Born in East Bengal in 1897, Nirad C. Chaudhuri lived for a hundred years, which meant that for almost the whole of the twentieth century one of the great masters of English prose was an Indian:
Chaudhuri wasn't a master of English prose. He wrote in the manner of Macaulay to denounce England's dereliction to a duty only Churchill believed it had. But, it is also true that, as Aubrey Menon had said in his novel 'a prevalence of Witches', people who hoped to get into the Civil Service imitated the style of a mid Victorian lead article in the Times. Perhaps some lucrative literary commission might be forthcoming from one of the Ministries.
To my mind, a mastery of a language's prose means that sentences can seldom be improved in any way. Chesterton, Saki, Beerbohm and Waugh were masters in this sense. Some Indians wrote English well enough but their prose could always be improved upon by a good editor.
and of Indian masters of English prose, Chaudhuri was by a long way the most distinguished.
Only in the sense that I am the most distinguished exponent of Bharatnatyam on Halford Road.
Good prose may be truthful or fanciful or humorous or melancholy. But, what is required of it is, if not naturalness, then 'naturality'- i.e. it can't be wholly ipse dixit or arbitrary. Consider the following passage from Niradh's criticism of E.M Forster's 'Passage'-
My most serious criticisms [of Passage to India] are the following. It shows a great imperial system at its worst, not as diabolically evil but as drab and asinine;
Forster does not show the Raj at its worst. That is not his aim. The question is whether what he depicts is 'representative'. His Indian friend, Ross Massood, thought it was.
Now, it must be admitted that a drab provincial town is described as such. It is true that, in its pages, stupid people make asses of themselves. But stupidity and drabness are not a function of the type of administration that obtains. They are properties possessed by particular people or places and can't be altered by changing the form of government.
the rulers and the ruled alike are depicted at their smallest,
no. People of a middling sort, such as are found in provincial places of a middling type, are depicted as being of a middling stature. What is wrong with that?
the snobbery and pettiness of the one matching the imbecility and rancor of the other.
Snobbery is a type of imbecility and rancour is always linked to pettiness of some type. Why not just say 'my most serious criticism of this book is that the people in it are people. They should be unicorns. Also, they should be able to fly and they should come to my birthday party. All the other kids will be totes jelly.' ?
Our suffering under British rule, on which a book as noble as Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et grandeur militaires could have been written, is deprived of all dignity.
Vigny wrote of the tedium and suffering endured by the professional soldier. Had the Raj conscripted a large portion of the adult male population- which is what happened in Tzarist Russia- such a book could have been written of India. As things were, you had a purely volunteer army which featured noble-hearted bhishtis like Gunga Din.
British prisons in India weren't too badly run. Caste rules were respected and thus dignity was maintained. This wasn't the case in the Cellular prison in the Andaman islands. But that tale had been told by the likes of Bhai Parmanand.
Our mental life as depicted in the book is painfully childish and querulous.
Like Niradh's mental life.
Lastly, attention is diverted away from those Indians who stood aloof from the world the book describes and were aristocratic in their way, although possessing no outward attribute of aristocracy.
He means nutters like himself. Still he makes a good point. Why did Jane Austen, writing 'Pride and Prejudice', not mention Hetty the hen who stood aloof from Wickham's dastardly machinations?
When I consider all this I feel Mr Forster’s literary ability, which has given the book its political importance,
it had none. By the time it came out, it was obvious that Dyarchy would fail. Sooner or later, there would be Provincial Autonomy. Could the British transfer power to united Indian Federation? No. First Buddhist Burma and then the Muslims went their own way. Hindus had to hang together, otherwise, history would repeat itself and either Muslim or Marxist hegemony would be established.
as a grievance.
But this is like having a grievance against Jane Austen for not focusing on Hetty the hen's increasingly fervent prayers for gender reassignment surgery. Laying eggs is no fucking picnic mate- as Sir Walter Scott was often heard to remark.
It may be that a man may be a great literary artist without having very much in the way of a brain or store of knowledge. But, such a man must leave severely alone any intellectual topic. Consider the following-
There was between European civilization
which is Christian and not derived from Greek or Gothic or Celtic religion
and the Hindu in its stricter form a common Indo-European element,
No. What happened was that the Jews were colonized by the Greeks- Second Maccabees was composed in Koine- but then a Jewish sect- that of St. Paul- gained hegemony over the entire Roman Empire and then, after an interregnum, over its successor States.
which was discovered and described by British Orientalists in the first century or so of British rule, but which came to be forgotten and ignored by Englishmen in later times.
It wasn't forgotten or ignored. It just didn't matter very much. Hindus had kept an Indo-European religion. Europe had not.
Modern Hindu thinkers did not, however, lose sight of the affinity.
Hindus and Christians believe in incarnation as hypostatic union. Muslims and Jews do not.
Swami Vivekananda, speaking at the end of the last century, said that two branches of the same people placed in different surroundings in Greece and India had
come together thanks to Alexander. There were Indo-Greek kingdoms stretching as far as the banks of the Ganges.
worked out the problems of life, each in its own particular way,
the Greeks gave up their particular way and adopted that of a Jewish sect.
but that through the agency of the British people the ancient Greek was meeting the ancient Hindu on Indian soil,
No. Some ancient Greeks had met ancient Hindus on Indian soil. Some of those Greeks became Hindus or Buddhists. Hindus continued to meet ancient Greek thought first through Arabic and Persian and then through English.
and thus ‘slowly and silently the leaven has come, the broadening out, the life-giving revivalist movement that we see all around us.’
Indians prefer unleavened bread.
The British in India never gave this fruitful idea any encouragement.
Except by setting up Schools and Universities and creating the Indian Education Service.
They were taken in by the deceptive simplicity of the Muslim
but didn't convert to Islam.
and repelled by the apparent bizarrerie of Hinduism and its rococo excrescences.
Unless, like Sir John Woodrooffe, they were experts on Tantra
I wonder if it was the Hebraic element in the British ethos which was responsible for this.
There is no such element. On the other hand, it is certainly true that Jews have done well in Britain. But they also did well in India.
What Niradh meant was that the Protestant or Low Church element in Britain looked upon Jews and Muslims with friendlier eyes than they cast upon the Whore of Babylon. 'Temple' Hinduism looks a bit Catholic. Indeed, when Vasco da Gama's sailors reached India, they rushed to a Hindu temple, believing it to be a Christian Church, to render thanks to an idol they believed represented the Virgin Mary.
By saying Niradh was a master of English prose, perhaps Clive simply meant that he was a darkie who wrote in a manner which suggested an expensive education. As such, one may forgive Clive for indulging in a spot of aesthetic affirmative action. Where he crosses the line is in suggesting Indians were taken in by Niradh's rhodomontade.
He was granted that title even by other writers of Indian background who might well have claimed something like it for themselves: V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose.
Naipaul is much imitated. Niradh is not. Zulfikar is Pakistani and unreadable. The Desais are dim bulbs.
In India, Dom Moraes's prose was considered good. The general feeling is that you must first master poetry before you can pursue excellence in prose. James himself was a fine poet.
They revered him even when they disagreed with him.
Nobody 'revered' him. He was a cartoon character.
Chaudhuri himself never set foot outside India until 1955, for a trip to the centre of the old British Empire—rapidly shrinking at the time—that he had always infuriated many of his compatriots by more admiring than not.
It is likely that he was more of a Nationalist than an Anglophile for the first 40 years of his life. In 1935 he penned the official Indian National Congress pamphlet on the need to Indianize the Armed Forces. It should be emphasized that he first sought success in Bengali not English.
His short book about that short visit, A Passage to England, gives us the essence of his limpid style and historical range.
His style is not limpid. It is over elaborate. His periods are stretched to inordinate length. This may have been fine in the Nineteenth century but we have less leisure than our ancestors.
As for Niradh's 'historical range'- it is bracketed by the ending of the reign of the first Elizabeth and the beginning of the reign of the second. To be fair, the rage for Anglo Saxon and medieval English had not reached the Academy, at least that of Ind's coral strand, when he was matriculating from Ripon College.
But readers should not be afraid to tackle at least two of his longer books. Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, his account of the crucial years in Indian history between 1921 and 1952, is one of the indispensable historical works of the century,
it is wholly dispensable to Indians though of possible interest to those puzzled by the Bengali 'buddhijivis' lemming like drive to plunge off any and every cliff top of reason.
The one amusing thing in it is his description of Shantiniketan as an Odette-like slut who gloms onto Proust's Swann- here represented by Tagore- to his everlasting social humiliation and spiritual ruin. But one might just as easily picture Shantiniketan as a Sapphic Albertine for whom Tagore acted as a great big beard. The thing may be funny, but it isn't true. The true masters of English prose express truth varnished by an all forgiving wit or exculpatory humour.
and The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is rich in self-examination, unfailingly hard-headed in its liberal sweep, and true in every detail except its title.
Nehru was well known. Niradh- perhaps because he was broadcasting from Delhi rather than Bombay or Calcutta- was not. Generally speaking, this is still the case. The fact is, had G.V Desani stuck to Literature, he'd be more famous than Niradh. T.S Eliot thought highly of H.Hatter. A third broadcaster, Aubrey Menen, had the better style.
If ever there was a known Indian, it was Chaudhuri.
When he died, his books had long been out of print.
His decision to live out the last act of his life in Britain had profound implications for some of his fellow Indian intellectuals.
It had none. What mattered was the global decline of the West. Once Thatcher's favourite politician- Lee Kuan Yew- came out and said what everybody was thinking- viz. prolonging the British Raj would have been highly beneficial- Niradh appeared a prophet without honour. Then you re-read his books and discovered he was a typical bhadralok bigot.
Many of them resented it. But his belief in India’s importance to the world remained beyond question.
Yet, India was not important to the world. Nehru had turned down the offer to take Taiwan's seat in the Security Council even though this was backed by Mao. India did not want to be of interest to foreigners and gradually lost interest in itself. What really mattered was caste. My own almost infinite literary output is simply my way of asserting the right of Iyers to be granted not just Educationally Backward Status but a special quota, for Government jobs, for being Extremely Fucking Mentally Retarded. Perhaps, Niradh was doing the same thing.
James quotes from 'Autobiography'-
'My notion of what is proper and honest between Englishmen and Indians today is clear-cut and decisive.
Nehru's notion was decisive. He decided he needed Mountbatten & Blackett's advise. He retained a British Admiral till 1958.
I feel that the only course of conduct permissible to either side in their political and public relations at the present moment is an honourable taciturnity.
As opposed to sodomy or mutual masturbation or whatever else it was E.M Forster had been getting at in his 'Back Passage to India'.
The rest must be left to the healing powers of Time.
Cancel that. Time's healing hand may need the assistance of lube.
IN EARLY 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have profited if his Foreign Office brief had included this quotation.
What would profit him was Robin Cook resigning over the invasion of Iraq. The Indians hated that ginger cunt.
He might have been a bit less ready to lecture his Indian and Pakistani opposite numbers on the advisability of cooling down.
It would turn out that his Pakistani opposite numbers were sheltering Osama while pretending to look for him.
The advice was received with polite disdain: the best that could be hoped for.
was that Robin Cook be told to fuck the fuck off. The Queen's visit to India was marred by the antics of her Foreign Secretary.
It was Blair’s lucky day.
Blair didn't matter. Bush did. He had held a nuclear gun to Musharaff's head. Sadly, he wasn't really interested in Osama or the Taliban. It was Saddam he hated because the fellow had tried to kill his Pappy.
After the Indian Mutiny, cheeky Sepoys were tied across a cannon’s mouth preparatory to its being fired.
Mutineers were killed in that way- if they were foolish enough to stick around.
The hankering for a comparable decisiveness must surely linger.
Vajpayee didn't want to blow up Blair. The fellow's ego was inflated enough as it was.
Another use for the quotation, and one we can all put into effect, is to remind us that Chaudhuri, while he valued the connection with Britain, had no rosy view of its effects: he was never a lickspittle for the Raj.
Till he became a Civil Servant. It must be said he was right to back the War effort. The Japanese were cruel to those they conquered.
In Thy Hand, Great Anarch! he recounts how Britain manoeuvred to get India’s cooperation during World War II without having to promise independence.
It did promise independence. Moreover, it had already granted Provincial Autonomy. If the Indians had been able to agree among themselves, they could have formed a Federal Government at the Centre to which the Viceroy was answerable.
On the other hand, he came down hard on the counterproductive intransigence of India’s political parties, especially of the Congress party.
So did Rajaji, who was of that party and who was also related to Gandhi by marriage.
If Congress had cooperated with Britain during the war, he says, it might have prevented partition afterwards.
If Congress had cooperated with Dyarchy, India might have stopped being a shithole. Going further back, if Indians in the INC had agitated for the implementation of, its founder, A.O Hume's plan for agricultural reform, India might have begun to rise from the Eighteen Nineties onward.
Nehru, not Gandhi, is Chaudhuri’s villain. In Chaudhuri’s picture, Gandhi retreats into the background while Nehru, between 1939 and 1947, stands forward as “the wordmonger par excellence.”
Niradh's Autobiography was a riposte to Nehru's. The symmetry here was between an unknown Indian from a small village and the son of a patrician who had an English upbringing (he was tutored at home by a British Theosophist before going to Harrow, Cambridge and qualifying for the Bar while attending lectures at the LSE) and who felt caught between plutocratic England and the poverty stricken world of his Province's peasants. Niradh is saying that he arduously acquired the paideia which Nehru had received as a birth-right. That is why he was more qualified to appreciate what England had to offer India.
The problem here is that Niradh didn't understand that the relationship between England and India was economic. It was not cultural. Britishers wanted Indian productivity to rise. They didn't give a fuck whether Indians knew Shakespeare from a hole in the ground. If India got richer, it would buy more from England. Money matters. Milton does not.
The Indian intelligentsia, says Chaudhuri, wanted Britain weakened but not defeated.
No. They wanted to move into the nice offices and bungalows the Brits had built for themselves. Anyway, a defeated Britain would have been unable to honour its debts to India. There would be no 'sterling balances' to draw on.
Like the Trinidad-born writer C. L. R. James, whose message to the Third World was that it should learn from the First,
rather than fist the First while learning from lemurs.
Chaudhuri offered no automatic comfort to the old Empire’s self-renewing supply of angry radicals.
Actually, the Hindu Right liked him. L.K Advani came to visit him in Oxford. There was some vague notion that Chaudhri was of the school of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee- the father of the founder of the BJP- and that he secretly hated Nehru.
Most of Chaudhuri’s political talk means discomfort for someone, usually for India’s intellectuals.
India's intellectuals study STEM subjects. Marxism is supposed to be 'Scientific' Socialism. Chaudhri's 'political talk' was mere ad hominem polemics. He had zero interest in economics though I suspect that he was shrewd enough when it came to financial matters. Satyajit Ray confirms that he lived very comfortably while claiming to be on the verge of destitution.
Many big subcontinental names have admired him, but you can’t imagine any of them not dropping the book and whistling at some point, especially when he reaches the conclusion (and his writings in toto reach no other) that Britain made India possible.
Nothing wrong with that. The fact is the Hindus only decided to hang together because the alternative was to be hanged apart thanks to Muslim and Communist salami tactics.
The best reason to whistle, however, is the quality of his prose. Ten pages into The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, he’s already snared you.
That is ten pages too many. You need to snare readers with your first paragraph.
“The rain came down in what looked like already packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground.”
Pencils of glass is good. But there is some slackness to the sentence. Rain of any type hits the ground. A glass pencil would shatter.
If he had lived long enough, W. G. Sebald would probably have got the Nobel Prize for writing like that.
He'd have got it for being as boring as fuck.
Chaudhuri’s prize was to live for a hundred years, retain a rock-pool clarity of mind,
Rock-pools may be clear. They may not.
and spend his extreme old age in England,
apparently the climate agreed with him.
surrounded by the foreign language he loved best, and of which he was a master.
Bengalis prefer French.
Chaudhuri and Sebald might seem a strange coupling, but more united them than their choice of England as a place of voluntary exile.
They were immigrants, not exiles. Sebald appears to have suffered from serious mental health issues.
Chaudhuri was a character from one of Sebald’s books: like Austerlitz in Austerlitz,
There was a holocaust of Hindus in East Bengal, but Niradh was safely in Delhi by that time. Later on, TTK got Niradh to write a paper on the sufferings of the East Bengali Hindu. It failed to hit the mark.
Chaudhuri could develop a philosophical theme out of a long study of practical detail.
No. Indians were rather good at philosophy back when he was at College. He went in for History, which did not require much in the way of IQ.
Similarly, Sebald was a character out of Thomas Mann.
i.e. as boring as fuck.
If you ever find yourself wondering where you have heard Sebald’s infallibly precise memory speak before, think of the enchanting and omniscient Saul Fitelberg in Doktor Faustus.
Mann was writing at a time when there really was a struggle for the soul of Germany. By the time Sebald started writing, that soul had found expression in making rather decent cars- at least when compared to those British Leyland turned out. Still, it must be said, what we hear when we listen to a German accent, is a fucker who woke up early so as to get the best sun-bed. Fuck you German peeps! Fuck you very much!
There are tones that connect authors in exile, and that give them a single country to inhabit: the country of the mind.
which is wholly concerned with STEM subjects. Exile is a condition of the heart. But Chaudhri wasn't an exile. There was a large Bengali buddhijivi community in Delhi and an even more erudite, albeit smaller, such community at Oxford. As for English people, Niradh had got along very well with them since the age of about 16. One particular Catholic priest who took an interest in him was a Public School and Oxbridge man. Later, he had British supervisors in the Department of Military Accounts and plenty of British colleagues at All India Radio.
The difference is in the timing. Chaudhuri and Sebald were looking back on shattered civilizations.
Hindu civilization may be said to have shattered a thousand years ago. But the Nazi interlude was too short to greatly affect German culture.
So was Thomas Mann,
only if, as some feared, Hitler really had inaugurated a thousand year Reich.
but with Fitelberg he could make the character prescient.
if by 'prescient' you mean as boring as fuck- sure.
In Doktor Faustus the end has not yet come. The character can foresee it because the forces that will lead to disintegration are the first he feels.
Hitler ate a bullet. Get over it.
Chaudhuri’s prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now.
He was merely scolding England in the way buddhijivis have always scolded Bengal. Due to why, Queenji is getting drunk on Gin and mooning Mrs. Thatcher? Is this what you call cultured behaviour? I tell you, Britain has reverted to total barbarism! Everywhere you go there is the stink of curry. Rivers of blood, I say, rivers of blood will flow from Robin's Cook's vagina. Virgil wrote something about that to Horace. As I recall it was 'ipse dixit Jim will fix it.'
By the mere act of writing such a richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.
Civilization's don't make a secret of their history. Some pedagogues are paid a little money to humanely examine it. But plumbers make more money.
As for Niradh, he took up a type of Bengali English prose where Shashi Chunder Dutt, not to say Micahel Madhusudan, left it and did well enough by it. True, he was a darkie. But that doesn't mean his prose was any good in itself.
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