Rabindranath Tagore meets members of Iran's parliament (Early 1930's in Tehran's Majles).

This talk discusses the advent of specific terrains in writing in Indian modernity, with special attention paid to Kipling, the English language, Tagore, and Bengal, and how this sense of terrain arose from the new significance of observation and also from strategic evasions, neither colonised nor coloniser wholly wishing to acknowledge each other.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five novels, the latest of which is The Immortals, which was a New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year, and Critics’ Choice, Best Books of 2009, in the Boston Globe and the Irish Times. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. Among the many prizes he has won for his fiction are the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Betty Trask award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was a judge of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2008, a Guardian editorial about him appeared in the newspaper's famous 'In Praise of...' series.

His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil’s Two Hundred Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years. His second novel, Afternoon Raag, was on Anne Enright’s list of 10 Best Short Novels in the Guardian.

He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and is also an acclaimed critic, with two highly regarded critical works to his name. He is a musician, a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, with two HMV India recordings, as well as being a composer and performer in experimental music. His second CD in this genre, Found Music (EMI; Babel), was an allaboutjazz.com Critic's Choice of 2010. He has been a featured artiste on flagship culture programmes on television and radio in the UK, including the Review Show (BBC 2) Late Junction (Radio 3), and Loose Ends (Radio 4).