Glyn Maxwell writes:

The Immortals could hardly be called an elegy for a golden age of classical purity; it’s more like a portrait of those who write the elegies: comic, affectionate, regretful, but, under the veil of Chaudhuri’s courteous, sympathising style, very drily aware. The system of mentors and disciples – gurus and shisyas – by which the gharana is meant to perpetuate itself looks moth-eaten. Mallika Sengupta’s artistic hopes fail in the hands of a series of inadequate singing tutors, from drunks and flirts and has-beens to the pedantic Ghulam Mohammed, who teaches her nothing but ‘intricate exercises that didn’t add up to anything but which he named, with satisfaction, “designs”’. Shyam is guru to the gifted Nirmalya, but the restless younger man thinks the fire has gone out in his teacher and prefers to study at the feet of Pyarelal, a feckless family hanger-on, with whom he can smoke and have deep discussions. A ready supply of charlatans is to hand in the political sphere: Congressman Hanuman Rao, who wears only white, breezily tells Shyam he is ‘the best singer in the country’ and asks him to be the musical director of a new film starring Rao himself as a peasant revolutionary. This project, Naya Rasta Nayi Asha (‘a new road, new hope’), is derailed by Rao’s embroilment in financial scandal.

(LRB 9 April 2009)

Picador | hardback 407 pp. |ISBN: 9780330455800