Nirad C. Chaudhuri is one of the most important names in the field of Indian English life writing. During his long writerly career, which spanned most of the twentieth century, Chaudhuri produced numerous autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, collections of essays and even a history of fashion in India. All these are marked by an idiosyncratic worldview underlined by a heavy dose of anglophilia which often made them controversial in India. However, in spite of the controversies, Chaudhuri’s meticulously crafted prose is widely read and appreciated and has become an essential part of the Indian English literary canon today.
Childhood Spaces of Home and Exile
Nirad Chaudhuri was born in 1897 in a small country town called Kishorganj, which is now in Bangladesh. His family was part of the middle class which had newly emerged in India during the nineteenth century under colonial influence. This middle class consisted of English-educated Indians who either worked as government employees or were engaged in professions like law, medicine, and journalism. Chaudhuri’s father, Upendra Narayan, a typical example of this new social class, had migrated from his ancestral village of Banagram to the nearby municipal township of Kishorganj to set up a practise as a criminal lawyer. Like most middle-class Bengalis of the nineteenth century, Upendra Narayan was deeply enamoured by the cultural and intellectual traditions of the West in general and England in particular. Chaudhuri’s own anglophilia which would later become such an important part of his personality and his writings was, in many ways, an inheritance bequeathed to him by his father. However, in this love for England and the West, Chaudhuri or Upendra Narayan were not unique. The influence of the Western intellectual tradition ran deep within the colonial middle class and, according to Chaudhuri, amounted to nothing less than a “wholesale transplantation of the modes of thinking evolved by one culture-complex to a society belonging to and inheriting a different one” (The Intellectual 8). In fact, by the time Chaudhuri was born, this intermixing of the two distinct cultural strains, Western and Indian, had led to what is sometimes referred to as the Bengal Renaissance, which shaped modern Bengali culture under the influence of individuals like Rammohun Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. It is in this social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth-century colonial Bengali modernity that Chaudhuri was born and brought up.
Upendra Narayan’s love for Western culture and his engagement with the modern Bengali culture that it had influenced was most evident in the small but representative collection of books that he had kept in his glass fronted cupboard. Chaudhuri recounts how, as a young boy, he would press his nose against the glass door of the cupboard to take stock of the volumes of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s poetry, and Edmund Burke’s speeches, which were kept along with the novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the poetical works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Western culture as mediated by British colonialism in India was brought even closer to Chaudhuri by Palgrave’s Children’s Treasury , which he had memorised as a child. The compositions of English poets such as Shakespeare, Webster, Wordsworth, and Rupert Brooke, that Chaudhuri encountered in this collection stirred his imagination and formed a lasting desire to become part of an idealised England which he encountered in the pages of literature. In fact, the lure of this imagined England was so strong for Chaudhuri that it wrapped his life in Kishorganj with a sense of exile.
Apart from this imagined space of England there was also a real space that kept pulling Chaudhuri away from Kishorganj, intensifying his feeling of exile. This was his ancestral village of Banagram. Chaudhuri recalls how “[t]he ancestral village seemed always to be present in the minds of the grown-ups” (Autobiography 46) who regarded the existence at Kishorganj as little more than a temporary stay. For young Chaudhuri, the contrast between these two places was significant. The immediate social circle of the Chaudhuris at Kishorganj was constituted exclusively of the middle-class men who had come to the municipal town for work and had brought with them only their wives and children. Between these families there were no bonds of kinship, but they were brought together by what Chaudhuri calls “some sense of citizenship” (Autobiography 49). In contrast, when young Chaudhuri visited Banagram during his school vacations, he was transported to a kinship network where everyone around belonged to the same joint family. Chaudhuri describes this as akin to being part of a “tribal camp” (Autobiography 49), which was far removed from the sense of the modern social relationship that he experienced in Kishorganj. Thus, in spite of the allegiance that Chaudhuri was expected to have towards his ancestral village, living in Banagram felt like being caught up “in the empty shell of the past” (Autobiography 75), that was already cast aside by the middle-class Bengalis who had emerged into the time and space of colonial modernity: a sense of being in-between and betwixt that is typical of exile. Hence, in their own different ways, both Kishorganj and Banagram represented places of exile and lack for Chaudhuri, which he finally left behind when he migrated to Calcutta in 1910.
In Search of a Vocation
The span of thirty-two years that Chaudhuri spent in Calcutta can be broadly divided into two parts. From 1910 till 1921 he was a student in the city. Thereafter he pursued his career in Calcutta, before moving to Delhi in March 1942. When he arrived in Calcutta it was still the capital of the British Empire in India. Parts of the city were built to replicate areas of London and had come to acquire the nickname of “the city of palaces” because of its grand colonial mansions. By coming to Calcutta, Chaudhuri was brought one step closer to his dream of belonging to England, which had fascinated him since childhood. However, while the grand colonial buildings did impress him and detailed descriptions of them find repeated mention in his works, he remained largely aloof from the life of the city. Speaking about his relationship with the city, Chaudhuri observes that “while I have learnt a good deal in Calcutta I have learnt hardly anything from it” (Autobiography 255). As a student, he deliberately cultivated the life of a reclusive scholar. He was a voracious reader and developed a keen interest in military history during his stay in Calcutta. In fact, he pursued this hobby seriously enough to be able to produce a long essay proposing a plan to modernise the Indian army titled “Defence of India or Nationalization of Indian Army” which was published by the All India Congress Committee in 1935. However, Chaudhuri kept away from the popular nationalist politics which was centred in Calcutta during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Also, though enthusiastic about literature, Chaudhuri initially avoided participating in the thriving literary scene of the city till he was “almost dragged to literary circles” (Autobiography 256) by his school teacher, the Bengali poet Mohitlal Mazumdar, in the 1920s.
As a student, Chaudhuri’s main interest was in history. In the University of Calcutta where he studied for his graduation, he had as his teachers such well-known historians as R.C. Majumdar and Kalidas Nag. Chaudhuri was also greatly influenced by the work of such nineteenth-century European historians as William Stubbs, John Richard Green, and Theodor Mommsen. At one point in his student life Chaudhuri even fancied becoming a historian himself. His ambition was to produce a voluminous history of India and he rejoiced in the “idea of a gigantic corpus piling itself up in annual volumes throughout a life-time” (Autobiography 352). In 1918 Chaudhuri stood first in his B.A. examination and graduated with honours in history. However, the rigorous study routine that he had set for himself soon started taking its toll and by the time he sat for his M.A. examination he was already physically and mentally exhausted. He left the examination midway and this not only brought his life as a student to an abrupt end but also made it impossible for him to achieve his dream of becoming a professor and an academic historian.
Following this, Chaudhuri’s career progressed along two separate and parallel lines – the first unfolding as a quest for livelihood and the other leading to a search for vocation. His attempt to earn a living for himself began with his getting a job as a clerk in the military accounts department of the colonial government in 1921. He left this job in 1926 and worked at different places during the next quarter of a century. In this period, he was employed as part of the editorial team in a few Calcutta based magazines and also worked as the personal secretary of the nationalist leader Sarat Chandra Bose for some time. Chaudhuri finally retired from full-time employment in 1952 as an official of All India Radio after working there for ten years.
However, this career trajectory, punctuated by frequent bouts of unemployment and financial misery, reveals only a small part of Chaudhuri’s working life because it had little connection with what he considered to be his real pursuit—the search for his true vocation. Writing about this in the introduction of Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Chaudhuri states:
I wanted to be a writer, and one who was to be involved with public affairs. I always thought that a writer was a man of action in his way, and since I could not take part in real action I conceived of my role as an observer with a practical purpose, that of being a Cassandra giving warnings of calamities to come. (xvi)
Interestingly, the first published piece with which Chaudhuri started his journey as an author and which appeared in The Modern Review in 1925 was not one of the Cassandra like commentaries on social and political matters which he would later become known for. Rather, it was a piece of literary criticism on the eighteenth-century Bengali poet Bharatchandra Ray. However, within the next two decades, he did establish himself as an astute commentator on public affairs especially through the letters and articles that he contributed to The Statesman, a leading English daily published from Calcutta with a pro-colonial stance. Unfortunately for Chaudhuri, he could make this vocation of being a writer only an informal part of his career as it never provided him with a substantial source of income till quite late in his life. Nevertheless, he kept producing a steady stream of writing from 1925 and reached his first major landmark as an author with the publication of the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in 1951.
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
It was in the summer of 1947, when Chaudhuri was working for All India Radio in Delhi, that the realisation of the imminent end of the British imperial rule in India finally dawned upon him. This was distressing for Chaudhuri for a number of reasons. First, he was a staunch supporter of imperialism as a political ideal and in fact had published in 1946 an essay titled “The Future of Imperialism” justifying this contrarian point of view in the age of nationalist politics. Secondly, though he was of the opinion that British rule in India fell short of truly fulfilling what he considered to be the political ideals of imperialism, he was nevertheless convinced that it was “the best political regime which had ever been seen in India” (Thy Hand 27). In Chaudhuri’s view, by moving towards independence, India was moving away from this political regime to an uncertain future, and was destined to fail. This mood of dejection was deepened by his sense of not having achieved anything noteworthy in his personal life till then. He therefore started working on his first autobiography both as a response to the unfolding political situation of 1947 and as an attempt to create something lasting which would give meaning to his career.
It was in the night between 4th and 5th May of 1947 that Chaudhuri took the decision to write the autobiography and proceeded to work on it for the next couple of years while continuing with his regular job at All India Radio. Though he framed the work as an autobiography, he also intended the book to be a miniature version of the gigantic historical corpus that he had wanted to write as a student. Thus, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian uses the first twenty-four years of Chaudhuri’s life to trace the history of the larger social, cultural, and political happenings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that had shaped the world in which he had spent his childhood and youth. Chaudhuri felt that with the independence of India not only was British political rule ending but what was also vanishing with it was the new social and cultural order that had been created by the middle class in India following colonial intervention. His book was an attempt to preserve for posterity the history of this socio-cultural milieu which had framed his own life as well as that of all those Indians who had shaped colonial modernity. Such intermingling of the personal with the political and the historical results in a startling claim that Chaudhuri makes towards the end of Autobiography where, much in the vain of such celebrated authors of national autobiographies like M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, he makes his own life inseparably identified with the existence of India: “I have only to look within myself and contemplate my life to discover India; … I can say without the least suggestion of arrogance: l’lnde, c’est moi” (461).
The publication of Autobiography in 1951 by Macmillan brought Chaudhuri into international limelight. However, ironically, despite weaving the story of his life and that of India so tightly together, the book also earned Chaudhuri the reputation of being an “anti-Indian” author (Thy Hand 917) especially among an Indian readership. The main cause for offence was the dedication of the book to “the memory of the British empire in India” (Autobiography vi) to which Chaudhuri attributes “all that was good and living within us” (Autobiography vi). In an India that had recently gained its independence from British rule, such a statement understandably produced outrage. But the dedicatory lines also included a condemnation of British rule for not treating colonised Indians as equal citizens of the Empire which is usually not adequately emphasised by Chaudhuri’s detractors. Chaudhuri’s assessment of British rule in India and of Britain in general is rather complex and cannot be simply brushed aside as an uncritical celebration of colonialism. His anglophilia is frequently mixed with criticism of Britain and its policies. Interestingly, one can observe this note of criticism struck quite sharply in the series of essays that Chaudhuri published in the British New England Review between 1946 and 1947, just before he started working on Autobiography. These essays were later incorporated into Chaudhuri’s Why I Mourn for England along with several other pieces which are equally critical of post-war Britain.
Passage to England
Ironically, in spite of his life and reputation being so intimately associated with the colonial metropolis, Chaudhuri first travelled to Britain in 1955 when he was already 57 years old. He was invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to deliver a few talks which allowed him to spend five weeks in England along with a couple of weeks in Paris and one in Rome. The experiences that he gathered on this first trip abroad were transformed into A Passage to England, which was published in 1959. The complex attitude that Chaudhuri displayed in his earlier writings towards British rule in India is also evident in this book with regards to the colonial metropolis. Though he was exhilarated to come into physical contact with what he describes as the “Timeless England” (3) of his imagination, the country that Chaudhuri encountered in person was also the contemporary post-war England which was very different from the idealised image of the place that he had cherished while in India. This latter England, which had lost its imperial lustre, was an anathema to Chaudhuri and he tried hard to keep it out of his account of the metropolis, but the contradiction between the two Englands remained and became more pronounced with time.
However, in spite of his growing dislike for how post-imperial England was shaping itself during the second half of the twentieth century, Chaudhuri was convinced that the constant sense of exile from which he suffered in India would end through migration to the colonial metropolis. At the root of this conviction was the theory of Aryan migration which was promoted by Friedrich Max Müller and was extremely popular in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian society within which Chaudhuri grew up. The theory was an extension of the linguistic research which had established during the late eighteenth century that the classical Indian language, Sanskrit, had a strong resemblance to the classical European languages, Greek and Latin. William Jones, in the eighteenth century, introduced an ethnographic turn to this linguistic discovery by suggesting that it was proof of Europeans and Indians originating from the same Biblical ancestor, Ham (see Trautmann). Max Müller developed and popularised this notion by associating the existence of a proto-Indo-European language from which Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin originated with the existence of a common Aryan race living in the Caucuses region. He argued that the present-day Europeans as well as Indians who spoke languages belonging to the Indo-European family had the same Aryan ancestors. The British colonisation of India was thus interpreted by Max Müller as the meeting of two groups belonging to the same racial brotherhood:
[I]t is curious to see how the [English] descendants of the same [Aryan] race, to which the first conquerors and masters of India belonged, return[ed] … to their primordial soil, to accomplish the glorious work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their Arian brethren.
(Max Müller quoted in Trautmann 177)
Following this theory, Chaudhuri believed that he was a modern-day representative of the ancient Aryans who had migrated to India from Europe a few thousand years before the beginning of the common era. In The Continent of Circe, which was published in 1965 and which went on to win the Duff Cooper Memorial award, he presents an ethnographic account of India based on this idea of contemporary Hindus living in the subcontinent as exiled Aryans whose original homeland is in Europe. Thus, Chaudhuri ends the book by exhorting his fellow countrymen to leave India and to “come back to Europe of the living” (178).
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih
