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The Immortals

Author Amit Chaudhuri
Introduction by Pankaj Mishra
Paperback
$22.95 US
New York Review Books | NYRB Classics
On sale Jan 06, 2026 | 432 Pages | 9781681379678
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Two families in 1980s Bombay—one making ends meet in the old world of Indian classical music, the other thriving in a booming new world of corporate luxury—intersect in this lyrical novel of art and commerce, capturing a city (and country) in a state of change.

Music is central to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, who is well-known as a musician and performer himself. In his brilliantly exploratory novels, character and action develop not through the conventions of plot but through the free play of paragraph, sentence, and phrase, and in The Immortals it is music that supplies the theme for a series of entrancing fictional variations. Shyamji is the scion of a celebrated Rajasthani dynasty of singers—his father, an Indian classical musician, became renowned as the "heavenly singer"—but his own sights are set on a level of material well-being his father could not achieve. In 1980s Bombay, the business capital of India, he scrapes by as a music teacher to the rich. Among his students are Mallika, the wife of a corporate executive, and her son, Nirmalya, who will embrace the cause of Indian classical music, threatened by the modern world of money, with the fanatical devotion only a sixteen-year-old can muster. Comic and lyrical, the novel is at once a Bombay novel—"the Bombay novel," as Pankaj Mishra calls it in his introducion—a story of growing up, a picture of a milieu, and a resonant tribute in kind to the most mysterious and universal of the arts.
Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician. View titles by Amit Chaudhuri

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Two families in 1980s Bombay—one making ends meet in the old world of Indian classical music, the other thriving in a booming new world of corporate luxury—intersect in this lyrical novel of art and commerce, capturing a city (and country) in a state of change.

Music is central to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, who is well-known as a musician and performer himself. In his brilliantly exploratory novels, character and action develop not through the conventions of plot but through the free play of paragraph, sentence, and phrase, and in The Immortals it is music that supplies the theme for a series of entrancing fictional variations. Shyamji is the scion of a celebrated Rajasthani dynasty of singers—his father, an Indian classical musician, became renowned as the "heavenly singer"—but his own sights are set on a level of material well-being his father could not achieve. In 1980s Bombay, the business capital of India, he scrapes by as a music teacher to the rich. Among his students are Mallika, the wife of a corporate executive, and her son, Nirmalya, who will embrace the cause of Indian classical music, threatened by the modern world of money, with the fanatical devotion only a sixteen-year-old can muster. Comic and lyrical, the novel is at once a Bombay novel—"the Bombay novel," as Pankaj Mishra calls it in his introducion—a story of growing up, a picture of a milieu, and a resonant tribute in kind to the most mysterious and universal of the arts.

Author

Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician. View titles by Amit Chaudhuri

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