Showing all 6 books
Literary Activism revisits and interrogates, and looks to renew, the force of the literary. It's a movement that emerges from a radically altered landscape for both publishing and academia, where what Amit Chaudhuri calls ‘market activism’ has effected changes – on language, on the measuring of value, on the concept of influence – in ways we struggle to recognise. Encompassing the perspectives of the writer, critic, translator, academic, ...
He saw his uncle once or twice a week. They got on each other’s nerves, but had grown fond of the frisson. He was Ananda’s sole friend in London-and Ananda his. ‘Friend’ was right; because his uncle was capable of being neither uncle, nor father, nor brother. Ananda’s uncle, Rangamama, is an eccentric bachelor who has taken early retirement and lives off his pension in a squalid bedsit in Belsize Park. His habits are angular-he ...
This is a compilation of six essays and a poem by novelist Amit Chaudhuri--written as an urgent response to what he feels is an ongoing state of emergency-followed by a conversation which takes up and further develops the same issues and concerns. 'Small Orange Flags' was written in early 1993 when he came back to India from Oxford, and encountered a changed world post the Babri Masjid demolition. In it lie the seeds of the idea for his novel Freedom Song. ...
In St Cyril Road and Other Poems, his first collection of verse, Amit Chaudhuri brings together many of the poems he has written over the last two decades. The early poems are permeated with a sense of place and an understated but powerful belief in the capacity of language to renovate our perceptions of the everyday—qualities we have now come to associate with Chaudhuri’s fiction. The later poems might be said to be about the heterogeneity and ...
Amit Chaudhuri’s stories range across the astonishing face of the modern Indian subcontinent. From a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teenaged poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from singing teachers to housewives to white-collar businessmen, Chaudhuri deftly explores the juxtaposition of the new and old worlds in his native India. Here are stories as sweet and humane as they are incisive and revealing.