Amit Chaudhuri


Amit Chaudhuri is an Indian English-language novelist, poet and essayist. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He is a professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Early and personal life

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and grew up in Bombay. His father was Nages Chandra Chaudhuri, the first Indian CEO of Britannia Industries Limited, and his mother, Bijoya Chaudhuri was a highly acclaimed singer of Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul Geeti, Atul Prasad and Hindi bhajans. He was a student at the Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay. He took his first degree in English Literature from the University College London, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on D. H. Lawrence's poetry at Balliol College, Oxford.
He is married to Rosinka Chaudhuri, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She was the inaugural Mellon Professor of the Global South at the University of Oxford, 2017-18. They have one daughter, Aruna.
Chaudhuri began writing a series for The Paris Review titled The Moment from January 2018.

Activism

In response to the marginalisation of the literary by both the market and by academia, Amit Chaudhuri began, in December 2014, a series of annual symposiums on what he called ‘literary activism’. This brought together writers, academics, and artists each year. One of the features of Chaudhuri's initiative has been a resistance to specialisation, or what he calls ‘professionalisation’. The project has involved the fashioning of a new terminology by Chaudhuri, in which he creates terms like ‘market activism’, and assigns very particular means to words like ‘literary activism’ and ‘deprofessionalisation’.
A collection of essays from the first symposium was published in 2017 by Boiler House Press in the UK, and by OUP in India and the US.
In 2015, Chaudhuri began drawing attention to Kolkata's architectural legacy and campaigning for its conservation

Music

Amit Chaudhuri is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition. He learned singing from his mother, the well-known exponent of Tagore songs and devotionals, Bijoya Chaudhuri, and from the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana. In the 1990s, he learnt new compositions from Pandit A. Kanan. He has performed worldwide. HMV India has released two recordings of his singing, and a selection of the khayals he has performed on CD. Bihaan Music brought out a collection called The Art of the Khayal in 2016.
In 2004, he began to conceptualise a project in experimental music, This is Not Fusion, which received critical acclaim upon its inaugural performance in Calcutta on January 15, 2005. His first CD of experimental music, This Is Not Fusion, was released in Britain on the independent jazz label, Babel LabelK. His second CD, Found Music, came out in October 2010 in the UK from Babel and was released in India from EMI. It was an allaboutjazz.com Editor's Choice of 2010.

Awards and honours

Poetry

Libretto

Newspaper Articles