Adam Mars-Jones
FREEDOM SONG by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)
Amit Chaudhuri’s writing comes as a mild therapeutic shock to those who visualise India as either benightedly rural or bustlingly urban: his characters may live in Calcutta, but they live at a private angle to their city.
The cast of Freedom Song is large and tenuously related. The focus isn’t tight – it’s hard, even in so short a book, to keep track. The plot is oblique to the point of non-existence, and events which would be set pieces in any other novel slip past without fuss. Yet the impression made by all this elusive humanity – an amateur group putting on a play, a man getting married – is subtle and strong.
The book opens with a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, but Chaudhuri’s characters are Hindus. They feel beleaguered by Islam both religiously and politically – and then suddenly realise that they have voiced their fears in the presence of someone such as Abdullah the tailor. Their reaction is both worried and mildly defiant (“He didn’t hear us” and then, “Even if he did, so what?”).
Here, as the narrative reminds us, “among jackfruit trees, malaria, and bluebottle flies, was one of the last socialist governments of the world”. One of the main characters is even a fervent communist, ready to condemn the new and sinister world order, “and every relative, cousin or uncle who happened to disagree with him”. Yet he, as much as anyone, seems – to borrow a wonderfully paradoxical phrase – “lulled by a vortex of calm”.
The characters seem to resist any amount of prompting to engage with history. In this respect, they are like amateur actors in rehearsal, who “did not have the ability to concentrate for very long” and so “drifted out of the play into their own lives”.
Freedom Song seems an absurdly flat title to attach to a book that isn’t obviously celebratory. Its only applicability is sweetly ironic: in the world’s largest democracy, freedom includes the freedom to melt, to drift, to experience your greatest intensity in moments of drift and melting (“Time and Calcutta seemed to pass through him like water”). The narrative flits from mind to mind, flashes forward and back, finding a great and casual beauty at the edge of the haphazard.
Politics must be present in a novel about a time of emergency but Chaudhuri can admit that even in these peace-loving people there is “a pleasurable and wholly fictitious feeling of doom” about going shopping in Calcutta the day after a wave of explosions in Bombay, and a sense of near-disappointment at the news that a blast closer to home was only a local hoodlum’s arsenal accidentally exploding.
Chaudhuri’s subject, in this tender and capricious book, is inexhaustible: “The semi-lit casual backstage and dress rehearsals, the unconscious helpless putting on and putting off of different selves.”