COMMUNITY
Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India
“Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.”
Amit Chaudhuri
Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified.
RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022).
Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified.
RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022).
SUB-HEAD
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV.
Interview
Avant-Garde Origins
Modernism
Anthology Traditions
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer
Avant-Garde Form
Auto-Fiction
Wendy Doniger
Multimodal
Stream of Consciousness
Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore as First Impulse of Modernism
Literary Activism
Impoverished Histories
Contradiction
Criticism
Intellectual History
Internationalist Perspective
Performance Art
Satyajit Ray
Avant-Garde Beginnings in India
Varavara Rao
AMIT CHAUDHURI is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. He is also an essayist, poet, musician, and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil's The Modern Library: the 200 best novels of the last 50 years, and his second novel, Afternoon Raag, was on the novelist Anne Enright's list of 10 best short novels for the Guardian. Its 25th anniversary edition appeared last year with a new introduction by the critic James Wood. He is a highly regarded singer in the Hindustani classical tradition and has been acclaimed as a pathbreaking composer and improviser who performed, most recently, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In 2017, the government of West Bengal awarded Chaudhuri the Sangeet Samman for his contribution to Indian classical music. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and was University College London's Annual Visiting Fellow in 2018. That year, he was also an inaugural fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and in 2019 became an honorary fellow at Balliol College, Oxford.