Amit Chaudhuri: A quick, short sojourn of self-discovery through Berlin

Storyteller, teacher, musician and heritage crusader Amit Chaudhuri’s new short novel explores a professor’s tryst with Berlin

By the end of this month, the much-awarded Indian author and musician Amit Chaudhuri may have bagged yet another prize. His 2021 book, Finding The Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, is one of the four shortlisted books for the £10,000 James Tait Black prize awarded by the University of Edinburgh in the biography category.

On the eve of the release of his next book — a short novel titled Sojourn, published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton and due for formal release on September 12—Chaudhuri shared in an interview with Deccan Herald that he did not lay a great store by prizes even though their importance in the life of a book and its author could not be denied.

When asked about the national hysteria around Geetanjali Shree’s book (Ret Samadhi / Tomb of Sand) winning the International Booker Prize a few months back, he said: “I don’t think prizes can do very much. Especially the way the Booker Prize is positioned, it doesn’t actually change the culture of thought around literature. At a particular time of the year, the long list will appear, and then the shortlist and the whole book promotion frenzy will begin. A particular book will enter the consciousness for a while until the next book comes along. What’s been clear is that the prizes going to particular authors from particular places doesn’t necessarily mean or hasn’t at all meant that the literatures of those places become more present to readers or are more deeply engaged with by readers.”

The prolific author, now 60, became widely known with his very first book, A Strange and Sublime Address, published in 1991. He enthrals as a music performer, too, as he is a trained Hindustani classical musician. He is currently a Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

Sojourn, his latest, is a racy read, following the life of an unnamed Indian who recently arrived in Berlin as a visiting professor. The book traces the protagonist’s discovery of the city, which runs parallel to his discovery of himself. It is peppered with dry humour at places least expected by the reader. Sample: ‘Using that toilet, my first thought was, ‘Oe must have sat here.’ He couldn’t have escaped it. And I felt a kind of empathy and embarrassment thinking of Kenzaburo Oe in this bathroom...’

Chaudhuri conceded that the protagonist’s story did have shades of his own life.

He said, “Partly, it does come out of my own experience of Berlin. At around the same time, the protagonist in the book is in Berlin, 2005-06, I went to Berlin in 2005 autumn as a visiting professor at the Freie University. My experience of Berlin and a strange sense of kinship I felt with it, a strange feeling of homecoming as I began to explore the city and especially certain parts of the city in east Berlin, I found both moving and puzzling. All of that made me want to come back to it in terms of writing a work of imagination or fiction about it.”

He added that most other details were invented though the Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe may have been the first awardee of the fellowship that took Chaudhuri to Berlin in 2005.

Besides telling stories and making music, Chaudhuri also spearheads the heritage initiative, Calcutta Architectural Legacies (CAL), which was born out of his 2015 article in The Guardian and is aimed at preventing the destruction of the distinctive architectural legacy of Calcutta. Among others, CAL counts Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and artist Chittrovanu Mazumdar as mentors.

“We have definitely not achieved all that we wanted to. The main goal is to create a consciousness that neighbourhoods and precincts are of great historic significance, and not just individual houses that look like monuments or are inhabited by famous people. What we have succeeded in doing is to file a PIL in August 2019, which resulted in an interim court order preventing the downgrading of listed buildings, which was one of the main reasons why the listed buildings in Calcutta were being destroyed and developed,” shared Chaudhuri.

A low-profile but powerful voice in all the spheres of the universe that he traverses, Chaudhuri’s initiative may yet succeed in preserving real Calcutta with as much enigma and sublimity as the city of his books.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist, editor and arts consultant. She blogs at www.archanakhareghose.com)