Amit Chaudhuri | My World: “In Indian music every moment is a moment of arrival”

‘I love listening to the world,’ writes Amit Chaudhuri in his recent book Finding the Raga. Amit Chaudhuri is not only an award-winning author of seven novels and Calcutta, his personal account of the city in which he was born, but he’s also a noted singer of Hindustani classical music. Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music charts his cautious journey ‘from air guitarist… to Indian classical vocalist’ and makes telling comparisons between the classical music of Europe and the subcontinent.

A track featured on the June issue’s covermount CD, suggested by Chaudhuri, is of his mother Bijoya Chaudhuri, a celebrated singer of Bengali songs, performing ‘Chirodin Kaharo Saman Nahi Jay’. The lyrics are by Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), a Bengali poet who composed over 4,000 songs. “For a time, Nazrul was second in popularity only to Tagore,” Chaudhuri explains. “Nazrul’s background was, in a sense, more traditional – at one point he was even a muezzin. His experiments in composition were extremely wide-ranging, even radically free. The meaning of the first line of this song, for instance – ‘no one’s life passes in the same way’ – is illuminated in each stanza by citing the vicissitudes of figures from Hindu mythology… Although a Muslim, he engages with Hindu culture with imagination and adoration.”

“In Indian music every moment is a moment of arrival, so it cannot be a journey from dark to light or light to dark”

Chaudhuri’s mother, Bijoya, who passed away in 2016, became best known as a singer of Rabindra sangeet (Tagore songs) – a genre of its own in Bengal. She “resisted the Tagore song industrialisation that gradually dominated Calcutta and deemed that singers had to specialise in one kind of popular song or another. My mother would have none of this,” Chaudhuri explains. “She brought her classicist temperament, her deep emotion and sense of balance, to every form she sang and remained true to the multiplicity of song and musical styles that characterised the culture that created her.”

His mother’s first recordings were made in 1965 and 1967, a year Chaudhuri describes as “a momentous year in popular music,” possibly referring to Sgt Pepper. We get talking about the common perception that Indian classical music is somehow unchanging and timeless, a misconception that he says is as commonplace in India as the West. “There’s a continuum of modernity all over the world,” he says. “If you look at the sunglasses and printed saris that women were wearing at that time – vibrant and psychedelic – they were going in a similar direction. I don’t hear anything psychedelic in my mother’s recordings, but there is something hypnotic and calm.”

Although his mother was a singer, a young Chaudhuri kept away from Indian music. “I’m a desultory, fitful kind of person and resist advice and education,” he says. “So I don’t think I’d have gone towards it if I’d been told it was important. I’d have probably gone in the opposite direction.”

Although born in Calcutta, Chaudhuri grew up in Bombay. And it was there that he encountered three artists that he credits with awakening his interest in Indian music. These are film composer SD Burman and singers Kishori Amonkar and Bhimsen Joshi. “Burman started out as a singer of modern Bengali songs… I was struck by the beauty and fluidity of his singing and creativity. And then I saw Amonkar on Sunday morning Marathi-language TV. A growing interest in classical music must have been the reason I began to watch that programme. I heard her singing and was mesmerised by the glides she was executing without any accompaniment. And then Joshi doing some modulations. I tried to sing them and it was very difficult. That’s when I decided I wanted to learn. So I plunged into that world.”

One of the striking aspects of his latest book is the contrast he makes between the classical music of the West and of the Indian subcontinent. He talks about listening to Karajan’s recordings of Beethoven symphonies that his father brought back from London. Clearly a piece like Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 is a journey, starting in one place and ending somewhere else. “Listening to those symphonies, I would begin to construct moods and stories in my head. And I was on a journey as a man might be in a film – a triumphal journey. But when I was listening to Indian music that didn’t happen at all – it wasn’t a human journey. I remember becoming engrossed in the detail of Indian music. Detail as a new moment of surprise. Detail as constant change. The detail that was approached in a particular way a minute ago is approached in a different way in the next minute. A particular note pattern has a disproportionate impact which you had no idea it could have. A raga is not like a journey in that kind of triumphant humanist sense. In Indian music every moment is a moment of arrival, so it cannot be a journey from dark to light or light to dark.”

As there’s a whole artistic genre of Indian ragamala paintings that are supposed to depict particular ragas, it is tempting to try and make the music pictorial. The Megh raga is associated with heavy clouds and rain; Malkauns is heroic; Marva suggests twilight and desire… but Chaudhuri insists they are not pictorial or descriptive. “I don’t see them as abstract, but as non-representational. The non-representational has a wide range of emotion which is still connected to worldliness. In representational art the world has to be represented, with figures and landscape. In non-representational art it’s not as if it has become abstract, but the colours have a worldliness about them which you hadn’t noticed before. I wouldn’t say a raga is abstract, but it’s worldly and non-representational. It is simply one of the forms you encounter in the world.”

However, one of Chaudhuri’s most intriguing notions concerns ragas and climate change. We’re chatting on Zoom from Kolkata, a city that has suffered terrible heatwaves in recent years and where the temperature is rising faster than the Indian average. He mentions Kalidasa’s most famous poem, Meghaduta, written in Sanskrit in the fourth or fifth century about a monsoon cloud carrying a message of love. And Malhar is a monsoon raga even reputed to be able to create rain, but Chaudhuri wonders, “when the monsoons don’t exist anymore, what will happen to this language? Could a Malhar be extrapolated to a future when the monsoon is no longer what we know it to be?” Something for Indian musicians of the future to grapple with.

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today