Indians connected with the Radio had started publishing books in England by 1940, when Ahmed Ali's 'Twilight in Delhi' came out thanks to support from E.M Forster. Two years later Ali was appointed the BBC's representative in India. Aubrey Menen, who worked for All India in Bombay, brought out his novel 'Prevalence of Witches' in 1948, the same year that G.V Desani- who had gained some fame as a broadcaster in England- published 'All about H.Hatter' which was praised by T.S Eliot. Three years later, Niradh Chaudhuri- who got his start as a broadcaster in Calcutta before moving to Delhi- published 'Autobiography of an unknown Indian' which greatly appealed to J.C Squire, T.S Eliot's bete noire.
Desani moved in a mystical direction becoming an authority on esoteric Indian philosophy. Menen's novel raises a question- what if Gandhi had embraced the creed of Walter Pater & Oscar Wilde rather than crazy nonsense dished up by Ruskin & Carlyle? Nehru himself had confessed to a Cyrenaic streak. Perhaps if he'd had a different sort of Guru, Partition would have been avoided. India's only problem would be the prevalence of witches- i.e. women who prevented Hindus and Muslims from becoming bum-chums. Needless to say, the Indians were rather afraid of Menen.
Chaudhuri, however, was a puritanical scold who for some eccentric reason doubled down on a Blimpish view of Indian independence and the craven decadence which had supposedly overtaken England as a consequence. That he chose to write in an ornate, scholarly, style was a reflection of the Kayasthat tradition of ars dictaminis save in that a Latinate English had replaced euphuistic Persian or, going further back, Sanskrit. Perhaps because of Niradh's experience of writing for the Radio, his prose does not smell too much of the lamp. There is a speaking voice, a personality, which holds our attention.
Desani's novel was written in the idiolect of a 'half caste' Eurasian and is comic in nature. Chauduri's book is an erudite riposte to Nehru's 'Autobiography' and his 'Discovery of India'. Nehru came from a rich family and had studied at Harrow and Cambridge. He was world famous as the Prime Minister of India. Chaudhuri was from a small village and had achieved little in life. In a sense, his book parallels his friend Bibhuti Bhushan's 'Pather Panchali' and 'Aparajito' which Satyajit Ray would turn into the 'Apu trilogy'- a cinematic masterpiece. Bibhuti was poorer than Niradh and wrote in a lyrical rather than an intellectual manner. Chaudhuri, who had begun writing for Desmond Jerrold's ultra-Tory 'New English Review' in 1946, provided solace to those in England who resented the loss of their Empire in India. Nehru, by upbringing, an upper class Englishman, had donned the homespun of the Indian peasant and battled vigorously against the Raj. Chaudhuri was a Hindu from the boondocks who, by arduous auto-didacticism, had turned himself into an Englishman of a choleric, early nineteenth century, type.
This was the quixotic symmetry which gave Niradh's book its piquancy. Englishmen could no longer write disparagingly of India without being accused of sour grapes. If anyone was to make a bit of money supplying the market for such diatribes, it had better be a brown man who could write in the grandiose style of the reactionaries.
Enoch Powell, a Professor of Latin and Greek, who served as a Brigadier in Delhi during the war, was one such nutcase. Ferdinand Mount- Pankaj Mishra's father-in-law- writes
When Powell joined the Conservative Research Department after the war, he wrote an 8000-word memo to his boss Rab Butler explaining that ‘for some two generations ahead ultimate responsibility for the government of India will continue to be with Britain.’ He followed this with an even longer memo of 25,000 words describing how Britain could hang on, which Butler recalled as arguing that ‘with ten divisions we could reconquer India’. At Powell’s insistence, he showed the memo to Churchill, who ‘seemed distressed and asked me if I thought Powell was “all right”’.
Powell was not all right. He was a crack-pot. He gained fame when he turned against the 'coloured immigration' he, as a Minister, had helped encourage and facilitate . His career in politics tanked around the time Niradh and his wife decided to settle in England.
There was an element of comedy in a Professor of Latin's Blimpish views being better represented by a little Bengali Babu whose classical paideia was almost entirely self-acquired. Perhaps Powell and Niradh's paths had crossed in Delhi in 1943 when the former was a Lieutenant Colonel and the latter was working for All India Radio. Sadly, Niradh was not a homosexual and thus the bonkers Brigadier may not have suffered the indignity of anal rape. Nevertheless, it is this counterfactual which Queer Theory must focus on if it is ever to develop its own theory of the 'subaltern' or 'native informant'.
It is notable that at a time when Powell was learning Urdu in the hope of becoming India's Viceroy, Nirad was applying himself to European art and literature hoping to become... nothing save what he already was- viz. a member of Bengal's 'writer caste' (Kayastha) wholly devoted to literature albeit of a deeply bigoted or meretricious type. Clearly, Niradh's failure to bugger some brains into Powell is a classic example of what Gayatri Spivak calls the 'catachresis of the anteriority of the ipseity of the scotomization of that thing I was talking about in my next book'.
A natural question to ask is why Niradh went in a right wing direction when some of the brighter sparks of the older cohort were making the hegira to Lenin's Kremlin. Perhaps, his generation felt that they had not the mettle of the Jugantar revolutionaries. In any case, the Brits were on their way out and perhaps rich pickings could be had from the Calcutta Corporation after the younger Bose became its C.E.O.
Niradh makes no mention of Dhan Gopal Mukherji's 'Caste & Outcaste' which came out in 1923 and which paints a picture of life in rural Bengal. Dhan Gopal was 7 years older than Niradh. His father was a small town lawyer turned village priest. He himself spent a year as a wandering ascetic. Rejecting religion he went to Calcutta University and became a revolutionary like his elder brother. After a brief sojourn in Japan he landed in America where he became a successful writer- mainly of children's books. Sadly, some problem with his wife caused him to hang himself in the mid-Thirties. I suppose, he was the first Indian to make a living by writing books in English. Sadly, the habit of hanging yourself did not take hold amongst such authors.
Returning to the question of why Niradh moved right-ward, we may well speculate that his cohort of aesthetes, believing Anatole France to be the summit of Parnassus, substituted a Gnostic demiurge for Tagore's irenic God as Nature. At a later point, T.S Eliot's Mannerist defence of 'Tradition' became influential though by then Niradh had abandoned literary controversy. That game was not worth the candle. You could be fined for obscenity while brave women were going to jail as freedom fighters.
I suppose, a young History graduate was bound to have been influenced by Spengler. Heidegger, however, was little appreciated in India at that time. Still, there was an esoteric, eugenic, Right Wing ideology in inter-war Bengal which had one or two Brahminical champions. Chaudhuri, being a Kayastha, remained a Rationalist. Perhaps, as a jobbing journalist, he tailored his views depending on where he could get published. What is certain is that he was part of a long tradition of Babus writing bombastic English. Michael Madhusudhan Dutt wrote the following in 1854.
I have heard the pastoral pipe of the Mantuan Swain
he'd read Virgil.
... I have listened to the melodies of gay Flaccus,
presumably Horace is meant
that lover of the sparkling bowl, and the joyous banquet;
as opposed to a guy who liked eating his own shit.
I have heard of bloody Pharsalia,
Lucan's epic poem on the Roman Civil War.
and learned to love Epicurus, the honour of the Greek race ... I have seen gorgeous Tragedy, in sceptered pall come sweeping by presenting Thebes’ or Pelop’s line;
The reference is to Milton- '
Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine.
I am no stranger to the eloquence of fiery Demosthenes, of calm and philosophic Cicero;
who wasn't calm and often waxed hysterical
I am no stranger to marvel-relating Livy; to sententious Thucydides ... I have laughed with Moliere; the melody from the dismal prison-cell of Torquato Tasso, has soothed my ears. I have visited the lightless regions of Hades with Dante
In other words, he had read a lot. Still, it is when he switched to writing in Bengali that he won renown. But, it must be admitted, it was British policy to get educated Indians to forsake English in order to enrich their own mother tongues. The problem was that Bengali literature could not achieve critical mass. The country was too poor. Its economic substructure militated either for detachment and emigration from, or an involuted denigration of, its own parasitic intelligentsia.
After Independence, vernacular writers and poets could gain power and influence. Bal Thakeray and Karunanidhi are examples. Still, speaking generally, their descendants preferred English but of a functional, or gesture political sort. Belles lettrism had had its day. Literature, as an academic discipline, has turned into a particularly illiterate branch of Grievance Studies.
In his 'The thought of Niradh Chaudhuri' Ian Almond- despite his own sneaking sympathy with fine writing- seeks to claim Niradh for Post Colonial theory. Bizarrely, he compares Chaudhuri with, of all people, Nabakov!
In the year 1951, two very different autobiographies appeared in English. The first was Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, written by the Indian who is the subject of this book. The second was
by the Duke of Windsor?
entitled Speak, Memory, and was written by the Russian author Vladmir Nabokov. It is unclear (and unlikely) that either writer knew of the other at the time. Both autobiographies were written in the fluent second tongue
Nabakov could read English before he could read Russian. He graduated from Cambridge University before deciding to become a Russian novelist. The Bolshevik Revolution reversed that decision. The memory of first love, grotesquely translated to the America of the Nineteen Fifties, produced Lolita.
When Niradh fell in love with the neighbour's daughter, he imagined himself caught in the coils of a python in a ruined mansion. The beloved comes and sees him for the first and last time. Then he expires. What spontaneously came to Niradh's lips was not Bengali, not English, it was French- A L'Inconnue dont la figure belle mais d'une tristesse infinie me rappelant la face douloureuse et deji obscurcie de notre passd suggera les pages qui suivent et les hante comme une ombre gracieuse.
To the Unknown Woman whose beautiful but infinitely sad figure reminds me of the painful and already obscured face of our past, suggesting the pages that follow and haunting them like a graceful shadow.
Those pages were never written. Niradh got his dad to find him a bride. He was very happy with her and she, in turn, ensured that he made a fitting place for himself in the Republic of Letters. This involved abandoning Bengali and moving away from Calcutta which had too many critics and no creativity.
The difference between Niradh & Nabakov is the difference between saudade and anemoia- the former longs for a love which was known, the latter longs what was never known.
of their authors; both recounted childhoods from which they were subsequently exiled –
Niradh wasn't exiled. Nabakov was.
Nabokov recollecting prerevolutionary St Petersburg in New York,
Russia is a different country from the US. Nabakov genuinely was in exile. Stalin would probably have killed him had he been foolish enough to return to the home of his ancestors. By contrast, Chaudhuri remained in his own country. He merely moved from the Capital of his Province to the Capital of his Country. Far from being an exile, he was a Government servant.
Chaudhuri turn-of-the-century Bengal in New Delhi; both writers professed various versions of anti-populism, even anti-communism
They also had penises. This shows how similar they were.
during their lives and cultivated a fondness for aristocracy and the forgotten charm of defunct empires.
Nabakov was an aristocrat. Niradh was a middle class 'Kayastha' descended from clerks and small town lawyers. Nabakov was fond of his own people. Niradh wasn't at all.
This last point requires a qualification: Nabokov rued the demise of an empire
The last Tzar and his family was shot. In India, the King Emperor presided over a peaceful transfer of power. India remained a part of the Commonwealth. Niradh was welcome to come and settle in the UK and to stand for Parliament.
he was very much part of (his grandfather had been the Minister for Justice under two Tsars1 ); Chaudhuri lamented the vanquishing of an empire which had ruled over him.
Ian does not know that the King Emperor defeated Hitler and Tojo. The British Empire was not vanquished. There was a gradual transfer of power which began when General Elections were held in 1923. India was already a member of the League of Nations.
Nabokov would have felt at home, racially and culturally, amongst the Tsarist elites who ruled the Russia he fondly remembers from his childhood; Chaudhuri, on the other hand, would not have been allowed to enter the ‘European-only’ clubs (such as the Bengal Club in Calcutta) which could be found in the urban centres of British India.
All official clubs had been thrown open to Indians by Viceroy Reading. Indians were only admitted to the Bengal Club in 1959. This was because it was private.
When Chaudhuri finally visited England for the first time, at the age of fifty-seven, a child playing in the street tells him he’s from Africa.
So what? Kids say the darndest things. Anyway, plenty of Indians in the UK- e.g. G.V Desani who was born in Nairobi- were from Africa.
Another 'exile' Almond compares Nirad too is Octavio Paz- later a popular Ambassador in New Delhi. His melancholy was the traditional 'saudade' which, in Urdu, is 'sauda'. Mexican 'solitude' had to do with it having embraced a unique type of 'metisage' and then, later on, a sui generis type of Secular Socialism.
Two similarities with Chaudhuri, however, emerge once we bring these texts closer together. I will not count the most obvious one – the situation of exile common to both writers (writing a book about Bengal in Delhi, a book about Mexico in Paris).
Calcutta was part of India. A Bengali residing in Delhi isn't an exile. He will find plenty of his own ilk in high positions in the administration and in academia. In any case, Hindi is very easy to learn if you are Bengali or Gujarati. It is the Madrasi who finds it difficult.
Rather, a more fundamental resemblance lies in the emphasis Paz places on the melancholy orphanhood of the Mexican,
They had become independent long ago and had pursued a unique historical trajectory. India wasn't very different from Burma or Malaya or, indeed, Nigeria.
a trope which seems to concur with Chaudhuri’s own feelings of filial abandonment at the departure of British rule. The ‘melancholy’ or ‘gloomy’ nature of the Mexican is a common feature of Paz’s text:
Tagore's poetry was pretty gloomy. Still, Paz found in Buddhism- with its doctrine of 'dukkha' or the sorrow of all things- a consoling philosophy. Unlike Neruda, he liked India.
'This is not the moment to analyze our profound sense of solitude, which alternately affirms and denies itself in melancholy and rejoicing [en la melancolía y el júbilo], silence and sheer noise ...; (19, 22)
India isn't silent at all. It has some very colourful and joyous festivals.
The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins ...
Hindus in India know their gotras and pravara. Our family priest can recite our family tree to us, if we are interested in learning it.
Our solitude has the same roots as religious feelings. It is a form of orphanhood [orfandad], an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All ... (20, 23) [North Americans] are optimists and we are nihilists – except that our nihilism is not intellectual but instinctive, and therefore irrefutable. ...
No wonder Paz liked Buddhism! Strangely, Nirad had no special feeling for the religion probably because it was one Indian export which the whole world seemed to value. Ian writes
Like Chaudhuri’s orphaned Indian,
India was not a settler colony like Mexico. I suppose you could say the Eurasian community was orphaned by the departure of the Brits. But they were smart, hardworking, people. Many emigrated and did well. Those who remained quickly adjusted themselves to the new dispensation. Consider Joe Biden's Indian relatives. They are doing so well for themselves that they didn't ask their American cousin to get them Green Cards.
the gods have abandoned Paz’s subjects,
The regime was anti-clerical but did not seek to crush the Church in the brutal manner of the Bolsheviks.
even if Chaudhuri refuses to join Paz in essentializing this sadness as a constitutive characteristic of the Indian.
There is a strong strain of ontological dysphoria- a feeling of not being at home in the world- in Vedantic Hinduism.
It is Chaudhuri himself, more than anyone, who is the orphan in his own book;
he did lose his mother at a young age. Apparently the lady had some mental disorder. But he still had his father and his brothers and sisters.
Why does Ian assert 'The physical impossibility of Chaudhuri’s return to his childhood origins'? True, he would have had to get a visa, but there would have been no great difficulty in his visiting his ancestral village save during periods of military conflict between India and Pakistan. Calcutta, it is true, may have greatly changed in the intervening period, but the countryside of East Bengal had scarcely altered.
beginning with its faintly sepulchral dedication to the British Empire,
he doesn't say the Brits were paternal. He says they conferred subjecthood but not citizenship. He was wrong. Churchill was as much a British subject as Niradh till the Nationality Act of 1948 after which the term British citizen replaced 'British subject'.
the whole text of the Autobiography itself could be seen as an orphaned child of the departing British.
If it had been written by a 'country bottled' Anglo-Indian- sure. But it was written by a member of the new master race. One final point. Nirad ended 'Autobiography' by demanding the return of European rule. Paz wasn't asking Franco to take over Mexico.
Ian asks a pertinent question-
...why write, let alone read, a book on Nirad Chaudhuri?
If you have to teach worthless shite, you may find this is easier than reading or writing about Finnegan's Wake. Still, a White Professor ought to be careful about teaching Nirad's texts. He could get himself 'cancelled'.
A separate point is that Professors, when supplying a quotation from a writer, should correct any misinformation it might contain. An example is the following-
Europeans only accord respect to their generals when they have ‘killed a sufficient number of Europeans’– a fact which, Chaudhuri argues, explains the greater prestige of Wellington over Clive
I can imagine a young person who, reading this, would jump to the conclusion that this was a commonly accepted view. But it is nonsense. General Gordon was a very famous general. He made his name in China though he came a cropper in the Sudan. Wellington was a two time British Prime Minister and thus in a different league. Also, no one can deny that Napoleon was not a formidable enemy and a military genius of the highest order.
Chaudhuri’s originality as an intellectual thinker did not lie in... theories
nor in the ability to synthesize facts so as to arrive at considered judgments which withstood scrutiny.
The truth is Niradh had no critical faculty. Consider the following
– Chaudhuri approvingly repeats an English historian’s claim that more poisons and assassinations can be found in one century of India than in ‘half of the kingdoms of Europe since the time of Charlemagne’ ; a culture so permeated with the lust for money that Hindus buried silver with themselves when they died rather than hand it on to their children
Ian may not know that Hindus are not buried. They are cremated. But Niradh must have known this to be the case.
... but rather in the way he expressed them,
he wrote in English. That's what made him original. Which other dude wrote in English? Nabakov! Was it because both Niradh and Nabakov had penises?
in the kind of intellectual he became through the act of expressing them. An immense store of erudition, largely Western when displayed, an enormous underground lake of German philology, French biography and English letters fed the drawing-well of Chaudhuri’s reference-peppered prose.
Back then, it was quite usual for writers to have read widely in all modern and two classical European languages. Some, like T.S Eliot also knew Sanskrit.
In Chaudhuri we encounter a Bengali who has not simply read the biography of Napoleon, but also that of his valet, one who can describe the village communities and practices of Mymensingh in terms borrowed from classical Greek – polis, nomos, metoikoi.
So could Morris Ginsberg who spoke only Yiddish till the age of 15. Sadly, there was no 'polis' in Mymensingh. It was an administrative unit not a self governing republic. Nomos just means norms. Metics are merely people who here but who hail from somewhere else.
And hidden beneath all the references to Bernheim’s Lehrbuch
historical method. Apparently, that kike didn't get that you could just make up stuff- e.g. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
and Zola’s La Terre
which has no application to India because inheritance law was completely different. Parents could not transfer property to adult children in return for a pension.
lies the subaltern voice of Chaudhuri’s East Bengali,
which was also the language spoken by the Nawab of Dhaka- a subaltern with a paltry income of just 120,000 pounds a year. This was at a time when 100 pounds a year was considered a decent competence.
speaking the language almost completely excluded from the Autobiography,
because it was in English and published in England. At that time few English people knew Bengali. They were fluent only in Zulu.
a language not even conceded the tradesman’s entrance of a footnote or a parenthesis.
Moreover, Niradh would beat and sodomize it if it tried to crawl through a window.
A second reason to be interested in Chaudhuri is his presence in modern Indian literature. Almost every Indian writer and thinker of any significance has had something to say about Nirad C. Chaudhuri.
Only if they get paid. Some even pretend to have read his shite.
Salman Rushdie praised the Autobiography as the ‘masterpiece’ of an ‘erudite, contrary and mischievous presence’ ;
One which didn't try to stab him. Rushdie is grateful for small mercies.
Khushwant Singh called him ‘the most outstanding intellectual I had the privilege of befriending’.
He used to lend him his typewriter and then run around Delhi telling everybody about his generosity.
Even an otherwise critical observer like the great novelist Mulk Raj Anand acknowledged the ‘brilliant style’ of an ‘odd genius’.
If G.C Squire & E.M Forster think your prose is good, it is good enough. It is when an Englishman hands back your manuscript saying 'I'm sorry. I don't know Swahili', that you realize it may have been a mistake to sleep through all your English language classes.
Contemporary writers such as Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri call him ‘a connoisseur of cultures and civilisations’ and an ‘astonishing and intractable writer’.
Sadly, both are shit.
Poets such as Kaiser Haq have written of Chaudhuri’s ‘apocalyptic sensibility’,
East Bengal became even shittier after it got rid of not just the Brits but also the Kayastha Hindus.
literary critics such as Meenakshi Mukherjee have declared their ‘special admiration’ for Chaudhuri’s transit between cultures,
There was no transit. In an earlier age, Kayasthas had cultivated Persian ars dictaminis just as, under English masters, they assiduously applied themselves to European literature. Sadly, the Brits wanted them to focus on writing in vernacular languages so that literacy might spread.
whilst Harish Trivedi has acknowledged ‘the crucial importance of Chaudhuri’s hard-won style because it was the man himself’.
It was a pose but an entertaining one. It's like when the African Chieftain in the grass skirt speaks with an Etonian accent to Dr. Doolittle or James Bond. But the boys from Hindu College had cultivated this literary style a hundred years ago. Shashi Chander Dutt wrote in this manner. Interestingly, he published some of his history books under English names. By the end of the nineteenth century, this subterfuge was no longer necessary. Indians could be authorities on Indian history because they had done the spade-work in the archives.
Historians and sociologists averse to his work grudgingly acknowledge the contours of his shore, even in passing it: Partha Chatterjee begins his Present History of West Bengal by distancing himself from Nirad Chaudhuri’s ‘decline of Bengal’ thesis
Though Bengal did decline in relative terms. Sadly, Niradh wasn't interested in explaining the economic reasons for this.
; in his classic work The Intimate Enemy, Ashis Nandy castigates ‘the Nirad C. Chaudhuris and the V. S. Naipauls’ for being ‘inverted modern gurus’
Nandy was Christian. He suspected that Nirad and Naipaul looked down on 'rice bags' like him.
; at several points throughout his Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty uses Chaudhuri as an example of the semi-repressed ‘colonial Victorian prejudices’ lurking within Bengal’s babu culture.
Like Niradh or Ranajit, Dipshit emigrated. His own preference was to live in a place still ruled by Whites.
If we include the Indo-Caribbean figure of V. S. Naipaul in this category of Indian writers, then his oft-quoted description of the Autobiography as ‘the one great book to come out of the Indo-British encounter’ supplies the very apex of recognition, grudging or not.
Kipling's Kim is that great book. He has Bengalis and Bhutiyas, Pathans and Punjabis. Britain encountered the whole of India, not just Kayasthas or Kaulas or Kannadigas.
The third reason to return to Nirad Chaudhuri’s work is that it illustrates, contributes to, and undermines a series of ongoing debates both inside and outside postcolonial studies.
Debates within shit are merely shit.
As we rotate the multiply faceted crystal of Chaudhuri’s persona under a number of spotlights – Islam,
He was against it.
melancholy,
He had read the 'Anatomy'
the idea of the archive,
which is where he would have been obliged to labour if he'd gotten his MA and then followed Kalidas Nag to Paris to get a Doctorate.
the concept of Empire –
which is that a bunch of sovereigns are subject to an super-sovereign. This isn't a difficult concept to grasp.
a number of different implications flash out in several directions.
They are what you'd expect of a student of R.C Majumdar who was able to find a niche for himself amongst die-hard Tory publishers like Douglas Jerrold.
Chaudhuri’s various and at times conflicting responses to Muslim culture makes us reflect
that Bengali Kayasthas and Baidyas were against Muslims more particularly if they came from the East. This is because their throats would be slit and their property taken by the Muslims if the Brits slyly fucked off.
not only on Edward Said’s arguments concerning systematic misrepresentation of the Other,
There was no 'misrepresentation'. Muslims really did ethnically cleanse Hindu from East Bengal. Will they do the same in West Bengal? Perhaps.
but also Bakhtin’s notion of a multiply-voiced self
does not apply to Niradh. He was as univocal as Bugs Bunny.
and the extent to which the archive formed but also fractured Chaudhuri’s notions of history and identity
The archive may be a place where you can find something to back up your ipse dixit pronouncements
has implications for Bhabha’s celebration of hybridity,
An immigrant isn't a hybrid. He is merely a person who moved to another country so as to do better for himself.
not to mention Gauri Viswanathan’s analysis of secularism and the colonial education system.
She presents no analysis. She pretends that English literature, as an academic discipline, was invented in India. Yet, Chancery English had been taught in England from the fifteenth century.
The central role that an idea of loss plays in Chaudhuri’s work (loss of British rule,
Bengal had provincial autonomy from 1937 onward. But, previously, there was dyarchy.
loss of Bengal)
West Bengal remained Hindu.
contains within it some ramifications not just for the burgeoning field of ‘Sadness studies’
Schadenfreude studies maybe. Niradh was safe in Delhi when the shit hit the fan in Calcutta.
and the relationship between melancholy and identity, but also for the possibility of a profounder relationship between melancholy and political conservatism.
That may have been true of aristocrats who lost their palaces and had to get jobs as waiters in a foreign country. It wasn't true of Niradh.
In many ways, this final point leads us to one of the questions which lie at the heart of this book: how does power convince people to love, respect and even defend cultures they don’t belong to?
By paying them well and treating them decently. The Statesman and then the Indian Radio and then British publishers treated Niradh well and his income started to rise. His son did well in England and, when he and his wife moved to England so he could write a book commissioned by Max Mueller's descendants, his health began to improve.
When a Bengali intellectual, born in a village in the provinces of present-day Bangladesh towards the end of the nineteenth century, decides to see himself racially as a displaced European – what factors are involved in this process?
Personal preference. There were plenty of English people who decided they were Indian and who served that country very loyally.
Even allowing for Althusser’s concept of ‘overdetermination’
e.g. killing your wife because you don't like her as well as because you think you can get away with it.
– the simultaneity of political/psychological/physical/economic factors in accounting for a phenomenon – exactly how does this apparatus work, and how many partners are involved in its operation?
Niradh was from East Bengal. He had a good reason to say that the departure of the Brits had been a disaster for his people. That reason was that Hindus were ethnically cleansed. It was also true that he liked England. His son became a Professor there. Later, when he took up residence in Oxford, his health improved. His literary reputation grew. Under Mrs. Thatcher, the country moved to the right while simultaneously becoming less racist. The England he died in would have a Hindu Prime Minister some 23 years later.
One of the ironies of Turkish nationalism is that its foremost intellectual and architect, Ziya Gökalp, was a Kurd;
He was a Turkmen though he described himself as Turkish. His mother's family may have been of Kurdish origin. But his was a patrilineal culture. He was associated with Cevdet- a Kurdish atheist.
a gifted writer and thinker who saw himself as a Turk,
Because he was Turkish. Nationality is inherited from the father, not the mother. In any case, the Turkish nationalists classify Kurds as 'mountain Kurds'.
and whose positive essentialization and celebration of the Turkish race and Turkish culture was a central component of Atatürk’s nation-building project, Gökalp’s Kurdishness-in-denial offers an eerie comment on the internalization of ideology.
It simply isn't true. The fact is there were plenty of Jews who were members of the Young Turks. Gokalp did not speak Kurdish. He spoke Turkish. True, he came from an area where Kurds predominated. But then the Kurds were happy enough to slaughter Armenians for Abdul the Damned. The complicating factor was the short-lived Kurdish Soviet. Maybe, if Ataturk had been strong enough to bring all Kurdish areas under Turkish rule, then an autonomous Kurdistan would be a bastion of Turkish nationalism. After all, the real enemy was the Arab or the European imperialist.
The enigma behind Chaudhuri’s own insistence that he was more English than the English, in this respect, will be one of the basic questions of this book.
Malcolm Muggeridge had said that last true Englishman would be an Indian. This is because the niggers will eat all the Whites. They will avoid the Indians because they stink of curry.
Chaudhuri was born in 1897 in a small town in East Bengal. His background was modest and provincial – his father was a mukhtar
i.e. he did not have a degree and could only appear in criminal cases in subordinate courts. It must be said, he gave his sons a very good start in life. Back in those days, an ICS officer with two sons would only be able to send one to University. I suppose College fees were much lower in India. But the opportunity cost of a young man's time was also very low.
(a pleader who worked in a legal court), and certainly the earliest part of his childhood was spent in a rural, village setting.
Small town. He also visited the ancestral village.
Visitors looking for the house today in Bangladesh will be disappointed – the ancestral home of Chaudhuri’s childhood is gone, although the absence of any buildings in the surrounding area gives a realistic idea of how it would have looked around 1900: palm trees; ponds (pukur); rice fields; raised, people-dotted paths stretching out to and from the horizon. Chaudhuri and his family moved to Calcutta for his high school and university education (which he received at the famous Scottish Church College) but, after failing to attain his master’s degree, he moved into a career in journalism.
He became a clerk in the Department of Military Accounts. Some 70 years previously Shashi Chander Dutt described the plight of the young Bengali- his head stuffed full of Milton and Shakespeare- having to settle down to the drudgery of office routine. Since then, the manners of the English bosses had improved and the Eurasians had been eliminated as a rival to the Bengali Babu. Still, this species of drudgery, though better paid, was scarcely superior to the drudgery of the historian working in the archives. A fate better yet might be that of the 'scholar gypsy' who escapes all drudgery by writing any old bollocks which comes into his head
In the years that followed – right up until the age of forty-five – he would remain for the most part in Calcutta, editing several famous magazines and contributing to many more on a regular basis.
From the English point of view, it is his contribution to Jerrold's rag which mattered. It was there that he rehearsed the arguments he would put into his autobiography.
Niradh's problem was that he did not want to be a scholar- i.e. to acquire and disseminate knowledge to some useful end. He wanted the emotions he believed a scholar would have without actually accomplishing anything. This was a false type of 'oikeiosis' or 'appropriation' which in childhood we indulge in when we believe ourselves to be secret agents or Japanese Samurai or American Cowboys or Red Indians. What is galling is that what we actually are is little boys whom Mummy spanks if we are naughty.
Niradh admired the German historians who inspired his professors. But they applied themselves to Indian history for the same nation building purpose as Mommsen. For this they received acclaim both abroad and at home. Scholar Gypsies had to content themselves with being jobbing journalists.
During his time in Calcutta (the formative and most significant period of his life), he became friends with a number of famous Bengali writers: the poet Mohitlal Majumdari, the writer and journalist Pramatha Chaudhuri and the gifted fiction writer Bibhutibhushan Banerji, with whom he shared a house on Mirzapore Street.
Bibhuti's autobiographical 'Pather Panchali' had been a big hit around 1930. Sadly, he did not live to see his old College friend succeed in England with his own autobiography.
Chaudhuri, it is important to note, was a provincial intellectual
No. He was a 13 year old boy from a rural district who attended High School and College in the Capital city where he remained. A provincial intellectual attends local schools and colleges and remains in the provinces.
moving in an urban environment he did not belong to (in the Autobiography, he details the kind of attitudes Calcuttans had towards East Bengalis).
He was 13 when he got to Calcutta. He belonged there within a year or two. His elder brothers may have faced some prejudice. Not him. He spoke in an urbane manner.
The point helps to illuminate the abiding sense of dislocation – both intellectual as well as geographical – he would feel throughout his life.
It would be like the great sense of dislocation Ian would experience if he moved from Preston to Manchester.
In 1942, after having worked for three years as a secretary to some
one
of the foremost figures in the Indian nationalist movement,
Sarat Bose. It must be said, Niradh had written the Indian National Congress's position paper on the Indianization of the Army in 1935. He considered himself an expert in military matters.
he took up a job with All India Radio and moved to Delhi.
He had been published in the Statesman. He was good at his job which was to prepare talks on diverse subjects.
It was in Delhi, during the partition riots of 1947, that Chaudhuri began writing the memoirs that would bring him international fame.
He was already writing articles for the die-hard Tory New English Review. He says he began his autobiography later after he developed heart problems and thought he might not have long to live.
The point is a crucial one: when Chaudhuri finally received the attention he felt had been due to him, he was well into his fifties.
He got about as much attention as G.V Desani. But this wasn't very much. The Brits only did something for their toady after the French Ambassador had taken him up.
A dedication in the memoirs to the British Empire earned him hatred in his own country and – Chaudhuri’s critics rightly note – a great deal of international esteem, particularly from a postwar British audience eager to have the massacres of Partition ‘explained’ to them as a consequence of decolonization.
There wasn't much of a 'post-war British audience for boring shite. Chaudhuri's book didn't make him rich.
Further publications – most notably, The Continent of Circe – created an increasingly hostile environment for Chaudhuri, culminating in his decision (at the age of seventy-three) to leave India and permanently relocate to England.
Actually, after 1962, Chaudhuri was getting paid quite well by Indian magazines. What brought him to England was the need to research his biography of Max Mueller. The climate suited him. His health improved. His biography of Clive could have sold well if it hadn't been as boring as shit.
Scholars working on Chaudhuri often provide two contexts for his work.
The Bengali market was different from the English market. Niradh was a professional man of letters and mentioned European texts when writing in English while quoting Bengali writers when writing in Bengali
The first is the phenomenon referred to as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’,
more accurately 'Muslim decline'
a period of time stretching from the early nineteenth century
mid-eighteenth century
to the opening decades of the twentieth. Often seen uncritically by Western scholars as an extended phase of ‘Western influence’ upon Bengalis, a more accurate gesture would be to see the moment as a kind of space in which a variety of ideas and cultures – European, Hindu, Islamic
Chinese, Zulu, Lesbian, Martian
– reacted with one another to produce something quite new.
The Brits did reintroduce Buddhism to Bengal. I suppose one could say there was a rebirth of a type of intellectual culture, based on Sanskrit, which had existed under the Sena dynasty.
There is no doubt that the encounter with Western ideas – Newton, Locke, Carlyle – was a significant factor in this phenomenon, but it was certainly not the only one.
Encountering ideas did not matter. What mattered was new ways to get very fucking rich.
Chaudhuri was born in the closing years of this period,
whose most significant figure was Swami Vivekananda- a fellow Kayastha and the first Bengali to gain an international audience which included Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain. It must be said that sixty years previously Raja Ram Mohan Roy's work had been appreciated by the Unitarians.
and its most significant figures had a profound influence upon him. The assertive presence of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and his vehement criticisms of Bengal and Bengali character, are definitely to be found in many of Chaudhuri’s stances;
Michael Madhusudhan got there first.
Rammohan Roy’s position as a cultural mediator and Indian corrector of English misrepresentations of India
Roy and Dwarkanath were lobbying Westminster to lift all restrictions on White immigration into India. They grew rich as Muslim power declined.
certainly has echoes in Chaudhuri’s work.
He did ask the Whites to return to rule over Bengal.
In addition to Roy, Chaudhuri’s astonishing erudition is also reminiscent of figures such as the poet Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, whose classical proclivities anticipate Chaudhuri’s own Graeco-Latin flourishes.
Aurobindo would be more to the point.
Finally Tagore, and the faintly Oedipal relationship not only Chaudhuri but many Bengali intellectuals nursed towards the grand old man of Bengali letters, is a crucial component in any attempt to understand the kind of writer Chaudhuri was and the context he was writing in.
Tagore wasn't edumicated. He was a practical man who had spent a lot of time administering his family estates. T.S Eliot, on the other hand, knew Sanskrit and had a PhD in Philosophy. By about 1930, Niradh's generation preferred Eliot to Tagore.
The extent to which Chaudhuri identified himself with Tagore
was zero. He also didn't identify himself with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.
as a public figure, outcast by the Bengal he was devoted to,
Tagore saw that the Hindus would lose their lives and property in the East if the Brits did a bunk. He kept trying to tell his people to stop trying to slit their own throats. One may compare him to a Cassandra. But he was no Judas.
underlines the deeply ambivalent feelings (a mixture of Cassandra- and Judas-complexes) Chaudhuri would nurture towards his own Bengali identity.
Hindu identity. He was safer in Delhi than Calcutta as became obvious on 'Direct Action Day'.
Apart from chronology, two other things separated Chaudhuri from many of the figures affiliated with the ‘Bengal Renaissance’.
They were prophets with honour in their own country. His life improved when he moved to Delhi. It improved once again when he moved to England.
The first was his admiration for the British –
which those who worked for them had more of.
although poets such as Tagore were criticized for being politically tepid about the independence struggle, Bankimchandra and Sri Aurobindo were noted nationalists.
Bankim worked for the British. Aurobindo did not. He was a Revolutionary despite the fact that he was educated in England.
Secondly, Chaudhuri operated most comfortably in English as his language of expression (his first book in Bengali would only come out in 1968).
No. He had written plenty of articles in Bengali. They just weren't worth collecting and publishing in book form.
Although this is also true of a number of figures in nineteenth-century Bengal (Rammohan Roy is sometimes still called the father of Indian English, whilst Chaudhuri himself observes how poorly Aurobindo spoke Hindi and Bengali),
He was a good Sanskritist but hired a Bengali tutor.
Bankimchandra, Dutt and Tagore were undisputed masters of Bengali whose experiments in English rivalled nothing they produced in their mother tongue. For this reason, Chaudhuri is sometimes placed in the context of what was once called ‘Indo-Anglian’ writers – the Indian writers of English who made their names around and after India’s independence: R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand.
All three were first published in the Thirties.
All kinds of problems arise with this understandable emphasis on the linguistic kinship of texts such as Autobiography of an Unknown Indian with works written by other Anglophone writers.
Nehru's Autobiography & 'Discovery of India' had been translated and read in many countries. Niradh was deliberately contrasting his own plebian life with that of India's patrician Emperor.
In contrast to Narayan, Anand and Rao, Chaudhuri wrote no fiction.
He wrote quite a good story in Bengali which he translated into English.
Nor did he share any of the political pro-Indian sympathies inherent in, for example, all three writers’ profound admiration of Gandhi.
He was like his teacher R.C Mazumdar in this respect.
The fact that the publication of Chaudhuri’s Autobiography is seen as a landmark in the ‘rebirth’ of Indian writing in English, appearing in the midst of other significant texts such as Anand’s Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) and Narayan’s Mr Sampath (1948), appears to be enough for some critics to place Chaudhuri alongside such substantially different writers.
Whereas placing him alongside Nabakov is perfectly sensible.
One of the aims of this book, however, is to suggest a third, somewhat more international context for Chaudhuri – that of the ‘native informant’ or comprador thinker.
He could be neither because India was independent. Also, he had no fucking information and couldn't be a comprador because he had no business sense.
The context is intended to be neither reductive nor rigorously definable, certainly not incontestable: the precise way Chaudhuri was a ‘native informant’ is far from clear.
One could say that he was an apologist for the Raj or a revisionist of a dotty type.
One vein of this book, however, will try to understand the significance of Chaudhuri’s work in the presence of other writers and thinkers sometimes labelled comprador: Fouad Ajami (Lebanese),
He immigrated to the US when he was 18.
Alexander Crummell (African American),
an abolitionist who spent 20 years in Liberia before having to flee the wrath of the Americo-Liberians. He wasn't the last Pan-Africanists to meet that fate.
Ziya Gökalp (Kurdish/Turkish),
Turkish. He didn't speak Kurdish.
He Qi and Hu Liyuan (Chinese),
the latter was an actual 'maiban' or comprador. Both subscribed to Sun Yat Sen's Nationalist 'self-strengthening' ideology. Marxists abused them but they also killed each other.
Ahmad S. Khalidi (Palestinian), Enrique Krauze (Mexican), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidadian/Indian), Azar Nafisi (Iranian), Richard Rodriguez (US/Mexican), Salman Rushdie (Indian), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian) and Fareed Zakaria (Indian).
None of these guys could have been compradors. Still some fifty or sixty years ago, it may have been cool to describe anyone you disliked in these terms.
A 'native informant' could be useful if you are in a foreign country of which you know nothing. Chaudhuri could not be a 'native informant' because he was poorly informed and, in any case, the well-informed natives spoke English and published all relevant or useful information about their country in books or newspapers or magazines.
Ian's book is utterly worthless because
One of the aims of this book will be to understand the circumstances under which Chaudhuri was able to perform this role – and what repercussions there were for the rest of his work when he did.
Chaudhuri could say he really liked European culture because he did in fact really like European culture. He was readily believed when he said Bengal was a shithole because Bengal really was a shithole. Nobody needed to read his books in order to grasp these facts. The question was whether they found his books readable. Some did. Most did not.
Almond has a rather superficial knowledge of nineteenth century Bengal. He calls Keshub Chandra Sen an Indian Christian. The truth is Sen came close to conversion- a legal matter involving inheritance rights- but, perhaps under the influence of Ramakrishna, did not do so.
More worrying is his apparent inability to understand Tagore's 'Home and the World' which shows that 'Revolutionaries' are crooks and that Muslims will kill Hindus and take their property if they can.
One of the novel’s essential motifs is a question which permeated all of Tagore’s thoughts about Empire: what does it mean, spiritually, to be involved in a struggle for power?
Lying, cheating and stealing and then running away once the Muslims come to know that you have money in which case they will very kindly relieve you of it before killing you.
Can nationalism ever authentically accommodate the overlap of the spiritual, the moral and the political ?
Not for Hindus in East Bengal. The Muslims will slit your throat and grab your property.
Although many Western readers would probably associate this spiritualizing of political struggle with Gandhi, it was Tagore who most comprehensively developed and fleshed out the answers to these questions.
No. He railed against Nationalism because his family would lose their Estates in the East. Then, with the Great Depression, his tenants could no longer pay very much by way of rent or interest. His class was doomed one way or another. Fortunately his Shantiniketan was in a Hindu majority area so his family would not be massacred.
Tagore repeatedly saw Empire – and any fight against it – in a moral and even self-corrective light: ‘If we are to achieve Swaraj then we have to prove before we get it that we are capable of doing the work of Swaraj’.
i.e. can kill Muslims if they run amok. The 1926 riots suggested that this might not be the case. Still, the Marwaris had the cash to hire hefty Punjabis or Biharis to defend their property. But what of the up country Bengali Hindu? He was well and truly fucked.
As we shall see, some of Chaudhuri’s moral disdain for nationalism does have this Tagorean insistence on authenticity as a precedent – ‘even though we desire freedom’ Tagore writes elsewhere, ‘we do not really believe it’ .
It wasn't just the Muslims India needed to worry about. The Japs might want to replace the Brits. India would need a navy and an air-force to fight them.
. This belief in Swaraj as being just as much a spiritual goal as a political one explains, in contrast to Bankimchandra Chatterjee-
whose novel was anti-Muslim not anti-British. Romesh Chandra Dutt thus summarised its message in the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. :
'The story deals with the sanyasi rebellion of 1772 near Purnea, Tirhut and Dinapur and its culminating episode is a crushing victory won by the rebels over the United British and Mussalman forces, a success which was not, however, followed up owing to the advice of a divinely inspired prophet ... to abandon further resistance, since a temporary submission to British rule is a necessity. Hinduism has become too speculative and unpractical, and the mission of the English in India is to teach Hindus how to reconcile theory and speculation with the facts of science. The general moral of the Anandamath, then, is that British rule and British education are to be accepted as the only alternative to Mussalman oppression'
and Lokmanya Tilak,
Tilak was Maharashtrian. Hindus had ruled over Muslims there. Indeed, the Marathas had ruled over a goodly chunk of India. Bengal had been forced to pay tribute to them. Niradh followed Jadunath Sarkar in despising the predatory Maratha.
Tagore’s reluctance to endorse violent action against the British – measures he called ‘terror tactics’ and adharma (against religion).
The Brits kept the Bengali Hindu safe. Killing them or even demanding they fuck off would be counter-productive.
Tilak’s commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita would justify Shivaji’s killing of the Sultan
Vizier, not Sultan. This was a time when Princes and even Emperors killed their own brothers or fathers to gain power.
– and make a general argument to the effect that violence against all mlecchas
or your brother, if he wants to kill you so as to inherit the ancestral estate
(non-Hindus) was spiritually justified in defence of the motherland.
or so as to gain property or money or a reputation as a tough guy.
Speaking in 1907, his assertion that ‘there is no empire lost by a free grant of concession by the ruler to the ruled’
was soon shown to be false. The Brits had crushed the Boers militarily. But the Boers 'won the peace'. The problem in India was that Tilak & Gokhale were seen as Chitpavan- i.e. of the same caste as the Peshwas. British rule was preferable to Maratha rule- for non Marathas. It was also preferable to Muslim rule- for non Muslims, or Sikh rule, for Muslims.
is reminiscent of the African-American Frederick Douglas.
Nonsense! Douglass was moderate and anxious to secure piecemeal reform. It is a different matter that he actively supported the North in the Civil War. But that calamity was not of his making.
Ian mentions the cretin
Amit Chaudhuri, a gifted novelist in his own right, who has lucidly explored the ambivalent mechanisms within Chaudhuri’s attachment to Empire.
Niradh was an East Bengali Hindu. His people suffered once the Brits departed. No ambivalence is involved in recognizing a plain fact.
‘All his life, Chaudhuri strove both to express his Bengaliness and to escape it’.
A Bengali doesn't need to strive to be Bengali. He may have to strive to learn Chinese or to acquire European culture. He may also, quite understandably, strive to escape a Turd World shithole and to emigrate to somewhere nice still ruled by White peeps.
Discerning within Chaudhuri a structure of disowning and recovery, Amit Chaudhuri places the author of the Autobiography alongside Michael Madhusudan Dutt
This is foolish. Dutt moved from writing in English to writing in Bengali. Niradh went in the other direction.
as writers whose creative drive stems from this continual abandonment and recuperation of the intimate object.
They weren't babies who threw away their toy and then bawled their lungs out till Mummy picked it up and gave it back to them.
Neither choosing to develop the Freudian implications of the fort-da movement he has highlighted nor proffering any elaborations on exactly why such a mechanism of disavowal and retrieval is so crucial to the creative projects of such writers, Amit Chaudhuri
is a fucking cretin trying to sound smart.
belongs, along with Rastogi and others, to what one might term the ‘subtlety school’ of Chaudhuri’s critics – those who see within the complexities of Chaudhuri’s negotiations with Empire some possibility of subversiveness and independent self-creation.
Niradh openly criticises both the English and the Indians. What he fails to do is to show how the Brits could have profited by keeping India. To do that, he would have had to produce economic arguments.
Ian devotes a chapter to Niradh's view of Islam. What he does not say is that, while a student of R.C Majumdar, Niradh absorbed an anti-Islamic view which caused him to view the Khilafat movement with alarm and suspicion. It had the potential to radicalize the Muslim tenantry in the manner that the Moplahs in Malabar would be radicalized. Interestingly, it appears he held this attitude even as a boy.
Like my father, our press and the majority of our people were pro-Turk.
This was during the First Balkan War. Most opposed European colonization of Ottoman Turkey- e.g. Libya, Tunisia etc.
I, on the contrary, though a mere boy, remained consistently anti-Turk ... Accordingly, I wanted Turkey, the cradle and forge of the pan-Islamist movement, to be crippled, and was very much disappointed when the Turk, instead of being ejected, lock, stock and barrel from Constantinople, succeeded in stabilizing a defence line at Tchataldja [Çatalca].
This suggests that Niradh already subscribed to a Hindu supremacist ideology. First get rid of the Brits, then bring the Muslims to heel. Perhaps, they will undergo 'shuddhi' and return to the Hindu fold. Where would the boy have got such ideas? My guess is that this was part and parcel of the movement to reverse the partition of Bengal. Otherwise the East Bengali Hindu may have made common cause with the Muslim so as to gain more autonomy and ensure that Dacca could become a rival to Calcutta.
Niradh had studied History at University and must have known that Islam has different sects which is why there can never again be a universal Caliph. Safavid Iran had turned Shia and was at daggers drawn with the Hanafi Sunni Ottoman Empire. In India, there was considerable rivalry between Shias and Sunnis especially in Lucknow where the ruling elite had been Shia though the majority of Muslims were Sunni.
'In the Islamic world we see the hold of one great political concept, arising from the creation and sway of the Islamic universal state, the historic Caliphate,
The thing had become ceremonial by the tenth century. The role of the Arabs diminished as Turks and Persians came to dominate.
and constituting a theoretical embodiment of the idea of such a state. Islamic political thought was never able to put forward an alternative concept.
Nonsense! There were plenty of Sultanates. The Ottomans, it is true, styled themselves as Caliphs though this cut no ice with the Shia Safavids.
In this respect, out of the ‘three-cycle’ history so beloved by Chaudhuri (Aryan, Islamic,
Turkic. But there had been Turkic Hindu and Buddhist dynasties.
British), Islamic India represented a middle stage of development politically, set halfway between the pre-Islamic Hindu states
many of which still existed
and the advent of the British.
who had preserved some Hindu and some Muslim and Sikh and Buddhist states.
Historiographically, there is something faintly German about Chaudhuri’s view of the Islamic expansion – his view of the Moghuls
who were Turkic
as an intermediary stage towards a fully developed political structure seems very Hegelian,
I suppose the Turks and Mongols could have given a pointer or two to the militaristic Prussians.
his understanding of the ‘original political vigour’ of Islam smacks of Spengler,
No. It was a commonplace of Indian history textbooks. The Arabs had established a great Empire very quickly. Sadly, as with the Romans, 'slave' dynasties took over- i.e. the Praetorian guard preferred to crown one of their own number. Thus Arabs were downgraded and Turks and Persians and Albanians ruled the roost.
whilst his self-Hellenizing pairing of the Hindu with the Byzantine – both victims of Islamic invasions – seems to be an association which only a Prussian classicist would come up with (although, it should be said, Chaudhuri’s devotion to Gibbon is also a viable influence).
Aurobindo may have influenced Niradh. He was writing about how Indians should be the Greeks who would civilize their Roman (i.e. British) masters. Arguably, India had also 'Hinduized' its Turkic rulers. However, there can be no comparison between Byzantium and Hindu India because the latter was deeply divided whereas the former retained a centralized state structure based on the 'logothete' bureaucrat.
One important factor in Chaudhuri’s treatment of the Moghuls as a political force is that, in certain moments, he almost sees them as forerunners of the English.
He was a Kayastha. They had switched from serving the Hindu/Buddhist Sena dynasty to learning Persian and serving Muslim rulers. Then they abandoned Persian for English. Sadly, Churchill prevented Japan from conquering Bengal. Otherwise Niradh would have been writing in Japanese.
If Chaudhuri the Enlightenment thinker could lump Muslims together with Hindus as obstacles to imperialism, then a different Chaudhuri could find the Moghuls redeemed alongside the English through the common quality of empire.
Empires keep minorities safe and, one way or another, the clerks who run things get rich. Kayasthas are a clerical caste.
The Hindu looked upon both the British and the Muslims as unclean,
Muslims consider non Muslims not to be 'Najis'- unclean. That's why they created a 'Pak' (pure)-istan. Khalis is another word which means 'pure'. Some Sikhs want 'Khalistan'.
we are told; both were seen as a ‘disease’ which blighted the skin of India; both achieved a level of imperial architecture Hindus could never emulate, so that Chaudhuri can mention, in the same breath, a ‘Gothic cathedral’, a basilica and a great mosque
but not a South Indian Temple.
; both imperial landlords looked down upon their Hindu subjects as a ‘cultural proletariat’.
Both employed Hindu Pundits and Kayastha clerks and rewarded them quite handsomely. Would Whitey reward Niradh for being anti-India?
[T]hey [the Muslims of India] were driven to seek a ‘national home’ like the Jews of the world-wide diaspora
There were plenty of Muslim 'national homes'. The question was whether Muslims would get the whole of Punjab as well as the whole of Bengal with Assam thrown in for good measure. The answer was 'no. Fuck the fuck off.'
... . Thus they were bound to seek firm ground to stand on by creating a country of their own in India.
Two countries. Bangladesh, with Indian help, split off from Pakistan.
They succeeded in doing this under the leadership, ideological and political, of Iqbal and Jinnah.
In Jinnah's case it meant leaving his property behind. His descendants live in India and are not Muslims.
These two men can be compared to Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann.
No. They can be compared to Nehru and Gandhi who removed the Muslim League from Indian politics.
I would say: Salut aux ennemis honorable, et fi des Hindous laches! ... .
' Hail to the honourable enemies, and fie to the cowardly Hindus'. By which the Indian understands only the Bengali bhadralok are meant. Macaulay sneers at the cowardice of this class while in the next breath praising the valour of a Khattri Naib.
Such was the creation of Pakistan. Sheer audacity of the demand takes the breath away.
More audacious, and foolish, was Sarat's- Niradh's old boss- demand that Bengali Hindus accept Muslim tyranny in a united Bengal.
Yet Jinnah, like Danton, did say: ‘De l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace!’
No he didn't. He overplayed his hand and got a 'moth-eaten' Pakistan. Muslims in India were reduced to second class status.
But Jinnah in everything – appearance, dress, speech, personality and temperament, was like Robespierre, not Danton.
Only in the sense that he was actually Josephine Baker. Anyway, if there is a Napoleon in this story, it is Nehru who founded a dynasty.
Chaudhuri is quite happy to designate the move from pan-Islamism
which was shot in the head when Ataturk abolished the Caliphate. Henceforth, there was no 'Islam-pasand' alternative to 'Wataniya' nationalism.
to what he calls ‘Pakistanism’ as the move from emotional politics to Realpolitik
It was a move to communal politics. Pan-Islamism could have used anti-Imperialism as a banner to promote coexistence with Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Khilafat had allied with Congress in this manner but it pre-existed in the politics of Azad, Amba Prasad Sufi and Ajith Singh.
– and it is here, in this use of cunning rather than fervour, of nous rather than somos, that Chaudhuri is able to praise a development he must otherwise see as backward and theocratic.
The Pakistan demand was emotional. It was not reasoned at all. True, in the short run, the well-educated 'mujahir' could do well in Pakistan but, sooner or later, the indigenous people would rudely shoulder them aside. Bengali politicians like Suhrawardy and Fazl ul Haq died disappointed men. Suhrawardy's protege, Sheikh Mujib, didn't get to be Premier of Pakistan. Instead, the Army conducted a genocide in the East till Indira slapped it silly.
Once again, Islam is plebianized, so that a kind of ‘bravo!’ is delivered not so much to the culmination of progress in a nation-state as to the crafty leader of a mob.
To his credit, Niradh does not jeer at Mandal who made the mistake of allying with the League. Jinnah made him his Law Minister but he soon had to run away to India.
This comparison of Israel to Pakistan
was routine in India. Both were considered puppet states furthering the interests of the Capitalist West.
also modifies Chaudhuri’s otherwise wholly positive endorsement of the Israeli state;
They had hosted him in 1967. A hungry man learns not to bite any hand which feeds him occasionally.
it suggests a recognition of artifice in the establishment of both states,
Niradh thought some artifice was involved in West Bengal being an unimportant Province in an India dominated by Hindi speakers.
perhaps even bordering on mendacity, as both Iqbal and Herzl are congratulated on successfully selling something which did not previously exist.
Herzl died in 1904. It was the Brits who permitted the creation of Israel. This was because they thought it could be financially viable whereas a Palestinian state would require subsidies which the UK could not afford. Indeed, they opposed the creation of Pakistan because they didn't think such a State would have the money to be able to keep out the Afghans- more particularly if the Soviets backed them. Fortunately, Uncle Sam decided to be very generous.
Both Pakistan and Israel, the analogy suggests, are cleverly packaged, politically engineered illusions. Even if one disagrees with the result, one has to admire the Realpolitikal acrobatics employed to obtain it.
Israel exists because its people fought hard. Pakistan exists because it is a shithole which nobody wants.
What the example shows is that, although a definite First World sympathy dominated Chaudhuri’s commentary as a political theorist, an idiosyncratic admiration for political dexterity fractured his proWestern conservatism with sympathies and understanding for political directions very different from his own
He was a crackpot. Crackpots say silly things.
– his admiration for Jamaluddin al-Afghani,
who led an adventurous life.
for example, or the occasionally positive remarks he makes about Maoist China and the Soviet Union. Chaudhuri usually dresses this either as a kind of chivalric gesture (‘Salut aux ennemis honorables’) or as a display of his objectivity, but what often lies beneath the gesture is an implicit condemnation of India’s political elites, whom Chaudhuri generally saw as clumsy, inept and short-sighted.
To be fair, India was stagnating economically and culturally. Smart kids emigrated. So did some very stupid elderly people. Nirad was one such. Consider the monumental ignorance embodied in the following
As there is no historical parallel or precedent to the demand for and the creation of Pakistan,
Ulster. This was the example quoted by the League. Protestants in Northern Ireland didn't want to be ruled by Catholics in Dublin. Lebanon is an example of a State created so Christians could be in the majority. Israel is another.
I shall assume a hypothetical case in the United States.
Utah is an example of a State created for a particular religion. Sadly, the Mormons had to give up polygamy (at least on paper) so as to be granted Statehood.
Undoubtedly, there is an irreconcilable conflict between the Blacks and the Whites there and fierce assertion of what is called Black Power.
African Americans were nowhere the majority. Haiti however did become a Republic. Some abolitionists favoured resettling African Americans in Liberia. Sadly, the American-Liberians mistreated the indigenous people.
But neither the Rev Jesse Jackson nor even the fierce Mfume ... [African American politician] has demanded that a Negro sovereign state must be created by wresting Texas, Florida and Louisiana in the south and California and Washington in the west from the union.
Because African Americans were a minority in all these states. Moreover, where they were the majority in a City or District, they could take over the administration in a purely legal manner.
It must be said, Tagore was equally ignorant- but then he hadn't been to Collidge. He wrote-
Countries that are fortunate find the essence of their land in the history of their country;
which was the case for India and China- neither of which were very fortunate at that time. The English were not greatly curious about their 'origins'.
the reading of history introduces their people to their country from infancy.
You don't need to be introduced to your own country. On the other hand, when you attain the age of 18, it is customary for you to be formally introduced to your Mummy and your Daddy and Woofy the dog.
With us the opposite is the case. It is the history of our country that hides the essence of this land from us.
The essence of Hindustan is found in the Hindu Itihasas to which we are introduced as infants.
Whatever historical records exist from Mahmud’s invasion
are unknown to the great mass of Indians.
to the arrogant imperial pronouncements of Lord Curzon,
His partition of Bengal was reversed. Kitchener got the better of him in India.
these constitute a strange mirage for India; ... the trumpeting of elephants, ... the golden glow of silk curtains, the stone bubbles of mosques, the mysterious silence of the palaces guarded by eunuchs—all these produce a huge magical illusion with their amazing sounds and colors. But why should we call this [Islamic history] India’s history? It has covered the punthi of India’s holy mantras by a fascinating Arabian Nights tale.
So what? The great mass of Indians were Hindus. They knew the Itihasas and believed they lived in the land of Lord Ram and Lord Krishna. Still, it must be said, English institutions proved useful. There may be no more Maharajas, but India has plenty of MPs and MLAs.
Almond's book is well written though marred by some elementary errors. One theme he might profitably have developed further was the notion that the Archive or the Encyclopaedia is a form of Power-as-Knowledge. I suppose Beria's archive is an example. At one time, in India, there was the fear that the secret police might have a damaging file on you. Perhaps that is why you were denied promotion. Thankfully, there was no truth to this belief.
More generally, one does not acquire power over a thing by knowing its name or by handling an object which belonged to it. That's why you can't summon up demons to do your bidding and also why Voodoo doesn't work. Still, one may make a modest living by working in an Archive or contributing an article to an Encyclopaedia.
Almond's most glaring error is to think Niradh was melancholy and that he truly felt orphaned by the departure of the British. The truth is, he was merely striking a pose. The British had been gradually ceding power to Indians over the course of his entire adult life. He had left East Bengal as a boy. In Calcutta, his class was gaining in power. By the time he was 27, the Mayor of Calcutta was a Hindu. Sadly, when he was 40, a Muslim became the Premier of an autonomous Bengal. It is not that the Kayastha had any great love for the British, but that the British had kept them safe from the Muslims.
Almond pretends that Niradh had been brought up by a British Nanny and Tutor. He became very sad when they, along with his Butler and Chauffer were forced to leave the country by Nehru.
A melancholy longing for the lost colonial parent is an ambivalent thing.
No. When I was young, there were plenty of Eurasians in Delhi who expressed no ambivalence about this. The departure of the British had been a calamity for them. The quality of beer had greatly deteriorated. The Cinema screened few English language films. On the radio, all you could hear was Hindustani screeching.
To reduce Chaudhuri’s oeuvre to this simple formula would be crass and reductive (Freud, we will recall, discerned ambivalence to be a key factor in the melancholic’s attitude toward his or her object-cathexes ).
Niradh did like looking at handsome English men. Sadly, he did not cathex them anally or orally. This made him very melancholy. Then the Brits slyly fucked off and he lost even the pleasure of gazing upon them.
Bengal does have a 'shehr ashob' (lament for the City in decline) tradition and Kayasthas had contributed to it. They also had a notion of 'sauda' and the heart break of disappointed love. Sharat's Devdas is still wildly popular. But Niradh wasn't specializing in this genre. He had started writing articles for the die-hard Tory 'New English Review' in 1946 and began writing his autobiography the next year. There might well be a market for a riposte to Nehru's 'Autobiography' from someone 'unknown' who had reason to regret the ending of the Raj. But Niradh affected to write an 'ethnography' of an intellectual rather than lyrical type and this made his book potentially useful. We may compare him to Shoshee Chunder Dutt- a prolific author of the mid Nineteenth century. There is considerable continuity between the ideas, the opinions and even the prose style of these two Bengali Kayasthas. Shoshee, I think, was more fortunate in that he found Christ and converted. For him, something good had come alongside the greed and bigotry of the English merchant adventurer. Niradh too found a safe harbour but it was in Butskellite Britain, not the bosom of Christ.
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