The key to this rich, provocative and not entirely accessible collection of essays lies in a little piece from 2007, reprinted here from the New Statesman. “Anti-Fusion” lays down an aesthetic that governs Amit Chaudhuri’s recent second career as a musician, and points towards a set of possibilites for the anglophone Indian fiction in which he made his name, a way to push aside the pop postmodernism with which, in his view, it is too often associated. The usual assumption is that fusion music “comprises a departure, scandalous or liberating, from the canonical music traditions”. But Chaudhuri argues that those traditions are themselves “hybrid forms”, and most creative when most restless: when, in trying to incorporate the new, an inherited form sustains an “inner tension between domestication and accommodation”. For him most “fusion” music lacks that inner tension. There might be a face-off between the different traditions on which it draws, but they do not quite manage to transform one another. Too often “the Eastern and Western elements in fusion have a designated static quality that they do not in their own contexts”. So Chaudhuri speaks on behalf of dialectic, not fusion; on behalf of quarrel and assimilation, and not the kind of multi-culti celebration that often winds up confirming our “unexamined beliefs about identity and where we come from”.

Still, Chaudhuri doesn’t quite call for a sense of perpetual flux. He is certainly interested in how newness enters the world. But he is drawn to older things too, and in particular to a conception of modernity that he sees as threatened by the succeeding idea of globalization. A globalized postmodernity excludes as much as it includes, and Chaudhuri is particularly troubled by the way indigenous high culture gets lost in the organizing narratives of postcoloniality and cultural studies. His sense of this has perhaps a touch of caricature. He writes here as an academic responding to the interpretative fictions of other academics, and overemphasizes the degree to which the university has put its weight on the side of popular culture. So I in turn will simplify his own views. He may like Bollywood, but he loves Tagore, and believes there is something wrong with a critical practice that has forgotten the profound moment of cultural dialectic called the Bengal Renaissance. There is more in the past than one thinks to help or enable an Indian writer’s encounter with the West.

Of course, behind this stands the elephant in the room – the bulky fact of Midnight’s Children. Chaudhuri both admires the book and is troubled by it. He suggests in his final essay that Salman Rushdie is a more various, a “more complex and intriguing” figure than most commentary will allow, but remains sceptical of the role that Rushdie’s work plays in the developing story of Indian fiction in English. It can too easily be made to seem the fount of everything. To Chaudhuri the book plays into a myth of national pride and new success, a myth that means the “Anglophone intellectual tradition in India . . . has developed no space for daydreaming . . . [and] is baffled, if not offended, by an indifference to lofty themes and causes”. In another essay on Rushdie – “Huge Baggy Monster”, first published in the TLS in 1999 – he takes up the question of the imitative fallacy, the sense that a large sprawling country requires large sprawling novels, not only Rushdie’s but also those of Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry. Chaudhuri speaks, in contrast, for a model of delicacy and restraint. Those qualities have characterized his own fiction, but they also mark the work of R. K. Narayan, that specialist in slackers, about whom he writes with unusual grace.

Chaudhuri divides Clearing a Space in two. The essays in the first and longer part are often methodological, and written with a lofty generality of their own; their style reminds one that he is also the author of a dense post-structuralist study of D. H. Lawrence (2003). The learning here is never carried lightly – he seems especially fond of semicolons in series – and few readers will be able to follow everything in this section. Few, that is, will have the intellectual vocabulary necessary to do justice to what he says about Bakhtin and Bengal alike. But to say that is to note how unusual a mind Amit Chaudhuri has, and the pay-off comes in aphorism: “Globalization is the tragicomic rhetoric of putative plenty overwhelming the awareness of palpable want”.

The second portion of the book offers a set of less sharply polemical readings of individual writers. There’s an especially fine piece on Kipling, another on Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, and a superb essay on the poet Arun Kolatkar. Of particular interest are Chaudhuri’s pages on the late work of V. S. Naipaul, whose dispiriting prose must have a totemic value for someone bored by the triumphal narrative of the anglophone Indian novel. Chaudhuri’s writing in this second section seems cleaner, punchier, less clogged by abstraction. Many of these pieces are ones I learned from when they first appeared, and it is good to have them collected. Inevitably there is some repetition from essay to essay, but no one interested in either postcolonial literature or the hegemonic discourse called postcolonial studies will be able to ignore this book.

Amit Chaudhuri
CLEARING A SPACE
Reflections on India, literature and culture
330pp. Peter Lang. £12.99 (US $19.99).
978 1 906165 01 7

Michael Gorra is the editor of The Portable Conrad, published last year. He teaches English at Smith College.

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