Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. He was a student at the Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay, took his first degree, in English, from University College London, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on D H Lawrence’s poetry at Balliol College, Oxford. He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, and they have one daughter, Aruna. His father, Nages Chandra Chaudhuri, was the first Indian CEO of Britannia Industries, and his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri, was one of the greatest exponents of Tagore songs of her generation.

He is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn, about which Jon Day said in the Financial Times: ‘Chaudhuri is one of the most consistently interesting writers working today. You get the feeling that with each book he has to begin again, reconfigure from the ground up what he wants the novel to be and to do. It’s this radical questioning that makes him such a consistently engaging writer, and what makes this novel so memorable.’ His first major work of non-fiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, was published in 2013. His second work of non-fiction, Finding the Raga, a critical meditation on North Indian classical music and his discovery of, and relationship with, this tradition, was published in 2021 and won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, 2022. Dr. Simon Cooke, one of the judges in the Biography category, called Finding the Raga ‘a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity. Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world.’

Some Studies On And Responses To Amit Chaudhuri:

Talks on literature, modernity, cities, and culture

Writings, talks, and interviews on politics

THE SWEET SHOP OWNERS OF
CALCUTTA and other ideas

This is a debut exhibition by Amit Chaudhuri of artworks conceptualised and created by him. It sees a further extension of his interest in working across genres in a way that involves a fresh engagement with the everyday world and its uniqueness. The exhibition is arranged in three parts. Each constitutes an encounter. The first has to do with the portraits of sweet shop owners which you may or may not notice whenever you walk into a mishtir dokan, a sweet shop, in Calcutta. To confront them is to face their mystery, for the owners possess the same air that the ‘great men’ of 19th-century Bengal did. This bit of the exhibition attempts to look at the human figure in its unexpectedness while allowing oneself to be transformed implicitly by its everyday context.

A Note On The Music

Amit Chaudhuri is a trained and critically acclaimed singer in the North Indian classical tradition; he has received high praise for his singing from various newspapers and journals, including the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, Ananda Bazar Patrika and India Today. He learned singing from his mother, the well-known exponent of Tagore songs and devotionals, Bijoya Chaudhuri, and, extensively, from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana. He was then guided in Hindustani music by Pandit A. Kanan.

Feedback

Amit Chaudhuri regrets he cannot read unsolicited manuscripts.