RAISING THE BAR

In Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri traces how his teenage obsession with rock and pop evolved into an attachment with Indian ragas, and process of declassicising that is crucial for him, both as a musician and a novelist. A conversation in time with the recent rejacketing of the book after the James Tait prize.

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WHILE most good books could arguably be said to carry their own music, only a handful can make you actually sing along with their overtures. Author Amit Chaudhuri’s exceptional and delightful Finding the Raga (Penguin) is one of these rare books. Part memoir, part literary and music history, and most charmingly an introduction to North Indian Classical music, the book traces the intersections and differences between life, musican dartin ebullient prose.

In his early teen years, Chaudhuri (re)discovered Indian classical music. He had “heard—or overheard” (as he writes in the book) about it as a child, but the form was followed by an “incredulous dismissal.” On (re)discovering the raga at this young age, he tells us, “The raga was there on the edges of my consciousness from my childhood onwards … [It] would have been present in some of the Tagore songs my mother Bijoya Chaudhuri recorded: her first recording, in 1965, is the song sandhya holo go, an ingenious fusion of Puriya Kalyan and Yaman, using both flat and natural rishabs (the second note) in the descent. I, of course, didn’t notice this as a child, and I wonder how many people pay attention to this kind of journey within a song … I began to get attuned to the beauty of ragas when I was 14 or so, first through Mehdi Hassan’s ghazals, Sachin Dev Burman’s raagpradhan Bengali songs, and the way Subinoy Roy approached the Tagore song … It was at 14 that my ‘self ’ awakened and began to listen to notes in a particular way.” As Chaudhuri writes about these events in his own life, the book is also enriched by stories about the evolution of the raga from Awadhi courts to the rise of Mehdi Hassan in the 1980s; offering a riveting history of the subcontinent’s sociopolitics as well—evolving in tandem with its preference and consumption of music.