“This extraordinary and wide-ranging collection, through a series of highly-focussed aperçus, puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern literature: 'modernism' and 'post-modernity', for instance; and this from the standpoint of an insightful observer who has moved between more than one Indian and several Euro-American vantage points. The book offers among other things a fascinating insight into the specificity of certain Indian itineraries within the multiple modernities we inhabit today; including that of a largely unrecognized 'secular spirituality'. This and much else make this book a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions.”—Charles Taylor, McGill University
“Amit Chaudhuri's collected essays and reviews constitute an intellectual autobiography of the first importance.”—Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor of English at NYU
“Amit Chaudhuri's career as a novelist has proceeded in tandem with an ongoing engagement as a robust critic and thinker and musician. In these essays breadth of knowledge and the fluency of thought are held in perfect balance. Clearing a Space is a compendious, quietly passionate, rigorous and unfailingly eloquent collection.”—Geoff Dyer
“In this thought-provoking and compelling set of essays Amit Chaudhuri teases out the implications of polarities that may seem fixed and suggests new ways of exploring the narratives of Indian modernity. He asks hard questions of himself as well as others, and he engages us as readers with the warmth and acuity of his observations across a wonderful range of writing.”—Gillian Beer
“The essays of Amit Chaudhuri are really a wonderful key to the understanding of the vitality and specificity of Indian modernity . . . a fascinating contribution to the understanding of this great civilization and its modern transformations. They are worth the serious attention of scholars in the social sciences as well as the humanities.”—Shmuel Eisenstadt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The essays assembled in Clearing a Space, written over the last fifteen years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The writer treats himself as a specimen for an exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to the West. Personal memoir gives readers a glance into a nation’s history; his relationship to the West provides insight into India’s national relationship to the West; and his struggle to define ‘Indianness’ for himself becomes a paradigm of searching for Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which the author has become known, Amit Chaudhuri writes anecdotally in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture; travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta, and Berlin; empire and nationalism; Indian and Western cinema, music, art, and literature; politics; race; cosmopolitanism; urban landscapes; Hollywood and Bollywood; Anglophone India; internationalism; globalization; the Indian English tradition that pre-dates Rushdie; post-colonialism; and much more.
Amit Chaudhuri was one of the London Observer’s Twenty-One Writers for the Millennium. His criticism and fiction have appeared regularly in most of the major journals in the world, and he contributes these days mainly to the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and Granta. His criticism, essays, and journalism have also appeared in The New Republic, the Guardian, The Observer, the Spectator, and The New Yorker.
He has written four novels. The first, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won the first prize in the Society of Authors’ Betty Trask Awards for a first novel and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. The second, Afternoon Raag (1993), won the Society of Authors’ Encore Prize. Both books were shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. All three of his novels were published in a single omnibus volume, Freedom Song: Three Novels, by Knopf in America in 1999. This omnibus volume was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an Independent bestseller in America, and was one of the New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember, 2000. His fourth novel, A New World, won the Sahitya Akademi award 2002, India’s highest literary honor for a single book.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On Clearing a Space
Part One: Towards a Poetics of the Indian Modern
Poles of Recovery
In the Waiting-Room of History: On Provincializing Europe
The Flute of Modernity: Tagore and the Middle Class
The East as a Career: On ‘Strangeness’ in Indian Writing
Argufying: on Amartya Sen and the Deferral of an Indian Modernity
This is Not Music: The Emergence of the Domain of ‘Culture’
‘Huge Baggy Monster’: Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel after Rushdie
Two Giant Brothers: Tagore’s Revisionist ‘Orient’
Travels in the Subculture of Modernity
Thoughts in a Temple: Hinduism in the Free Market
On the Nature of Indian Gothic: The Imagination of Ashis Nandy
‘Hollywood aur Bollywood’
The View from Malabar Hill
Stories of Domicile
Notes on the Novel after Globalization
Anti-Fusion
Part Two: Alternative Traditions, Alternative Readings
Arun Kolatkar and the Tradition of Loitering
Learning to Write: V. S. Naipaul, Vernacular Artist
A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter: On R.K. Narayan
‘A Feather! A Very Feather upon the Face!’: On Kipling
Returning to Earth: The Poetry of Jibanananda Das
Women in Love as Post-Human Essay
Champion of Hide and Seek: Raj Kamal Jha’s Surrealism
Midnight at Marble Arch: On The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Beyond ‘Confidence’: Rushdie and the Creation Myth of Indian English Writing
Notes
Index
