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'To be honoured means to feel somewhat assured of the legitimacy of what you are doing'

Nitish S Rele

Amit Chaudhuri was recently in the United States to pick up The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2000) for his book Freedom Song: Three Novels.

Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta, but raised in Bombay. In Freedom Song, he highlights the intimate worlds of middle-class men, women and children. Indeed, Salman Rushdie once said, "His languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all."

The judges for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize said, "The three short novels introduce us to a voice as intimate, homely and elaboratively imaginative as young Marcel's in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past."

It took quite a while to catch up with Chaudhuri who had already flown out to the United Kingdom. But he spoke a little about his award and his next book coming up in a month or so. Excerpts:

What were your thoughts while receiving the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in LA?

It was absolutely unexpected, and I mean that quite sincerely. Especially when I discovered who was on the shortlist -- among others, Annie Proulx, former Pulitzer and National Book Award winner and finalist for this year's Pulitzer; and Ha Jin, winner of this year's National Book Award. I was honoured enough to be on the shortlist for one of the most distinguished American prizes open to non-Americans.

Was this a prize you expected to win?

No.

What do awards mean to you?

Not a great deal in the long term, but to be honoured means to feel, at least briefly, somewhat assured of the legitimacy of what you are doing.

Have you been happy with the response to Freedom Song here in the United States and in India?

Freedom Song: Three Novels, published in the US, is a collection of my first three novels [in India, Freedom Song is just the third novel] and I have been delighted with the response. Besides winning the prize, it's been a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Independent bestseller, and was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of its '25 Books to Remember' of 1999.

When you pick up a book of fiction to read, what do you look for?

I look for a tactile prose style, for humour and poetry, and a language that will suggest to me the physical immediacy of the world being described.

Who are some of the authors you look up to or idolize?

Jibanananda Das, Elizabeth Bishop (both poets); James Joyce, early V S Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Buddhadev Bose. As both poets and critics, A K Ramanujan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Do you think Indians have finally made it on the world stage as far as novelists go?

There have been Indian novelists of world stature -- in English and, most importantly, in other languages -- for more than a hundred years now. Whether they have a worldwide audience or not is really not a measure of the kind of significance they have in our national life, culture, and our mental landscape.

What is your next book all about and when will it be published? A few details?

The new one's set in Calcutta, but it's about a divorced man who teaches in the American Midwest and visits his parents in Calcutta in the summer, his only son with him. It'll be published here, in the UK, next month, and in the US by Knopf.

What do you miss most when you are away from India?

Light, and street-life.

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