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The Immortals

This novel seeks to capture a world in transition, especially as experienced in the city of Bombay in the early 1980s. India, in the novel, is still ten years away from economic regulation; the fall of the Berlin Wall and globalisation are yet to happen. Yet the groundwork for those changes is still being laid. The novel reflects how these changes subtly affect two families brought together by music: a nuclear, corporate family, the Senguptas, in which the young son, Nirmalya, suddenly wishes to learn Indian classical music; and the teacher, Shyam Lal, from an old musical lineage, who earns his livelihood by teaching the wives of rich businessmen, and is impatient to partake of the benefits of the changing world. Chaudhuri fictionalised and excavated this remembered world by revisiting literary texts that represent the career of art, especially music, in a context tinged with ambition, disappointment, and, importantly, moral complicity. Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus was of use here, as Chaudhuri examined the artistic turn in a bourgeois Bombay family, as was his son Klaus's Mephisto, especially in its cinematic version by Istvan Szabo. Szabo's sequel to that film, Taking Sides, was apposite and instructive, in its representation of music's sublime power, and political complicity and cowardice, dealing as it does with the question of why conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler decided to stay on in Nazi Germany. In order to recreate the lineage of the traditional music family in the novel - Shyam Lal's family - Chaudhuri interviewed members of his own late music teacher's family, to better understand the direction in which they had travelled, toward classical music in the court, and then migrating, generations later, to Bombay.