The award-winning author of A New World now gives us an incantatory novel--at once plaintive and comic--about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.
Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained by his father in the classical idiom but happily engaged in teaching the more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the romantically rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from Nirmalya's mother (Shyam's prize pupil), Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in both their lives. As the novel unfolds, we see how their two families come to challenge and change each other, and how student and teacher slowly mesh their differing visions of the world, and what place music holds in it.
With exquisite sensuous detail, with quiet humor, generosity, and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals gives us a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpts
From the book...
The notes of Bhimpalasi emerged from a corner of the room. Panditji was singing again, impatient, as if he were taking his mind off something else. But he grew quite immersed: the piece was exquisite and difficult. He'd composed it himself seven years ago.From not far away came the sound of traffic; the roundabout, bewildering in its congestion. Bullocks and cars ground around it. The bulls looked mired in their element; the buses and dusty long- distance taxis were waiting to move. The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.
The Panditji wasn't there: he'd died two years ago, after his third cardiac seizure. They had rushed him to Jaslok Hospital; on the way, in the car, he'd had his second heart attack. He had died in Jaslok, to the utter disbelief of his relatives: they hadn't thought that he'd been admitted to a hospital to die. Now, his presence, or his absence, persisted in the small seven-hundred-square-feet house. The singing had come from the tape recorder, from the tape the grandson had played accidentally, thinking it was a cassette of film songs.
"Yeh to dadaji ke gaane hai," remarked the boy, recognising his grandfather's singing; was he surprised or disappointed? Next to him hung a portrait of his dadaji, enlarged from a photograph taken when he was fifty-seven. The face was an austere one, bespectacled, the oiled hair combed back. It was the face of--by common consensus in the family--a great man. The large forehead had been smeared with a tilak, as if someone had confused the portrait with a real person.
Already, the Panditji was becoming a sort of myth. It wasn't as if a large number of people knew him; but those who did divulged their knowledge with satisfaction. How well he sang Malkauns, for instance; how even Bade Ghulam Ali hesitated to sing Malkauns at a conference in Calcutta after Panditji had the previous day. How Panditji was a man of stark simplicity, despite his weakness for the occasional peg of whisky in the evening.
But it was certain that Panditji was proud, a man of prickly sensitivity. He had been a man silently aware of the protocol between student and teacher, organiser and performer, musician and musician. If slighted or rebuffed, he sealed off that part of the world that rebuffed him.
This severity had probably cost him. There was a story of how Lata Mangeshkar wanted a guru to train her in the finer points of classical music, and of how she had thought of him, Ram Lal, having heard his abilities as a teacher praised highly. "You must call her, Panditji," said a well-wisher. "She is waiting for your call." Panditji did not call. "She should call me," he said. "If she wants to learn from me, she will call me." The call did not come. In the meantime, Amir Khan telephoned her and said that he was at her disposal. Word spread quickly; Lata turned to the distinguished ustad; and Amir Khan became known as the man who had taught Lata Mangeshkar the subtler intricacies of classical music.
And yet, for all that, his reputation as a teacher had remained intact when he died; like something small and perfect, it had neither been subtracted from nor added to. People outside the family remembered him less and less; if asked "Where did you learn that beautiful bandish?" they might say in a tone of remembrance, "Oh I had learnt that from Pandit Ram Lal," for people used to drift in and out of Panditji's life, and some became students for brief spells of time.
Shyamji's life was to be different. This was a simple determination, but it was not a conscious plan. Consciously, Panditji's life was the ideal life; when Shyamji mentioned it, it was as if he were speaking of a...
Reviews
The Independent...
"Amit Chaudhuri is one of India's most distinctive literary figures. While lesser writers obsess over the heat and dust, he charts the by-ways of the Indian soul . . . The Immortals is a memorable work--capacious, multi-faceted but intimate, it is Indian to the core but universal in its implications . . . [It is a] superb new novel . . . Handled with great sensitivity and wit . . . Masterful."
Times Literary Supplement...
"The Immortals is an important novel . . . There is a filigreed, Jamesian quality to Chaudhuri's work, an urbanity and aesthetic style not often associated with Indian fiction . . . In Chaudhuri, we get an intense moral and psychological realism, a honed treatment of the fleeting specificities of everyday life."
Sunday Business Post (Ireland)...
"An entertaining, engaging read . . . Chaudhuri is a master of social comedy . . . And what a cast of humankind is conjured up."
Financial Times...
"Chaudhuri's particular art lies in rendering beauty from normality. His characters linger in the mind; and his prose, with its exactness and elegance, its exquisite delineation of memory and emotion, has a strange, mesmerising grace."
Irish Times...
"A graceful tale by a writer whose fiction is as beautiful as a classical ballet . . . There are so many reasons for liking this delicate human comedy of a novel . . . It is as if we are unofficial tourists being given an unofficial eye hole to look through . . . [This is] a book that not only brings India to life, it considers all life and all endings."
The Times (London)...
"The lyrical quality of Chaudhuri's writing is striking. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique . . . The great strength of the novel is the truthfulness of the emotional landscape . . . It invites honourable comparison with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks."
About the Author
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist.Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and TheTimes Literary Supplement. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
