At first glance, Afternoon Raag seems like a novella where not much “happens.” There��s no dramatic arc, no shocking twist, no hero’s journey. And yet, it’s full of things — memory, identity, longing, music, nostalgia, and cultural dissonance.
Set in the late 1980s, the novel follows an unnamed Bengali narrator — a student at Oxford — navigating the fluid space between India and England, past and present, East and West. The voice is gentle, almost hesitant, but fiercely intelligent and sharply observant.
Imagine if a Satyajit Ray character decided to write stream-of-consciousness prose while listening to Hindustani classical music — that’s the vibe.
The term rāg in Indian classical music is more than a melody — it’s an emotion, a time of day, a personality. The Afternoon Raag, or Madhyama, is known to evoke mellow introspection, warmth, and a touch of wistfulness. Chaudhuri doesn’t just title his book after a raag — the novel is a raag. It loops, it improvises, it repeats images (like water, old songs, sunlight), and it quietly builds mood over narrative.
The narrator is constantly in a state of "in-betweenness" — caught between Kolkata and Oxford, tradition and modernity, India and the West, nostalgia and present living. There's a sense of being a foreigner everywhere, even at home. The beauty of the book is how Chaudhuri refuses to exoticize this experience — instead, he presents it as ordinary, banal, and deeply human.
“When I first heard the Afternoon Raag,” the narrator says, “it was like a memory I never had.” This paradox becomes the soul of the novel — feeling at home in places that were never quite home.
Amit Chaudhuri doesn’t write prose. He writes liquid silk. His sentences are like brushstrokes — impressionistic, elegant, richly detailed, and often lingering on a single image or idea for a page. The rhythm is slow, like alap before the raag kicks in. If you're looking for page-turners, this might feel like a literary lullaby — but if you surrender to its pace, it’s deeply rewarding.
For example: “The sun fell like a blessing on the yellow stone, the lawns, the solemn buildings, and the girls with open mouths lying on the grass like sacrificial offerings to the season.”
Uff. Tell me that isn’t lush.
There’s a quiet undercurrent of emotional tension throughout. The narrator has two primary friendships — with Shehnaz, a cosmopolitan Indian student, and Mandira, more rooted in Indian culture. Through these women, we get fragmented glimpses of affection, jealousy, cultural commentary, and a kind of subdued yearning. But nothing is explicit. In classic Chaudhuri style, everything is implied, never spelled out.
If you’re even remotely interested in Indian classical music, this book will sing to you. Music isn't just a hobby for the narrator — it’s a metaphysical space. References to raags, tanpuras, and gharanas are scattered throughout the text, not just as decoration, but as structure. The novel’s form mirrors the way music unfolds — cyclically, through repetition and return.
And for those not steeped in classical music, don’t worry — Chaudhuri writes with such ease that even unfamiliar terms feel like part of the rhythm.
Instead of loud postcolonial angst, we get small, exquisite ironies. Like the way the narrator’s English professors are more interested in Shakespeare than he is. Or the way he notices the “unspoken” rules of class and race among his white classmates. The colonial hangover is still there, but it’s whispered in undertones, not banged on a drum.
Afternoon Raag is not a novel for everyone. It’s for the readers who love to pause, re-read, reflect, and sink into a mood. If you're in a hurry, you'll miss the music. But if you let it wash over you, it becomes a meditative experience. It’s about the unsaid, the in-between, the blurred edges of identity and memory.
Like the afternoon itself — neither morning nor evening, neither here nor there — it’s a story that exists in liminal light.