Listening to the world: Amit Chaudhuri’s book argues that classical Hindustani music is modernist
Poet and writer Ashok Vajpeyi’s reads ‘Finding the Raga’. Amit Chaudhuri performing in 2020.
The new book of prose by the well-known fiction writer Amit Chaudhuri is described by him as “a narrative but not a story, a series of opening paragraphs, where life is about to happen”. It has autobiographical details including those of initiation into music, and Hindustani classical music, insights into many aspects and history of that music, a narrative of its teachers as Amit found and learnt from them.
Chaudhuri discovers that “The classic occupies a strange place in any culture hovering between authority and illegitimacy receiving both reverence and indifference. In India, the reasons for its questionable status have a complex history.” Not sharing the common assumption about the classical, Chaudhuri finds “that the remarkable creative periods don’t necessari