Freedom Song New York: Knopf, 1999 Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia Amit Chaudhuri's Freedom Song is a collection
of three short novels which were first published in Britain as
separate volumes: A Strange and Sublime Address, (1991);
Afternoon Raag, (1993); and Freedom Song, (1998).
Chaudhuri received considerable critical acclaim for these novellas--
for example, The London Review of Books said: "...
he writes better than just about anyone of his generation."
In May 2000, Chaudhuri won the Los Angeles Times award for fiction. "A Strange and Sublime Address" paints languorous
impressions of life in Calcutta as seen by a ten-year-old boy,
Sandeep, during two vacations from his schooling in Bombay. At
his uncle's Calcutta house, on one occasion, the narrator looks
through a shutter: "A bhelpuri vendor was wandering
past, his prop under his arm, the basket of bhelpuri balanced
almost stylishy, like a Malayasian fedora, on his head. Later,
the key man went by, with a cluster of keys around a large ring,
the metal shimmering against the sun, the keys jangling. The
vendor had called out in a loud voice, 'Bhelpuri!' but the key
man had said nothing; he had simply shaken the ring and let the
jangling keys speak for him. The strange metallic whisper of
the keys could be heard, immaterial and ghostly, even when the
man had disappeared, seemingly evaporated by the heat." "Afternoon Raag" is a first-person portrayal of the narrator's student days at Oxford -- his casual involvement with two female students; nostalgic memories of his parents in India; and his fond recall of the classical music teacher in India. Structured loosely like a Hindustani "raag," this novella's prose rises to the poetic. "Freedom Song," set in the early 1990's, describes the life history of two interrelated middle-class Calcutta families. The publisher's introductory summary notes: two of the main characters, Khuku and Mini, "spend their time talking about family, friends, health, and occasionally, Muslims and the Babri Masjid." The summary errs-not"occasionally," they talk frequently about the Muslims. "Freedom Song" opens with Khuku's being awakened too early in the morning by the loud Muslim prayer and her guest, Mini, commiserating at this nuisance: "They are going too far! And it isn't really Indian, it sounds like Bedouins." And "Each day, at some point, they talked of the Muslims. They talked of how, by the next century, there would be more Muslims than Hindus in the country. Mini being the teacher, had the facts and figures..." During another talk, Mini says, "What if one mosque had gone -- for hundreds of temples had been destroyed before. She could not understand what the fuss was about...." "Who'll rebuild those temples?" Khuku agrees: "That's right. No one talks about them." Mini decides to vote for the Hindu nationalist party, BJP: "It was no bad thing that they toppled that mosque." Despite these contentious remarks, "Freedom Song," like the other two novellas, lacks in narrative tension. Rendered in evocative prose, Chaudhuri's carefully observed writing remains at the surface, confining itself to the thin segment of the upper-middle class. Nowhere is there a mention of the squalor and abysmal poverty of the Calcutta slums, even though the point of view chosen is third-person omniscient. In the earlier novellas, the childlike and adolescent points of view make the surface observations easier to accept. The details of daily Indian life Chaudhury so masterfully depicts will appeal more to the Western reader's exotic quest, and will probably seem all too ordinary to the Indian reader.
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