The Careful Use of Compliments

In On Tagore,Reading the Poet Today,(Penguin) a collection of essays,Chaudhuri negotiates the different facets that made Tagore the icon he is,distilling the poet from his more public persona of a romantic and a national icon,alongside Gandhi and Nehru. It also marks his own engagement with Tagore,first as an antagonist,and then,as an admirer of his modernism,so unique from contemporary poets of the 20 th century,like his favourite,Eliot. “He had a distinctive public personality that reacted to history and events,like his refusal to be knighted following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre,and a secret self which explored the nuances of the language,lending it both a delicacy and a preternatural openness,” says Chaudhuri,50.

The essays,written between 1998 and 2001,show Chaudhuri’s predilection with a form that is not necessarily fiction. “I like to move between genres,go beyond the novelistic conventions of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. I enjoy a certain degree of unpredictability while writing,” he says. His next is an extensive work of non-fiction on the city of Kolkata. Chaudhuri,who grew up primarily in Mumbai before moving to England,returned to Calcutta,in 1999. He shares a strange relationship with the city,which is both home and alien,familiar and unknown and the backdrop of almost all his novels. “I don’t belong to the city,now that I live here. I felt more at home when I was away. Besides,the Kolkata in my imagination,of the Sixties and Seventies,does not exist anymore,” he says. His works,therefore,have the objectivity of an outsider. “I don’t have very many friends here because I didn’t grow up in the city and it’s difficult to make friends after a point. Most of the friendships in the city are anecdotal,dating back to school,college and common acquaintances. I have no access to that world,and no inclination to be a part of it,but that does not mean I am not fascinated by it,” he says.

His days,when not travelling,are divided between writing and music; Chaudhuri has trained in the north Indian classical tradition. Rabindra Sangeet meets Joni Mitchell and Kishori Amonkar punctuates Pandit Bhismadev Chatterjee and Bee Gees during these music sessions. Preparations are on for an audio-visual theatrical production this autumn in UK,to present A Moment of Mishearing — an exploration of musical traditions and how they run into each other. “I was singing raag Todi one day and I thought I heard bits of Eric Clapton’s Layla in it. The project grew from such non-serious beginnings into a full-fledged concert and a narrative,” he says.