In Indian literature a 'ritigranth' is a text with a particular pattern of literary ornamentation which is taken as canonical and which becomes a mimetic target for practitioners of 'ars dictaminis'- i.e. the hyper-elegant or ornate prose style adopted by courtiers and clerks.
For historical reasons, many Indians who wrote in English, chose outmoded English authors as models. As Aubrey Menen said, the belief was current that if you wanted to pass the ICS exam, you should model your prose style on that of a lead article in the Times circa 1850. Thus, the native Englishman considered Indian English prose to be behind the times. T.S Eliot greatly praised G.S Desani's 'all about H.Hatter' because its use of a Eurasian dialect appeared 'modernist' to him.
The fact is, if Indians wrote in a manner that was behind the times, it was because most parts of India were behind the times. Moreover, when Indians were writing to each other, rather than for Europeans, they did so in a stilted 'Babu' English rather than a living, idiomatic, language. One characteristic of such English was the indiscriminate use of the Thesaurus such that words, or idioms, which were only synonyms in very particular contexts, were treated as interchangeable for the purpose of variegating vocabulary to achieve 'elegant variation'. But, for the English, this is 'The stylistic fault of studiedly finding different ways to denote the same thing in a piece of writing, merely to avoid repetition.' Sadly, rather than elegance, what the Babu achieved was a ludicrous type of bathos. Thus a poem on the death of Queen Victoria might begin well enough- 'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes' but then turn grotesque 'into her grave, the Great Queen crashes'.
On the other hand, the use of phrases from other, currently prestigious, languages as a way of achieving 'elegant variation'- much as we may dislike it as affected, elitist, or as a pompous type of Punditry- if done in an apposite and accurate manner, is impressive or even quite useful. After all, what other advanced or classical cultures thought or said may be worthy of consideration. Sadly, India's rulers have always disagreed. James Mill was British India's first historiographer. His point was that book-keeping matters. Books and the languages in which those books were written, don't matter in the slightest. But this had been equally true of Turkish origin Sultans. Hermeneutics, in India, is pragmatic. 'Artha' that is meaning is also Economics or 'cash value'. But Religion too is Economic. Either you believe in karmic accountancy such that books balance over a long course of re-births or you believe that you face an angelic audit by Munkar & Nakir.
For Indians who fell in love with the English language and Western Paideia, there was and there remains the beautiful and gracious possibility of embracing Lord Jesus Christ as your personal God and Saviour (Ishtadeva). This doesn't mean you have to be rude to Mummy or Daddy or that you need to bang on about how Hindus will burn for eternity in Hell fire. You can 'honour your parents' and discharge all ritual obligations to the 'Pitr' while working for one of the many Christian institutions in India which are educationally, or otherwise socially, beneficial. True, Hindus and Muslims and Atheists will benefit from your efforts. So what? There is only one Creator ; only one Creation. As to who is truly a Christian or truly a Muslim or truly a Hindu- we can withhold judgement because the matter is imperative, not alethic- in other words, 'the true Scotsman' fallacy applies.
I suppose one might say, for those who won't embrace Christ but incessantly jerk off to Western Christendom- even in its current Secular, self-hating, incarnation- emigration, on the basis of great wealth or such work-skills as are in short supply- is a wholly honourable alternative.
Sadly, Europeans may come to feel- unless they already have- that they have taken in too many useless darkies like myself. Perhaps, just as the Indians got rid of the Brits after two hundred years of the Raj, they will expel us either with fair words and equitable compensation or such mulcting and murder most foul as has previously been involved in the West's periodic expulsions or eradications of Asiatics or Africans- e.g Jews, Gypsies or 'Moors'.
One reason Europeans may turn against us is because of the absurd type of 'affirmative action' associated with 'multi-culti' & political correctness.
Consider the following dreck, published in 1999, by Christopher Carduff, in the 'New Criterion' regarding
The triumph of Nirad Chaudhuri
Presumably, this triumph was like that of Ranajit Guha and involved emigrating from India so as to get intellectual affirmative action on the basis of being a stupid, ignorant, darkie. The difference is that Ranajit, who was almost 30 years younger, had emigrated ten years earlier than Niradh. Also Ranajit pretended he was a Communist while Chaudhuri pretended he was some sort of die-hard Tory. Thankfully, both East Bengali Hindus shared a great loathing for India and thus fucked off from its coral strand.
It must be said, of the three Indian origin broadcasters during the Second World War who subsequently wrote books, only Niradh remained mired in poverty. Aubrey Menen did well enough by his suave, Shavian, pen while G.S Desani, who was born in Nairobi and never went to College, after having been lauded by T.S Eliot, turned into a genuine Hindu Pundit.
The bombastic, but also mendicant and meretricious, Bengali however required 'affirmative action' from Cold War culture warriors like Edward Shils.
Nirad Chaudhuri loved aphorisms.
An aphorism is the pithy expression of a general truth. Nirad loved verbose vacuous expressions of a crazily bigoted type. Aubrey Menen had the better style. Sadly, he wasn't saying- 'darkies, like my Daddy, are beastly. Whities, like my Mummy, are angels.'
When I was 15, I coined an aphorism because I believed it contained a general truth, viz. - everybody ends up blindly believing that which is just one step beyond their own intelligence to formulate. My history tutor sternly cautioned me against such generalizations.
I was welcome to quote Ambrose Bierce, with due acknowledgement, and say the high-brow was a dude educated beyond his intelligence. It was fine to opine, if backed up by relevant facts and figures, that particular savants, of a particular period- perhaps over-ambitious for their own field of endeavour- ended up the slaves of an imbecilic ideology erected upon the misprisions of an inferior discipline. Say 'Ideologies are a flame only to such disciplinary moths as pre-date the discovery of fire'- and you have said nothing true, nor of any general utility. No doubt, an Iyer, to whom the cow was sacred, could algorithmically generate what Mahaffy called 'Irish Bulls'- i.e. Spivakian catachresis or Malapropism on so industrial a scale as to achieve a squalid, and self-defeating, liberation from any sort of Enlightenment hegemony- but why fucking bother?
Avoid such ipse dixit assertions. Otherwise, don't waste your time trying to get into Collidge. Just go to work in your Uncle's grocery shop or Tandoori restaurant.
He reveled in their combination of wit, moral rigor, and compactness of expression;
stupid lies can have those qualities. Aphorisms must contain a general truth.
in what he called their “intolerance of commonplaceness”;
Aphorisms are commonplace because general truths are common to all- e.g. 'the child is the father of the man'. Chaudhuri was incapable of saying anything true that was also pithy or insightful.
in their ability to shock one into instant argument with their author and with one’s own assumptions about life.
Aphorisms aren't about starting arguments. Saying 'your Mum is a dirty whore' may start an argument. It isn't an aphorism.
He loved how they stick in one’s mind like a burr,
ear-worms do that. So do egregiously false statements like 'Mum is a dirty whore'. However, what everybody else was aiming at was the epigram. That's way more elegant than an aphorism.
and, in nearly every sentence he wrote, he strove for the aphorist’s ideal of pith, truth, clarity, and nettlesomeness.
He was a pseudo-intellectual trying to come across like a dude with a Classics degree from Oxbridge and a PhD from the Sorbonne. The problem was that cunts with those qualifications had shat the bed big time. It turned out that what those who could not learn from history actually did for a living, was teach it or write bombastic books about it.
He achieved it often.
gaining affirmative action is not an achievement. It isn't even a consolation prize. At most, it is a type of reparation for a collective crime which it would be ignoble for any individual to accept.
It is, indeed, the characteristic Chaudhuri note.
That note is of the bombastic Babu scolding the wickedness of all the other Babus while taking a sly pleasure in the coming apocalypse.
It is there in the first line of the first book he published, in the famous dedication of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian:
To the memory of the British Empire in India,
At that time, though there was no longer an Empress of India, Elizabeth II was still the Queen of Pakistan. Thus, Niradh's ancestral home was sill part of the British Empire.
which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship;
British citizenship came into existence in 1948. Prior to that Niradh, as much as Churchill, was a British subject, not a citizen.
to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: “Civis Britannicus sum,”
There was no need. Palmerston had affirmed the principle in the Don Pacifico case.
because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.
In other words, Muslims killing Hindus and chasing them out of East Bengal were 'good and living and quickened' by the best thing which had ever happened to India. But so were Nehru & Co- who came from Hindu majority areas- when they told the Brits to fuck the fuck off.
When Chaudhuri wrote this, in 1951, he was fifty-three years old.
He was a Government servant. By demanding the return of European rule, he had committed sedition. The only reason he wasn't prosecuted was because, as an East Bengali, he had a genuine grievance against India's new rulers. If he did jail time, he could rise politically as the champion of the Hindu refugee. The safest thing was to deny him an extension of service so he didn't get a pension. That way, at least the Government saved a little money. Still, at a later point TTK did ask him to write something on the plight of the East Bengali refugee. Sadly, the fellow was useless.
Independent India was only four—a thin-skinned toddler, quick to slap back when slapped.
Nonsense! India had been a member of the League of Nations since 1919. There had been a gradual transfer of power which, truth be told, Gandhi had delayed. Nehru was feted by world leaders. The Korean War had raised India's diplomatic profile. Radhakrishnan, in Moscow, had gotten very cosy with Stalin. Meanwhile, Churchill had offered profuse apologies to Nehru and Vijaylaxmi. Nobody gave a fuck about a handful of ex-Fascists like Douglas Jerrold or his Indian protege.
“No nationalist reader of my book needed to go further than the dedication to acquire a strong and unconquerable prejudice against me,” Chaudhuri wrote some thirty-five years later.
What was seditious was his calling for a return to White rule towards the end of the book. Few Indian readers got that far.
“This was not simply heresy, but treason,
sedition. Only if some group of Whites were actively trying to conquer India, could Niradh be guilty of aiding or abetting them in which case he could be tried for treason.
and it was the high-placed Indians, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who resented the statement most violently.”
They didn't give a fuck about him. The frail little dwarf obviously had the hots for well built Englishmen. Sadly, no Jolly Jack Tar had thought it worthwhile to sodomize the fellow.
His words consigned him, in Delhi and Calcutta, to a spittoon reserved for him alone and whose slippery sides he could not scale.
Nonsense! He remained safe enough. The French Ambassador, whom Delhi liked because he was pressuring his Government to speed up transfer of French possessions in India, did something for him. So did some affluent Indians who were amused by him- people like Khushwant Singh or Cyrus Jhabwallah.
He became persona non grata, “a known un-Indian.”
He gained a little notoriety. The question was whether the Americans would give him a visiting Professorship or a sinecure in a Think-tank. Apparently Edward Shils- later discovered to have CIA links- did help him. The problem was that Indians considered him ignorant. His style was mid-nineteenth century. It was as though he had read nothing written after 1925. Later, he confirmed this was the case.
In the end Chaudhuri’s dedication, and the scandalous success of his Autobiography in England and America, cost him his pension at All India Radio, where for ten years he’d worked as a writer on foreign and military affairs;
He wasn't given an extension and thus did not qualify for a pension.
AIR let him go, after a year of internal intrigue, mere weeks before retirement benefits were to have kicked in.
The same thing happened to a lot of other people who had been taken on during the War. In Niradh's case, the Government saved itself 45 years worth of pension benefits.
Simultaneously, India’s Minister of Information and Broadcasting, acting on a tip from AIR, met privately with those Indian editors who’d welcomed Chaudhuri’s articles and told them they could no longer do so.
No Minister had any power to tell an editor what he could or could not publish.
This media ban was not officially lifted until 1970,
there was no media ban. Niradh did get a fair number of articles and a book or two published in India. They just weren't very good.
when India was twenty-three—the age, it seems, that one becomes old enough to appreciate aphorisms.
We appreciate aphorisms from about the age of 5.
It was then that the government invited Chaudhuri to write a propagandist tract on his native East Pakistan.
No. That had happened previously. Sadly, Nirad didn't give a shit about his own people. The Government could not use him because he literally was useless.
“The Government of India may have lifted its ban on me,” he told his friend the Sikh writer Khushwant Singh, “but I have not lifted my ban on the Government of India.”
He complained that Khushwant went around telling everybody that he was so poor he had to borrow his typewriter. Still, it makes sense for a Sikh to pretend that a dwarfish imbecile is the finest flower of Bengali culture and intelligence.
Most of the papers, acknowledging
he was a darkie and nice things must be said about darkies
his international reputation as a writer, asked one or another of his admirers to write a warm, signed tribute.
rather than send in an unsigned stool sample.
These are old stories, and they were told again last summer, when Chaudhuri died, at age 101, on August 1. I read the Indian newspaper obituaries with interest, for signs of further mellowing in the official national attitude toward “Niradbabu.”
Newspapers don't express 'official attitudes'. Still, I suppose, Niradh was considered anti-Nehru and thus pro-BJP. Advani had visited him in Oxford.
Not surprisingly, I found little.
In Bengal, there was some story of Niradh having spied on Sarat Bose. It wasn't true but it resurfaces from time to time.
Most of the papers, acknowledging his international reputation as a writer, asked one or another of his admirers to write a warm, signed tribute. These, however, were invariably accompanied by unsigned editorials that
were objective.
gave with the one hand and took away with the other. The one in The Times of India was typical. In “his pronouncements on Indian affairs,”
e.g. that Whitey should come back to rule the place
it said, Chaudhuri got the problems and the “assumptions behind them” right,
the problem being that Indians are shit.
but “he slipped, and did so very often, on comprehending the reality of modern mass politics.”
Don't tell Indians in India they are shit. Go to England and say 'Indians are shit' over there. If anyone asks, say you are Pakistani.
He wrote brilliantly and with erudition about Europe and England,
No. English or European people did not quote him as an authority.
but “it was one which was dead and buried with Mozart, Jane Austen, and Lord Palmerston.”
The art of Mozart or Austen is not dead.
“He lived a life devoid of compromises,”
because he was completely dedicated to being a stupid shithead.
but he lived it, like a Bengali Don Quixote, in
England. But wholly unquixotic Bengalis prefer to live in a place still ruled by White peeps.
a world “almost mythical and only partly real . . . an India which was entirely his own mental creation.” In other words, Chaudhuri was brilliant in his own sphere—
that of a stupid bigot
but that sphere was a mere soap bubble, coruscating high above a map of Victoria’s vanished empire.
Soap bubbles may coruscate but they don't do it any great altitude. Also, they are ephemeral.
He had nothing to say of relevance to modern India, or to the modern world.
He had nothing true to say about anything.
I can almost hear Chaudhuri cackling—his laughter came in gleeful, high-pitched bursts—and saying, as he had said once before, “Of course my writings did not exert the slightest influence on Indian opinion!
Or any other type of opinion. You don't have to read books to be a bigot.
I do not feel ashamed for that.
Shame is not commonly felt by stupid bigots.
I know the definition of a prophet. . . .
a guy who is honoured in his own country- like Moses or Christ or Muhammad.
Even now my countrymen have not learnt to be afraid of me,
whereas in England, SAS officers cowered and gave Niradh the wall if they saw him coming down the street.
and pay no heed to my writing. That is because their minds are so constituted that if they ever acquire an idea, whatever its value, they become impervious to a second idea, as if they were ova which, once they are fertilized by a racing spermatozoon, will at once grow a hard coat to prevent the entry of another.'
Niradh made sure that his countrymen were English not Indian. Sadly, they changed their mind about Indians and let a Hindu become Prime Minister.
In England, where Chaudhuri lived after 1970, the obituaries were better—more detailed, more understanding, certainly more stylish.
Because you must say nice things about darkies. Otherwise people will think you are a Racist.
The Independent, to its credit, said the necessary thing: that he was, quite simply, “India’s most distinguished writer of English prose in the twentieth century.”
He was a self-conscious stylist. But that style was dated fustian. The plain fact is Indians wanted prose to be informative or entertaining. Niradh was neither. Also, he was a parochial, provincial, Bengali and had zero knowledge or interest in the rest of India.
K.M Munshi had a good style. Rajaji wrote plainly but his translations of the Ramayana and Bhagvadgita sold well. Both had some political influence. But it was Nehru whose books were translated into many languages.
He was also “his country’s most controversial commentator since independence: a lonely position he never regretted, maintained with real courage, and indeed grew to relish.”
Nonsense! India had plenty of senior journalists and academics whose commentary was well-informed and highly influential. Speaking generally, such people also edited newspapers and magazines. Indians did not seek to emulate Niradh's style. V.S Naipaul, on the other hand, was influential and gained many imitators.
The Autobiography and its sequel, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987), were not really anti-Indian: they were,
proof that the buddhijivi had shit for brains. But, by 1987, it was obvious that Bengalis were shit at running things. If the Brits based their government in Calcutta it wasn't because the Bengalis were smart. It was because they were utterly shit. What helped rehabilitate Niradh was Thatcher's victory and 'Raj nostalgia'.
“as more thoughtful Indians realized, a heartfelt, often wonderfully lyrical pleading on behalf of the best of Bengal.”
Which was still shit compared to anywhere else.
They were also a forceful protest against the decline of modern Indian culture,
Satyajit Ray was shit compared to David Lean- that's true enough. But nobody watched Bengali cinema.
which, as Chaudhuri never tired of saying, “was created by Indians . . . mainly Bengalis who had received their education in English
or refused to pursue that education- like Tagore or Uday or Ravi Shankar. The plain fact is the Brits insisted that Indians learn at least one Classical and one vernacular language. But, in any case, the market for Indian culture was almost entirely Indian. If you could supply that market you gained money, fame and political influence. Niradh could not supply that market. He fucked off to Britain and got by on affirmative action.
. . . during the British rule, under the impact of European civilization.”
Japan felt that impact much more profoundly.
The British papers, though, did as poor a job of handling Chaudhuri’s criticism of the British
Chaudhuri didn't say that letting in lots of darkies was a bad fucking idea.
as the Indian papers did of his criticism of the Indians. It fell to Tunku Varadarajan, an Indian
British citizen
writing for The Wall Street Journal,
for which Carduff wrote
to hammer home the point that Chaudhuri’s dedication of the Autobiography was as much a slap at the Raj as it was at the nationalists who so effectively dismantled it.
It was a feeble gnawing at the hand which fed him.
“To the memory of the British Empire in India,” it reads, “which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship”—or, in other words, “which ruled us, which educated us in its ways, but which never could accept us into its political life.”
Three Indians- all of them Parsis- had served in the House of Commons. One Bengali was admitted to the House of Lords around the time Niradh got his first job. But since few Indians lived in the UK at that time, they themselves did not want to be part of its political life. In India, Indians played an increasing role in the administration from the 1880s onward.
Little wonder that Chaudhuri’s criticism of the British, both pro and con, was given short shrift by the British obit writers.
Queenji should not get drunk on Gin and then display her bare bottom to Mrs. Thatcher. It is a most unseemly practice.
As Chaudhuri writes in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, from the very beginning the British community in India “opposed all political concessions to Indians, and this they maintained until the end of British rule.”
Every community opposed all concessions to other communities. So what?
Beyond that, “they aired their contempt for all classes of Indians blatantly,”
just as Niradh did.
and “their rancor against any Bengali who wrote or spoke English well was as unrestrained as it was irrational.”
Shoshee Chunder Dutt, writing of his life as a clerk in the 1850's contradicts this view. Still, it must be said, the Bengali was not liked unless, like Shitab Roy, he was actually a Khattri and possessed military valour.
As a result, “they could drive all reasonable Indians to despair, but could not intimidate those who were driven by hatred.”
Why did those despairing Indians not succumb to hate? Was it because they were intimidated?
Chaudhuri could never forgive the British, whose rule was “the greatest and most beneficial economic and political phenomenon the world has ever known,”
It wasn't. This is just an ipse dixit assertion without any facts to back it up. The current ruling party looks up to the great Bengali revolutionaries and spiritual personalities- e.g. Swamy Vivekananda and Aurobindo. It is believed that Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee helped his relative Bagha Jatin- the Indian Bruce Lee- and the RSS joined forces with his son to found the Jan Sangh which was later renamed the BJP. Incidentally, both the RSS and the Congress Seva Dal were set up in imitation of the Bengali 'Anushilan samitis'.
for self-destructively inciting hatred among their subjects.
That hatred declined continually. What increased was hatred between Muslims and kaffirs.
Nor could he forgive their caving into it—their abandoning India, tail between legs, when the bombs began to explode.
No bombs were exploding in 1947.
Worst of all, when the British departed, “all the advantages which they had in India by virtue of their Empire were bequeathed . . . to those who were opposed to it, and not to those who supported it.”
Nobody supported it except maybe some drunken Eurasians.
The pearls of British India were fed, by the British, to the swine.
The jewel in Britain's crown was India. That jewel passed back to Indians. Britain didn't have the resources to hold the place.
Chaudhuri had limitless faith in empires—“empires as protectors and reclaimers of civilization,”
It must be said, he was not enthused with the Japanese Empire conquering India.
empires “whose imperialism is consistent with moral principles, with freedom, and with human dignity.”
No such Empire ever existed.
But he knew that “to speak in favor of empires,
after 1917 was simply silly
including the British Empire in India, and to live in [present-day] England,” was “like being a Lutheran in old Spain under the Inquisition. Even Torquemada’s ferocity to the reformers cannot be compared with the zeal to burn which the British anti-imperialists have!”
Torquemada died when Luther was 15 years old. Niradh knew nothing of European history.
Little wonder that Chaudhuri’s criticism of the British, both pro and con, was given short shrift by the British obit writers.
They didn't want to draw attention to the fact that the brown monkey they were praising was as stupid as shit.
“The creation of the new Indian culture”—the culture which produced Tagore
a boring shithead
and the Bengali Renaissance
boring, stupid, shite
—was, said Chaudhuri, “the greatest achievement of the Bengali people
because they have no fucking achievements unless, like Narendra Modi, you are enthused by the 'Jugantar' Bengali revolutionaries.
as well as the most important product of the cultural interaction which [accompanied] British rule in India.”
Bengal may be important to Bengali people. It isn't to anybody else. For the Brits, the Raj opened the door to a knowledge of Sanskrit and Persian literature. It fed the Romantic Orientalism of Tom Moore and Southey. Shelley's feminism was inspired by a fellow Old Etonian's novel about the Nairs of Calcutta. British vegetarianism seems to owe much to contact with India. Some Indian customs- e.g. wearing pyjamas rather than nightshirts, or jodhpurs when riding- were imported. Bengal contributed little because Bengal had no indigenous culture or art or costume or haut cuisine. These things were imported from other parts of India. Indeed, the 'kulin' elite was of foreign provenance as was its Muslim aristocracy.
On the other hand, the working people of Dacca had created a type of muslin with a higher thread count than anything that can now be produced. Thus it was the upper class, not the indigenous people, who were shitty.
The beauty and incompleteness of this cultural creation—beautiful because it so naturally recast traditional Bengali art into Western forms, incomplete because there was no real political and cultural cooperation between the Bengali people and the British
Lack of cooperation between Bengali people meant it would be ruled by foreigners. Bengal supplied the money used to recruit and pay soldiers from less cowardly parts of India. Where there already was a strong and ancient culture and civilization, Pax Britannica, enabled a cultural efflorescence. In Bengal no such thing obtained. Some Babus could mimic the educated Englishman well enough when it came to talking or writing but could they also show valour on the battlefield? The Brits, in common with other Indians, thought not.
On the other hand, there was plenty of cultural cooperation. The Government Art College in Calcutta helped create a wholly indigenous style of painting. At an earlier period, British people like H.H. Wilson had worked closely with young Bengalis to translate and publish ancient Sanskrit texts. The Asiatic Society built upon achievements of this sort. Politically, there was considerable cooperation with the Bengali elite outside the Capital. The policy of breaking up big estates greatly benefited 'Chaudhuries' like Niradh. Sadly, the burgeoning of a class of intermediaries proved a crushing burden on the working people.
—is rendered poignant throughout all of Chaudhuri’s writing.
Viceroy refused to come and wipe Niradh's bum. That's the reason Niradh didn't become a greater soldier than General Slim.
The writer himself was no doubt its finest flowering,
If Niradh is a flower, what is horseshit?
as evidenced not only in his two volumes of autobiography but also in his other books on the Anglo-Indian encounter, especially his biographies of Robert Clive and Max Müller, and his books on Hinduism and the peoples of India.
They are shit.
Chaudhuri is invaluable, and will forever be invaluable, as a witness to what happened in twentieth-century India.
No. A good witness is one whose testimony is sober, considered, and can be corroborated on many points while revealing something new which is potentially significant. Chaudhari merely wanted to mention various books he had read in between screaming hysterically because Whitey is refusing to sodomize him.
He is invaluable, too, in the words of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
She spent 25 years in India. Her husband was Parsi. She never claimed to know anything about the 'Hindu personality'. But she was a friend of Niradh's.
as the very embodiment of perhaps his chief literary subject, namely “how the highest achievements of European culture can be effortlessly absorbed into the Hindu personality without making it any less convoluted, deep, wildly humorous, devious, or sublime.”
i.e. Hindus will produce shit even if they have absorbed the highest achievements of non-Hindus. This is because Hindus are shit.
For this reader, at least, he is also invaluable as a great penseur, a later La Rochefoucauld, a coiner of aphorisms that stick in one’s mind like a burr.
If one has a shitty mind- maybe. Why not simply say Niradh is greater than Pascal?
I leave you with three:
Unquestioning complacency;
Since complacency, by its nature, does not question, it is redundant to say so.
facile pessimism;
it is easy to be pessimistic.
chastened hope and unrebelliousness; a stern, almost exultant despair—these are the four stages in a man’s maturing outlook on life.
Complacent people aren't rebellious. Nor are pessimists. Hope can't be chastened after it was displaced by pessimism. This is not a 'pensee'. It is a fucking oxymoron. Also, it is intolerably verbose. As for 'exultant despair'- that is mere schadenfreude or meanness of spirit.
The distinction between a misanthrope and a moralist: A misanthrope despairs of himself as well as of his fellowmen;
I suppose Niradh was thinking of Moliere's play. He didn't get that misanthropy may be a mere rejection of the conventions of polite society. Rousseau adopts this pose. The truth is, he was mentally ill.
a moralist despairs of his fellowmen only.
No. He may consider himself superior to everybody else but this does not entail the belief that scolding them might not do some good.
There is no greater misfortune than for a man to die with a sense of bitterness;
in which case he has suffered misfortune. Try not to die till you have reversed the setback or else have ceased to think it matters. Sadly, a lot of people die at a time not convenient to them at all. Viceroy may kindly take appropriate measures.
he should die, not simply with reconciliation even, but with a sense of triumph, whatever his worldly lot has been.
If you die when you are not ready for death, you are unfortunate in that respect. This is not an aphorism. It is a tautology.
“When I say triumph,” wrote Chaudhuri, “I mean triumph over the worldly world.”
Which, in death, we all achieve.
Carduff does not mention the last line of this 'aphorism'. No one can have it on one's side unless he has the strength to kick it, or the weakness to prostitute himself to it.
It is sad to think that any man, at the end of a long life, can say of his world nothing better than that he kicked it and nothing worse than that it fucked him in the ass. Still, if you feel that you have spent your days incarcerated with thugs and sodomites, the knowledge that you did more kicking than sucking off may indeed seem a victory which robs death of its sting.
Chaudhuri’s death, like the uncompromising work he left behind him, was, on his own terms, a triumph.
After India became independent, Whites who wrote books mourning for the Raj would have been accused of being sore losers. There was a small market for darkies to take on this job on behalf of Whitey and aim some kicks at the niggers.
What warms the cockles of our heart is the thought of Churchill sniggering and chortling over Niradh's 'Autobiography'. Hindus truly were a beastly people. Nehru was welcome to them.
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