Nirad Chaudhri's Passage to England.

Sir John Collings Squire- the bete noire of the Bloomsbury group and the Blimpish Magazine editor of whom T.S Eliot said that nothing good could be published in England if his views prevailed- nevertheless raised up an unknown Indian into the ranks of the great autobiographers in the English language. 

He wrote to his old College chum, C.R.R Reddy

I spent five days and nights reading a manuscript for Macmillan (this is between ourselves) called The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The author’s name is Chaudari — though I don’t think I have spelt it properly. I wish that you had been here when I read it. He has his defects, for instance, he has never been out of Bengal, and although he has drawn spiritual sustenance from all the great English authors of the past, and thinks that any Indian revival must come from Europe and mainly from England, he has met very few Englishmen, and has a certain resentment against the commercial community in Calcutta, who I don’t suppose would suit me any better than they suited him….my dear Reddy, the man is a sage; he is as familiar with all the arts of the world as he is with the religions and philosophies. His English is so good that one is tempted to think that he must have had a translator; but a translator as good as that would never have bothered about translation, but have written great works of English prose on his own. This “unknown Indian” hovers above our globe, and sadly scrutinizes the fluctuating fortunes not merely of India with her succession of invaders, but all of mankind…He could meet any of the great thinkers of the past on equal footing…if his book comes out, as I hope it will, it may put India into an uproar. But it will certainly enlighten all historically-minded men.”

It seems, it was not the bien pensant metropolitan elite, but this cricket playing, genially toping, Commander in Chief of Literary England's 'Squirearchy' who gave a leg up to the sort of Bengali Babu his caste was supposed to despise. More strangely yet, it is precisely the elitist erudition, the Francophilia, which the Squirearchy abhorred in the modernists, which their leader found compelling in a man some fifteen younger than himself from a very much more modest background.

Though Nirad never knew who it was who had recommended his book be published, he wrote, some five or six years later in 'a Passage to England,' 

It does not become an 

Nirad belonged to the Kayastha- or writer- caste but, under the Raj, to do well, this caste had to keep up its knowledge of Persian while regaining and expanding its knowledge of Sanskrit. At the same time, the Kayastha was required by his British master to invest in the creation of a large and instructive body of vernacular Bengali literature. Of course, the Indians were welcome to learn English of a useful sort. What was not desirable was that they turn English literature into an esoteric Babu jargon unintelligible to all but its authors. 

I should emphasize that traditional Brahmins were not supposed to have much love for secular literature- more particularly of an erotic sort. They were expected to just stick to Scriptural and Devotional works. Princes, too, should never develop an unmanly addiction to phrase making. They should be vigorous of body and virile of conception but maintain a bluff indifference to the hypertrophied literary culture which had marked the decline and decadence of the Mughals and the Nawabs who succeeded them. Merchants, like Gandhi, were welcome to learn enough English to do well in the Courts but what was required of them was factual arguments and a mastery of the Rules of Evidence, not ornate or recondite eloquence. 

The English tutors of Princes were ex-Army men who spoke the various vernaculars in a dignified enough but essentially utilitarian manner. They might wax loquacious over the port in describing a martial engagement, but eschewed 'poodle fakery' in the presence of ladies. 

It is interesting that Sir Syed Ahmed, the inheritor of Mughal erudition and founder of Aligarh Muslim University, demanded that instruction in the Humanities be given in plain and simple English. Why? Urdu's convolutions and euphony rendered young brains barren. 

Both the Indians and the British rejected both 'Babu English' as well as the preciousness of Walter Pater and his school. Wilde, it is true, could be very funny- and a sense of humor is important- but Wilde walked the primrose path to perdition. Let the French, who had decriminalized sodomy during their Revolution, go in for a Mallarmean cult of pure language. As for the Bengali bhadralok, buddhijivi, who had always shown an attraction to France and its Roman Law tradition, let them continue to live in a mental universe where Dupliex not Clive, had prevailed. It was a small compensation for their continuous loss of power, prestige and money which had been going on since the 1840's. With the coming of Independence, many East Bengali Hindus- and Nirad was from East Bengal- lost everything. First Ranajit Guha and then Nirad himself- apparently with the help of the erudite American sociologist, Edward Shils- emigrated to the UK and took British citizenship. During the Fifties, the French supported Nirad, by paying him to edit their Embassy bulletin, because he was the only brown man from South Asia who was saying that the White man should come back and rule his patch of swamp where men were as mosquitos. Nirad's Francophilia justified the French attempt to keep their Empire by selectively granting a few colored people the status of being 'evolved' and thus notionally equal to proper French citizens. Later it would be Spivak who would take up this torch albeit in an even more solipsistic and senseless manner. 

Was English literature the 'wife' of the Englishman? No. At best, she was a kindly Aunty or elder sister. Work was his wife and Sport his recreation. Literature was a return to the Nursery, with its brightly colored book covers, but only while the rain bucketed down. 

Nirad forgets that Jeeves was the creation of a younger brother of a great Theosophist in India who, for a time, was the tutor of Jeddu Krishnamurthy- the Universal Messiah promoted by Annie Beasant. Jeeves is a jeeva-mukt- liberated soul- or pratyeka (hidden) Buddha. He has achieved Spinozan univocity. Wodehouse's genius is to give him a conatus and an oikeiosis of a shrewd and commendable sort. He has humanized a Divine Comedy and given his readers many sunlit hours when golf is impossible because the rain keeps bucketing down.

Indians, to contribute something to England- in the same manner that Armine Wodehouse contributed to India- had to do what the English had done in India- viz. find profitable opportunities for trade and industry or novel methods to enhance the value of what already existed. The only ties that matter in a Common Law- as opposed to Roman Law- jurisdiction are those of a Contractual, mutually beneficial, kind. Meaning- artha- is concerned with having the means to achieve desirable ends. 

England would briefly become a nation of Asian shopkeepers. Then the children of those shopkeepers started to rise up through education and a more complicated, technological type, of enterprise. We don't ask of Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak that they be able to recite the Faery Queene. We expect them to do a good job for us so that our economy recovers from COVID and Brexit and whatever yet worse calamity is waiting for us around the corner.

As for Indian visitors to England- like other visitors- they want to see cricket and football matches and go shopping and take selfies and enjoy the chocolate box perfection of the Home Counties' sunny vistas. 

Interestingly, Nirad's own son, seems to have been a typical 'Public School' type-

Nirad was destined by nature to be a Professor of Military History. Sadly, he didn't get the distinction in his MA that he deserved- a case of 'exam nerves' I suppose- but he did get a very good berth with the Department of Military Accounts. Nirad's own auto-didacticism soon put him in a position such that he could correspond with people like Liddell Hart. He had the soldier's ability to imagine an entire topography and thus to understand the deeper strategic logic of military engagements. In 'Passage to England', Nirad repeatedly gives proof of this essentially aesthetic aspect of the soldier's eye. Yet, precisely because his destiny had not been to be a soldier or to rise high in the Defense hierarchy of even one of the native princes, this aestheticism was linked to nothing but Hippolyte Taine's bogus 'race, milieu, moment'. 

Nirad rose to public prominence first through his articles on the military situation and then through his broadcasts for All India Radio. After the publication of his 'Autobiography', he was refused an extension of service in his Government job but the French were happy to take him on as a client. This forced the Brits to do something for Chaudhri in their turn. Ultimately Edward Shils, his reputation tarnished by the discovery that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was CIA backed, helped the one Indian who fitted his own theory of the 'intellectual' to get the fuck out of India.

The BBC, in affording Nirad his first 'passage to England', had hoped for praise of their Welfare State but had received instead a welter of incomprehensible erudition and arcane literary allusion. Nevertheless, the thing was the beginning of a beautiful romance. Here was a genuine dhoti-wearing Bengali whose great love for England and Europe, though entirely bookish and abstract, was delightfully, dottily combative and cross-grained. There was a bluff and Blimpish soldier hidden within that small but upright form. Had India made a proper use of his ability, he would have travelled across its length and breadth so as to form a better idea of its defensibility and capacity to project force. In that case he wouldn't have written nonsense of the following sort-

The truth is quite different. The Europeans ensured that their forests and mountains and fjords and islets could not become centers of resistance. They abolished the 'Zomia'- the 'fracture zone' of Empires- they invented a type of forestry management which was later imported into India. Brahminic civilization eagerly embraced the Universal Empires promoted by the Shramanic religions- indeed, most Jain and Buddhist monks were of Brahmin origin- and thus the exclusion from the town which Nirad remarks on, only obtained where Muslim rule was enforced with a heavy hand. Had Nirad visited South India, he would have seen with his own eyes that Temple towns were as ubiquitous as European Cathedral towns. Thus Radhakrishnan felt at home in Oxford- though maintaining orthopraxy- precisely because it was a sort of more cosmopolitan Kumbakonam. Indeed, the Tamil who reads G.U. Pope- who did much to revive our language in its pure form- feels he is reading the work a Tamil scholar who happens to belong to the sect of St. Thomas which had arrived on our shores some two thousand years ago. Indeed, we eagerly keep alive the notion that Alfred the Great's emissaries, who had come to us seeking a relic of that Saint- whom Oscar Wilde thought should have been the patron of the skeptical English- had received a fond welcome. 

India is, of course, much larger than Britain- indeed its population was already twice that of Western Europe and, with the exception of the Gypsies who had come to Europe from India many centuries ago, nowhere in England, save amongst recent New Commonwealth immigrants, was there visible any difference of race or religion either in the faces or the clothes of the population. 

What Nirad is remarking is a somewhat unique feature of South Asia- viz. 'jati' based endogamy which seems to have halted gene flows between populations some 2000 years ago. The differences in costume reflected differences in Religion, region of origin and occupation. However, these have tended to erode and disappear over time.

Why did Europe move towards homogeneity whereas India did not? The answer of course is that Europe moved to a market economy and increased the power of the State while ensuring this power would be used to accelerate economic progress. This meant a substantial investment first in oceanic trade and then manufacturing trade so as to gain an even larger profit on that maritime commerce. Properly speaking, the East India Company was forcibly exporting 'invisible' services to Nirad's Bengal. His own class prospered by it- forgetting Persian in the process. But, when Independence came, there was a terrible reckoning. The Hindus were forced out of East Bengal as, a little later, they- and other Indians- were forced out of Burma. Nirad's own class was able to leverage its erudition into well paying jobs in Academia and Scientific Research and the higher branches of International Banking and Corporate Management. But, other 'educationally forward' classes from ex-colonies did something similar. What set the Bengali apart was the knowledge that they had reached a peak of affluence and cultural influence even before the noon-tide of the Raj. Ever since they had witnessed nothing but decline which- as Nirad chronicled- began to extend to the arts and the Humanities from the Twenties onward. Still, unlike most other 'subaltern' peoples, the Bengali buddhijivi had had his day in the Sun. 

Back in 1977, my father was posted to London. He sent us eloquent letters describing the beauty of a city enjoying one of its finest Summers. My sister and I were completing our O and A levels respectively so as to be able to get into good schools. I was not considered smart enough to do Eng Lit and so had to settle for a special paper in English language designed for non-first language candidates. I still only managed to get a 'B' despite private coaching. 

It was at this time that Mum made me read 'Passage to England'. It made little impression on me- other than confirming in me a fanatical hatred of English literature- but there was one golden passage in it. Indeed, it was for the sake of finding that passage that I took the trouble today to skim through Nirad's worst book.

Here it is- 

The odd thing here is that Nirad's description of the behavior of the Indian men he met in bus queues in Delhi is very similar to what he observes in the English cat. On seeing a small, very learned looking, Bengali gentleman, elderly Indian men become terribly loquacious. They inform him about all the members of their family and the details of the legal case they have come to Delhi to fight. They want to send him mangoes from their own orchard but he is able to escape in time.

But there's another side to this. A man on a bus tries to pull the Bhagvad Gita Nirad is reading out of his hands. Nirad resists. The man says 'But this is a Holy Book! If you don't want to give it, then I want nothing to do with it!' Nirad says he is made to feel a pariah. 

Obviously, for a Hindu, the sudden realization that you are in fact a pariah has an immediate soteriological effect. The scales fall from your eyes. You repent your delusive egotism. Salvation has come to you on the DTC bus. However, what is even better is if a cat suddenly jumps through your window and starts playing with your computer mouse. Enough with the bile-filled blogging! Go find something tasty to offer this English incarnation of Shashti Devi. Don't try to compete with a Bengali bhuddijivi in uttering encomiums upon the Anglo Saxon cat. Your passage to England will forever remain incomplete.