The Immortals

On Amit Chaudhuri's new novel, The Immortals:

The role of the musician in India, once central and revered, has changed much in the last century. In the wake of Indian independence and the disappearance of the old princely states, the traditional sources of patronage ceased to exist. The middle class stepped in to fill that role, fundamentally altering the relationship between patron and artist. “Suddenly”, Chaudhuri explains, “people from the middle class were themselves wanting to be musicians, wanting their moment in the musical world, and using their teacher as a facilitator.” The gurus’ position in society was fundamentally altered to one of necessary obeisance, undermining their status and artists and placing them in deference to commerce. “People like Mrs Sengupta were drawn to teachers like Shyam Lal because of their talent. They would give them the respect and reverence due to a teacher, but at the same time were really dominating them because they were in a position of power.” At one point in the book, Shyam Lal puts on a conference in memory to his father in which many of his students take part. The event becomes a kind of talent show; people are interested only in their own performance. His disciples – “from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold” - have paid him as a teacher for the right to perform in public.

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The idea of artistic value is meaningless these days

So says novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. The context of his saying this is Bollywood and the kind of films it produces. I quote from a review of his latest release (a book of essays, Clearing a Space: reflections on India, literature and culture) in The Economist:

Pausing briefly, Mr Chaudhuri, the earnest poet, dismisses any possibility of Bollywood containing “artistic value”. And then the critic recollects himself, and Mr Chaudhuri reflects that, “of course”, the idea of artistic value is meaningless these days.

Here's on his take on Indian literature and postmodernism:

Post-modernism, writes Mr Chaudhuri, is “polyphony; the conflation and confusion of fantasy with history”, a “rhetoric of excess, plenty and a relentless engulfing inclusiveness”, which has been the context for Indian writers since the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s babbling narrative, “Midnight’s Children”.

An exhausting theorist, Mr Chaudhuri likens this and the Indian literature that has followed it—with all its variety and interconnectedness—to globalisation. Literary merit, he says, has become synonymous with commercial value; “today’s writers are stocks and shares”. Here, the poet in Mr Chaudhuri asserts himself: “The triumphal narrative of Indian writing”—perhaps even including Mr Rushdie’s feted trickery—“bores me, personally speaking, as a reader and writer.”

Thought-provoking, isn't it?