Freedom Song - by Amit Chaudhuri (Paperback)

About the Book

"Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s. Freedom Song, set in in 1993, is about the city and two families who live there. The first consists of a couple, Khuku and her husband Shib; their son has been living for a few years in America. Khuku's old friend Mini is visiting them while she recuperates from arthritis. Khuku and Mini spend their time talking about family, friends, health and, occasionally, Muslims and the Babri Masjid. Not far away, in Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Road, lives the second family: Khuku's brother Bhola, his wife, their son Bhaskar and daughter Piyu; a second son, Manik, has gone to live in Germany. Bhaskar, much to the consternation of the family, has recently joined the Indian Communist Party, disappears to sell the party newspaper Ganashakti (People's Power) and has become active in street theater"--

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s.

Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time. Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America. Khuku's old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town. Khuku's brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children. Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party. He sells the party newspaper on the streets. He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried.

Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middle-class world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence. A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time. A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri's wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge.

Review Quotes

"Chaudhuri writes about India like no one else." --Robert McCrum, Observer

"Amit Chaudhuri evokes the background noises of Calcutta so effectively that even for a reader who has never set foot on the sub-continent there is an eerily realistic effect." --Penelope Lively, Spectator

"The narrative flits from mind to mind, flashes forward and back, finding a great and casual beauty at the edge of the haphazard." --Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

"Fiction very different from the kind being written by other Indians...Chaudhuri is interested in the life each of us leads that no one else knows about." --Richard Cronin, London Review of Books

"It takes us further 'towards a home in the heart' than Chaudhuri has before. Its final, subtly elegiac section reveals Chaudhuri's overriding concern: the slow unfolding of personal trajectories around the pages of national narrative." --Independent

"Chaudhuri is a poet's novelist, not just in the sensibility but in technique. All this, employing a language that is balletic--slow and artful, and at the same time, arresting and precise." --The Guardian

"Breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces and melancholy grace notes." --New York Times Book Review

"This novel is one of the closest and most luminous illustrations of 'still life' I have seen in contemporary fiction. Here is a world so 'still' that the reader expects it to collapse at any moment from the explosion or from some internal combustion of violence. And it is this gap between the reader's expectation and the novelist's refusal to fulfill it that gives Chaudhuri's narrative both energy and a rare kind of tranquillity." --Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books

"What makes itself felt most abruptly in Chaudhuri's fiction is not what happens by way of plot but the change in tone romance is quickly, repeatedly, unrelentingly deflated." --Saikat Majumdar, Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen books, several of which are available from NYRB, including the novels Friend of My Youth and Sojourn; a work of memoir and music criticism, Finding the Raga; and the poetry collection Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the author of more than forty books, and among her translations from Sanskrit are three titles from Penguin Classics. Her most recent book is Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History.