Amit Chaudhuri: Music as a Non-Universal Language

At this series of lectures with performances, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri (Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, 2025–2026) will explore how North Indian classical musical forms like the khayal as well as his own experiments with the raga, the blues, and the soundscapes of the contemporary world emerge from, and express, complex philosophical shifts and departures. Chaudhuri will also consider how the everyday, in India, is situated in philosophical positions that are unwritten, and “in the air.”

Organized by the Sonic Borderlands of South Asia research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the International Balzan Prize, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.

Monday, May 4

The Raga as Investigation of Song

This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies, but investigations into them.

Monday, May 11

Music as a Non-Universal Language

This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire, which disposes of cultural categories like “East” and “West” not in order to embrace universality but to address a constant provisionality.

Monday, May 18

The High Philosophies of Orality

We associate the “oral” today with the vital, the raw, and the multivocal. Chaudhuri looks, instead, at how, in India, orality has often been the domain within which sophisticated philosophical lineages have been disseminated.

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