Sir John Collings Squire- the bete noire of the Bloomsbury group and the Blimpish Magazine editor of whom T.S Eliot said that nothing good could be published in England if his views prevailed- nevertheless raised up an unknown Indian into the ranks of the great autobiographers in the English language.
He wrote to his old College chum, C.R.R Reddy
I spent five days and nights reading a manuscript for Macmillan (this is between ourselves) called The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The author’s name is Chaudari — though I don’t think I have spelt it properly. I wish that you had been here when I read it. He has his defects, for instance, he has never been out of Bengal, and although he has drawn spiritual sustenance from all the great English authors of the past, and thinks that any Indian revival must come from Europe and mainly from England, he has met very few Englishmen, and has a certain resentment against the commercial community in Calcutta, who I don’t suppose would suit me any better than they suited him….my dear Reddy, the man is a sage; he is as familiar with all the arts of the world as he is with the religions and philosophies. His English is so good that one is tempted to think that he must have had a translator; but a translator as good as that would never have bothered about translation, but have written great works of English prose on his own. This “unknown Indian” hovers above our globe, and sadly scrutinizes the fluctuating fortunes not merely of India with her succession of invaders, but all of mankind…He could meet any of the great thinkers of the past on equal footing…if his book comes out, as I hope it will, it may put India into an uproar. But it will certainly enlighten all historically-minded men.”
It seems, it was not the bien pensant metropolitan elite, but this cricket playing, genially toping, Commander in Chief of Literary England's 'Squirearchy' who gave a leg up to the sort of Bengali Babu his caste was supposed to despise. More strangely yet, it is precisely the elitist erudition, the Francophilia, which the Squirearchy abhorred in the modernists, which their leader found compelling in a man some fifteen younger than himself from a very much more modest background.
Though Nirad never knew who it was who had recommended his book be published, he wrote, some five or six years later in 'a Passage to England,'
It does not become an
Nirad belonged to the Kayastha- or writer- caste but, under the Raj, to do well, this caste had to keep up its knowledge of Persian while regaining and expanding its knowledge of Sanskrit. At the same time, the Kayastha was required by his British master to invest in the creation of a large and instructive body of vernacular Bengali literature. Of course, the Indians were welcome to learn English of a useful sort. What was not desirable was that they turn English literature into an esoteric Babu jargon unintelligible to all but its authors.
I should emphasize that traditional Brahmins were not supposed to have much love for secular literature- more particularly of an erotic sort. They were expected to just stick to Scriptural and Devotional works. Princes, too, should never develop an unmanly addiction to phrase making. They should be vigorous of body and virile of conception but maintain a bluff indifference to the hypertrophied literary culture which had marked the decline and decadence of the Mughals and the Nawabs who succeeded them. Merchants, like Gandhi, were welcome to learn enough English to do well in the Courts but what was required of them was factual arguments and a mastery of the Rules of Evidence, not ornate or recondite eloquence.
The English tutors of Princes were ex-Army men who spoke the various vernaculars in a dignified enough but essentially utilitarian manner. They might wax loquacious over the port in describing a martial engagement, but eschewed 'poodle fakery' in the presence of ladies.
It is interesting that Sir Syed Ahmed, the inheritor of Mughal erudition and founder of Aligarh Muslim University, demanded that instruction in the Humanities be given in plain and simple English. Why? Urdu's convolutions and euphony rendered young brains barren.
Both the Indians and the British rejected both 'Babu English' as well as the preciousness of Walter Pater and his school. Wilde, it is true, could be very funny- and a sense of humor is important- but Wilde walked the primrose path to perdition. Let the French, who had decriminalized sodomy during their Revolution, go in for a Mallarmean cult of pure language. As for the Bengali bhadralok, buddhijivi, who had always shown an attraction to France and its Roman Law tradition, let them continue to live in a mental universe where Dupliex not Clive, had prevailed. It was a small compensation for their continuous loss of power, prestige and money which had been going on since the 1840's. With the coming of Independence, many East Bengali Hindus- and Nirad was from East Bengal- lost everything. First Ranajit Guha and then Nirad himself- apparently with the help of the erudite American sociologist, Edward Shils- emigrated to the UK and took British citizenship. During the Fifties, the French supported Nirad, by paying him to edit their Embassy bulletin, because he was the only brown man from South Asia who was saying that the White man should come back and rule his patch of swamp where men were as mosquitos. Nirad's Francophilia justified the French attempt to keep their Empire by selectively granting a few colored people the status of being 'evolved' and thus notionally equal to proper French citizens. Later it would be Spivak who would take up this torch albeit in an even more solipsistic and senseless manner.
Was English literature the 'wife' of the Englishman? No. At best, she was a kindly Aunty or elder sister. Work was his wife and Sport his recreation. Literature was a return to the Nursery, with its brightly colored book covers, but only while the rain bucketed down.
Nirad forgets that Jeeves was the creation of a younger brother of a great Theosophist in India who, for a time, was the tutor of Jeddu Krishnamurthy- the Universal Messiah promoted by Annie Beasant. Jeeves is a jeeva-mukt- liberated soul- or pratyeka (hidden) Buddha. He has achieved Spinozan univocity. Wodehouse's genius is to give him a conatus and an oikeiosis of a shrewd and commendable sort. He has humanized a Divine Comedy and given his readers many sunlit hours when golf is impossible because the rain keeps bucketing down.
Indians, to contribute something to England- in the same manner that Armine Wodehouse contributed to India- had to do what the English had done in India- viz. find profitable opportunities for trade and industry or novel methods to enhance the value of what already existed. The only ties that matter in a Common Law- as opposed to Roman Law- jurisdiction are those of a Contractual, mutually beneficial, kind. Meaning- artha- is concerned with having the means to achieve desirable ends.
England would briefly become a nation of Asian shopkeepers. Then the children of those shopkeepers started to rise up through education and a more complicated, technological type, of enterprise. We don't ask of Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak that they be able to recite the Faery Queene. We expect them to do a good job for us so that our economy recovers from COVID and Brexit and whatever yet worse calamity is waiting for us around the corner.
As for Indian visitors to England- like other visitors- they want to see cricket and football matches and go shopping and take selfies and enjoy the chocolate box perfection of the Home Counties' sunny vistas.
Interestingly, Nirad's own son, seems to have been a typical 'Public School' type-
Nirad was destined by nature to be a Professor of Military History. Sadly, he didn't get the distinction in his MA that he deserved- a case of 'exam nerves' I suppose- but he did get a very good berth with the Department of Military Accounts. Nirad's own auto-didacticism soon put him in a position such that he could correspond with people like Liddell Hart. He had the soldier's ability to imagine an entire topography and thus to understand the deeper strategic logic of military engagements. In 'Passage to England', Nirad repeatedly gives proof of this essentially aesthetic aspect of the soldier's eye. Yet, precisely because his destiny had not been to be a soldier or to rise high in the Defense hierarchy of even one of the native princes, this aestheticism was linked to nothing but Hippolyte Taine's bogus 'race, milieu, moment'.
Nirad rose to public prominence first through his articles on the military situation and then through his broadcasts for All India Radio. After the publication of his 'Autobiography', he was refused an extension of service in his Government job but the French were happy to take him on as a client. This forced the Brits to do something for Chaudhri in their turn. Ultimately Edward Shils, his reputation tarnished by the discovery that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was CIA backed, helped the one Indian who fitted his own theory of the 'intellectual' to get the fuck out of India.
The BBC, in affording Nirad his first 'passage to England', had hoped for praise of their Welfare State but had received instead a welter of incomprehensible erudition and arcane literary allusion. Nevertheless, the thing was the beginning of a beautiful romance. Here was a genuine dhoti-wearing Bengali whose great love for England and Europe, though entirely bookish and abstract, was delightfully, dottily combative and cross-grained. There was a bluff and Blimpish soldier hidden within that small but upright form. Had India made a proper use of his ability, he would have travelled across its length and breadth so as to form a better idea of its defensibility and capacity to project force. In that case he wouldn't have written nonsense of the following sort-
The truth is quite different. The Europeans ensured that their forests and mountains and fjords and islets could not become centers of resistance. They abolished the 'Zomia'- the 'fracture zone' of Empires- they invented a type of forestry management which was later imported into India. Brahminic civilization eagerly embraced the Universal Empires promoted by the Shramanic religions- indeed, most Jain and Buddhist monks were of Brahmin origin- and thus the exclusion from the town which Nirad remarks on, only obtained where Muslim rule was enforced with a heavy hand. Had Nirad visited South India, he would have seen with his own eyes that Temple towns were as ubiquitous as European Cathedral towns. Thus Radhakrishnan felt at home in Oxford- though maintaining orthopraxy- precisely because it was a sort of more cosmopolitan Kumbakonam. Indeed, the Tamil who reads G.U. Pope- who did much to revive our language in its pure form- feels he is reading the work a Tamil scholar who happens to belong to the sect of St. Thomas which had arrived on our shores some two thousand years ago. Indeed, we eagerly keep alive the notion that Alfred the Great's emissaries, who had come to us seeking a relic of that Saint- whom Oscar Wilde thought should have been the patron of the skeptical English- had received a fond welcome.
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