September 21, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Distraction By Amit Chaudhuri This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment. Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again. On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the Guardian, charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple of friends, and, when I wasn’t doing any of this, which was a large percentage of the time, ranged over my collection of music on my iPhone. I never listen to music on earphones when I’m at home in Calcutta – or in Oxford, where I play songs on a small Bose Bluetooth dock that I carry with me. But, like many others, when I’m traveling I create a makeshift interiority. The temptation to create a portable archive presented itself with the introduction of the smartphone. I deferred carrying Walkmans and MP3 players for much of my life. The iPhone has changed our existence – as we think we know, though we can’t, really, because none of us can experience what it means to live in history. It has changed our children, those who were born at the end of the last millennium or at the start of this one: indeed, the smartphone has invented them. For a long time, we thought the personal computer was destined to take us over. Phones crept upon us unobtrusively. I can no longer recall when I got a Nokia. At first, odd though it may sound, my wife and I shared it. The idea of the personalised phone was still to grow on us. I came similarly late to the iPhone. I can now hardly recall what the words ‘sharing’ and ‘synhronising’ meant in the twentieth century, or for my parents. I have no idea what my daughter’s life would have been like had not the smartphone remade it completely six years ago. It’s useless to speculate on the nature of reality in that way. Read More
May 10, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Writing By Amit Chaudhuri Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation, c. 1880. When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page—as I am doing now—is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It’s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your first school-going day as a child. Once you’ve gone through, you’re in a different domain; you’re in the story, which involves inhabiting a new space and a new self. Before going in, you stare at the lit doorway of the blank page, partly with anxiety and partly with exhaustion. Exhaustion because the blank page is not only the beginning but the end of something. It’s the end of the hours or days or months you’ve spent considering both the subject and the prospect of writing about it. Arriving at the blank page represents our coming to the end of the undecided space we call living. Now we must get down to telling. Read More
April 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Applause By Amit Chaudhuri Still from Pyaasa, 1957. Appreciation of artwork is always situated in, and partly an expression of, a cultural context. And there are different cultural contexts, and, within these, different languages of appreciation. Certain milieus make room for visceral, spontaneous responses and others for a certain refinement—knowing, say, when to laugh or when to applaud. I get the impression that the latter is especially important in performances of Western classical music. People are silent as they listen. They don’t generally shake their heads or gasp with pleasure during the recital, but they must at least know when the piece has ended, and when—and how much—to applaud. Concerts of popular music, on the other hand, are often, as we know, propelled by the audience’s response—a response that’s at once visible and (at times deafeningly) audible. The joke that Joni Mitchell made to the audience in 1974—“No one said to Van Gogh, Paint a starry night again, man!”—was a rueful admission about the way audience intervention could shape the pop-rock-folk concert. In the North Indian baithak, or soiree, the visceral, the unpremeditated, and the refined converged. The listener, too, was a participant. The Hindi word baithak relates literally to baithna, or “sitting,” and implied a far smaller space than an auditorium. It sometimes encompassed the middle-class drawing room, in which culture was often showcased in India. There were overlaps between the North Indian baithak and the Urdu mehfil, which was associated with performance and recitation. I use the past tense here because the smaller spaces, and the cultural lineage they sprang from, have been vanishing for decades. In the baithak or mehfil, the informed listener’s response followed the development of the performance like the live and changing thing it was. Appreciation expressed at the right moments—when a sense of beauty was created, say, by a note being deliberately elided in a raga—demonstrated generosity and knowledge, and both were important to a classical performer. The performer articulated a creative transformation of the melodic mode, the raga, and took liberties with the time signature. The informed listener needed to also have mastery over these time signatures and modes in order to be struck by the recital’s creative departures. One of the stock expressions of appreciation, still often used today, is the exclamation wah!, which is a nonsense word that has to be earned: it is the cognoscenti’s astonishing! or well done! It’s the paradoxical sound of informed wonder (paradoxical because the seemingly spontaneous utterance is the result of years of training and exposure, like great music itself). Read More
March 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Doorway By Amit Chaudhuri Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1806. My mother often told me how much I’d looked forward to my first day of school. Although I find the thought extraordinary—I loathed school—it’s plausible. I was an exuberant boy. The deceptively effervescent nursery, which no longer exists, was located in an old house on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay. My mother dropped me there but lingered, to look out for me (she was very protective) but also to spectate. From afar, she watched me push a boy—a gesture of friendliness, she’d later insist. At this, the teacher apparently smacked me. I took great umbrage and began to cry. My mother swooped down and plucked me from the crowd of children. She believed the teacher had punished me because the boy I’d pushed was European. I went home but did not stop crying. In the evening, I got a fever. I didn’t want to go to school the next day. The honeymoon period was over. After that first experience, my parents struggled to put me into a series of kindergartens. I finally found myself attending a school called Sunny Side, a seven-minute walk from the flat we then lived in on Malabar Hill. Once, when my father dropped me off on the way to the office, I refused to get out of the car. I remember him opening the door on the left, then the right, as I moved sideways each time to the opposite direction. Occasionally, I resigned myself to mornings in Sunny Side School. My favored spot was the doorway, where I said goodbye to my mother, watched her walk home, studied her as she turned to wave, and instructed her, with a gesture of my hand, to come back soon. Read More
February 8, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Tiles By Amit Chaudhuri On watching Ben-Hur in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile. Still from Ben-Hur (1959). I think I began watching MGM-style historical epics at the New Empire. There was a cluster of three cinemas in the bit of Bombay near my school—Sterling, the New Empire, and the New Excelsior. I have a memory of shamefacedly submitting to The Ten Commandments. These films were shown as reruns in the midseventies, of course, but the crowds were large and easily impressed. I say “shamefacedly” because, even then, I think I was allergic to the genre: the costumes, the sets, the battles, the panoply. To in some way abet such a spectacle seemed beneath one’s dignity at thirteen. When it came to history, my generation was drawn insatiably to the downfall of the Nazis. Biblical stories, given we went to schools with Christian affiliations, weren’t taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dinyar, a boy of superior culture, said gravely (in retrospect, I see his tastes were quite camp), “Have you seen The Ten Commandments? You’re missing something if you haven’t.” So I went to the New Empire and was moved to reluctant tears by the parting of the Red Sea. The cinema and the life I knew had been bereft of miracles, and here was an example of what Dinyar said I’d been “missing,” of what technology and divine intervention could achieve if they chose to. Here, too, I encountered the sculpted, orange-skinned Charlton Heston, who appeared like a plausible link between the vengeful expanse of antiquity and a lithe Californian freedom. Whether I knew him already from Ben-Hur, I can’t say, but I did see Ben-Hur, too, at the New Empire. In a couple of years, I had forgotten these films. I saw them as inextricable from the comic exuberance, hard-nosed commercial agendas, and faux devotionalism of a particular period and consigned them to a category called DeMille movies. Then I saw Ben-Hur again, probably a decade ago. It might have been shown on TV during Christmas or Easter—it is, after all, as the subtitle of the novel it was based on states, tangentially “a story of the Christ.” I rewatched Ben-Hur as you would pick up a storybook you’d read as a child: to check if its pages amused you in some way. I was also curious, I suppose, about what the chariot race at the end, in which the eponymous hero’s survival skills are displayed at their keenest, would look like on an adult review. My prejudice against the genre had grown more ingrained since I was thirteen, and I was also in fundamental agreement with Roland Barthes that these Hollywood epics comprise a weaving of codes (“The frontal lock [of Romans in Hollywood films] overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in ancient Rome.”). Yet I discovered, at the end of the four hours, that I was again inexplicably moved. Read More
January 23, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Houses By Amit Chaudhuri This is the first installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s new column, The Moment. When do we start noticing a house? We know it’s there, but don’t look at it. We might die without actually having seen it. I ask this because of my interest in Calcutta’s residential houses. Calcutta is where I was born, but I grew up in Bombay. I rehearse this sentence yet again for strangers to explain my discombobulated sensibility. I used to visit my uncle’s three-story house in Calcutta over my summer holidays as a child, and think of it as home—because my aunt and uncle and three cousins exuded a Bengali dysfunctionality that I associated with that word. But, in comparison to the twelfth-story flat where I grew up in Bombay, in Malabar Hill, and from where, when I was ten years old, I had an uninterrupted view of the sea, the house in Calcutta absorbed me. At some point, I must have gained clarity about two things: first, that the low houses of South Calcutta, and the opportunities they offered me to study the street outside and the houses opposite—to eavesdrop and spy—were preferable, to me, to the panoramic and godlike perspective that the twelfth-story flat provided. Second, I understood retrospectively that these Calcutta houses meant something not solely because of my personal memory but because they comprised areas that bore the imprint of a modernity that was to be found in some other cities, too—in Istanbul, Montevideo, Berlin, New York—though not, when I was growing up there, in the bit of Bombay in which I lived. These areas involved an encounter with the “historical.” Read More