Q&A with Amit Chaudhuri, author of Odysseus Abroad
The British Indian author discusses the layers of meaning in his latest novel
Indian-English author and academic Amit Chaudhuri, who won the top Indian literary honour, the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 2002 for his novel A New World , is back with another multi-layered work, Odysseus Abroad. He talks to about Homer and James Joyce.
The idea of using this material - what my life was like as an undergraduate, what it meant to meet with my uncle once or twice a week - was always there. I never had any impulse for fictionalising it. That only happened when a particular convergence happened with Homer's Odyssey somewhere between 2002 and 2012. I began writing it as a memoir, but realised it was not going to work. Then I remembered the noisy neighbours who had made my life a misery as a student. I thought, these are the "suitors" [who besiege Odysseus' wife, Penelope, for her hand in marriage].
I had been visiting London and England since 1973. The fact that light is beautiful was something I didn't recognise until I came to England. More than learning anything at university in London, I learned about language through the weather. I also learned about my love of light and love of life through London. To know more than one language, more than one way of life, does help to educate you. I see travelling and living in some ways synonymous as, in the deepest sense of the word, educational. Not because you go and see the famous monuments or art galleries. Life turns out to be an education because it teaches you that everything you had read is not true. That process must have begun for me in London.
It was a complicated inheritance - through education, the culture I grew up in. That would be both Western high and popular culture, but as a Bengali, I was also inheriting the modernist culture of Bengal. On some level, I was an outsider to both. With Bengali culture, I had no ownership because I grew up in Mumbai. I didn't learn Bengali in school. But I was deeply interested in what had happened in Calcutta and Bengal to produce (Rabindranath) Tagore and Satyajit Ray, but also my parents, my uncle and myself.