Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri, Wendy Doniger (Introduction)

Overview

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s.

Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time. Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America. Khuku’s old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town. Khuku’s brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children. Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party. He sells the party newspaper on the streets. He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried.

Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middle-class world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence. A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time. A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri’s wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681378077
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	282 KB

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen books, several of which are available from NYRB, including the novels Friend of My Youth and Sojourn; a work of memoir and music criticism, Finding the Raga; and the poetry collection Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2023. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the author of more than forty books, and among her translations from Sanskrit are three titles from Penguin Classics. Her most recent book is Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History.

Read an Excerpt

Later, after washing their hands, they went up to the second and topmost storey of the house. Sandeep's mother and Mamima reclined on the large bed. Their conversation was a transparent stream that occasionally trickled into desert patches of silence. Chhotomama turned on the radio, which began to babble immediately like the local idiot: "Both grandson and grandfather love eating Thin Arrowroot Biscuits."

"Nothing's as kind to your skin as Boroline Antiseptic Cream."

He lay back on the small bed, secure as a soldier in his trench, with the newspaper in his hands; he folded it several ways and made it crackle festively. His face and his arms drowned in the black-and-white ocean of the newspaper, surfacing intermittently. Sighing regretfully, Chhotomama fell asleep, the newspaper covering his face. When the breath came up from his nostrils, the newspaper rose and fell lightly, as if it were breathing as well. On the big bed, Mamima and Sandeep's mother began to dream, sprawled in vivid crablike postures. His aunt lay on her stomach, her arms bent as if she were swimming to the edge of a lake; his mother lay on her back, her feet (one of which had a scar on it) arranged in the joyous pose of a dancer.

A mournful song now came on the radio. It was an old radio, a wedding gift, shaped like a box, with outdated knobs and dials. When Sandeep was younger, he had thought there were little men, talented homunculi, inside the box of the radio, who performed those songs. But that seemed long ago. Beside the radio, there was a clock with a white face which always ran ten minutes fast. Every night, the time was readjusted, and every morning, with great accuracy, it hadgained ten minutes. At about half-past four, when the clock said twenty to five, the grown-ups woke and stretched their arms like reluctant children. The Sunday lunch, then the Sunday nap--and the thought of Monday, that difficult day, was aborted. The radio crackled with the nervous, breathless sound of football commentary; dust had settled on the floor and furniture of the house.

Calcutta is a city of dust. If one walks down the street, one sees mounds of dust like sand dunes on the pavements, on which children and dogs sit doing nothing, while sweating labourers dig into the macadam with spades and drills. The roads are always being dug up, partly to construct the new underground railway system, or perhaps for some other obscure reason, such as replacing a pipe that doesn't work with another pipe that doesn't work. At such times, Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. Trenches and mounds of dust everywhere give the city a strange bombed-out look. The old houses, with their reposeful walls, are crumbling to slow dust; their once-gleaming gates are rusting. Dust flakes off the ceilings in offices; the buildings are becoming dust, the roads are becoming dust. At the same time, dust is constantly raised into startling new shapes and unexpected forms by the arbitrary workings of the wind, forms on which dogs and children sit doing nothing. Daily, Calcutta disintegrates, unwhispering, into dust, and daily it rises from dust again.

A house in Calcutta must be swept and scrubbed at least twice a day. Once, in the morning, Saraswati polished the floor with a moist rag, and Mamima religiously dusted the tables and chairs. The dust rose in the air in breathless clouds and seemed to evaporate and disappear. But by evening, it would condense, like moisture, and resettle on the surfaces of things. A little before sunset, a woman called Chhaya came to clean the house a second time, smiling at the boys as they waited impatiently for her to finish. She had a serious cultured face with a serious smile, the face of a kindly and understanding teacher; it was hard to believe she lived across the railway lines, in the clump of huts called the basti, from which whiffs of excrement rose on windy days.

She would sweep the floor--unending expanses, acres and acres of floor--with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird. She would collect the dust in a corner, and here there would be an accumulation of unlikely treasure that had blown in from outside or had gathered, unnoticed, inside: a single elegant pigeon's feather, a page lost from a book, a dead spider which ants had forgotten to carry off, the long, black, tender loops of Mamima's and Sandeep's mother's hair.

Then she would dip a grey rag into a pail, and sit on her haunches at one end of the room, and swish the rag around the floor. Carefully, deliberately, she would begin to advance to the other end of the room, swiping the floor with the moist rag, her right arm moving regularly and automatically, like a fin, till she had reached the other end. Her odd movement forward on her haunches had an amphibian quality, half human and half of another world. It was laborious, and yet had the simplicity and poise of a tortoise's amble; when she finished, hardly a speck remained; the floor was bright as a mirror or a lake on a calm day. Then, at last, she would unbend her body and straighten her back. Most of the time she worked, her body was slightly bent, as if in obeisance to an invisible god.


There are several ways of spending a Sunday evening. You could drive to Outram Ghat, and then stroll with your family by the River Hooghly, watching balloons floating volitionlessly in the air, the steamers in the water, the smoky outline of the Howrah Bridge, like an altar on the horizon. You could stay at home and listen to plays on the radio once the football commentary was over: comedies, melodramas, whodunits. The heroine's voice would quiver like a note on the violin; the star-crossed lovers would frequently cry "Never!" and "Forever!"; the murderer would murder accompanied by drums and cymbals; the funny man would mispronounce words and fall in love with the heroine. It was like Shakespeare, and yet it was not like Shakespeare.

Sometimes Chhaya would come in and say excitedly: "They're showing a seenema in the field!"

"Seenema! What seenema?" Mamima would ask.

"Street-Singer," she would reply, or the name of some other such film made forty years ago in the New Theatres.

The boys would run up to the terrace and lean out to look at the field that lay beyond the professor's house. This surprising piece of empty land, which builders and contractors had somehow overlooked, was usually a meeting place for fireflies; at night, wandering with their small lights, their miniature green hurricane lamps, they turned the silent field into a lighted marketplace of activity. Servants and their children, rickshawallas, people from the basti, had now gathered in the field to watch the seenema; a great piece of white cloth had been hung between two poles at one end. After some time, giant black-and-white figures came alive on the piece of cloth, and a white funnel of light ran from the projector to the screen; the audience sat dwarfed by the indistinct majesty of the figures moving before them. Voices, loud and elemental as thunder, boomed from a scratchy soundtrack. Sandeep tried to follow the story, but all he comprehended was the sound of thunder and the darkness of evening and the dance of black-and-white phantoms.

When they came down, their eyes smarting, Chhotomama looked up from the newspaper and said: "Let's go for a drive."

And Mamima, who had been sewing a button onto trousers, bit the thread and asked: "Where to?"

"Anywhere," said Chhotomama, with childlike conviction.

"But won't you be tired driving? You have work tomorrow."

"The roads will be deserted today. The roads are always deserted on Sunday."

They went down; Chhotomama backed the car out of the small garage that was attached to the house. It was an old, grey Ambassador; its faded, mottled colour did not seem to be its natural colour, but a complexion attained with age and unrewarded industry. It was battered like an old cardboard box, and the needles on the dials on its dashboard never changed direction, like futile compasses always pointing north. When it ran, the engine and the ramshackle body of the car combined to make a grating, earthy noise, like a drunk man cracking an obscene joke in a guttural dialect and laughing at it at the same time.

Chhotomama sat at the steering wheel with superior confidence; Mamima and Sandeep's mother huddled in womanly league at the back; the three boys were crammed together in the front, Sandeep by the window, Abhi next to him, and Babla inside, between his father and his brother, where it was hottest. The best place, by the open window, was graciously afforded to Sandeep by his two cousins, and Sandeep accepted it graciously, a tyrant condescending to please his subjects. Babla, the youngest, had to be content to squeeze into the worst place. It seemed there was no democracy among children--always an aristocracy based on strength, intellect, and seniority. But seniority counted most, because a boy of ten is bound to be stronger and cleverer than a boy of nine, having spent an extra year in the world, at a time when each year is like a precious deposit in a newly opened bank account. Among boys of the same age, there would be a silent tussle, a clean, honourable contest. Once a leader emerged, however, no elections were held.

They went past the bridge in Dhakuria, past Gol Park, where a statue of Swami Vivekananda, with arms folded in fierce serenity, stood staring unflinchingly at an advertisement for biscuits; past Gariahat Market; past Rashbehari Avenue, which would be lit with rows and rows of shops on a weekday, and which was distinguished by having the largest number of underwear shops in the world; then into Chowringhee with its colonial buildings, vacant and proud, looking on Sunday evening like a black-and-white photograph of another era.

A swift, streamlined breeze, such as only blows on summer nights, came in through the window. Sandeep, who envied birds and fish because they could float in their chosen element, the fish by moving with the tide and the bird by opening its wings and allowing the wind to carry it, transport it, loved going for drives because it seemed to him the only human equivalent of floating, of letting one's legs rest and setting one's body adrift. As the car turned right into Park Street, he felt at peace as effortless images of shops and restaurants passed by him as coral and anemones pass by a fish's life. A sports shop--the red letters said castlewood (INDIA)--had its glass doors closed, but its lights were on, and he could see two tennis racquets crossed diagonally behind the shop window. Still and surreal, they had the finality of a religious symbol. The car passed Flury's, tea shop, cake shop, and idler's den in one, where young clerks came with their newly married wives, wives they had never spoken to before marriage and with whom they were still shy and unfamiliar, and with whom they tried to make halting conversation across the table, where clever young men from St. Xavier's College came to glance sideways at the young, unassuming wives, who glanced sideways at them, together with the Anglo-Indians and the Chinese from Free School Street--here they congregated, like votaries belonging to a single religious order, each morning, afternoon, and evening, drinking tea and eating sausage rolls and nodding at each other. Around the giant letters, FLURY'S, were sprinkled small, absurd, many-coloured stars, a parody and tender caricature of the stars of the universe. MONDAYS CLOSED said a melancholy sign. As the battered car drifted homeward, the rear window, in a wide-eyed ignorance, recorded the last images--empty pavements, a drunk leaving a bar, a dog at a zebra crossing--of Park Street.

What People are Saying About This

Annie Dillard

No lover of literature will fail to love these vivid novels by a master of prose.

Ann Beattie

I'm so happy to be introduced to Chaudhuri's writing. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, he's a precise, sensual writer with a great gift for storytelling.

Editorial Reviews

Chaudhuri has created an indelible portrait of India...a Proustian tapestry....He conjures a web of relationships among family, neighbors, friends...he gives us the busy rhythms of a morning in Calcutta, the languor of a summer afternoon...a sense of time and flux is created...Deaths, marriages, births, the loss of a job, a new car...all are woven effortlessly into a seamless piece of music.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Attended by its watchful, intuitive handmaiden--the laudable Chaudhuri, in his first U.S. publication--the English idiom emerges new-skinned and crying healthily in the humid air and shuttered rooms of Calcutta and Bombay. Collected in one volume, a primer on Chaudhuri's remarkable sui generis prose, these three modern, postcolonial novels poise their characters delicately between the ebb of the future and the flow of the past. This tension is often dramatized by the characters' use of the English tongue. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) tells of the Bombay-bred Sandeep who aspires to be an English writer and, at 10 years old, already uses such words as "tentative," "gingerly" and "enthusiastic." Morning piles on midday, which builds to evening (or "cow dust" as the Bengali word means literally) as Sandeep spends his school holiday with his poorer and less educated cousins in Calcutta. In their house, and in Chaudhuri's nostalgic gaze, routine is elevated to ritual. The uncle's shaving and the aunts' application of "kumkum powder in the parting of their hair" are sacred arts; the sound of bangles clinking, rattling keys and "dervishing" fans are hymnals in the domestic temple. The North Indian protagonist of Afternoon Raag (1993), like Chaudhuri himself once did, studies English literature at Oxford. Far from home, and deeply immersed in the transporting lines of Lawrence's poems, he remembers vividly scenes from his childhood and the traditional music he played with his now-dead guru. "The raags," he says, "woven together, are a history, a map, a calendar, of northern India..." The simultaneous affairs the narrator carries on with two Indian girls--one skinny and one plump--provide a framework for his recollections and perfume the book with heady dormroom love. The final novel in the trio, Freedom Song, is a work of greater length and complexity than the preceding two; in it Chaudhuri hits the full stride of his mature voice. Dwelling longer on characterization, he examines the intricacies and contradictions of middle-class life in Calcutta through the relationships of one extended family. Bhaskar, a son more thin and dark than his mother wishes him, has compromised his chances of making a good match by joining the Communist Party and a street theater troupe. Bhaskar's Aunt Khuku and her friend Mimi winter out their late years in an intimate conspiracy of shawl-shrouded, tea-drinking gossip and political conversation. What may frustrate readers of the first two novels--that Chaudhuri seems to chronicle events as they occur to him, and pushes the stories to their ends by the thin connectives "one time" and "the next day"--gives way here to a more deliberate plotting that is nonetheless charmingly concerned with the behavior of Calcuttan pigeons and the rain-damp laundry on the line. (Mar.) FYI: A Strange and Sublime Sadness won the 1991 Betty Trask Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Afternoon Raag won two prizes, in Britain.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This collection of three novels is Chaudhuri's first publication in this country. Set in Bombay and Calcutta and written in a quiet, meditative style, the novels reveal the intricacies of family life, providing the reader with insightful observation and very little directly related dialog. We see into the characters' thoughts but only from the narrator's perspective, as if we were looking through a window in the ceilings of the rooms where the action takes place. A Strange and Sublime Address describes a small boy from Bombay and his visit to relatives in Calcutta. In Afternoon Raag, a young Indian man, a graduate student at Oxford, reflects on his parents, his recently deceased music teacher, and the two women with whom he has become involved. Finally, Freedom Song follows two related families in Calcutta during a time of religious and political upheaval. These novels are distinguished by their peaceful and poetic tone. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA

Library Journal

Beautifully evocative, rich with fascinating improvisations on the themes of family life, memory, and dreams.
— Philadelphia Inquirer

Edward Hower

He has proved he can write better than just about anyone of his generation...He is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally.

London Review of Books

He evokes the sweet decorousness of a way of life....he has written with persuasive resonance of an older India of family ties and shaped ceremony exiled into contemporary formlessness.
— Los Angeles Times

Richard Eder

An immensely gifted writer...his novels are crammed with breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations...he is perpetually delighted with 'the enduring allure of the everyday.'
— The New York Times Book Review

Alice Truax

One of the most dazzling new talents of any nationality.
— San Francisco Chronicle

David Wiegand

...[E]very fiction...must create an illusion of reality; nad Chaudhuri's novels succeed in doing so to an impressive degree. He has such a tender intimacy with the world and the people who inhabit it...
— The NY Review of Books

Pankaj Mishra

Three brilliantly written short novels by a young Anglo-Indian author who has been praised throughout Great Britain as one of his generation's finest prose stylists. And the reader immediately sees why in the opening pages of "A Strange and Sublime Address" (1991), which recounts in delightfully funny detail the perceptions of Sandeep, a 10-year-old boy from Calcutta whose family pays an extended visit to his uncle's bustling and eccentric Bombay home, then returns a year and a half later to chart the progress of Uncle Chhotomama, a loony mixture of communist ideologue and failed businessman whom Salman Rushdie might have invented. The story is plotless; Chaudhuri simply presents a parade of gorgeous vignettes and tableaus filled with wondrously observed small moments (when a toddler takes one hesitant step, "its other leg forgot it was a leg, and the child, bewildered by its own body, collapsed in a soft heap"). "Afternoon Raag" (1993) depicts with comparable facility the confused sensibility of a music student (perhaps the grown-up Sandeep, though not specifically identified as him) at Oxford, poised uncertainly between the comforting world of his parents back in Bombay and the contrasting promises of two girl students he tells himself he loves. The piece is slight but beautifully done. The more ambitious "Freedom Song" (1995) examines the relations among two families living together temporarily in present-day Calcutta: Shib, who works in a British-owned chocolate factory, and his wife Xhuku; and then also Xhuku's weirdly extended "family of ne'er-do-wells" whose communal raison d'être seems to be the need to arrange a proper marriage for Xhuku's scandalous nephew Bhaskar, adevout communist who performs political street theater. The two families' ineffably comic, intrinsically melancholy interactions are rendered with quiet compassion in a tour de force that suggests an Indian Buddenbrooks in miniature. Some of the most accomplished fiction of the decade.

Kirkus Reviews

"Chaudhuri writes about India like no one else." —Robert McCrum, Observer

"Amit Chaudhuri evokes the background noises of Calcutta so effectively that even for a reader who has never set foot on the sub-continent there is an eerily realistic effect." —Penelope Lively, Spectator 

"The narrative flits from mind to mind, flashes forward and back, finding a great and casual beauty at the edge of the haphazard." —Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

"Fiction very different from the kind being written by other Indians...Chaudhuri is interested in the life each of us leads that no one else knows about." —Richard Cronin, London Review of Books

"It takes us further 'towards a home in the heart' than Chaudhuri has before. Its final, subtly elegiac section reveals Chaudhuri's overriding concern: the slow unfolding of personal trajectories around the pages of national narrative." —Independent

"Chaudhuri is a poet's novelist, not just in the sensibility but in technique. All this, employing a language that is balletic—slow and artful, and at the same time, arresting and precise." —The Guardian

"Breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces and melancholy grace notes." —New York Times Book Review

"This novel is one of the closest and most luminous illustrations of ‘still life’ I have seen in contemporary fiction. Here is a world so ‘still’ that the reader expects it to collapse at any moment from the explosion or from some internal combustion of violence. And it is this gap between the reader’s expectation and the novelist’s refusal to fulfill it that gives Chaudhuri’s narrative both energy and a rare kind of tranquillity." —Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books

“What makes itself felt most abruptly in Chaudhuri’s fiction is not what happens by way of plot but the change in tone: romance is quickly, repeatedly, unrelentingly deflated.” —Saikat Majumdar, Los Angeles Review of Books

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