In an essay titled 'The last Englishman' Pankaj Mishra- who would soon quit India and become British himself- wrote
The celebrations to mark 50 years of Indian independence revealed the cultural poverty of the Indo-British encounter.
This is nonsense. The Indo-British encounter produced Kipling. He will be read in translation after English itself has perished.
Indians now look to American global culture
So do Britishers.
Almost forgotten in the country to which his unabashed Anglophilia brought him three decades ago, Nirad C Chaudhuri,
was never well known in England- or India for that matter.
the Indian writer, will turn 100 in November. In India he has always had more baiters than readers; it is only the approaching centenary that has at last brought him official recognition from cultural bureaucrats willing to overlook his frequent references to India as a land of "barbarians."
Because it was conquered by Muslims. Mishra was very angry that L.K Advani visited Niradh in his home at Oxford.
As for Britain, Chaudhuri's uncompromising intellectual elitism- he steadfastly refused to translate quotations from Latin and Greek in his books-has long lost him the few readers he had:
because they died. Not everybody lives to be a 100 years old. Had Chaudhuri possessed true erudition, he would still be read by specialists. I think his two volumes of Autobiography will command a readership at least amongst Indians of a certain class. We are dimly aware that some ancestor of ours got his start as vakil in moffusil town.
none of his books, either the great Autobiography of an Unknown Indian or the biographical studies of Max Muellar and Robert Clive, are in print. Yet his fate is no worse than that of Ram Mohan Roy, another great Bengali, born 225 years ago and now lying buried in Bristol.
Nonsense! Roy is important. He helped found the Brahmo Samaj alongside Dwarkanath Tagore. He was a staunch supporter of unrestricted British immigration because he feared a return to Muslim rule.
Roy and Chaudhuri stand at the beginning and the end of one of the longest, if not most fertile, cultural relationships between two parts of the world which were not then supposed to meet.
There were Bengali compradors before Roy and there are Benthamites like Amartya Sen, alive today, who are in the Brahmo tradition. However, the greatest hero of the Bengali Kayastha- i.e. scribe- was Maharaja Pratapaditya of Jessore. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, this tax-farmer, grown rich thanks to Portuguese merchants engaged in trans-oceanic trade, could achieve a degree of independence and a pinnacle of affluence which the rise of British power in Bengal rendered an increasingly distant memory.
My point is that it is through trade that all parts of the world are supposed to meet. The question is who gets the gains from trade. Direct rule by a metropolitan power means those gains are confiscated. The periphery works harder but grows poorer. Mishra was not enough of a Marxist to understand this.
Roy was the first, Chaudhuri is the last, in the great line of 19th century Bengalis who believed that their own and India's future lay in apprenticing themselves to the modern west, specifically Britain, without detaching themselves from their cultural roots.
They thought they would do well for themselves by acquiring Western education. Roy was more Benthamite. He wanted only Scientific instruction- not literary studies- for India. However, he himself was a polyglot versed in Latin and Greek and Hebrew and Sanskrit.
Still, he and Dwarkanath Tagore made it abundantly clear that they supported the British because they feared the rapacious Muslim.
Their belief, caricatured by a thousand institutions of education and culture across the country, lies at the very basis of modern India's cultural identity.
Nonsense! Our cultural identity has to do with our indigenous tradition of music and dance not to mention our Religion and Classical Literature. Our economic or political identity is a wholly different matter.
Roy's quest for a liberal British culture allied with a reformist Hinduism was to result in what is grandly called the Indian renaissance.
Bengali, not Pan-Indian. Other parts of India had their own reform movements- e.g. Arya Samaj or Prarthana Samaj. It must be said the vernacular languages became more Sanskritized and thus became fit for the purposes of higher pedagogy and Governance.
Some of its leading figures, such as the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, went on to bigger things;
like what? His father was the head of one Brahmo sect. He had to take over that role and was seeking to repair ties with other factions. It must be said, he tried to warn the bhadralok against clamouring for Independence because the Hindus were bound to lose lives and property to the Muslims in East Bengal.
others lay trapped in their country homes or Calcutta mansions in Chekhovian isolation,
You can be 'in Chekovian isolation' at your country house but not in a City mansion.
well evoked by the filmmaker Satyajit Ray-himself a late product of the Anglo-Bengali school.
He studied Art at Tagore's Shantiniketan- but he already had an Econ Degree from Presidency College.
The renaissance was not destined to endure;
because birth or rebirth does not endure. Babies grow up quickly.
predictably, it led to no enlightenment.
Yes it did. There is no more Sati or Kulinism or Untouchability or Polygamy or child marriage.
It was riven with internal contradictions, most notably the discrepancy between Britain's crudely exploitative policies in India and the refinements of Victorian high culture on which the Anglo-Bengalis were hooked.
There is no contradiction between rich people living in a refined manner even if they gained their wealth by robbing banks.
The problem Bengal faced was correctly diagnosed by A.O Hume. The Permanent Settlement had to go. He created the Indian National Congress so as to lobby for this and other measures to raise productivity and thus get rid of poverty.
The racist excesses of the British before and after Lord Curzon made the Anglo-Bengalis culturally defensive;
There were no such excesses. Curzon partitioned Bengal but the Hindu Bengalis got this reversed. In 1947, they decided Curzon had been right all along. Bengal was partitioned and stayed partitioned.
the partition of Bengal was the last straw for many of them.
It was reversed quite quickly.
The Jallianwallah Bagh killings in 1919 prompted Tagore to renounce his knighthood and strengthened his attachment to a vague "internationalism."
During the Moplah uprising, the very people who had denounced Dyer were demanding that some nice Brigadier go slaughter the revolting Muslims in Malabar.
The Anglo-Bengali movement petered out;
There was no such movement. One could say that before the Great War there were some 'loyalists' but not after 1917. Empires of all types were doomed.
the idea of improving on the British through diligent emulation
of America or Germany or whichever country was ahead in a certain field. Many thought this was the Soviet Union. They were wrong.
was replaced in India's cultural mainstream by the ideological tensions between the nativist Gandhi and the modernist Nehru.
There was no tension. Nehru was a follower of Gandhi. Perhaps Mishra is thinking of Netaji Bose who broke with the Congress Party at the end of the Thirties.
After independence there was a division of labour. Nehru would focus on industries in the cities while Gandhian nutters like Vinobha Bhave roamed the countryside.
What is remarkable about these developments (spanning more than a century) is the almost complete absence of any British contribution.
I can think of no field where there wasn't some British contribution.
There was the odd theosophist,
Annie Beasant? She became President of the Home Rule league and the Congress Party. Motilal Nehru converted to Theosophy and hired a British Theosophist as the tutor to his son. Beasant decided some South Indian boy was the new Universal Messiah. The fair-skinned Nehrus were not amused.
the good-hearted missionary, the dedicated anthropologist, but they were exceptions.
The ICS and the Indian Education Service and Medical and Engineering and Railway Services made foundational contributions. As a rule, the Brits in India worked hard doing useful things in India. They trained Indians to take over their jobs.
Given the length and intensity of the encounter between India and Britain, the cultural output on the British side was meagre.
It was huge. The Brits revived vernacular languages and rediscovered Buddhism and much else of India's ancient history. The Archaeological Service uncovered Harappa and Mohenjedaro. By the Thirties, Indians could take over from Britishers and continue their good work.
The sad record of Islamic depredations in India is at least balanced by the extraordinary art, music and architecture produced by the fusion of Islamic rule with existing cultures.
Says an Indian guy who wrote novels in English! The fact is our judicial and political system were created by the British and are going strong to this very day. So are the Universities and Research Institutes they created or which were created during their Rule.
In comparison, 200 years of British colonial rule were to yield very little of cultural value-for either side.
Kipling is enough. At one time, we might have mentioned Tagore as representing repayment in kind.
The reasons are not hard to find. For the British in Britain, India was a distant source of exotic goods, raw materials and little else;
No. It was the 'jewel in the crown'. India contributed greatly to Imperial Defence. It is still a member of the Commonwealth.
a thousand PhD students now strive for tenure in Anglo-American academia by speculating on why India is scarcely acknowledged in the major texts of the Victorian period.
Queen Victoria ordered the sheets of 'Confessions of a Thug' to be brought to her hot off the printing press. Hansard shows that scarcely a week went by when some Parliamentary question regarding India was not tabled.
For most British people in India, the country was primarily the setting for personal profit and adventure.
No. It was a 'karmabhoomi'- a place where you worked hard and saved up money for your retirement. But so was Manchester or Liverpool.
The local culture they fitfully encountered was a source of bewilderment, even revulsion.
They encountered 'local culture' in their own kitchens. Mishra thinks the British Sahib had an English butler and a French chamber-maid.
Indeed, the efforts of the earliest Indologists such as Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones,
they held high positions in the Administration.
or the later discoveries by British archaeologists and historians of India's lost artistic treasures, met with scepticism and discouragement.
Nonsense! Jones became a celebrity on the Continent. Goethe read his translations from Sanskrit and Persian. One reason the Britisher in India, if possessing any intellectual or aesthetic gifts, took the trouble to write about what he found there was because this secured his reputation back home.
The Taj Mahal was widely believed to have been the work of a non-Indian. It was blithely vandalised and its wide porch used for dances, until Lord Curzon declared it a protected monument.
This happened in 1920 long after Curzon had left India.
The philistinism of the British in India has a respectable intellectual lineage:
No. Philistinism (the term was taken from German by Mathew Arnold) is condemned by intellectuals. The people of the 'gown' (University) look down on 'townies' (the common people of the City).
Macaulay dismissed all of India's literature as not being worth more than a single shelf of a good European library,
He was echoing what Ram Mohan Roy- whom he had met in England- had said to the Governor General.
and called for the manufacture of an elite class of Anglicised Indians who would help the British maintain order.
No. He echoed Roy's demand that the EIC stop subsidising Sanskrit and Arabic studies. What Indians wanted was sound English education.
The romance of being British and regnant in India is recreated and relived in a hundred Raj-revival and anniversary-inspired novels and television films.
Boring shite.
But one must still go to Kipling for the most accurate picture.
Mishra will find only Mishra in Kipling. A proper Brahmin would find the Kena Upanishad in Kim.
The self-absorption of the British in India,
If they had been self-absorbed they couldn't have ruled the place. They were absorbed in doing their fucking jobs.
the insularity of their daily lives,
social lives. You can't be a judge or a police superintendent or run a factory if you keep to yourself and refuse to see any natives.
the provinciality of their world-view:
they were stuck in provincial places. But, some of them did very good work.
Kipling- himself a fully paid-up member of that world-
he was a badly paid journalist. Still, his parents had made friends with some high officials in Simla.
faithfully, almost mechanically, reflects these in his stories.
Kipling 'shows more than he knows'. He had some 'daemon' or 'tutelary genius' of his own such that he became the 'poet of work'. For Hindus, India is a 'karmabhoomi'- place for work- not a 'bhogabhumi'- place for pleasure.
The self-absorption found expression, most lastingly, in British architecture in India: those extravagant, Gothic government offices of Bombay or Delhi's ostentatiously arrogant domes and pillars, erected by Lutyens who loudly proclaimed his contempt for Indian architecture.
Nonsense! Lutyens & Baker are 'Indo-Saracenic'. Lutyens' wife was a theosophist.
The buildings still stand, slowly decaying, without past or future, or any links with the surrounding land.
They are useful. If they weren't they would have been knocked down.
It is the same with much of the British creation in India, which expresses only a fantasy-laden notion of imperial power.
In the opinion of a fantasist who would soon run the fuck away from India. The truth is 'imperial power' required hard work and pragmatism. Anyone can indulge in fantasies.
Other legacies of the British presence in India are- unlike the legacies of Islamic rule-neither religious nor artistic.
The legacy of Islamic rule is everywhere present in the language of the law and the administration and the ordinary spoken language of the North Indian.
Some of them have been cruelly mixed blessings for modern Indians.
They got rid of anything which wasn't useful- e.g. Maharajas with fat privy purses.
Created by the British, the labyrinthine Indian civil service was kept intact by the Anglophile Nehru.
It was greatly expanded though Nehru harboured no great liking for it. Sardar Patel gets the credit for this.
Fifty years later, it has succeeded only in perpetuating a ruling class of semi-Anglicised, semi-feudal Indians whose dealings with the Indian masses are tainted with the same mixture of contempt and paternalism displayed by the British.
That may have been true of Harsh Mander. The average IAS officer was obsequious to his political masters- who tended to be rustic and 'backward class'- and, more often than not, as corrupt as fuck. This was not generally the case with the British era ICS officer.
Another legacy is the continuing dominance of English as the language of power and privilege.
Narendra Modi's real name is Nicholas Maugham. He only pretends to speak Gujarati and Hindi.
Much has been made of the handful of Indian writers who have mastered the language to the satisfaction of their former colonial masters.
More was made of Sarojini Naidu and Tagore. That was before the Great War. Nehru's own books sold very well.
But their few, extravagantly ballyhooed novels
e.g Arundhati Roy's? Mishra felt his own novels were ballyhooed in a grudging and miserly manner.
cannot compensate for the grievous social and psychological damage caused by the hegemony of a language few people in India know, or have the means of knowing well.
If so, Indians and Indians alone are responsible for this. Still, it is true that English peeps should give up English and switch to Swahili. Also, they must apply a lot of boot-polish to their faces so that I will look quite fair skinned by comparison.
Forced to learn a pidgin form of English-routinely burlesqued by British travel writers-and forced, in the process, to unlearn their first languages,
Mishra can no longer speak Hindi because his parents made him study in an English medium school.
millions of Indians dwell in a permanent twilight zone, exiled from the world of complex perceptions and responses that proficiency in any one language would provide.
Very true. When Rahul Baba was forced to learn Hindi, thus unlearning English, he entered a permanent twilight zone.
The English language survives in its oppressive, debased form, but the people who brought it are, after just 50 years, sliding out of middle-class consciousness in India.
They came back into that consciousness when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.
For India's non-middle-class population, the British have always been remote, mythical figures.
Thankfully, Mishra would soon become a remote, mythical figure, to them. But so would the Communist Party.
The bald, cruel villain with the funny Hindi accent in Bombay films represents the average British person to millions of Indians.
Whereas to Mishra, the British person is responsible for his 'unlearning' Hindi and thus getting exiled to a 'twilight world'.
The Anglicised classes, standard bearers of petit bourgeois British culture in India,
There is no 'petit bourgeois' British culture in India. Indeed, it has perished in England. Who now has lace curtains or an aspidistra?
have been supplanted by people more in tune with a globally diffused American culture. Enid Blyton has lost out to Nintendo; Somerset Maugham to John Grisham; Cliff Richard to Michael Jackson.
this has happened in England as well. More worryingly, chaps at the pub can no longer quote Chaucer.
Anniversaries are never a good time for calculating the costs and benefits of any relationship.
Mishra can't calculate shit.
But, as celebrated in Britain, the 50th anniversary of Indian independence provided remarkably little occasion for sober introspection.
It is a curious fact that independent India was ruled by people who had studied at Cambridge about 80 percent of the time. Had Rahul won in 2014, that figure would be higher.
Very often it seemed as if not India but the British achievement in India was being celebrated.
The Brits had transferred power in an orderly enough manner. They tried to avoid Partition but failed.
Certainly, the loud presence of revellers from Britain at the summer-long celebratory party contrasted sharply with the hosts' shyness- a conspicuous Indian reluctance to gloat over five decades of unsteady evolution.
Why would they want to gloat? The plain fact is, Indians pretended that the Brits were responsible for all India's problems. But, after they left, India became less capable of feeding or defending itself.
To a visitor from the subcontinent, much of the British television and newspaper chatter on India was bewildering. It also revealed astonishing ignorance. To give only one example of the incredible gaffes committed by the media, a Times editorial described the Indian prime minister as an "untouchable." This is a bit like calling Linford Christie a "slave"; as it happens, it is India's president, not its prime minister, who belongs to a formerly "untouchable" caste.
He was a high ranking diplomat before becoming President. The story is that Laski gave him a letter of introduction to Nehru who promptly inducted him into the Foreign Service. It must be said, this was a good decision.
One learns to live with this sort of solecism, which is not quite on the same scale as the acts of political incomprehension- detailed in Patrick French's Liberty or Death- that led to the partition of India.
Jinnah's real name was Jemima Smith. Viceroy could not comprehend that when Jemima demanded Pakistan what she really wanted was a house on Park Lane. Patrick French should have explained this. Due to he is White, he is living in 'twilight world' having unlearnt English when he was forced to study Latin at Ampleforth.
The nature of these misjudgements, many of which were linked to a failure of personal perception, reveal just how little Indians were understood (even after 200 years) by the British men deputed to rule them.
They were understood better by the British than anyone else. Mountbatten could understand both Jinnah and Nehru. They could not understand each other. Mountbatten remained close to Nehru till the latter's death in 1964.
This absence of understanding at the most important levels was witnessed again two decades ago, when Michael Foot chose to support Indira Gandhi's imposition of dictatorial rule.
He was right to do so. She came back to power within three years. The fact is Indira's Emergency was a success. Heath's Emergencies failed.
To Nirad Chaudhuri the inadequacies of Britain's engagement with India, past or present, have been a deeply personal matter.
Viceroy refused to come and wipe his bottom.
"When I remember," he wrote in his autobiography, "how until even ten years ago
When Gandhi could have got independence from the Labour Government
all those Englishmen who had anything to do with us or our country, as a rule, denied every capability and every quality in us,
just as Niradh himself did. Mishra goes the extra mile and suggests that anyone in India who is not a monoglot from infancy lives in a 'twilight world' because he has unlearnt language in toto.
and when I set the interested superciliousness of yesterday against the interested complaisance of today I blush for the English character,
Niradh was too dark skinned to blush. This was a good thing. Otherwise he'd have been perpetually red in the face because he had a lot to blush for.
and my shame is not lessened by the manner of the flattery. It is being ladled out to us with intellectual incompetence and vulgarity of language- a combination of poor knowledge, poorer logic, and the poorest conceivable English."
Inglis peeps can't spick Inglis gud.
This was written in 1947. Few events have caused more bitterness and regret in Chaudhuri's long life than the failure of the Indo-British encounter, its inability to enhance either of the two cultures.
He wrote more in English than in Bengali. But it was the Brits who had encouraged the growth of Bengali literature. On the other hand, it was the Chinese who first introduced the English language to India.
One can safely guess what he would say about the anniversary-mongers of today.
He would hint that they were taking it up the bum from the rickshaw wallah.
But Chaudhuri's anger, for all the virtues of its honesty, and its Gibbonian cadences, would be ill spent on them.
The anniversary didn't matter in the slightest.
In the last 50 years, both Indians and Englishmen have moved on, further away from each other and their own cultural ideals of the past.
Just like the Nigerians and the Nicaraguans. Curiously, in Norway, time hadn't just stood still. It had reversed course.
To a centenarian from a less hasty era, the change cannot but seem for the worse. Chaudhuri's new book is about "western decadence," the philistinism of the democratised classes in Britain and the US-a subject he has dealt with glancingly in previous books while discussing Indian barbarism. Not surprisingly, the book has not found a publisher in Britain. Chaudhuri is, in his 100th year, the last Indian of his kind, and also happens to be, by default, the last Englishman in the world.
Mishra has replaced him. 50 years from now he will still be gassing on about how the English, like the Indians, have unlearnt their own language and thus entered a twilight world. What was it Robert Musil said to Karl Kraus? 'Wo ist die Toilette?' This is such a profound remark. I will base my next book on teasing out its implications for Neo-Liberalism.
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