Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture

by Amit Chaudhuri

In the essays assembled in Clearing a Space , Chaudhuri draws on his own experiences to offer an acute exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian in relation to history. Often beginning with the personal, he inquires into the nature of the secular in India, into the history of such categories as the West, the foreign, the global and the exotic, and into the frequently torn and self-divided nature of modern Indian identity. With the same elegance and intelligence for which he has become known, Chaudhuri writes in these essays about Indian popular culture and high culture, travel and location in Paris, Bombay, Dublin, Calcutta and New York, empire and nationalism, Indian and Western cinema, the place of the everyday in Indian creativity, music, art and literature, politics, race, cosmopolitanism, urban landscapes, Hollywood and Bollywood, Anglophone India, internationalism, globalisation, the Indian English tradition that predates Rushdie, post-colonialism and much more.

Genres: Nonfiction, India

330 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.

He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

[Sanjay · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection of essays formerly published in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, among others, Chaudhuri attempts to locate an alternative history of Indian writing, one that steers a course between the idea of India as a mystical, exotic land and the postcolonial, polyphonic torrents of Salman Rushdie and those who followed him. Carefully thought-through and insightful, but two concerns: many essays use the language of postcolonial studies, making them heavy going for the layman; and second, there's a faint, dated air about quite a few pieces. Yes, Midnight’s Children did cast a gigantic – and well-deserved – shadow, but those that came after Rushdie have by now have emerged into their own light, with Vikram Chandra and Amitav Ghosh being merely two examples.

[Chaitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spectacularly insightful, if you are able to immerse into it... Not a light read... Cant grasp the depth of the issues discussed over a casual read... However if you do manage to get yourself on the same wavelength as Amit Choudhary, its a deliciousy joyous read....
Try at your own risk :)