Amit Chaudhuri

Q: Where do you enjoy spending the 31st of December?

A: After a swift comparison, I’d say I actually like being in Calcutta. The combination of warm weather, women in shawls, and burning tyres has always fascinated me with its mixture of despair and prettiness. However, I feel there is a certain ceremonial irrelevance about the New Year. We look upon it with affection, as we do all ceremonial irrelevances, but are thankful, deep down, that the moment has no real historical importance. As far as Bombay, where I grew up, is concerned, the city is abuzz with people who are anyway partying all the time. In Bombay, you are always in the current of the present ? Martin Amis said his character John Self was ‘addicted to the twentieth century’, and you might say Bombay is a similar addiction. It certainly doesn’t have the smokiness or memory-laden ambience of Calcutta in winter. There is a paradoxically retrospective quality about New Year in Calcutta.

Q: How was it in England, where you spent your student days?

A: England is lonely, fog-bound and unpopulated during New Year, especially because there are laws against drinking and driving. So it’s very quiet, traffic-wise. I remember I used to feel homesick and the weather made me more so. In fact, I have just returned from Berlin and the moment I landed in Calcutta, I could almost sense the physical pleasure of arriving in this city during winter.

Q: What was it like in Calcutta around New Year when you were a child?

A: For one, its smokiness was greater when I was a child. There were the charcoal fire-induced smogs. Today the pollution is of a different order. I still remember the Naxal period and have memories of my uncle who lived in a lane disturbed by Naxalite and Congress activities. At that time, I was around six. I remember a man being chased by another man, bottle in hand, and also the occasional bomb going off. I remember looking out upon the street with my cousins through the slats of the characteristic Venetian windows, both that disturbed world and the winter smoke entering the room together. Those events had a compelling fictional quality. After the Naxal period, Christmas in Calcutta changed. I have a vague memory of it being very quiet for a while. But over the past seven or eight years, there has been a revival, though in a commercial way.

Q: Would you rather revert to the past?

A: Going back in time may seem attractive but it is also dangerous, especially when politicians base their visions of society knowingly on that reversion. But the metaphorical journey to the past is an important one, and it’s important we continue to recognise the importance of that distinction, and retain the right to make it. Memory is a source of value. But we live in an intellectual climate inimical, for all kinds of reasons, to the journey to the past.

Q: What changes would you like initiated in the New Year?

A: One is dismayed by so many things in this world ? for instance, what globalisation is doing to writing and culture. I look forward to the emergence of an alternative space for culture. I feel there has to be some sort of resistance to the free market, but the idea of resistance has been domesticated, and we all concentrate on being politically correct, or on the analyses of cultural misrepresentation, or on deconstructing, for the hundredth and fiftieth time, ‘repressive’ absolutes. That’s the domestication of resistance. Resistance may sound Utopian, but it is necessary. Or else, there may come a time when we won’t take pleasure in culture.

Q: Would you like to see some changes in the publishing industry?

A: I would. These days, ‘masterpieces’ are manufactured between publishers, booksellers and newspapers; we are told which books are masterpieces before they appear (the free market’s wonderful and terrifying reversal of linear time); the novelist is almost like a paid scriptwriter in Hollywood. I do feel a book is a private discovery. It is not an event like New Year. But today the publication and selling of books with all the associated promotional fanfare tries everything it can to rob the act of reading of the element of chance.

Q: J.K. Rowling’s book Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince was considered a high point of 2005. How would you rate it?

A: A good writer makes you look at something in a new way. There has to be a quality of freshness, whether in the turn of phrase, the vision, whatever. What tempts me to read a book (always a difficult commitment) is a paragraph or sentence, no more ? spotted somewhere, sometimes years after a book has first appeared. No such chance discovery has made me curious about Rowling’s books ? but who knows?

Q: If you were to pick two of the best films you have seen in 2005, which would they be?

A: Maqbool, especially, and Khamosh Pani ? both of which I liked a lot.

Q: What, according to you, was one of the low points of 2005?

A: The bomb blasts in London were shocking. I was in Cambridge at the time and was affected by it; my wife had been going regularly to King’s Cross to the British Library. I wondered what would happen to the fabric of Britain’s multicultural society ? I myself, having visited England from 1973 onwards, and been a student and then briefly a teacher there from the Eighties into the Nineties, had seen it evolve from a polarised, even racist, society into one of the most successful multicultural experiments in the West. But there has been no immense and overt change, and, though there will be tensions, I don’t think Britain can go back to Larkin’s England, and nor does it really want to.

Q: Any high points on the personal front?

A: I started experimenting in music in 2005. I began to finally relate my involvement with Indian classical music ? 20 years as a performing vocalist ? to my memory of Blues, Rock etc from my guitar-playing days in the Seventies. 2005 has seen me create a relationship with other musicians in the city and find an audience for my music which I’ve called a bit cheekily: This is not fusion. It has been both frustrating and interesting. It’s an idea and project I define against what I see to be fusion or world music.

Q: Do you have any plans of taking it further this year?

A: I’ve been writing about music, a novel about making sense of Indian classical music, both as a profession and as a definition. Perhaps there’d also be scope for experimenting with the form of the novel.

Q: On the last night of this year, in which part of the city would you like to be in?

A: On the level of pure fantasy, perhaps in the length of the street behind the Grand Hotel, around Nizam’s, Free School Street...