(Outlook Magazine, 25 August 2008)
REVIEW:
And So The Qawwali Meets The Meera Bhajan
Don't be distracted by his novelist reputation; Amit Chaudhuri proves to be an incisive cultural critic
by Alok Rai
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CLEARING A SPACE REFLECTIONS ON LITERATURE, CULTURE AND INDIA
by Amit Chaudhuri
Black Kite
Pages: 336; Rs. 395
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Amit Chaudhuri is a fine novelist. This contributes an occasional, faintly illegitimate frisson to the weighty matters that he is dealing with in this book. As in this observation about the Birla Mandir in Calcutta: "I have never really cared for the Birla temple, for its security guards who hover not very far from you once you enter, its marble floor and enormous chandelier, its expansive air of a lobby in a four-star hotel, its spotless, garish, unimpeachable idols.
" That "four-star", particularly, is very finely judged. However, it would be a pity if the novelist’s reputation were to distract attention from the fact that he is an insightful cultural critic. I must confess to a twinge of disappointment when I learnt that Chaudhuri was employed in distant Norwich. Chaudhuri’s title seems to imply that there is some kind of jungle of controversy, some intrusive undergrowth of argument about these matters in our India. In fact, there is a resounding silence. Gossip abounds—and pretty young things—but there is hardly any space in our public world for the kind of detailed essays, published in sundry heavy-duty Western periodicals, in which Chaudhuri has developed his argument.
Chaudhuri bemoans the neglect of a secularism that is an experiencing of the modern world through shared cultural artefacts.
So perhaps one should be grateful that the argument is there at all.
The argument? The remarkable thing is that there is an argument, because of course this book is an assemblage of pieces that were written at different times, for different audiences. Further, Chaudhuri
is fighting on several fronts at the same time—he is an Indian writer in English who must not only overcome "nationalist" suspicion, but must also combat "postcolonial" orthodoxy, wherein particular histories of cultural creation are lost in a fog of jargon.
Then again, Chaudhuri has important things to say about the manner in which the Indian debate on secularism has been dominated by social scientists and constitutional experts. This has led to a neglect of the process of creating a secular modern culture—at least in Bengal! Thus, secularism is accommodated not only in the relatively sterile environs of the Constitution, it also finds a place in language, in image and metaphor, in ways of feeling, in experiencing the modern world—through shared cultural artefacts. Culture makes the Meera bhajan and the qawwali available to secular folk, who share some of the emotions, but not the framework of belief, whether in Krishna or the One and Only.
This secularism, crucially, has room within it for the "spiritual" hungers—the existential bewilderment, the unassuaged longing for something beyond the prison of the self—that, far from being addressed, are unwelcome in official secularism. Despite all the constitutional bulwarks, this is a significant default. Because that unassuaged longing finds a home, of sorts, in the reinvented "religions" with which we are beset. (That "four-star" lobby is an important cultural symbol.) This is why it is a cruel twist of fate that these reinvented "religions" masquerade as culture and even, courtesy their Lordships, as "ways of life". This is Chaudhuri: "...the domain of culture, unlike the domain of religion, belongs to the modern in a way that doesn’t presume or demand allegiance or belief. Surely the principal project of Hindutva is to destroy this domain of culture that was created in modernity."
Of course this process did not take place uniformly over a country as diverse as India. Thus, in the crucial Hindi region, the creation of a modern culture was inevitably inflected by the cultural politics of the invention of modern Hindi itself—politics that translated, all too fluently, into emergent communalism. But that is not, by any means, the whole story, even of modern Hindi. I have little doubt that there are similar processes happening elsewhere on the cusp of our strangely troubled modernity.And while we are all destined to suffer the consequences of these oddly aborted and distorted processes, we are not free to call them to mind, to think of how we came to be in this crowded, desolate place.
The Indian writer in English, particularly in this age of globalisation, is a suspect hybrid, often a performer, sometimes merely a puppet. Chaudhuri is neither. He belongs with us, thinks with us. Even though he works in East Anglia.
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