The new book of prose by the well-known fiction writer Amit Chaudhuri is described by him as “a narrative but not a story, a series of open...
The new book of prose by the well-known fiction writer Amit Chaudhuri is described by him as “a narrative but not a story, a series of opening paragraphs, where life is about to happen”. It has autobiographical details including those of initiation into music, and Hindustani classical music, insights into many aspects and history of that music, a narrative of its teachers as Amit found and learnt from them.
Chaudhuri discovers that “The classic occupies a strange place in any culture hovering between authority and illegitimacy receiving both reverence and indifference. In India, the reasons for its questionable status have a complex history.” Not sharing the common assumption about the classical, Chaudhuri finds “that the remarkable creative periods don’t necessarily belong to the remote past”
Recalling Gertrude Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose”, Chaudhuri asserts that a raga is a raga and chooses to describe it negatively ie, it is not a composition, not a mode, not a scale, not a sum total of its notes – not a self-enclosed composition, it’s an unfolding rather than a representation. He invokes Bharat of the Natyashastra to say that “music is a form of listening to the world”.
Further on, Chaudhuri states that “A raga...
