Introducing... Professor Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. He is also a poet, essayist, short story writer, and musician. His New and Selected Poems is scheduled to published later this year in the NYRB Poets series. His works of non-fiction include, most recently, Finding the Raga, which received the James Tait Black Prize in 2022. Other awards his work has received include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, and the inaugural Infosys Prize in Literary Studies in the Humanities. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and Critical at Ashoka University. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006-2021.

His work at the IAS

Music as thought, creativity as argument

As Creative Fellow, I wish to continue my explorations of the North Indian raga and the genre in North Indian classical music called the khayal as forms of thought. These forms rethink linearity and test the limits of the representational; they replace, or supplement, the idea of the composer or composition in the post-Enlightenment sense with an infinite nuancing of how the philosopher-musician might deal creatively with found material - that is, with material that's already at hand, whether it's a melody or a seemingly immemorial cultural tradition.

Read his full staff profile and project description