And So The Qawwali Meets The Meera Bhajan, Islamic Culture, NewAgeIslam.com

Islamic Culture

And So The Qawwali Meets The Meera Bhajan

Amit Chaudhuri is a fine novelist. This contributes an occasional, faintly illegitimate frisson to the weighty matters that he is dealing with in this book. As in this observation about the Birla Mandir in Calcutta: "I have never really cared for the Birla temple, for its security guards who hover not very far from you once you enter, its marble floor and enormous chandelier, its expansive air of a lobby in a four-star hotel, its spotless, garish, unimpeachable idols.

“That "four-star", particularly, is very finely judged. However, it would be a pity if the novelist’s reputation were to distract attention from the fact that he is an insightful cultural critic. I must confess to a twinge of disappointment when I learnt that Chaudhuri was employed in distant Norwich. Chaudhuri’s title seems to imply that there is some kind of jungle of controversy, some intrusive undergrowth of argument about these matters in our India. In fact, there is a resounding silence. Gossip abounds—and pretty young things—but there is hardly any space in our public world for the kind of detailed essays, published in sundry heavy-duty Western periodicals, in which Chaudhuri has developed his argument.

http://newageislam.com/and-so-the-qawwali-meets-the-meera-bhajan/islamic-culture/d/748