Amit ChaudhuriFinding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music

Abstract

0 table,” where the complicated covenants and codes of masculinity are passed down in silence and violence. Everywhere in this book, Finna strikes notes of salvation and resistance. Collectively , the poems make a parable of vernacular culture, which is to say, Marshall constructs an eloquent and defiant freedom inside the very contours of speech that is designed to imprison. This battle is played out as a kind of verbal interplay where “we make shambles of their standards / we stand on them / & fashion an abolition / in diction.” In a series of portrait poems and origin stories, he names and writes himself into existence as “Nate Marshall” while outing the other “Nate Marshall” that a google search reveals is a white supremacist in Colorado. Then, of course, is the brutal poem “nigger joke,” which narrates a palpably tense conversation in a bar in a gentrifying neighborhood with a white man that exposes the limits of language and faulty logic of comparative suffering. Marshall’s power is an unmitigated belief in the expressive and communicative powers of language to proffer agency and might, sustenance and strength, but he remains committed in writing poems that are authentic in capturing both the beauty and ugly reality of struggle in America. These poems work to embody that complexity if not to supremely imbue the world with the aliveness born of twisting and bending language as a measure of one’s enduring humanity: “let all my poems be / bowls or thrones or hairpieces or marriages . / let everything i make, if it should survive, tell the next world / mine were a people of faculty & faith.” Major Jackson Nashville, Tennessee Amit Chaudhuri Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music New York. New York Review Books. 2021. 253 pages. IF FICTION IS “CREATED,” then nonfiction is surely “found.” Criticism is a hunt for flaws and virtues, history spotted in the wind-mirror, memoir nothing but the draff at the bottom of memory’s barrel. Quality is not intrinsic to characters, events, or ideas but a question of how they come together, like notes in a melody. Viewed in this light, Finding the Raga, the latest book by writer-cum-singer Amit Chaudhuri, is an awkward and somewhat dissonant composition in which musical exegesis rubs shoulders with commentary on modernist art and episodes from Mughal history; “chapters” range in size from a paragraph to a dozen pages, while part 1 (out of four) occupies three-quarters of the book. And yet it is precisely by tearing through structural conventions that Chaudhuri is able to alight on a new summit of cultural discourse. For this is not just a book about found things. Rather, as its title implies, it is a commentary on the process of finding the inaudible harmony, or raga, between music, art, and life. A raga is a scale, the musical framework of Indian classical music. “You can’t compose a raga because ragas have no composers in the conventional sense,” writes Chaudhuri. “They are ‘found’ material turned into fluid and imperishable forms by the culture.” But Chaudhuri’s presence as the maestro of this quiet work, and his unique position on the threshold between music and literature, between East and West, are what make Finding the Raga so illuminating. Nearly every thought and anecdote is forged by Chauduri’s experiences and tempered by his humble, understated style, from discovering the overlap between social consciousness and musical taste as a student at University College London, to learning from his tutor to incorporate external factors—a drop in temperature, the pitch of the air-conditioner ’s humming—into musical performance. Chaudhuri himself proves a patient teacher, as he familiarizes readers with the lexicon of Hindustani classical music and walks us through the various khayals and ragas note by note. The reading is certainly enhanced by having a pitched instrument at hand, for ultimately the book remains a literary, as opposed to musical, work. Perhaps Finding the Raga’s greatest shortcoming is its inability to reconcile form and content in this way, but it is a shortcoming that Chaudhuri acknowledges. “People have asked me, ‘In what way does being a musician affect your writing?’ . . . After three decades, I see . . . one link...