Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri in conversation

Date: 29 April 2021
Time: 5:30 - 7pm (BST)

As a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large.

This term, Professor Chaudhuri will be in conversation with Dr Katherine Collins about this innovative blend of memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection, written with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response.

Chaired by Professor Elleke Boehmer.

To book your place please click here.

Professor Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, critic, essayist, and a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world.

Dr Katherine Collins is a poet and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her writing has appeared in The Rialto, Shearsman Magazine, Bath Magg, Volume Poetry, Finished Creatures, Ink Sweat & Tears, Anthropocene, and the anthology Angled by the Flood. Her Leverhulme-funded research explores the writing of southern lives.