“Never Have We Privileged Success So Much”

A Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri

Illustration by Shyamli Singbal

I first met the author Amit Chaudhuri as an instructor when I attended the UEA India Creative Writing workshop in Kolkata towards the end of 2016. In addition to being a stellar and deeply knowledgeable source of inspiration, what I was often struck by was the way in which he managed to balance so many roles - as author, musician, essayist, poet, activist, teacher and more, he has achieved a great deal over the past few decades. We sat down virtually a few weeks ago, for a conversation about his process, craft and several other topics that is recorded below. Interviewer questions are in bold, and some responses have been edited slightly for clarity.

I was an admirer of your work even before we met at the workshop in 2016. One thing you said that stuck with me at that point was how you’d love a book made up of the perfect opening paragraphs and beginnings. 

 Did I actually say that?

I might be paraphrasing, but something along those lines.

It makes sense that I would talk about composing a book made up of beginnings. I actually ended up writing a piece on that in Granta, about the first sentence, which ended up being about the first paragraph. Ideally, I want all my paragraphs to be opening paragraphs because it’s the only time where everything is open ended and not tied down. I also wrote about this in Finding the Raga, my book on Hindustani classical music, because an inordinate amount of time in a khayal is given to this bit of exposition called aalap, which means prologue or introduction. The aalap is the heart of the khayal, so it’s as if the idea of exploring fresh beginnings is at the core of this aesthetic that inspires me.

What is your writing process? As someone who’s written for so long and been doing so many other things alongside it, what is your daily routine like? Do you write everyday or when ideas come to you?

I do have a daily routine when it comes to writing or thinking about writing, and one to do with practicing or thinking about music. I don’t always write, only once I have embarked upon a novel does it become an everyday thing. I don’t necessarily write fiction every day, but thinking about what to write, figuring out why I am doing this, what I do as an artist, which includes music, has taken up a lot of my time. Not only why I write, but why I write in this particular way. Why I am this particular kind of writer or musician, and to what extent chance or accident has played a role in where I have ended up in life. How much does it owe to intention? One has to consider these questions from time to time if only to understand the confusing, perplexing nature of life. You might end up writing or doing things as an artist which are ‘out of sync’ or which perplex others, but thinking about why I do these things or work on them is also a big part of my process.

As someone for whom music plays such a big role alongside writing, and who has written so much about Hindustani music, how do you see the link between the two? Were they always interconnected or are they separate pursuits which you find connections in between later?

I didn’t start off practicing music or writing with any clear sense of connection, but in the last ten years I think I’ve grown to understand that there is a connection between the two. I’m drawn to sound as a human being – it may not be musical sound, but sound in itself is significant, as a musician and a writer. I’m also drawn to deferral, which is where the aesthetics of beginnings comes in again. You aren’t concerned about the ending or the ‘meat of the story’, the core of a narrative. You are instead expanding through deferral – this is what I’m drawn to as a writer and a musician. One of the things that drew me to Hindustani classical music is its investment in this aesthetic of expanding through deferral. In fact, deferral is creativity in the khayal. I think this is also true of my writing. If you come to the point right away, there is no imagination involved, no creativity involved. It is in not coming to the point or finding your way there that creativity is at play.

Speaking of imagination and creativity – I’ve read perhaps three or four of your books, and it seems to me, particularly in Friend of My Youth and Odysseus Abroad, that there is a lot of your life and your memory that comes into your fiction. Is that something you approach intentionally? Do you remember things and intend to record them, or does it happen the other way round? How much do you plan a project or novel and how much do you go with the flow and imagination?

Something happens, a point comes after which a particular memory or experience of living becomes indistinguishable from writing. So then, there is no clear demarcation between remembering and living, writing and living.

With Odysseus Abroad, that happened when my uncle checked out this charcoal sketch I’d bought by F.N. Souza. I bought it because I was a great admirer of Souza, and my uncle said ‘why did you spend fifty five thousand rupees on this? You might as well have given me fifty five thousand rupees for farting!’ Then he made further remarks about the sketch and went off, and it occurred to me that the sketch, because it was a self-portrait, also had a resemblance to my uncle, because my uncle looked quite a lot like Souza. Souza had titled the sketch ‘Ulysses’, and it suddenly seemed to me that my uncle was an Odysseus type figure. And then it seemed to me, when I used to go in the eighties to visit him in his bedsit, quite reluctantly, because he was my only relative in London, how I was like Telemachus making that journey. When these co-ordinates began to gather and connect with each other, memory became no different from writing. It wasn’t as if I had decided to write about my uncle or even to cast him as Odysseus, but certain co-ordinates came together.

 Then I was deciding how to write it, whether as an essay about some of these connections or take a cue from Joyce, in terms of juxtaposing Dublin and the Odyssey, translating one to the other. I thought, should I do this? But then, how do I start? Where is the start of the Odyssey in this particular episode in my life? And then I remembered that where I was living between 1983 and 1986, on Warren Street, I had noisy, intolerable neighbours. Maybe they thought I was intolerable, but they were for me very unpredictable and intolerable. And then I thought of them as the suitors, in the Odyssey, who are creating so much trouble for Penelope and Telemachus by settling in Odysseus’ house. Once these co-ordinates and various other things came together in my mind, I began to feel I’d experienced a part of the Odyssey as written by Homer within this episode of life. So then it became a question of translating, of discovering and feeling that memory, writing and life were not so different from each other. You are no longer writing about life, but just writing up the text and these elements become difficult to distinguish.

That’s a very interesting approach. Speaking of the Souza sketch and money being tied to art,  I remember at the workshop, we’d spoken towards the end about the financial viability of being just a poet or novelist or essayist. You’d said something like ‘if you have the illusion that a book will turn you into some kind of literary rockstar, get rid of it immediately’. Do you still believe that? What do you think has changed over the course of your career in terms of ease of publishing, the work that is popular and financial viability for people starting their careers now?

When I began to write A Strange and Sublime Address, it was a slightly different world to when I finally published the book in 1991. That was a year and a half after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the moment of economic deregulation in India. Leave alone the fact that things have changed so much in the last thirty odd years. The beginnings of my career as a published writer happened at a moment of extraordinary change which is still with us, which shapes the way in which we think of life, writing, success and various other things.

 There was a degree of drift allowed in earlier times, before the Berlin wall collapsed, which then gradually began to disappear under the stranglehold of capital and our aspirations and the new elites. Never have we privileged success so much in the history of human beings. Never have we been so hostile to the idea that failure might be a kind of freedom. If I indeed said ‘don’t think it’s easy to be a rockstar writer’, that was a reality check but also, I really believe, that it’s not our business to want to be rockstars. Our business is to stay with the work. We have forgotten, I think, about how difficult it is to be any kind of artist. It’s a difficult path, and not a path to do with social acceptance or success. If you want social acceptance, of which celebrity is the most banal and extreme version, then do something else. But we are writers not only because we want to write but because we love writing itself, not just our own work. Everything we have encountered in the written word and imagination, we give nearly undue importance to it, and that’s what makes it a difficult path. We’ve forgotten that, and have to reeducate ourselves in terms of how to conceive of the life of the writer.

 I think it was Frank Zappa who said when Reagan came to power that “music has entered a darker age than has ever existed before”. And soon this would be true for writing too. The degree to which corporates control not just music and artists but also our own imaginations is something we’d never have imagined thirty or forty years ago. Capitalism consolidated itself, after Reagan and Thatcher arrived, and we still feel the effects of that. We are in a very dark age, as novelists, as human beings, as Indians. Or people of any nationality, more or less. We are living in a dark time of what it means to be part of a nation. So that coupled with the fact that if you don’t value what you do for its own sake, you begin to lack courage, and that courage has political implications as well.

So you’ve spoken of the political and economic changes of this era, but another thing that has drastically changed for writers today is technology. Has technology impacted your writing practice or mindspace? A lot of young writers these days, particularly on social media, have to immediately capture attention, which goes against an aesthetic of deferral. Does that affect you in any way? Is it something you think about or see in your students?

Well, there are a few questions in there. I continue to write longhand for the most part, especially when I write fiction. My writing has evolved in that it’s become more self-reflexive, that I am more aware of the peculiar burden but also the peculiar pleasure of what I’m doing. I resolve not to think about whether or not it makes sense to others.

As far as short attention spans are concerned, I always had a short attention span! I was always easily distracted on the one hand, but on the other, there are certain things I can take a lot of and contemplate for a long time. So it depends what kind of attention we’re talking about. On one level, one has deep attention. On another level, I always wanted to be free of the pressure towards a domination of attention.  I don’t know if short attention span makes any difference to the kind of ethos we live in today. The preponderance of attention is stronger than ever. Maybe it all comes in small soundbytes, but the attention is always engaged, it’s never allowed to go into this deeper space. One short bit of attendance after another, we are never on holiday. That is dangerous.

I wouldn’t have said this twenty years ago, but it feels to me like we are in a position of endangering or harming ourselves with the arrival of the smartphone, without being very clear about why we’re doing this. I suppose self-damage is one of those mysterious human traits. The way it links us to a variety of things including social media platforms has led to this preponderance of authoritarian attention. Not always from something outside us, but also inside us. We spend a lot of our time judging more than we ever did before. This takes up more of our time than ever in my living memory. But it’s one thing to be aware of the workings of these things and another to know where it will lead.

Alongside technology, I think another thing that has now gained prominence is the importance of knowing a reader or target audience. As someone who has lived and taught in various places, and someone whose work is often set in different cities, do you think about Indian or international audiences? Do you see a difference in writing for different groups of people and do you think about this while developing your work?

No, I don’t think about the audience at all. Not in an arrogant way, it’s not as if I only think of the piece of writing or my own views, but I know that both me and the writing are situated in history, in my interpretation of some bit of the cultural fabric I have a connection with, which could even refer to history or the past. Sometimes things that are in the past can seem more alive than what is around you at the moment. Those are the contexts that I try to be aware of, certainly not the audience.

One is always negotiating consciousness while writing, and the crassest form of consciousness is one that is only concerned with audience. Not in any conscious sense do you want to be aware of that. Having said that, there must be many audiences within India itself. Readership within other languages like Oriya or Bengali or Marathi will probably be different and emerges from a different history than the Anglophone readership in India, which feels very jaded and instrumental, for whom English is a kind of social accomplishment or aspirational tool, or without always being aware of it, as a tool for neocolonial custodians who have decision making power. Similar problems have beset the United Kingdom or particularly America, but there are still vestiges of other sensibilities and other histories within those contexts, in terms of how they engage with the literary.

 There is a problem here in India with even producing critical thought which is alive. Everybody is so busy playing it safe and trying to survive, which is the primary preoccupation for most people because we live in unprecedently precarious times. All we want to do is survive, so we play it safe, which means critical thought doesn’t exist in any persuasive way. I think this is a huge problem in India.

When you say everybody is trying to survive and has an instrumental approach to the literary, do you see this as a problem that’s increased or was it always that way?

No, I don’t think it was always that way. Indians, like other people across the world, had far more time for daydreaming. Reading and writing had connections with that, but I think our daydreaming capacities have either disappeared or the time we allow ourselves for vacancy is no longer there. But I don’t think it was always like that, not at all. At the same time, I’m very aware of the precarity of being a writer today, which prevents the time for daydreaming.

Over the course of the last many years, I’ve come across young people who are far more unfettered, imaginatively, far more poetic than say the people teaching them or the academic or publishing environment. It’s happened many times over the past twenty years, and that would give me hope.  But then they’d always disappear into that particular establishment, because of the compulsion to survive. They’d become appropriated or want to be appropriated by that environment, the mantra of success, how to go about it, the neocolonial pieties which are expressed in social media and even sometimes in academia, which these students didn’t seem to have anything to do with at their most promising. But they want to get appropriated for reasons of survival.

And because this happens over a generation, there’s been no pushback against the way things are, from the people we want it to come from – the young. There’s just been a deepening and extension of the same sort of rhetoric around this worship of success, this pressure to play it safe and not jeopardise any of your own projects.

That sort of ties back to what you said earlier about languages or traditions – do you think this is a reason that there is so much more recognition and literary acclaim and even success for fiction in translation or books that seem to come from outside ‘the establishment’. Do you see this as related and do you think anything can change this?

Those outsider kind of phenomena are often similarly appropriated or absorbed by this system. One would need to undertake the difficult business of making one’s values on one’s own terms, when there is less and less leeway to do that. It would take great courage, but as of now that courage is lacking in everybody. We hear a lot of judgment, but no real critique or depth.

 There’s an extraordinary tolerance of besur singing, or a tonality that’s not as appealing as it could be. One should be able to distinguish between a tone that is rich in beauty, that has some sensuous or spiritual immediacy. Some people had this ability to distinguish that kind of voice from those who didn’t have it, which is a gift. It’s arguably even more important than learning classical music or the technicalities. But that is hardly at play any more.

The same goes for writing, for a particular sentence or particular paragraph or writer. That happens when you encounter something of yourself on the page, it doesn’t matter who’s orchestrating the availability of books. But now that encounter has become so mediated that those moments of direct contact are rarer and when they occur, we don’t even know that this particular voice or thing is beautiful. We live in a culture where we are saying yes to everything; not in a way that’s full of wonder but in a way that is afraid to stick our neck out or unable to identify the truly beautiful or valuable because there is too much. And I don’t see it changing because of these larger social and political factors. I’m sorry, I’m sounding pessimistic but you asked.

Some might say pessimistic, others might say honest. So, a last couple of things before wrapping up. I think most of the interview has been this, but to ask it more directly. What advice do you have for writers, particularly young ones, who want to push back against the status quo and create lasting work?

They have to read a lot, to be exposed to a great deal of art or seek it out. And of course they have to be courageous. But also, to decry cliches and false optimism and false praise. We’re surrounded by things like that – this book changed my life, this is the greatest book ever. To decry ways of speaking that hurt us in the long term.  

 This might sound very cruel, but they have to stop thinking about themselves. It’s your love of things, your love of writing or love of music, that is the important thing. Not the fact that it’s you who wants to write or do music. You have to see that as the most important thing before thinking of your life in terms of what it will get you or how to sell. To somehow hold on to that original love in the current environment.

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Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of eight novels, three books of poems, and four nonfiction books, as well as an editor of several other works. His writing has been won several awards and honours, including the Betty Trask Award, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sahitya Akademi Award, James Tait Memorial Prize and many others. 

He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021. Since 2020, he has been at Ashoka University as Professor of Creative Writing and is also the Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical at Ashoka University.

Abhay Puri is a writer and the founder and editor of Hammock Magazine.