It sounds like a handsomely prestigious assignment. The year is 2005 and the unnamed narrator of Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel has moved to Berlin for four months to occupy the role of Böll professor at an unnamed university. Awarded a generous stipend, he is put up in a spacious flat that once housed the Nobel prizewinning author Kenzaburō Ōe. He has a minder who handles his admin, frets over his cultural intake and introduces him to luminaries in the department.
But the narrator is under no great illusions. At his inaugural talk, where he “rambled on why India was a ‘modern’ idea, not a colonial or postcolonial one” – a subject that Chaudhuri has written about in the past – he notes that his hosts have to pretend he is a scholar of significance and not, as he believes, “an ornament to an international initiative”. Teaching a class later on, he “holds forth” to a dwindling number of students “but wasn’t authoritative”.
