Odysseus abroad - Amit Chaudhuri

The Nobel, for Amit Chaudhuri, is good for a “blurb in the end.” Responding to a question from the audience about the declining number of international literary awards – including the Nobel -- coming India’s way, Amit Chaudhuri says, “Nobel is one of those things that doesn’t matter. It is so random and bureaucratic. It is never known what bureaucracies do – there’s a degree of unpredictability – and the Nobel committee is a Kafkaesque thing.”
Awards, he explains, are a part of the “check-list” – along with author signings and reviews by specific reviews – that writers have moved beyond.“You want the Booker the way you want chicken-pox – to immunize yourself for the need.”
Chaudhuri was at the Times Lit Fest Delhi, 2015, to discuss Odysseus Abroad. His latest wouldn’t have been the novel it is if a maternal uncle he saw a lot of as an undergraduate in London didn’t bear a resemblance to the artist FN Souza. In fact, that period in the mid-80’s was “insignificant” to him till this fact struck him. The narrative of an undergraduate student and his single uncle going about the city on a single day in 1985 draws, of course, on the Greek epic and also James Joyce’s Ulysses. But the origin of the idea for the book was less exalted. Chaudhuri persuaded his uncle -- who detested the Bengali bhadralok and spent decades in England -- to visit Calcutta in 1991. He took a look at a Souza self-portrait in charcoal hung up in Chaudhuri’s room and allegedly commented, “You should’ve paid me Rs. 55,000 for farting.” “Souza had called the self-portrait Ulysses and my uncle looked like Souza.”
This happy accident led Chaudhuri to reflect on the nature of his uncle’s journey and his own and that, in turn, led to Odysseus Abroad. His book may have even gone by another name as he’d briefly considered calling it Black Odysseus – a reference to the tendency of Indians and Pakistanis to identify themselves as “a part of the larger political constituency that called themselves black” during the rise of right-wing politics in England. “But I thought that would be too obvious.” The “Asian” identity emerged later as they emerged as “an entrepreneurial community that was distinct in their ambitions.”
Chaudhuri read from his book and it led to a discussion that was more emphatically ‘literary’ than most others. Co-panelist Somak Ghoshal used the word “Rabelaisian”; an audience-member brought in Mikhail Bakhtin and parody. Chaudhuri himself had to check that tendency by saying, “That’s a very high level of response and I don’t know if I can answer appropriately and I don’t want to turn this into a seminar on Bakhtin.”