Author Amit Chaudhuri loves indulging in ideas which are truly out of the box. While he was here to talk about his book Odysseus Abroad, he shared how he discovered Calcutta through the works of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Shrabasti Mallik reports
There are a lot of adjectives that would describe Amit Chaudhuri — musician, singer, internationally acclaimed academician and author. But there is just one word that describes him best — a good speaker.
The ardent way he speaks about his memories of Kolkata and the very many ways the city has influenced him leaves one with a clear picture of why he wrote Calcutta: Two Years in the City. And it is with the same sentiment and the ‘Calcutta connect’ that he has published his latest work Odysseus Abroad, which narrates the story of two men — an uncle (an eccentric, shambolic old man who has taken an early retirement) and his nephew (a college graduate). It is a study of relationship of unspoken love between these two people who are lonely in london. “The characters are inspired from real life,” Amit mentions, “Ranga mama, the uncle, is an extension of my own uncle. He was unintentionally funny and he knew it. But even while being being outrageously funny he was just being himself.”
The story, apparently, has been heavily borrowed from Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odysseus. There is an irony underlying the journey taken by the travellers in the novel which is similar to the epic journey of the warrior who takes a long time finding his way back home after fighting the war. Drawing the parallel movement of characters — of Ananda to Telemachus and of his mother to Penelope, he explains, “A lot of the references in the novel have been taken from Homer and Joyce’s works.” The entire story is set during one day, a structure that he claims he “borrowed from Ulysses quite deliberately.”
The Sahitya Akademi Award winner is drawn to joy. He believes that the word comedy, as in the divine comedian, means something which has a happy ending. He says, “In spite of being miserable in life Anandoa rejects tragedy, claiming that he gets this from his exposure to Sanskrit drama.” He adds that there is no such thing as tragedy in the western classical sense, something quite similar to India’s vision in its artistic expressions.
As subtle and enduring as all of his works are, Amit continues to find magic and thrill in unconventional places and loves to indulge in ideas which he believes are truly out of the box. “A small cottage in the suburbs allures me more than a high rise building in the city. There is a sense of the unknown that excites me,” he says. A few minutes with the author and one would realise that he takes interest in idiosyncratic characters. He has, however, faced criticism for writing about the upper class gentile, but he begs to differ. “It is true for some of my work. Also, a lot of what I have written is of the middle class people whose lives are frail and desperate under the cover of comedy. Truthfully, I write about the middle class especially when I am exploring the depths of relationships,” he comes clean. Interestingly this book, as critics have claimed, is exceptionally funny and sly while simultaneously mocking and tender. It concerns itself with food, bodily functions and even has sex in it.”
They say that living away from home makes the heart grow fonder. And Amit is no exception. “It was perhaps I grew up in Bombay that I connected to Calcutta more. I had this urge to learn about the place. Not growing up there has actually increased my love for the city. The city with all its inert magic and mystery intrigues me and appeals to my imagination,” he explains. Not surprisingly, the characters in his book are not only Bengali but they converse with each other in the language.
He draws his inspiration from Woolf and Mansfield’s works simply because it was through their works that he discovered Calcutta. “These are writers through whom I have learnt to translate my experiences of the urban as the ordinary, something that has to be discovered by a particular king of eye,” he points out. He referred to Joyce’s account of Dublin in his famous Dubliners and adds that the way the writer recounts his memories of that place made him remember the Calcutta he knew in the 60’s and 70’s. He continues, “It is an act of translation and my inspiration came through these viewers of locality. But even much of the ideal locality had to be imaginary even to them.” He recounted the time he was in Dublin and could find no connection which he had come to know through Joyce. “Maybe it was a different part of the country that Joyce wrote about,” he concludes.