at soft-Hindutva feelings, dust on leaves and birds humming, critics wontedly point to the realism of Joyce’s Dubliners.
If there is a more taut plot in “A New World”, Freedom Song had bargained for poetic trajectories, the characters drifting in thought. As a reader, one becomes aware of the necessity for reminiscences similar to a novel like “Mrs. Dalloway” but not really in the technique of “streams of consciousness”. Plumbing into the lives of his characters in a very unobtrusive way, almost gliding, Chaudhuri tries to connect the disparate stories together and along with his lively evocations of feelings and places serves to stitch together a story of ‘the city’ and ‘the coming of old age’. It is difficult to map a few lines towards the end of a novel with surfacing of ideas, but I will leave you with them to perhaps gain an understanding of Chaudhuri’s concerns.
“A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy. Sometimes there seems no reason, except a slight sense of boredom, hint of life’s emptiness, a memory of familiarity and a promise of pleasure….she’d come to this city with some trepidation and uncertainty to make her home here in old age. The young leave this city if they can; the old it seems, return to it; and this had been the incentive for coming here – the possibility of experiencing in ripe old age, the buoyancy of visiting known houses through this roads, of watching the old apparently arrest and embrace time as children and grandchildren grow taller and older surprising one.” (pg 197-198)
Book referred here is Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, PICADOR, 1998.
