Note: this piece is a reflection on a book I enjoyed reading. Hope you find what I have to say about this book and on literature in general, engaging.
Amit Chaudhuri is, without any caveat, my favourite writer. Whenever I am struggling with putting something to language and am on the verge of giving up, convinced that language cannot handle the situation, I go back to Chaudhuri’s work to find evidence to the contrary. He can turn the most mundane detail into something lively. It might as well be something in the passing but it’s often enough to know that you are in the presence of a writer who is acutely aware of everything around him.
Calcutta is a book he has written about the city he loves. It reads more like a collection of essays with the city as the common theme running through all of them. The essays are not about the city per se but about what constitutes the Calcutta Chaudhuri experiences - people, places, politics, food, family, friends, history, literature, music and so on. There is no clear demarcation in the organizing principle of the essays when it comes to these themes, but they are invoked at will to serve the holiest of writing’s purposes - evoking pleasure.
This pleasure is often the pleasure of recognition. Chaudhuri’s writing works for me as a mirror that reflects aspects of myself and the world around I was aware of but had never seen taking a concrete form. I don’t mean it the way Saadat Hasan Manto meant it - forcing the society to look into the mirror to see how ugly it is and probably shock it into action. It’s more like catching a fleeting glimpse of your own image or the street’s while walking past a mirror shop.
Take this sentence for example taken from the description of a couple he saw in the flight to India -
She nudged her partner and invited his response frequently; he replied with the colloquial immediacy of a man who has an opinion on everything.
What is ‘colloquial immediacy’? An immediacy that results in nothing tangible? A useless non-serious immediacy? Why show the immediacy then? But this is what we all do - assume the role of the guide when someone is visiting our space; and as if to prove that we belong, respond immediately to questions asked about it. Regardless of whether we are supposed to know the answers or not. This happens to me quite a lot when I am visiting my hometown with my partner. I feel a strange anxiety when I don’t have answers to simple questions like - how far away are we from home or whether this road leads to the new Yamuna bridge? That Chaudhuri has captured this in a fleeting description of a couple is remarkable.
Consider this sentence in which he talks about the new phenomenon of the Indian Premier League (the book was published in 2013), and the newfangled concept of cheerleaders in cricket -
The cheerleaders were met with grave reproach by both cricket purists and common-or-garden puritans, and then - as is the case with so much in Indian public life - lazily accepted and secretly looked forward to.
How many things do we lazily accept and secretly look forward to? What is said about cheerleaders is true for almost everything that is considered indulgent or contemptuous by the Indian public morality. Also, notice how he effortlessly squeezes into a single sentence the fact that there are puritans of the garden variety and then there are the common ones.
Most of the time I found myself nodding in agreement with Chaudhuri’s opinions, but the nods were most vigorous when he opined about food. Take this for example -
‘Kormaisation’ is what this process, integral to Indian cuisine, might well be termed: a suffocation of individual ingredients in the interests of the sauce poured over it, the result of a dozen impossibly unlikely condiments brought to a simmer and then turned into this all-purpose national deluge.
For a long time I have been trying to come up with a term that captures the ridiculous ubiquity of the yellow-orange gravy that is supposed to be Indian food. I can finally conclude my search as I’ve found the term ‘all-purpose national deluge’.
In this book I found sentences that reveal, in condensed form, the perspective of the writer on concepts that normally require more elaboration. Take this sentence about marriage for example. It is about marriage but also not about it -
I knew marriages, in a strange bid for immortality, could be perilously terminated in this way; but employment?
Could you be more precise in the description of marriage? The word strange reveals what Chaudhuri thinks about it. And yet, the point he wants to convey is the unusual termination of employment.
Take this one about craftsmanship -
By craftsmanship I mean a quality of tactility, of ‘madness’. It comes from the instinct to shape and touch things, to impart an intimacy to materials.
Isn’t every act of creation nothing but the act of ‘imparting intimacy’ to whatever is being created; by the very virtue of having worked on it closely, having spent time obsessing about it?
These are concepts that can be explored independently but they feature in this book in specific contexts. Contexts related to Calcutta. The book is titled Calcutta after all.
In case you’re wondering if it is about Calcutta at all, let me assure you that there are enough quintessential Bengali cultural elements, some would call cliches, explored in the book. The usual suspects - Tagore, Park Street, CPM-TMC, bhadralok, Satyajit Ray, Durga Pujo, Ingabanga, colonial hangover, French windows and so on - are very much present in the book. One might even say that the book is made up of exploration of these elements.
This book was published in 2013 and I am sure a lot has changed since then. In one of his essays he describes how a friend of his, Samirda, after coming to know that Chaudhuri was flying to Europe wanted to know if he was flying to Europe of his (Samirda’s) imagination. Chaudhuri writes it as -
Now he wanted to know, rapt, whether it was that Europe I was flying to.
Notice the use of the word ‘rapt’. It was the first time I encountered this word without its companion ‘attention’. Why would you disturb the rhythm of a sentence if a single word is enough to convey the point?
By the time this gets published, I would have visited Kolkata for a friend’s wedding but unlike Samirda, I am aware that it would not be the Calcutta of Chaudhuri’s book. Ten years is a long time even for a resilient city like Kolkata to avoid morphing into something unfamiliar. But I am sure at least one statement made in this book about the city would still be true and strangely it came not from Chaudhuri -
‘I like this city’, the novelist Akhil Sharma shrugged and admitted to me on his second trip to it. ‘You feel that something happened here’.
This is how I felt when I was last there, this is how I will most likely feel this time.
For people who write on Substack, please consider recommending Mehfil if you enjoy reading the posts. Thank you.
Thank you for introducing me to Amit Chaudhuri and this lovely curation of his sentences. I'm visiting Calcutta towards the end of the month and look forward to finding at least snippets of Chaudhuri's imagination
"....to serve the holiest of writing’s purposes - evoking pleasure." Ah, loved this!
Very interesting insights on the book and the prose, Rahul. Hope you enjoy your Calcutta trip!