International Journal of Music and Performing Arts

Music as Narrative: Amit Chaudhuri’s a Strange and Sublime Address and Namita Devidayal’s the Music Room
Arnab Roy, Dr. Joydeep Banerjee

Abstract
The universe of Indian classical music is a very well constructed one. There are definite structure of a Raga and a very clear instruction on the performance. Amit Chaudhuri and Namita Devidayal are the two writers in the genre of Indian Writing in English who has formal training in Indian classical music and they perform at a professional level regularly. This paper aims to show how Indian classical music has influenced these two writers subtly and the structure of a Raga has infiltrated into the structure of their debutant novels, A Strange and Sublime Address of Amit Chaudhuri and The Music Room of Namita Devidayal . Though there is no direct reference of music in A Strange and Sublime Address, Chaudhuri follows, among many characteristics, the sonant-consonant note structure of a Raga on various levels. Moreover, he aims to create an ambience of a microcosmic universe through his writing, the same purpose a Raga serves. Namita Devidayal on the other hand constructed the novel in the shape of a Khayal rendition where the time sequence, characterization and plot structure moves in a circular way.

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