THE DUAL PERSPECTIVE IN AMIT CHAUDHURI’S LITERARY NARRATIVES

2024, Vol.01, Issue 01 Pages 25-29

Bansode, Namdeo Changdeo¹, and Neelam² 👤 ✉ ORCID¹: DOI: https://doi.org/10.70388/sm241103

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Citation

Bansode, N.C., & Neelam (2024). The Dual Perspective in Amit Chaudhuri’s Literary Narratives. Shodh Manjusha: An International Multidisciplinary Journal, 01(01), 25–29. https://doi.org/10.70388/sm241103

Abstract

A sense of internal struggle known as double awareness is felt by almost everyone in diapora. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an American sociologist and historian, first mentioned it in his autoethnographic book The Souls of Black Folk. In actuality, it alludes to the psychological difficulty that Black Americans of African descent experience. The two cultural areas they continuously move between are their own black culture and the superior white culture. In this way, displaced individuals constantly oscillate between two physical locations: their own area, where they locate possessions that they have lost abroad, and an unfamiliar foreign place that they perceive via their mentality. However, their wavering psychological dolna ends up nowhere. The current study examines a few samples from the previously mentioned collection and compares them to the psychology of the moved population.

Keywords: Auto ethnographic, Psychological, Alien, Migrated

INTRODUCTION

One may include Amit Chaudhuri, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Shashi Tharoor, Salman Rushdie, and Amitav Ghosh as members of the new wave of Indian English novels. He is well known for portraying an actual vision of contemporary life, particularly in Calcutta. He differs from the majority of his contemporaries in that his work focuses on the everyday details of middle-class Bengali life rather than topics like caste, love, or the fate of countries. In addition to expressing his affection for Calcutta, he portrays the city’s darker aspects, such as its dust, traffic, and power outages, as well as its drooping phone systems, generational divide, riots in the community, etc. His writings have an ambivalent aspect because of this approach toward culture and the self. Therefore, exile, self, and ambivalence are all prevalent themes in his books, and these attributes—along with style, mood, sentiment, and evocation—set him apart from a large number of other current Indian novels. Let’s talk about how Amit Chaudhuri uses his characters to shed light on double awareness in this situation.

The concepts of multiculturalism, dislocation, identity crises, and exile from one’s own culture have all attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. Several well-known authors have made significant contributions to this topic, including Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey,” Salman Rushdi’s “Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children,” Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy,” and V.S. Naipaul’s “A House of Mr. Biswas.”

Many books written by women stand out in this sector; ‘The Nowhere Man’ by Kamala Markandaya is one of the notable authors. The “Journey to Ithaca” by Anita Desai “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri In “The Inheritance of Loss,” by Kiran Desai, “The Mistress of Spices” by Chitra Banerjee Divakurni, “Everything Happens for a Reason” by Kavita Daswani, and so on.

The books of Amit Chaudhuri depict two different types of exiles: those who are banished from their own culture and those who are banished from their own selves. This strains recollections of one’s culture, identity, home, and family. Chaudhuri’s own experience in this situation unsettles his psychological awareness:

It was by mistake that I came onto A Strange and Sublime Address. This was six years after its release, or around eighteen years ago. It was a late winter day in a little sub-Himalayan town, a lonely provincial university library where the availability and acquisition of books remain largely dependent on luck. I had used up all two of the postgraduate students’ allotted books for the day. This book has a certain something that made it impossible for me to put it down for another day. What if I was never able to locate it? I stood beside a window that let in a meagre amount of winter light. Breathlessly, I read it with hunger.

The idea of “Double Consciousness,” developed by W.E.B. Du Bois, provides a full picture of the global immigrant community’s predicament. The protagonist in Chaudhuri’s debut book, “A Strange and Sublime Address,” Sandeep, seems to be a representation of the author’s own boyhood, as he embraces the carefree pleasures of eating, sleeping, and sightseeing in the city. A huge, kaleidoscope background appears through the ten-year-old’s eyes, and even something as basic as taking a bath assumes the overtones of a ritual, striking us with a sharp wave of nostalgia.

The two hours of perfect silence are over. The roads were once again filled with automobiles and packed buses; Abhi and Babla, Sandeep’s two cousin boys, would return home from school [because their bus could have stopped in the traffic congestion]; pigeons fluttered above the tidy world of terraces and roofs.

Even though the narrator of “Afternoon Raag” is physically located in Oxford, he often thinks back to his childhood home in Bombay and, eventually, Calcutta. On his travels back and forth, he physically and, more significantly, creatively traverses two universes. Living in two different places and juggling two identities that rattle his psychological boundaries and give him an uneasy feeling that occasionally seems to be mutually exclusive are other ways immigrants express their feelings about their experiences and their various social and personal identities. He lacks a true identity in this situation and is always bouncing between “home,” which is a place of comfort, happiness, and security, and “unhomeliness,” which is a place of alienation, misery, and insecurity.

Double awareness is an odd concept. because those who have been colonized and/or relocated constantly see themselves through the prism of their colonizers. Because they were taught to believe that colonists were better, they copied them. They are in the middle of nowhere as a result of starting to follow and disregard their own cultures and customs. The situation with diapora people is similar. Chaudhuri portrays in “Freedom Song” the downfall and ultimate collapse of the family enterprise, along with the forfeiture of the homes belonging to the extended family. The novel’s metaphor for the deterioration of “old” middle class values in contemporary India is the loss of the family company and the home, demonstrating Chaudhuri’s deep concern for Indian traditions tinged with Bengali sensibility. In his fourth book, “A New World,” American writer Jayojit Chatterjee, who is divorced, recounts the tale of his summertime visit to his parents’ Calcutta home with his son Vikram. The memory of insignificant details from ordinary events alludes to the narrator’s mental struggle with dual consciousness.

Strolling along the street reveals heaps of dust similar to sand dunes on the sidewalks, where kids and dogs lie aimlessly as perspiring laborers use spades and drills to excavate the macadam.

The study will include interpretation, comparison, and contrast as well as a detailed examination of a few chosen texts. A variety of relevant literary and nonliterary texts will be included in the research. To comprehend the social and cultural context in which the writer lives and works, historical and biographical details will be included. It will also examine in detail the emergence of new migration as well as other kinds of migration that are varied and dynamic. In order to strengthen the study, it will also investigate post-colonial theory, New Historicism, and Cultural Materialism.

Following the debate above, it should be highlighted that although though Amit Chaudhuri is regarded as a rising star in the Indian English writing scene, his body of work has not yet received the due exploration. It demands the focus of a thorough investigation to emphasize the subtleties of the texts and the problem of double consciousness he has addressed in his works, demonstrating Chaudhuri as an astute observer of the psychology of the characters in his stories. It also reveals more of Chaudhuri’s inner turmoil, as he constantly oscillates between the two geographical regions. This is where the idea of twofold consciousness succeeds from the standpoint of moved individuals.

Conclusion

The concept of split consciousness appears as a subtle examination of the intricacies of identity in postcolonial India in a few of Amit Chaudhuri’s works. His characters often struggle with how Western modernism and traditional Indian values interact, which causes them to see themselves as dual. Their internal struggles to balance their deeply ingrained cultural history with the pull of a global lifestyle are manifestations of this dual awareness. By deftly capturing this conflict, Chaudhuri shows how his characters’ identities are formed by their capacity to balance these opposing forces, eventually representing the experience of a society in flux on a larger scale.

References

Mandal, Ranjit. A Sense of Oscillation Between ‘Home and ‘Unhomeliness’ a Study of Amit Chaudhuri’s Select Novels
Chaudhuri, Amit. A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Minerva Paperback, 1992
Chaudhuri, Amit. Afternoon Raag. London: Vintage, 1993. Print. Chaudhuri, Amit. Freedom Song. London: Picador, 1998. Print Chaudhuri, Amit. New World. London: Picador, 2001. Print
Colonialism / Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba Routledge third edition, 2015 print.
Bose, Devika. The Novels of Amit Chaudhury: Stories without Beginning, Middles or Ends.
Birch, Dinah (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University press 2009 print.
Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23006479

About Author

Namdeo Changdeo Bansode is an enthusiastic learner of English and pursuing Ph.D. in the Department of English at NIILM University Kaithal under the supervision of Dr Neelam. Dr Neelam is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at NIILM University Kaithal Haryana. She has presented and published around 20 research papers in various National and International Journals

Impact Statement

The present paper aims to study multiple themes in the novels of Amit Chaudhuri. Amit Chaudhuri is a prestigious literary figure in the modern Indian diasporic writing. Indian diaspora literature has blossomed into an academic field during the era of multiculturalism and transnationalism. It thrives through the contributions of Indian-origin authors who have migrated to various nations for diverse reasons. This paper will provide further insights to the researchers working in the same area.