Cultural Turn: The Burden of the Grand and Amit Chaudhuri’s Rejection of it in A Strange and Sublime Address and Odysseus Abroad

Abstract

This article explores Amit Chaudhuri's subdued but radical opposition to the “grand” cultural narrative that permeates post-colonial Indian literature written in English. It makes the case that his books A Strange and Sublime Address and Odysseus Abroad subtly rebel against the Western-centered “cultural turn,” which values hybridity, spectacle, and reductive identities. The essay places Chaudhuri in the context of Bengali modernity and the nationalist movement in late-colonial India, demonstrating how his writing deviates from the loud, mythic-realist style of authors like Rushdie and instead uses the commonplace, the unremarkable, and the minute as sites of cultural and political significance. Chaudhuri reclaims realism as an indigenous mode attuned to everyday life, memory, and the city's quiet afterlives, rather than as a Western import, through close readings of the domestic Bengali household in A Strange and Sublime Address and the London-diasporic consciousness of Ananda in Odysseus Abroad. The study highlights his rejection of both the glossy “Indianness” of popular culture and the epic nationalist drama, all the while maintaining a strong emotional and historical connection to Bengal. By doing this, Chaudhuri becomes a Bengali modernist of the twenty-first century who speaks for both his own age and the previous Bengali nationalist and cultural identity theorists.