Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals: A Study

Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals: A Study

G.Suguna

Assistant Professor of English

Sree Sevugan Annamalai College

Devakottai

Post modernism has become a popular talk recent days and has acquired a significant place in the field of literature especially in fiction. Indian literature boasts a wild and rich tradition filled with detectives, spies and ghosts, Indian English writing has very little to offer incomparison.Authors such asAmitavGhosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhati Roy, PankajMishra, ShashiTharoor, TabishKhair, JeetThayiletc come under this category of writers.

Amit Chaudhuri is one of India's most distinctive literary figures. Chaudhuri was born in Calcuttain 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, beforecompleting a doctorate on the verse of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford in 1993.Chaudhuri has written five novels, among them A Strange and Sublime Address(1991), whichwon the Betty Trask Award and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, A New World (2000), whichreceived the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Immortals (March 2009) his first novel in nineyears and, most recently, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013).

He has also authored several collections of essays, poetry and short stories, and edited ThePicador Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001). His criticism and fiction have appearedin Granta, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic andthe New Yorker. He is the first Indian on the judging panel for the Man Booker InternationalPrize. Chaudhuri is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of EastAnglia, and divides his time between England and Calcutta. He is also an acclaimed Indian classical musician. In The Times Literary Supplement, Ronan McDonald reviews The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador):There is an abiding notion that novels written from the postcolonial perspective tend towards experimentation, magic realism, fabulism, the quirky and the avant-garde. Chaudhuri's slender, focused novels could not be more different. Chaudhuri's work is in a different Indian tradition.

His booksare about particularizing things and people. They're calm. Details of behaviour and scene are memorably well done. Domestic life is shown to be subtle and complicated. The present chapter tends to focus on the position of postmodernism being taken by Amit Chaudhuri through his novel The Immortals (2009). Chaudhuri negates the tendencies ofpostmodernism, by re-establishing the traits of modernism which is left incomplete in India.

Amit Chaudhuri makes brief reference to such a mythical composite of colour andsmell but goes on to show that his approach shares none of the gaudy exuberance celebrated –and often demonstrated – by Rushdie. Chaudhuri’s India is a land of “the banal and the everydaythat comprise your life”. Despite the title, he is interested in the mortal and the mundane.

TheImmortals tells the story of three Indian musicians: a mother, her son and their guru, who is aclassical music teacher. Set in Bombay during the 1970s and 1980s, it traces two familiesseparated by status and circumstance, yet inextricably connected through the bond of music. The focus is primarily on Mallika, incipient professional singer, married to Apurva Sengupta, chief executive of a large corporation, and their sensitive son Nirmalya. The other pole of the narrative concerns Shyamji, musician and tutor,who instructs Mallika and then Nirmalya in the intricacies of Indian classical music. Others whowing their way in and out of the text include the Neogis, old friends of the Senguptas, a domestic retinue of cooks and cleaners, and others from Shyamji’s extended family, who also dabble in music.

The Immortals set in Bombay during the 1970s and early 1980s, mainly traces the history of two families, one soaked in corporate affluence and the other enduring on its musical legacy. Mallika Sengupta, married to a high-flying executive, has never strived for a career in music but hermusical fascinations are more than the nonchalant hobby of a woman living in the lap of luxury. Mallika had wanted recognition, that pure woebegone desire for a reward for her gift hadaccompanied her life from the start but never overwhelmed it; but she hadn’t wanted to dirty herhands in the music world; she’s is wanted to preserve the prestige of being, at once, an artist andthe wife of a successful executive. (68)

Another character is Shyam Lal, the son of a famous singer, now a teacher supporting anextended set of relatives. He becomes the guru of Mallika Sengupta, “knew she could have beenfamous”, but less interestingly “opted for the life of a managing director’s wife”. Mallika’s son Nirmalya is interested in teenage philosophizing and playing the harmonium. Nirmalya has all the puritanical zeal of a privileged adolescent. While his friends drift intomoney-making professions, he walks the streets of Bombay in a torn kurta, carrying a well-thumbed copy of Will Durant's Story of Philosophy and dreaming of purity in art.

But then, not much of moment happens: Mrs Sengupta gets old, Mr Sengupta gets pushed out of the company, Shyamji's fortunes wax and then wanes quite precipitously, and the novel ends with Nirmalya moving to Britain to study philosophy. The novel becomes an ordered tabulate onof their unremarkable existence, the words on the page like the notes on a music sheet. Chaudhuri achieves this in a way that is oddly hard to describe, given a style that appears so keento avoid both the exceptional and the exceptionable. So, his writing is best embodied in – his use of the semicolon.It helps him linger on the banalitiesunder description.

Chaudhuri is being faithful to the middle-class perspective of the Lals and Senguptas, for whom life is no more than “daytime drifting” between recitals and tea-drinking. But he is perhaps not rewarding the faith of the reader, who might wish to be treated to something more entertaining. The Immortals feels too small a production (and everything in it, in fact, is un-showly miniature: “people who were half-hidden, small-scale” and so on) to warrant our extended attention. We sense that the purpose of the novel is to testify to no more than the “untidy ebb and flow oflife” in the author’s own tidy fashion. The Immortals is, like the characters it describes, not destined for immortality.

At a basic level, The Immortals is about two families and their very different relationships withthe world of commerce. Chaudhuri's portrayal of the attractive but often empty life of corporateexecutives in pre-boom India is masterful, especially because it refuses to moralize. The novelalso charts the growth of a commercial megalopolis – Bombay expands malignantly in thebackground, its tentacles reaching out to grab every scrap of empty land.Ultimately, however, TheImmortalsis a sustained meditation on the relationship of art and commerce. Again and again, it asks whether the two can have any legitimate connection but never proffers any simple answers. The theme, explored mainly through the reveries of Nirmalya, could easily have become precious.

In fact, it is handled with great sensitivity and wit. The narrator is always ready to deflate Nirmalya's more pompous thoughts, but never questions the importance of the young man's fundamental concerns. The narrative is a mosaic of small events and beautifully observed details, but Chaudhuri is not just a miniaturist. Rather like Nirmalya, whose mother laughs at his penchant for converting"s imple things" into "portentous adventures", Chaudhuri draws layer after layer of meaning fromthe simplest acts and events. The disappearance of a South Indian café evokes the end of the oldworld; a ride on a suburban train turns into an odyssey; biting on a Ginster's pasty expresses all the confusion and alienation of a foreign student in London.

The tone is often elegiac but never maudlin, and Nirmalya, for all his adolescent brooding, remains fascinating and likeable. Once he moves to London, though, Chaudhuri seems unsure about what to do with him and the novel ends rather too abruptly. That one quirk apart, TheImmortals is a capacious, multi-faceted but intimate work; it is Indian to the core but universal inits implications. Chaudhuri’s prose has a luminous, unforced elegance which is consistentlyengaging and wholly delightful, though readers unfamiliar with the trappings of Indian life mayregret the absence of a glossary. If The Immortals reaches no dramatic conclusions, its spheres ofenquiry — a young man’s coming of age, his parents’ acceptance of the perimeters andpossibilities of the lives they have made for themselves — possess universal appeal whichresonates beyond the confines of this accomplished and absorbing novel.

Works Cited:

Chaudhuri, Amit. The Immortals. Picador India, 2010

Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.