'Circumstances so shaped my literary career that I became and have remained a controversialist.
i.e a professional scold
If, however, Bengali literature had remained in the stable condition it had reached by the turn of the century
i.e. remained worthy of scolding as opposed to a richly deserved oblivion
and had not begun to show what I considered symptoms of disease and decay,
i.e. becoming as jaundiced as its critics
I should certainly have become a literary critic of the type of Sainte-Beuve or at least like Jules Lemaitre and Anatole France.
Nothing stopped him from writing criticism of French novels in French and submitting it to French magazines.
They all wrote their criticism in a form which, by adapting a well-known phrase, I would call critique feuilleton.
There is nothing wrong with a Bengali preferring the literary products of Burgundy or Belgium. Why not scold the French in their own language and see if they will pay you for doing so? Why come down so hard on the Bengali for not being a haut bourgeoise belles-lettrist?
In his 'Thy hand great Anarch' Niradh Chaudhuri quotes Pascal, a great scold, as a moral for writers - 'When we see the natural style, we are completely astonished and delighted, because we expected to see an author, and we find a man.' Sadly, if the man has achieved nothing and is a boring bigot, our astonishment is quickly replaced by irritation. Worse yet is the case of a writer whose true author is another. There can be nothing natural about him because by his banshee shrieks he believes he weaves a most melodious spell though what renders his solitary rock so repellent is that it is an agglomeration of affectations or sonorous sedimentation of spite.
A publicist or propagandist may be better rewarded for bombast than balanced judgment and thus seek to win his point by arbitrary assertion rather than sound observation. An insensate sententiousness, clothed in the purple of the prose of a previous age, may, for those paid to produce such fustian, be a work-skill. The aim is, if not to dazzle, then to bludgeon, or if not to bludgeon, then to distract. Au fond, the thing is disingenuous and, if not wholly mercenary, utterly mad.
A natural style is never self-absorbed or self-regarding. It casts its eye in all directions before formulating its perspective. Niradh was a student of History. Yet he put up obstacles so as not to see the precipices of reason over which he, as Pascal said, blindly plunged. I suppose, reasoning is merely a type of integrity or internal consistency. If you aren't your own man you neither need nor can supply any such commodity. Odysseus polytropos- that myriad minded man- serves his nation in foreign fields and finds a path to return to his own isle. Thersites, incarnating single-minded spite, is a plague to his own comrades. His is the Horme of the renegade publicist or propagandist, recoiling in hatred from everything he previously held faith in, whose cacoethes scribendi devotes itself to so belittling his own oikos as to affront all oikeiosis. Though his prose may be cast in the mould of a Thucydides, it is a scandal to Clio and a monstrous abortion of scholarship.
Nevertheless, a Hindu might see in the 'virodhabhakti' of the Hindu who expends all his venom upon Hinduism, the pitiable hypertrophy of attachment which turns into an obsessive paranoia like that of an uxorious husband who, in his dotage, comes to believe that his wife is seeking to poison him or that she is in league with infernal forces of implacable malice and infinite power.
It is said that such 'virodhabhakti' or 'samrambha yoga', unites one more securely to the object of one's devotion- precisely because hatred of a thing causes you to think more incessantly of it. But, unless the Lord himself strike you down, such a path grants not deliverance but dementia.
Consider the multiple misologies in the following- 'After the abandonment of India there was no possibility of the survival of British rule over non-European peoples anywhere in the world; and not only that, the rule of other European countries, too, was doomed at the same time. Decline of the political power of Europe began in India. Thus, so far as this book is history, it is the first chapter of the very much larger history of the end of European rule over non-European peoples.'
Niradh forgets that Allenby forced the Brits to accept Egypt's unilateral declaration of independence in 1922. Afghanistan too became wholly independent in that year. Had Gandhi not unilaterally surrendered, India would have gained something similar. Indeed, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had said that Britain did not have the troops to hold India. The truth is all multi-ethnic Empires were known to be doomed by the end of 1917. The Brits were sensible enough to transfer power peacefully. The Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indo-China fought costly wars before admitting the game was not worth the candle. However, some 'non-European' people- e.g. those of Martinique- chose to retain ties with a European power.
This political history had also a cultural complement within India, about which nothing has been written and therefore nothing is known.
Because the thing does not exist.
That was the decline of the modern Indian culture
there was no decline. As education spread, modern Indian culture broadened and deepened. Culture is highly income elastic. Rising income means more of the commodity.
which was created by Indians during the British rule under the impact of European civilization.
Schools and Colleges did play a part but they focused on utilitarian subjects. As income rose, more and more people could send their sons and daughters for training in traditional arts. This also meant that music and dance, previously associated with courtesans, became thoroughly puritanical and middle class.
It was mainly the creation of Bengalis
only in Bengal. Tamil culture was developed by Tamils. Maharashtrian culture was developed by Maharashtrians, etc.
who had received their education in English.
The Brits insisted that Indian students study at least one classical and one vernacular language. It is true that it was only under their auspices that some of the current official State languages became standardized and achieved their current form.
Urdu literary culture, it must be said, did not depend on education in English as the example of Maulana Azad shows. Though there were one or two Bengali authors who were translated into other Indian languages, Urdu was always Pan-Indian.
In this book I come forward as a witness of this double decline.
There wasn't much European civilization in India though in the early years of the Raj, when Nabobs were making fortunes, more of that very expensive commodity was available in Calcutta than in the other Presidency cities. As for modern Indian culture, it burgeoned as incomes rose and literacy greatly increased. New technology- the radio and the cinema- brought culture to an increasing proportion of the population. In Tamil Nadu, 'reel society' took over 'real society'- i.e. film stars and scriptwriters became Chief Ministers. Their education was not in English. Like Kamraj Nadar, they left school at too young age for them to have acquired much knowledge of English. It was these leaders who ensured that Tamil Nadu rose above Bengal in education, industrialization, and per capita income.
Furthermore, as a Bengali, I have to record a decline which has a poignant relevance to me. During the same period of political and cultural decline in India I had also to observe the eclipse of Bengal as a force in Indian politics and culture.
At one time Bengal produced the surplus the British could use to finance the expansion of its Empire. I suppose, the educated Bengali could spread out into neighbouring provinces so as to rise in the bureaucracy and the professions. But this was also the case for Indians from the other Presidency towns. Burma, in particular, was a place where Indians could do very well.
From the beginning of British rule down to 1920 the Bengali people dominated the political and cultural life of India.
No. The British dominated political life. Urdu replaced Persian and became the lingua franca. There was a revival of Sanskrit learning and the vernaculars of Hindu majority regions tended to become Sanskritised. Educationally forward castes- Brahmins in particular- took a leading role. The Bengali Hindu's sentiments were expressed by these lines of Shoshee Chunder Dutt
Calcutta's decline can be dated to around the time the Capital was shifted to Delhi. Bombay was more vibrant and the Indian National Congress came to be financed and controlled by people from the West and the South of India. Punjab stood out as a place where the prosperity of the cultivator had risen both in directly ruled and Princely states. But there were other such places- e.g. Coorg- where association with the Raj was purely voluntary and thus imposed no psychic cost.
Though scarcely flourishing under the Raj, over the course of the Twenties and Thirties, it was UP, Bihar and portions of what is now Madhya Pradesh. which would take the lead in Indian politics. A Sanskritised version of their mother tongue- Hindi- became the national language though, no doubt, it was already a lingua franca.
How positive their domination in politics was will be realized if I recall the curious idea which the British administrators in India held about the extension of self-government to Indians.
They said that the cowardly Bengali would be conquered by martial races if they departed. There was no 'Bengali domination'. However, it is true that the Jugantar revolutionaries and their 'Anushilan samitis' were admired by Maharashtrians. Hindu spirituality went hand in hand with patriotic ardour. Vivekananda and Aurobindo were heroes to all Indians. Tagore, on the other hand, discouraged participation in the freedom movement. He knew he would lose his estates in the East if the British did a bunk.
Niradh had two precursors- Shoshee Chunder Dutt, who had published a book in 1880 describing the life of the Bengali clerk in British employ in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta, and Dhan Gopal who published 'Caste and Outcast' in New York in 1923. It described his Brahminical childhood in rural Bengal after which, as a Revolutionary and a publicist for the Nationalist cause in America, he reflected on his status as part of a global 'outcast' community seeking Social Justice.
The Dutt family had been pre-eminent amongst Indians writing in English. One branch embraced Christianity. The other tended to move in a Socialist direction- e.g. Rajani Palme Dutt.
Taraknath Das, Dhan Gopal, M.N. Roy and other revolutionaries- some five or ten years older than Niradh- who went to the USA and studied at Berkeley and other universities there, were active within the broader framework of International Socialism or else an Irenic, universal, Spirituality. As publicists, they sought to bypass entrenched elites and to reach out to workers and the middle stratum of American society.
Consider the following passage from Dhan Gopal's autobiography-
Indian life cannot be understood with even moderate justice, if its constant background of religious thought remain unrealised. That is the difference between the point of view of the most humble Hindu and such a brilliant painter of Indian life as Mr. Kipling. I use the word painter advisedly, for everything that the eye alone can take in, that M r. Kipling not only sees but completely conveys. No one, however, except a Hindu, to whom the religion of his country is more real than all its material aspects put together, can understand Indian life from within.
In other words, only if Indians take responsibility for running their own country can they tackle problems like 'untouchability'. Kipling can paint a picture of 'Gunga Din'. But only the Indian will understand why a bhishti, despite belonging to the noble Kabirpanthi sect, would be treated by his own people as a pariah. To remove such social disabilities, Indian must achieve Independence. The problem here was that Gopal was clearly deeply prejudiced against Muslims. About a dozen years after Dhan Gopal's autobiography came out, Americans could read Nehru's Autobiography and have confidence that the cause which Indian publicists on their soil were advancing, by their books and public speeches, corresponded to the most powerful and wide-reaching political force in India. Moreover, Nehru clearly had no animus against Islam.
But here is the dilemma— to convey this in a manner consistent with the western idea of what a book ought to be. I fear it is impossible. However, when I came to America, I encountered, as you will hear if you will follow me so far, an object which figures much in American controversial, if not philosophic life— I mean the “ soap box.” And when my western auditor secs me mounting this humble platform to quote and expound, I hope for a degree of sympathy with my effort to present a more intimate impression of eastern life.
Dhan Gopal was probably the first Indian writing in English to earn his living by his pen in America. No doubt, his motivation was to gain a 'soap box'. But, he mounted it for no egotistic purpose. On the other hand, it is true that like Tagore and Nehru, Dhan Gopal was a Brahmin- i.e. descended from priests. Niradh was a Kayastha- i.e. descended from scribes. The British Raj was unconcerned with matters of the spirit. It had created a vast bureaucracy staffed by 'Babus'- obsequious clerks- for whom the British felt contempt.
Dhan Gopal, in his account of Hindu orthodoxy redeems it thus
I was taught our golden rule: “ Until and unless you treat man and all living creatures with the same consideration that you wish to treat yourself and be treated yourself, you have not attained religious consciousness.” Buddha says the same thing: It is not enough to take refuge in wisdom. You must take refuge in constructive brotherhood, and you will find joy in the result.”
Anti-Imperialism needed to go hand in hand with a concern for the working people, not to mention the conscript soldiers, of every Race or Nationality. Constructive brotherhood on an international scale was the one creed which might prevent further World Wars.
Niradh was still a mainstream Nationalist when Dhan Gopal and, later, Nehru's autobiographies came out. Indeed, his bitterness against the British was greater. It is in that spirit that he avers that the extension of self-government to Indians
... (the British) said with anger and contempt, would be handing over India to the Bengali Babu,
who would be swiftly slaughtered by the Pathan or other 'martial races' of India. Mention of the erudite Bengali Babu was quickly followed by a reference to his effeminacy, impracticality, and inability to substitute deeds for words.
Niradh's first great success as a publicist for the Nationalist cause arose out of his critique of the 'martial race' theory. He wrote the INC's position paper on the need to Indianize the Army. Perhaps, being of meagre physique, he feared ridicule for his interest in military matters.
whom even in 1911 Kipling called Caliban.
Niradh did not know that Kipling was greatly taken with Browning's 'Caliban upon Setebos- Natural Theology in the Island'. Setebos is the demiurge Caliban believes created this fallen world. He comes to feel reverence for that senseless deity. Niradh is indeed Browning's Caliban. His piety is directed at some sententious Setebos who might, in his own image, have retrospectively created that Babudom- i.e. the vast bureaucracy that held India in its maw- in whose lower ranks Niradh himself had served.
But from 1921 onwards the influence of Bengal in Indian politics began to decline.
I suppose what Niradh means is that the Hindu Bengali protest against the partition of Bengal had succeeded before the Great War and this gave Bengalis an exaggerated idea of their own importance. Thirty years later, it would be the Hindus who demanded and got that partition. Moreover, of the Garam Dal triumvirate 'Bal-Pal-Lal', the Bengali, Bipin, like 'Surrender Not' Bannerjee, was rejected at the ballot box and declined in significance. With the death of C.R Das, no Bengali politician had an all-India stature though Netaji Bose had a brief period of importance before he over-played his hand.
In the cultural field the same decline became perceptible to me, and I myself took some part in what might be called the Bengali Kulturkampf.
the Brahmos had indulged in a Kulturkampf against the orthodox but Ramakrishna and Vivekananda had settled their hash. Though Bengal had some leading Communists like M.N Roy and Chatto and a nephew of Tagore, the Province tended to lag behind some other parts of India in this respect.
With independence, the eclipse of Bengal was completed.
It was partitioned. Niradh, as an East Bengali, would have been justified in dwelling upon the sufferings of his people who were subject to ethnic cleansing. He prefers not to do so.
It may be argued that we are all entitled to feel greater attachment to and pride in our own mother tongue and natal place. What is odd about Niradh is his insistence that Bengalis were 'childish' before the Brits came and that they only rose up under their tutelage. He seems to believe that only Bengalis received the benefit of British instruction.
This begs the question, which group of Indian people were most changed by coming into contact with the British? The answer is- the Parsis. From being a class of artisans, priests and petty merchants, they became industrialists, ship owners, artists, scientists and leading political figures.
Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, married a Parsi and his descendants are Parsis living in India. Indira Gandhi married a Parsi and thus Nehru's dynasty continues under a Gujarati Parsi name.
Indians have done well in various fields but, to the best of my knowledge, only Parsis- Zubin Mehta and Freddy Mercury- have made very distinguished contributions to both Western Classical and Western pop music. This is in addition to substantial contributions in every other field of achievement.
The Parsis are not ashamed if they had an ancestor who was a carpenter or even an agricultural labourer. On the contrary, they are proud that their families rose up through hard work and enterprise. Like the Brits, they are mercantile and highly mobile and forward looking though they retain a very ancient religion with complex rituals and practices.
The group least affected by the British was the country landlord who could live comfortably off inherited wealth. His tenantry might be wholly ignorant of the existence of the British.
In the districts of Bengal, this was the rule, while in Calcutta there developed the 'Babu' culture of the bureaucrat and the officer of the court. But here too the concern was to preserve the old ways at home while meekly accepting an alien language at work.
Niradh Chaudhuri believed differently.
It is sad to have to contemplate the decline of the Bengali people from their position of dominance in India
the Brits used the land revenue from Bengal to establish their dominance over other parts of India. They considered the Bengali to lack martial qualities and thus would seldom employ them as anything but clerical beasts of burden.
to the final stage of being of no significance to Indian history in the space of some fifty years.
They were of no significance at any time which is why the Brits could make such a big profit running the place. Initially, it is true, a class of Bengali compradors did well for themselves. Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore were lionized when they visited England. But their descendants held more and more aloof from the English because the status of the native tended to fall over the course of the nineteenth century. Moreover, opportunities for personal enrichment had declined in the higher ranks of the administration or the judiciary. You might get a knighthood or other such mark of distinction but your people firmly believed you had to swallow a peck of dirt for every such advancement.
No one can deny that in the nineteenth century the Bengali people created a new life, not only for themselves, but for the entire Indian people, by their intellectual and moral effort.
They didn't create any such thing for their own poorer class or their Muslim brethren. The Arya Samaj spread from Gujarat to Punjab and even down into the South. This is because it had the courage to do 'shuddhi'- i.e. reconvert people to Hinduism. The Brahmo Samaj was deeply boring and was riven by caste based splits. In 2001, the total number of self-identified Brahmos in India was 177. There were 8 million Arya Samajis.
They created a new Bengali culture which
was as boring as shit. Still, Bengali patriots were added to the pan-Indian pantheon.
broadened into the modern Indian culture. They created the nationalist movement.
Dadhabhai Naoroji, a Parsi, is called the Grand Old Man of the INC. But it was founded by a Scotsman.
They reshaped the Indian personality.
There is no 'Indian personality'.
For present-day Bengalis all this is now a thing of the past, except for retrospective, senseless, and unmanly bragging,
mendacious bragging. Bengal wasn't important- save economically- and it still isn't important- even economically.
and, in so far as it is real, it is of historical interest alone. Of course even today's life in Calcutta contains some of the old spirit and behaviour as a survival, but without creativeness and power.
The Left Front was ruling, or ruining, Bengal at that time.
In so far as the Bengalis have not accepted defeat and still possess ambition, the one ambition they cherish today is to become indispensable mercenaries of those other Indians they formerly despised.
Marwaris from West India. The Jagat Seths had come to Murshidabad from Rajasthan in the seventeenth century.
By virtue of their cleverness
sycophancy
the best of them are employed as such and are satisfied with being sterile hirelings on high salaries.
as opposed to hirelings on low salaries. The truth is the best Bengalis are found all over India or all over the world excelling in STEM subjects or creative fields.
This decline, quick and untimely, has to be explained,
Why did the Parsis rise and rise? How is it that Gujarati or Kutchi speaking people are spoken of as the fathers of India and Pakistan respectively? How is it that India has had two Gujarati Prime Ministers but no Bengali Prime Minister?
and I diagnosed not only the decline but also its causes even when the process had just begun.
The decline began in 1847 when Carr, Tagore & Co. went bankrupt. The Bengali comprador lost his entrepreneurial nerve.
The first cause was to be found in the historical evolution of the Bengali people in the very period of British rule which gave them their dominant cultural and political status in India.
No. The Bengali agriculturist filled the coffers of John Company allowing it to become dominant. No doubt, Niradh thinks African Americans were dominant in the ante bellum American South
They were the first group of Indians who responded eagerly and actively to the impact of European civilization on Indian life which British rule brought with it.
No. The Goans and other Indo-Lusitanians were the first to feel that impact. In Bengal, Maharaja Pratapaditya of Jessore, worked with the Portuguese to raise the Kayastha to a pinnacle of power and prestige never again achieved till a descendant of his became the Chief Minister of West Bengal.
Like the Portuguese, the British came to Bengal only after they had established themselves along the Western and Southern littoral. Thus, it was the banyans of Surat and their equivalents in South India who most eagerly and actively responded to the new commercial opportunities. In the South, a class of Eurasians came into existence which, even in Shoshee Chunder's day, was a significant competitor to the Bengali clerk in the lower ranks of Calcutta's bureaucracy.
Clive, it will be remembered, came to Bengal via Madras where local rulers had taken the help of the French. Tipu was important. Ranjit Singh was important. No Bengali was important. Macaulay unfavourably compares the gallant Khattri, Shitab Roy, with the ignominious forger, Nundcomar.
The new culture and social life they created
soon segregated itself and spent all its time denouncing its cousins and neighbours who responded with equal virulence. Virtue, in Bengal, meant scolding everybody especially those not wholly engaged in similar scolding.
were the products of that interaction, but the nature of the interaction and of the interacting agencies were misunderstood from the beginning, and are not historically understood even now.
The 'interaction' consisted of the Brit saying 'jump' and the Babu seeking clarification on the required height of the saltation in question.
The view which was taken, and which still holds the field, is that in the nineteenth century India became the meeting ground of an old civilization with a new one,
a decaying Sultanate with a multinational company
and the crucible of a new culture in which the best of both mingled.
There was no mingling on the British side. If anything, they became more aloof. But so did the wealthier or more cultured Bengali. I suppose if Carr, Tagore & Co had not gone bankrupt and if more and more such ventures had been launched there would have been more intermingling. Perhaps, you would have eventually got an Anglicized elite of the Ceylonese sort. There were some business partnerships at a later period between Bengalis and Europeans- e.g. the engineer, Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee, who partnered with Sir Thomas Burn, also an engineer- to set up what was one of the biggest Indian companies even in the nineteen sixties. There were also a number of highly educated Bengalis who set up successful companies- e.g. Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray of Bengal Chemicals who got his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in the 1880s. Surendra Mohan Bose, of Bengal Waterproof, was educated at Berkeley and Stanford. Kiran Shankar Roy, of Bengal Lamps, attended Oxford University. This trend could could have continued, or even grown exponentially, if the Bengali bhadralok had not decided that achieving Socialism by scolding everybody was a more worthwhile endeavour than creating wealth. Meanwhile, Bengali scientists and industrialists began enriching other parts of India or other parts of the world.
All of us in Bengal were brought up on this historical interpretation, at the bottom of which was a concept of synthesis:
If White man says 'jump!' and you reply 'kindly elucidate required height of requested saltation to ensure proper compliance', then 'synthesis' is achieved because you sprout wings and fly away to Yurop Amrika.
an impressive illustration of the 'law' of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
This was Hegel's 'struggle for recognition' in which the slave remains the slave because he prefers scolding to striving.
This, it was proclaimed, was the essence of the cultural history of India during British rule.
It was true enough of the Parsis. By the Thirties, there was a composer of Western Classical Music who was Parsi.
But it was and is a pure myth. I have already described how in the late Twenties I had discovered it to be so, and had arrived at a new view about our cultural condition on the eve of British rule, and as I have also related I entered into a long correspondence with Professor Arnold J. Toynbee on this subject.
Because the dude knew nothing about India. This was a dialogue between of the deaf.
I embodied my views in a long note and I sent it to him in 1936. I shall quote parts of it. 'Even educated Indians of today'. I wrote, 'are curiously indifferent to their immediate past, the past that is to say which forms the warp to the weft of Western influences.
That warp was purely local and confined to one's own sub-caste.
This is certainly due to the discovery of the classical Hindu civilization in the nineteenth century,
That civilization was kept alive by Brahmins and particular sub-castes linked to Temple worship or the practice of Ayurveda.
which has fired their imagination and made them conscious of a heritage of their very own to pit against Western civilization.
or Islamic civilization.
In their anxiety to feel at one with this heritage from motives of self-respect they have forgotten the intervening phase of their existence-
i.e. by what fraud or malfeasance great-grand pappy managed to get possession of our ancestral estate
and are now no more able to tear away their immediate past from the classical Hindu background than, looking at the sky at night, we are able to perceive any spatial separation between the solar system and the stellar world.'
Such planets as are visible to the naked eye are larger than any of the 'fixed stars'. That means they are closer. Brahmins know how their ancestral 'matam' evolved. Non-Brahmins can always ask their purohit or Guru about such matters.
I believe this short-circuiting has been made easier by the fact that the society of our immediate past was of a character altogether different from what went before and has come after,
why? What made it different? Niradh does not know. He merely believes.
and that brings me to my real point.
His real point is that failing his MA in History was due to 'short circuiting'. It is not the case that he was shit at History. Everything he had written was true. Napoleon was the father of Josephine who became the Emperor of Russia. Anyone who says otherwise should be scolded.
Contemporary sources give glimpses of a curiously naive and, in many respects, a primitive society in India in the eighteenth century, which is more properly called a folk-civilization than civilization.
Josephine noticed that in India people were hanging from trees by their tails eating bananas. This suggests that when the British came, evolution short-circuited and thus monkeys turned into Bengali Babus. Josephine's daddy, Napoleon, asked her to kindly return from the eighteenth century. She said 'kiss my black arse! I'm the fucking Tzar of Russia, mate!' Stupid Indian people are not understanding my great historical discoveries. That is why I failed my M.A.
Of course, there were two things in it which gave it an outward appearance of maturity. These were the Islamic civilization and the Hindu scholastic tradition.
Kayasthas tended to be good at Persian.
But the influence of the former was almost wholly urban and confined to the ruling aristocracy, while the Hindu survivals possessed values in this society which were quite different from their values in classical Hindu times.
because Josephine said so while she was marching backward across the eighteenth century. You stupid people don't understand that the highest accolade a historian can garner is MA (fail).
Neither the same sophistication nor the same self-consciousness was there, and there was a total lapse of historical memory.
Sir William Jones found this was not the case at Nawadwipa. William Carey published a Bengali history book by a Kayastha. It was obvious that no lapse of historical memory had occurred.
This last is perhaps the most important proof of the "childishness" of the new society.
Niradh is incapable of supplying proof for his crazy ipse dixit assertions.
It seems to me that between 1000 AD (I use this date quite arbitrarily because
I don't know shit about Indian history
I have not been able to explore the upper limits of the society which meets us in the immediately pre-British age) and the eighteenth century a re-barbarization (in no contemptuous sense) and simplification of Hindu life had been taking place.
No. Hinduism was reinvigorated by Poet-Saints belonging to various sects. During Niradh's own life-time, a batch-mate of his from Scottish Church College, Swamy Prabhupada, brought the religion of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to millions of people in Europe and America and Africa.
It was certainly the age of the differentiation and fixation of the modern vernaculars of India,
Modern Bengali is said to originate from the Shantipur dialect and only got standardized in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Spelling was standardized from about 1936 onward.
of the creation of vernacular literatures, of simple and unorthodox religious movements,
which, when looked at more closely, are actually highly complex and orthodox
of folk art, dances, and songs, and of social customs very loosely affiliated to the orthodox Hindu system.
Anything at all call be assimilated by orthodoxy. Look at the harmonium!
Altogether, the impression of winding down and a decided crudeness is impossible to resist.
Unless you have a brain and know some Indian history. If you believe that the Bengali servants of the British 'dominated' India, you don't have a brain. Still, perhaps the Tzar of Russia, Josephine, will take you with her on her backward march through the eighteenth century. Her daddy, Napoleon, will cry and cry.
That is why I am disposed to look upon the supercilious and unenthusiastic estimates of Indians by early European writers and administrators,
more particularly if they never visited India
when stripped of the xenophobic excrescences, as a truer index of the quality of the society they met than the opinions of later scholars who had discovered ancient India by painstaking research.
Such scholars are useless. Did they fail M.A in History? No! Then, what good are they?
'Whether this "childish" society would have grown to man's estate by its unaided efforts and in what way it would have grown up, are questions which we are no longer able to answer.
The Brits said the Bengalis were cowardly, cunning, and mendacious. They didn't say they were childish or that they had not been potty trained.
For, before the evolution had gone very far, the revolutionary impact of European civilization was upon it. Close in its wake came the discovery of ancient India,
which Sir William Jones made when he studied with the Pundits at Nawadwipa. They always knew their religion was ancient. Jones may not have done.
whose sophistication had almost as great a disintegrating effect on the primitive society which turned eagerly to it as the reaction to European ideas.
Primitive people can't react to one set of ideas by turning to another set of ideas. What they can do is eat missionaries.
Faced with these challenges, Indian thinkers and reformers from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore have evolved a pattern of response, which they look upon as a solution.
Roy and Tagore were Brahmins. They said they were returning to the pure Monist religion of the Upanishads. The Arya Samaj, too, was against idolatry.
They have popularized the idea of a synthesis between the East and the West.
Because they belonged to both worlds. Brahmoism was like Unitarianism. Theistic Hinduism was like Catholicism. Maybe Jainism was like Quakerism. Back then, these sorts of comparisons were useful enough.
This formula has enabled us to civilize ourselves to a certain extent at the top,
Niradh's bottom was uncivilized. Sadly, Viceroy Sahib refused to come and wipe his bum.
but by far the most important result of its adoption has been the sterility of our intellectual and moral life,
Mahatma Gandhi's moral life was not sterile. Nor was Vivekananda's intellectual life.
dominated by imported phrases on the one hand and archaistic models on the other. If this is the case with the intelligentsia, the masses have not been touched at all by the excessively intellectual influences.
The masses refused to follow Mahatma Gandhi- right?
They are reacting to the machine technique of the West,
sadly, few could to react to what was not available in the villages where they lived.
but not to the cultural currents, which are driving a wedge between them and the educated classes.
Education, not cultural currents, divide the illiterate from the well read.
All thoughtful Indians are conscious of these features of our life and have a profound feeling of malaise.
All thoughtful people have a sense of malaise. I find Rum & Coke an effective remedy.
But they do not see that the root of the trouble lies in the fact that in India two civilizations are not meeting on equal terms.
Nowhere do civilizations meet on equal terms. Just the other day I saw Chinese civilization sneering at Aztec civilization. I tried to intervene but Mayan civilization told me to fuck the fuck off. Fortunately, I was able to find a bottle of Bacardi which had rolled under the Sofa. Otherwise my sense of malaise would have driven me bonkers.
Mahatma Gandhi, I believe, has a subconscious perception of this, and that is why he is advocating a deliberate rejection of sophistication (both European and Indian) and a return to the folk level.
He read a lot of pamphlets about how 'machine civilization' was destroying man's soul. Everybody should give up sex and live simply by the sweat of their own brow.
But his is also an impossible position because the Indian people cannot cut themselves adrift from world currents - not so much of intellectual and moral ideas as of the new scientific technique of living.
They were already cut off from this because they didn't have electricity and the money to buy radios and so forth.
The problem for us today is therefore, not how to bring about a reconciliation between two civilizations of the same species, but how to adjust the relations of a more or less primitive people to the triple contact with (1) European classical civilization;
why bother? It had been superseded.
(z) Western scientific technique of living;
This involves promoting economic growth based on a rise in general factor productivity.
and (l) ancient Indian culture, all of which are too advanced - though in varying degrees - to be assimilated easily by a people belonging to a different species of human society.
Hindus already possessed ancient Hindu culture.
In short, the relations of modern Indian society to the "Western" may differ in degree, but does not do so in kind, from the relations of other modern primitive peoples, like the negroes, to "Western society".'
The problem with 'negroes' is that, given an equal playing field, they would out do the Whites. That's why apartheid and Jim Crow were so essential.
This was the substantive part of the note dealing with our cultural status in the late eighteenth century.
It was self-hating racist drivel. Still, at least Niradh did not demand that Toynbee personally turn up and bugger some brains into him.
I concluded it by saying that for me the question was not purely historical but had a practical aspect.
I have a Punjabi neighbour. Should I tell him he is a primitive fellow? He is rather hefty and quick to anger. Perhaps it would be better if I confine myself to remarking how much I enjoyed fucking his wife. He is sure to feel flattered.
Thus I wrote: 'As a modern Indian with hopes and fears for his country, I feel that the adoption of this theory takes me out of the deep shadows of the evening of an old civilization and releases me to work, to accept, and to create as I please in untrammelled freedom from the self-imposed burden of a dead past.
In other words, I want to publish a book on Ancient Indian History based on the observations of Tzar Josephine of Russia who is marching backward through the eighteenth to the seventeenth century. Calcutta University will recognize its mistake in not awarding me an M.A in history. My Punjabi neighbour will be greatly pleased that a distinguished scholar is ploughing his filthy slut of a wife.
But there are other modern Indians who as decisively think otherwise.'
Those would be the traditional Indians or those who were opposed to modernity for ideological or religious reasons.
Of course, I knew why they did so. It had become a matter of national pride.
No. It was a matter of esprit de corps or cohesiveness in the national struggle.
So I wrote finally: 'British rule in India makes it a point of honour with us to cling to ancient India as our newly-found soul.
Only if you were upper caste. If you weren't, you were welcome to say the thing stank to high heaven.
As long as this rule lasts, it will prevent us from seeing our past as it really was and from reacting normally to European influences.'
So, Brits should kindly fuck the fuck off.
Professor Toynbee replied to me in his own hand, and in his last letter to me written on 5 September 1936 in reply to one of mine of 7 August. he wrote: 'Your letter makes it clear what kind of society you are defining, and I think you have brought to light an important type which, as you say, is neither a civilization in the historian's full sense
i.e. a complex, organized society characterized by urbanization, advanced technology, writing systems, and specialized labour. Niradh's Bengal did have these things but the specialized labour involved in defence was a monopoly of the paramount power whose civilization was wholly alien.
nor yet, perhaps, a primitive society in the meaning of Hobhouse and Ginsberg.
Two British 'evolutionary' Sociologists.
'I look forward to hearing how your work on the modern Indian instance of this type gets on.' Alas! the work was never written.
Because as Niradh himself knew, the army could be Indianized easily enough. The only real question was whether Bengal would remain united or whether, as Curzon had done, it would be partitioned on the basis of religion.
As it happened however, six months later I got an opportunity to put my thesis formally before my countrymen in Bengali. But I did not present it to them as a pure historical thesis
Bengalis were little better than monkeys when the Brits first showed up. Tzar Josephine of Russia told me so herself.
but as the theoretical basis of our approach to the contemporary cultural situation. I brought it in as an explanation of our premature cultural decline. I said that this decline was implicit in the very conditions in which our new culture of the nineteenth century was born.
The Bengalis flattered themselves that being the servants of the British made them super special. Then they noticed that clever Gujaratis and Marwaris were getting the better of their masters.
I pointed out that as a people we were not sufficiently advanced socially and economically to create a solid culture with a long expectation of life. We wanted the end product before we had built the factory. The simple fact was that both psychologically and socially we were a very simple people and therefore what we were trying to do was to force a growth. I said that the pioneers of our new life and culture were so overwhelmed by the splendour of the modern European and the ancient Indian civilizations that they set themselves to
scolding each other incessantly?
create a culture of that order before the ground was prepared for its development.
No. Bengali Hindus, like their counterparts elsewhere in India, wished to purify and infuse new life into their ancient religion. The ground was more than ready to receive such salutary purging of impurities.
I put our aspiration in a simile: we wanted the flowers before we had grown the plants.
But only flowering plants can produce more flowering plants. It is a different matter that judicious pruning gives you a better type of blossom.
This more or less unrealistic effort exhausted our powers even before they had reached their full strength. Thus our cultural creation, which in itself is not to be underrated, was the result of a precocious effort. It was the work of a child prodigy, so to speak.
A child prodigy's work is just as good as that of a mature genius. What Niradh means is that Bengalis were at best precocious infants. They needed to spend many years in School and College before they could finally become capable of failing their MA exam.
Such creations do obtain wondering respect, but they are also most often a tragedy for the child himself.
No. A precocious child may gain so much attention that his ego becomes inflated and thus he fails to apply himself and ends up failing his exams. A prodigy is a different matter. His work stands or falls by its own merits. It is a different matter that fashions change and he is neglected where previously he was applauded. But future ages will recognize his merit.
Niradh took a highly negative view of the intelligence of the educated Bengali. Perhaps this was because he did not understand that, in any discipline, reasoning has to be on the basis of facts or likelihoods. It can't simply be a catalogue of bigoted ipse dixit assertions unsupported by objective evidence. This is because the purpose of reasoning is not scold people incessantly. It is to improve how things work.
The Bengali intelligence is sharp, but not strong or well-tempered.
If so, there would be no Bengali mathematicians or physicists or chemists of distinction. Yet such people existed in Niradh's own social circle.
The British in India always spoke of the Bengali as the 'nimble-witted Babu',
they employed 'nimble witted' Bengalis rather than clumsy oafs because the Bengalis were more efficient. Reading Shoshee Chunder Dutt's account of his days as a clerk in the Treasury Dept. back in the 1840's or 1850's, we find numerous incidents were the 'nimble witted' Babu saves his British master's bacon because he thoroughly understands the working of the administrative machinery. Suppose the head cashier finds that he has mistakenly paid out ten times the face value of a bill. What is he to do? If his negligence is made known, he could lose his job. Worse, the Auditor General might come to hear and order an investigation.
The Bengali clerk comes up with an expedient which serves the Department's purpose. In commercial life, there is a suave and elastic 'economia' or method of discretionary management which is more serviceable to the enterprise than a rigid 'akreibia' or sticking to a narrow interpretation of the rules. In this particular case, there is no reason to believe the person who received the money has an intention to hang on to it. He will willingly offer a security for it if for some reason he has insufficient cash in hand. He knows this will win him the good will of the Treasury. Indeed, they may decide to deem such advances as 'money at call'.
and ill-natured as the phrase was, it still contained some truth. The Bengali intellect was at its strongest in argument,
Arguments don't matter. Devising expedients and keeping the machinery of administration ticking over smoothly can matter a great deal.
which could descend through such intermediate stages as plausibility, logicality, logic-chopping and hair-splitting, to a chicane which was wholly devoid of embarrassment and even bland.
There is no chicane if there is no unjust enrichment. Economia is preferable to akreibia.
The more clever a Bengali is, the more incapable he is of making distinctions between these.
No. In law and business management there is always a bright line between an expedient and fraud. Sometimes you self-report an irregularity. Sometimes you shuffle responsibility till the auditor backs off in baffled rage. Whatever you do, be as bland as possible. Don't make enemies. But do show you are no push-over.
Thus, in the pre-British era, the Bengali mind was seen at its most efficient in the exposition of Hindu logic and of Hindu sacred law;
both provide useful expedients so the religious purpose is served without an intolerable burden being created.
in the British era, in dealing with the extremely complicated legal system which the British introduced into India;
It isn't complicated if you understand the purpose of the relevant law or procedure.
and is now seen in theoretical economics.
The application of set theory to epistemic objects- e.g. preferences or expectations- is wrong. However, for any particular purpose, it can be useful enough in a rough and ready manner.
To the Bengali, all these were and are games, and, in playing them, he does not care to have any truck with reality.
Not if he has 'skin in the game'- i.e. he stands to lose money if his game theoretic strategy is wrong.
I have offended fellow-Bengalis by saying that the Bengalis are clever but not intelligent.
Some stupid Bengalis may want to appear clever whereas, it may be, a Punjabi would prefer to be considered very strong but somewhat dim witted.
Even the distinction has not been understood,
by Niradh
which in itself would confirm my judgement.
He genuinely was stupid. That's why he failed his MA.
Thus the best products of the Bengali intellect are very much like the best industrial product of Bengal, fine muslin.
Muslin was produced by a very complex procedure broken up into 16 separate operations performed by different sets of people. The working class of the Dacca region had shown a great ability to self-organize and sustain a 'Marshallian industrial district' without any top-down direction. I suppose there are Bengali programmers or engineers or rocket scientists working on even more complex projects. If this is done in Bengal, by Bengali start-ups, then the wealth generated will remain in Bengal. There will be further innovation and greater economies of scope and scale. But, if the Government or the Labour Unions act in a predatory fashion, the golden goose will be cooked before it can lay any eggs.
It must be said, the best products of the Bengali intellect- the baul song as much as the mathematical theory underlying the boson- were as transparent as Dacca Muslin. They did not clothe the ideas they expounded in yards of fustian. There was no gaudy ornamentation. Buddhijivis, like Niradh, hated this type of nakedness. Why boson is not scolding fermions? Is it because bosons did not fail M.A History? I tell you all such stupid elementary particles should be scolded and scolded. Einstein should have told Satyendranath Bose to go read Pascal's Provincial letters and then scold Quantum Theory till it cried its little eyes out.
The peculiar character of the Bengali mind has made a significant difference to its reaction to different things from European culture. The Bengali's response to English literature has made him most sensitive, human, and creative,
Many Bengalis don't particularly like English literature. It may strike them as flippant or unseemly. What is certain is that Bengalis do very well in STEM subjects.
while European thought, whether political or social, has invariably desiccated him and led him to a sterile dogmatism.
Political philosophy and Sociology aren't greatly relished by any- even those paid to produce it.
But this intellectual fragility could not have become a normal trait of the Bengali personality without the presence in it of a greater shortcoming: weakness of character.
Weak character is not a normal trait in Bengal. Scolding people is. But anybody can scold anybody.
It is a mistake to think that human intelligence can reach its highest effectiveness without character, because it is the element of personality which supports and even drives intelligence in two ways: first by creating the will to work hard and continue effort, and, secondly, by making the intellectually inclined individual ready to be involved in all realities, instead of running away from them.
Stupid people can work hard doing stupid shit. They may want to be involved in all realities even though everybody keeps telling them to fuck the fuck off.
It was in both these respects, that is, in both will and robustness, that the Bengali was wanting.
Some may have been. It is also possible that Bengalis prized scholarship more than other Indians and many who weren't cut out for the life of the mind ended up, like Niradh, as pseudo-intellectual blathershites. Similarly, in a Province where the finest flower of young manhood goes into the Army, you may find people who appear martial but who lack valour. This may be protective mimicry like my appearing to be a younger version of Beyonce though I am actually a fat elderly balding man.
All societies have a 'duality' between the genuine and the counterfeit but, speaking generally, people appreciate that you may simply be trying to conform rather than 'pass' as one of the dominant group. That's why, though few people think I genuinely am Beyonce, they appreciate my effort to fit in with a culture which values youth and beauty even though I possess neither quality in any abundant measure. Still, I admit to feeling some mild irritation if people come up to me and ask for my autograph under the impression that I am Rihanna.
The duality may have been present in pre-British days,
It was present. There is a story about certain young sprigs of the Tagore clan who had gone to visit a high official who had recently converted to Islam. Their host was fasting for Ramadan but mentioned the enticing smell of a fruit. One of his visitors quipped that, in Islamic law, to smell a thing is to eat it and thus is to break your fast. Their host then forced them to convert to Islam and thus the Tagores were disgraced as 'Pir Ali' Brahmins. Whatever 'duality' arose after the British Raj was established, it did not involve forcible conversion. Previously, there was the danger that if a Hindu learnt Persian so as to thrive in the administration, he might be compelled to convert. With the Brits there was no such danger. In Sindh, it is said, the plight of the Hindu was worse. Muslims would try to get him to say the word 'rassi' (rope) and then make out that he had said 'rasul' (Prophet) and was now a Muslim. If he returned to his old ways, he could be killed as an apostate. Since such 'forcible' converts tended to do very well, I imagine the whole thing may, at least in certain cases, have been a put up job. Still, the fact is, there was more 'duality' in the Hindu-Muslim interaction than in that between Indians and John Company.
but there is no evidence that it affected general Bengali life in any way. In fact, there was very little to promote it, because Bengali life in that age was lived within narrow and modest limits, and it could not lead the Bengalis into temptation.
Some Bengalis became very rich. Others lost their ancestral wealth. The Brits reduced the size of the pie available for division between Bengalis but Niradh's own ancestors are likely to have benefited from the British policy of breaking up big estates.
Both politically and culturally, Bengal was then an outlier, a semi-isolated extension, of northern India, and Bengali culture was only a minor provincial version of Indian culture, whether Hindu or Islamic.
In other words, it had little significance though, it must be said, the Pundits of Bengal did have a high reputation.
The Bengalis themselves were not important in political, military, or economical life,
they became less so as the British took control of the Province.
and at their most ambitious they sought minor posts and functions in the Muslim administration.
Some amassed great wealth and created semi-independent kingdoms for themselves
But all this changed suddenly and drastically with the establishment of British rule. Bengal became the political centre of India,
Indian politics was a matter for Westminster. Calcutta was a commercial and administrative centre.
and due to the introduction of education through English, the cultural centre as well.
Their system of education had been introduced even earlier in Madras. Bombay lagged a little initially. It must be said that where Bengalis were gaining promotion over local people, there was a social and political reaction. Thus Rajendra Prasad first political and social role was to organize the Bihari Kayasthas to resist the domination of Bengalis. Later he joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi at Champaran and ended up as the President of the Republic. Bengal did have Gandhians like Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy who served as Chief Minister for 12 years. He was a descendant of the famous Maharaj Pratapaditya who worked with the Portuguese to raise up Jessore economically and as a naval and military power. It is puzzling that a Kayastha who studied history does not dilate on the success of a Kayastha ruler 150 years before the Battle of Plassey.
For the first time in the historic existence of the Bengali people, that is to say, of a people who could be distinguished clearly from the rest of the Hindus of India as a human group with an identity of its own,
Pundits in the South believe the Bengalis had a separate identity from before the time of Adi Sankara. There were Brahmin dynasties in Bengal.
there came to them the opportunity to play a major role in the history of their country, and also to obtain the highest worldly positions open to Indians.
Those positions were as rulers of princely states. Great wealth could buy you influence in London. Seats on the Legislative or even the Privy Council didn't actually command any great power or influence.
Quite naturally, with the opportunity their aspirations and ambitions also grew, without adding either to their capacity or to their inclination to work hard.
Nonsense! Plenty worked hard. Some were rewarded with titles or other honours but most were content to have contributed to the betterment of society.
On account of this, the duality came to the surface and became, during British rule, a feature of Bengali life which could neither be eliminated nor be overlooked.
But, as in England, the law would punish you if you engaged in forgery or fraud.
Did Niradh think Bengal has any achievements to its credit? No. He says there was a brief moment when one or two nice books were published.
The very incompleteness of the Bengali's cultural creation,
suggests it was a flash in the pan.
combined with its fineness,
Bengalis may consider it a very fine thing to have a book written in their own language. But all literate societies have such things.
should give him a special kind of place in history.
He is very special and should get special education and a special prize for being so darn special.
Others should think of him as they think of Mozart, Schubert or Keats.
Who died young. But the Bengali writers Niradh mentions weren't particularly young when they died.
What they got from the world presented a sad contrast to what they contributed to life.
Bengali writers and artists were rewarded well enough.
As a people, the Bengalis will perhaps have only this epitaph in history: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water''
Only if like Keats they choose it for themselves. But Keats was unknown when he died.
But their contribution to civilization should be likened to the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert.
Its significance lies in its being seen as a precursor to the Romantic movement. What was the Bengali the precursor to? Yet more scolding?
I suppose, the period that Niradh was thinking of as the period of 'Bengali achievement' was one where the Hindu bhadralok thought they could replace the British without regard for the lower caste Hindus or the entirety of the Muslim population. This was clearly a pipe-dream. It is one thing to participate in a Romantic movement which aims to give a rising young nation a grand culture of its own. It is another to produce anthems others will appropriate. There is little point adding valuable appurtenances to a house where you are but a tenant-at-will.
His dilemma is captured in a memo that he began to write for Sir Stafford Cripps after the failure of his mission.
The transfer of power at the present moment will involve the handing over of India to a particular social class - the middle-class intelligentsia,
No. Power would go to the 'barristocrats' who had Princes and big Industrialists as their clients. It would not go to Professors or Journalists. However, what truly mattered was which community was in the majority. In Bengal, Muslim barristers like Fazl ul Haq and Suhrawardy benefitted. Sarat Bose would have been squeezed out in a united Bengal. After partition, Gandhians, with Marwari backing, would dominate till the 'intelligentsia' struck back through the Communist Party.
which is fitted neither by its aptitudes, nor by its experience, nor by its system of values to strive for and bring to fruition any of the objects outlined above. (these were Indo-British cooperation and Social and Economic reconstruction)
Whereas Lord Linlithgow was fitted for this task. Eton is well known for the high standard of Urdu it inculcates in its more aristocratic pupils. Perhaps, if Niradh had practiced law he would have come to understand that a representative democracy will always count many a lawyer as its legislators. Lawyers do deals on behalf of their clients. Government is about making deals which are then called 'policy' and which are implemented by bureaucrats.
This does not mean the bureaucrat is himself important. He is merely a cog in a machine. What matters is whether sensible deals are done and sound polices are implemented as a result of which tax revenue is spent on tackling collective action problems such that productivity and thus income can rise.
Sadly, it remains the case in India today that much of politics is concerned with which caste or other social groups gets what percentage of Government jobs. In this context, Kayasthas- like Niradh- were looked upon with envy because, by tradition, they were a clerical class. Even if you could limit the number of jobs they can get in the Civil Service, how do you prevent them rising to the top? Heredity has shaped them for promotion.
The answer, I suppose, is to consider bureaucracy as merely a service industry. An official is just a salaried employee like any other. What matters is whether his work raises total factor productivity or, as Niradh avers of the Indian bureaucracy, if it strangles it in its cradle.
An earlier generation of Bengalis had embraced Utilitarianism and free enterprise. Sadly, some came a cropper and went bankrupt. Perhaps it was at that time that the fate of the Bengali was sealed. Safety lay in a clerical berth. But so did ignominy. Niradh rebelled against his fate and by his own enterprise and industry created a market for himself. He was truly sui generis. What is sad is his succumbing to a blind worship of British Imperialism- a soulless bureaucracy with semi-feudal trappings. One might as well look for a civilizing mission in the Circumlocution office. Escaping from the Department of Military Accounts- as Shoshee Chunder Dutt, 80 years previously wished to escape from the Treasury Dept.- Niradh ended up worshipping the very people who created that behemoth which kills the spirit of all who fall within its bureaucratic maw.
It is interesting that he reserves the most envenomed vials of his wrath for the Indian scions of ICS officers who, in some atavistic manner, had absorbed the magical 'mana' of the Raj and thus had gained an unfair advantage over the sons of lawyers or merchants.
I had better confess that all Hindus are traditionally imperialists,
No. Hindus want ancient Hindu monarchies to remain in place. The Rajput doesn't want all Udaipur to become the vassal of Jaipur. Let both flourish.
and they condemned imperialism only in so far as British imperialism made them subjects to an empire instead of its masters.
It made them subject to a bureaucracy whose masters were in Westminster. We want government servants to be answerable to those we elect.
This is due to the fact that the strongest political passion of the ancient Hindus was directed towards conquest and domination.
No. It was directed towards 'Artha'- economics- and Niti- sound policy.
All Sanskrit literature and all the historical inscriptions are full of glorification of both.
Only if battle was what was being commemorated.
This aspiration to conquer and dominate was suppressed during Muslim and British rule,
it was a feature of Maratha rule. But the Marathas had plenty of independent kingdoms just like the Rajputs or the Sikhs. It was enough if they could cooperate against foreign interlopers.
but today, even if not given practical expression, it conditions the attitude of the present Hindu ruling class towards the neighbours of India.
Nonsense! India does not want territory where Muslims are in a majority. It has never cast avaricious eyes on Sri Lanka or Nepal.
After 1917, it was clear that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. Egypt and Catholic Ireland and Afghanistan were sufficiently cohesive to get independence in 1922. What about India? What was feasible was provincial autonomy rather than Dyarchy maybe with some sort of cosmetic Federal Government presided over by rotating Maharajas or Nawabs. However, for this to work, existing provincial boundaries had to be acceptable to dominant groups- e.g. Telugus not wishing to be banded together with Tamils- and, more importantly, the bureaucracy had to be efficient and transparently neutral. I think this was the sticking point. The machinery of government was not trusted. It may not have had a mind of its own but it incarnated an active and inexhaustible malignancy and malice.
The emotional impulse to be hostile to British rule
increased because of the burden of war taxation. Indian blood and treasure had been squandered for Britain's greater glory. The Indian tax-payer had gained no benefit from this.
was transformed into compulsion by a distrust in the promises of the British Governments,
Muslim grievances regarding Khilafat and the extension of European control over Islamic territory were perfectly justified. Hindus too saw the benefit of joining an anti-Imperialist alliance of all 'the toilers of the East'. Some of the old Jugantar & Ghaddar revolutionaries had already made the hegira to the Kremlin. The question was whether the 'national bourgeoisie' could secure a transfer of power or whether they would collaborate with Imperialism.
complete loss of faith in the goodwill of the British people,
which had always been irrelevant
and even greater suspicion of the British bureaucracy in India.
This suspicion was more specifically directed at 'ethnic monopolies' in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy. The Bengali Kayastha or the Madrasi Brahmin or the Ashraf Muslim in the UP was considered to have spread a spider's web over the Revenue department. 'Depressed classes' had even more to complain of.
By 1920 all these had become ineradicable.
Clearly not.
It was the bureaucracy which the Indian people looked upon as their particular enemy.
A lot of those same Indian people either had jobs or wanted jobs in that bureaucracy.
All this distrust and suspicion was shared by the leaders.
who knew that Lloyd George & Clemenceau were determined to turn littoral Asia Minor into a Greek colony. The plan was to defeat the Bolsheviks, put a compliant Tzar on the throne while reducing the Ottoman Turk to a puppet and perhaps achieving something similar in China. These were pipe dreams. Trotsky crushed the White Armies. Ataturk crushed the Greeks. In Egypt, there was a spontaneous uprising and Allenby counselled an end to the veiled protectorate. Ireland, sadly, descended into Civil War. In India, Gandhi's pusillanimity postponed, but could not prevent, the gradual transfer of power.
On this score Mahatma Gandhi did not show any evasiveness, and was very frank. As Lord Reading wrote to his son at the time: 'I asked the question pointblank: what is it in the actions of the Government that makes you pursue the policy of non-cooperation?
Reading was a lawyer. His question was 'what can I do- or undo- to get you to withdraw Non-Cooperation?' The answer would have to be 'repeal Rowlatt'. Reading would then point to evidence it was still necessary and then say it's application could be limited to particular districts. In other words, a deal could be done in time for the Prince of Wales' visit.
The problem was that Gandhi had started off by making foolish demands- e.g. Dyer's pension must be cancelled. The problem here was that plenty of Indians had pensions. They didn't want them to be cancelled under any circumstances.'
The reply, repeated more than once during our interviews, was that he was filled with distrust of the Government, and that all their actions, even though apparently good, made him suspect their motive.'
That was okay. You can tell your counter-party that you think they are acting in bad faith. You are not obliged to negotiate under those circumstances.
It was a suspicion which had a long history behind it.
Not in Gandhi's case. He had somehow convinced himself that there can be no negotiation so long as some method of compulsion remains. Thus, before negotiating, the Viceroy should first hand over everything he has.
Reading was playing a different game- viz. that of driving a wedge between the Ali brothers and Gandhi. More by luck than cunning, he prevailed.
It had begun with the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time,
The Anglo-Indians resisted a foolish piece of virtue signalling imposed by London. Nobody greatly cared. The real problem was that Ripon's attempt to push forward representative local government was killed off by the hostility of the ICS and the indifference of the natives. Local bodies were staffed by officials, presided over by the Deputy Commissioner, and were peppered with a few lickspittle 'independents'. The 1920 Devolution Act looked promising. But it too was sabotaged. One can't put all the blame on British bureaucrats for this. Under dyarchy Indians had an increasing say. After 1937 there was provincial autonomy. Elected politicians were making the decisions. But they would suspend any municipal or other body which they didn't like. The Lahore Municipal Committee was suspended for nine years till 1945. Since local bodies were not under the control of local people, a localized political culture able to protect minorities and solve collective action problems failed to materialize. Thus when the tsunami of communal violence hit the country at the time of Partition, local breakwaters were few and far between. I have read that in Bengal, some big landlords were able to protect minorities. Similarly, particular local customs linked to syncretic reverence for 'Pirs' saved some lives in the Punjab. But these were pre-modern phenomena. Neither the steel-frame, nor its newly elected masters proved of much use.
and had been deepened by the conduct of the British civil service in the decades following, especially by the obstinacy of the British officials over the Rowlatt Bill.
Young people in the towns and cities certainly felt that 'Authority' was minatory and inclined to blow things out of proportion. White officials, however, had a lively fear of bomb chucking assassins.
It was the hatred generated by this conduct which made all Indians resent the speech of Lloyd George in 1922 in which he described the Services as the steel frame of the whole structure of British administration in India.
Nonsense! Few Indians knew who Lloyd George was. What they wanted was lower taxes.
Even the Indian Legislative Assembly censured the speech formally, to the scandalization of Lord Peel, the then Secretary of State for India.
The truth was, if the Legislature proved useless, then the Executive would rule through the police and the civil service. This remained the case after Independence.
The year I9I8 saw the beginning of the final breach between the Indian Civil Service and the Indian people.
No. It was confirmed that the machinery of Government would remain at the disposal of the Executive such that order was maintained even if there was a political deadlock or 'state of exception'.
In that year the Indian nationalists got the impression that the British Government was backing out of the promise to give self-government to Indians made in the Declaration of 1917 (which with the Balfour Declaration of the same year, was one of the two notorious trouble-makers for Britain), because the proposals in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report fell far short of Indian expectations.
More to the point, there was considerable unrest as demobbed soldiers returned and there was increased awareness of the Khilafat problem.
To make matters worse, the Rowlatt Report on the revolutionary activities recommended a continuation of the emergency measures for Detention without trial in a permanent form, and a bill to that effect was introduced and passed against determined opposition in the Indian Legislature on the part of the nationalist members. The obstinacy showed by the officials over this measure was unjustified by the political conditions, and the spirit shown by the British section of the Indian Press was worse.
With hindsight, the thing worked well enough. Once Gandhi went to jail and the Khilafatis discovered that the Viceroy had tried to help them, the Rowlatt Act could be withdrawn. What would have secured Independence was Gandhi & Co sticking to their guns. If Rowlatt was insufficient to repress unrest then power had to be transferred. There was no other way the place could be governed. Sadly, what happened is that Gandhi & Co meekly went off to jail. Rowlatt could be lifted. There was no danger to public safety save for, some four years later, Hindu-Muslim riots in some cities. This gave people the impression that even if the earlier disturbances had a spontaneous element, the associated political demands had been cooked up by Gandhi & his wealthy pals.
I remember reading in The Statesman of Calcutta
which represented British business interests in Calcutta. If Gandhi & Co. rose, so would the Marwaris. Contracts would go to Bombay side outfits.
the very superior comment that 'the Pandit talked the leg off a donkey', apropos of a very measured speech made by the elder Indian nationalist politician, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya (who brought about the meeting between Lord Reading and Mahatma Gandhi).
If Gandhi's nerve had held, tables would have been turned in Calcutta. The European would become the comprador to the Indian banyan. With hindsight, Gandhi's mistake was to talk up 'Satyagraha' as a magical remedy. In Egypt, a spontaneous uprising put Zaghloul in the driving seat. In India, Gandhi's claim to have trained 'satyagrahis' to lead the Non-Cooperation Movement meant that he had to take responsibility for the violence. Moreover, his network could be disrupted by judicious arrests and cat and mouse tactics. Organized civil disobedience is easier to crush because the organizers can be identified and targeted. More to the point, its financiers can be punished through forfeiture of property.
This led Mahatma Gandhi to launch a campaign of resistance to the measure, and the disproportionate severity with which it was suppressed brought about the final alienation of Indian nationalists from the British administration.
But that alienation turned into a sullen acceptance of defeat. The Brits were left to unilaterally dictate the pace and scope of reform even though two Labour led administrations were formed during the period. It is interesting that, whereas in 1918, Labour committed to Indian independence in its manifesto, it subsequently dropped mention of India. Gandhi's unilateral surrender in 1922 had cut the ground from under Col. Wedgwood's feet. Thus Olivier became Secretary of State in 1924. He soon grew disgusted with the blind-alley obduracy of Motilal & C.R Das.
The Amritsar episode, in which General Dyer shot down a defenceless and flying crowd and afterwards inflicted humiliations of a barbaric order on the population of the city, must be regarded as the watershed of Indo-British relations.
It was regarded as such till the Moplah uprising. At that point Indians realized that you yourself may find yourself demanding that a Dyer be sent to machine gun mobs in your own province. In the Punjab, there would soon be Punjabi Premiers who pleaded for the 'smack of firm government'. The word 'Rowlatt' came to mean rowdyism. The thing was better suppressed.
Followed by that stupid soldier's bragging about not only his brutality but what he described as his mercy, by the condonation of his actions by the British House of Lords' and by the gift to the General of a large sum of money raised by the Morning Post, convinced all Indians that the whole British people stood behind the inhumanity of Dyer and no fair treatment of India could be expected from them.
Dyer did well in the Third Afghan War. He had shown that if Whites were molested, Indians would be slaughtered or forced to crawl. But this also meant that the Army would not be available for 'nation building'. Kitchener had established the principle that the Army was a thing apart. It would not answer to the Civilians. The problem was that the Army rank and file was exhausted and demoralized. The officers faced 'Geddes Axe'. As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff said, England did not have the troops to hold India and without Indian troops it could not hold the MENA.
That was why Mahatma Gandhi demanded the stopping of the pensions given to Sir Michael O'Dwyer and General Dyer, and why he called British rule Satanic.
If Government pensions can be stopped, so can privy purses & 'inams'. Indeed, the Permanent Settlement itself could be scrapped. This was a dangerous precedent which the Indians themselves did not want.
The whole of India agreed with him.
Then they changed their minds. Today, some White missionary lady is assaulted. Tomorrow it is your daughter. Day after, you and your family have to run away from a pogrom. That's when you choose Dyer's law over the rule of the Thug & Pindari.
Even I felt like the rest of my countrymen over this episode. And I have never changed my opinion that the Dyer affair was the worst exhibition of the spurious and arrogant imperial sentiment which was created in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.
Dyer was born in Indian. His sentiment was that of an Indian who saw that members of his community had been attacked and that he had impunity to exact a ghastly retribution. Jallianwallah was as nothing compared to the siege of the Golden Temple or the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984.
The stories which circulated among us Indians about the attitude of the local British heightened the impression of British callousness. They regarded the cashiering of Dyer by the Army Council,
He was not cashiered. He resigned because no offer of further employment in the Army was forthcoming. Many officers did so because of Geddes axe
which was approved of by the British Government of the day, including two of its members who were better imperialists than the British crowd in India, namely Churchill and F. E. Smith, as a cowardly appeasement of the Indian extremists.
This is nonsense. Dyer was not cashiered. Churchill did condemn his action but made it clear that it was up to the Army to decide whether a fellow officer should face a court martial. Anything Dyer said to a Commission of Inquiry would be inadmissible. There is an inherent right against self-incrimination. This may or may not be sound in law, but it was the argument that the House of Commons accepted.
To be fair, Niradh was very old when he wrote this.
We may well ask whether some expedient could have been adopted by Westminster such that India's minorities could have been kept safe? The answer, I believe, had to do with ensuring that power devolved to local authorities in 1920 was effectively exercised. This would lead to 'Tiebout sorting'- i.e. people would relocate to where they could prosper without fearing persecution. With hindsight, it is obvious that many Indians in the Twenties needed to start selling up and moving out of places where the dominant community had no interest in keeping them safe. Subsidiarity is the solution where a centralized bureaucracy is shitty or can't be relied on when the shit hits the fan. The big problem with Empires is that they look more solid than they are. Vulnerable people may rely upon them and then, when they need them most, find they have banked upon a mirage.
It was after independence that I became fully aware of the futility of all the political moves between 1921 and 1947,
The Local Government (Devolution) Act of 1920 need not have been futile. Sadly, many Indians saw it as a method to increase taxation. Gandhi advised the people of Cherala-Perala to flee into the jungle (desh-tyag) to avoid paying the cess for sewage etc. imposed by the municipality. They had to return after they got malaria or typhoid but they felt little enthusiasm for local government. When Labour came to power, Olivier stressed the importance of building up democracy at the local government level. The problem was the restricted franchise and the lack of consensus on objectives or priorities. Do we really need sewers? What about schools? Isn't it the case that learning to read makes your memory weak and harms your eye-sight?
and since then I have firmly held the view that the best date for transferring power to Indians, as was done in 1947-
on the basis of Partition
, was 1921
when Partition could have been avoided. Anti-Imperialism had the potential to unite the country.
If that could not be done outright, even the fixing of a final date then and adoption of a plan of concessions in stages would have spared India the calamities which followed the inevitable transfer in 1947.
If you say you will leave on a certain date, then the question arises how hard you'd fight to prevent being ejected one period earlier. Presumably this will be equated to the value you extract. By applying backward induction, we get a formula whereby, depending on the discount rate, whatever period you specify will lead to an expected duration which is a small fraction of it. Wavell understood that Indians would believe that Britain would do anything to keep India during the War- because of the existential threat to England itself- but that there was no pressing reason to do so once the War ended. That is why he proposed the evacuation of the White population.
The big problem, from the Nationalist point of view, with a transfer of power in 1921, was that the Princes were in a much stronger position. Some had troops who had served in the War. One big risk was war-lordism. Princes might hire mercenaries and import war surplus guns and ammunition. India might have gone through what China was going through.
I would add that a good opportunity came
on the two occasions when the Labour party headed up administrations. The third time they had a big majority. Even the maha-crackpot couldn't fuck things up
in 1935. If in that year a decisive step had been taken, instead of passing the Government of India Act of 1935, which demoralized the British administration in India without satisfying the nationalists, that would have been a second-best. That opportunity was missed.
Churchill and other die-hards were angry enough with the 1935 act which would have allowed the Indians to form a Federal Government if they could agree amongst themselves.
I know what the answer to this contention of mine would be - that to do in 1921 or 1935 what was done in 1947 was impossible in view of British public opinion.
If they didn't care about Ireland, fuck would they care about India? The Brits didn't want to squander blood and treasure on shitholes.
That I would not dispute, but that would only justify the moral which I wish to draw in this book that neither human intelligence nor human free will matters in shaping the movements of history.
This guy wasn't utterly stupid. He got the fuck out of East Bengal in plenty of time. Viceroys, speaking generally, were able to get a good deal for the Brits. Indian leaders, speaking generally, got a fucking horrible deal for those they represented. This remained the case after Independence. Still, some founded dynasties or otherwise did very well for themselves.
If a political cataclysm that the abandonment of India by Britain was, could not be foreseen and provided for even twenty-five years in advance, it is utter vanity to speak about these two faculties in man.
Fuck off! Smart Hindus got the fuck away from Muslim majority areas.
The same public opinion not only accepted what was done in 1947, but also applauded that as an act of statesmanship.
They literally didn't give a fuck. In 1948, middle class Englishmen were worse fed than their counterparts in India. A banana was a great luxury.
That is why ever since I have become capable of thinking I have despised public opinion.
Publicist generally despise the public. Prostitutes feel the same way about their clients. Niradh, to be clear, was a publicist not a prostitute though, no doubt, he'd have been happier putting out to Jolly Jack Tar at the Calcutta docks.
I have realized that it follows events and cannot influence them, and, besides, shifts with a blind fickleness which is terrifying to watch.
British public opinion was sound enough. It didn't care about India because India didn't matter. It did care about the invasion of Belgium and, later on, the invasion of Poland. It was not fickle. Morale did not waver even during the darkest days of the Blitz.
By showing fear of this kind of public opinion the Conservatives of Great Britain brought about the second world war as well as the abandonment of India.
Also, Tories showed fear and thus failed to abolish death. They should learn courage from Bengali dwarves who failed their M.A.
In 1947, it would have been natural for an East Bengali Hindu to remember his childhood homeland as a vanished Atlantis. Niradh was differently constituted
'If there is to be any vanished or vanishing Atlantis to speak of in this book, it should be
the British jail cell. Nehru had moved out of it into the mansion of the British Commander in Chief. His pal, Rajaji, would move into the Viceregal Palace.
and would be all our life lived till yesterday.
Niradh's own life did not change. He continued to work for A.I.R. earning a thousand rupees a month- a very good salary at that time.
All that we have learnt, all that we have acquired, and all that we have prized is threatened with extinction.
It was threatened by the Japanese. Sadly, Churchill sent them packing.
We do not know how this end will come, whether through a cataclysmic holocaust or slow putrid decay. But regarding the eventual cxtinction there does not secm to be any uncertainty.' That was written in 1947, and now the scene has become clearer. I can see that it is going to be putrid decay and not the clean blaze.
The British administration was decaying. Wavell understood this and told Whitehall that the Brits would have to evacuate the country. Fortunately, Mountbatten became a great pal of Nehru and so India remained in the Commonwealth. It retained a British admiral till 1958. Churchill realised he had been wrong about India. As an independent country, it was more useful to Whitehall.
Above all, politics was the main preoccupation of the mental life of all of us, the vortex of all our thoughts and emotions.
Sadly, religion, not politics mattered. There were big Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta in 1926. Also, what really preoccupied people was money and jobs. Politics was about which community got more of both.
Even more than in contemporary Europe, we in Bengal were politique d'abord, politique partout, politique toujours, politique uniquement.
In Calcutta, yes. There was a big struggle to get control of the Corporation because this meant jobs for the boys. But the districts were a different matter.
It impinged even on our workaday life. In my case, my personal career would not have been what it became except for the political developments described in the book.
No. It wouldn't have been what it became if he hadn't given up a government job to try to rise by his pen.
Moreover, those developments were interwoven with the very strong sense of vocation I had from a very early age. I wanted to be a writer, and one who was to be involved with public affairs.
In which case, he needed to study law and economics. Also, if you are Indian and live in India, you need to know a lot about India, not Europe.
I always thought that a writer was a man of action in his way,
Caesar and Napoleon and T.E Lawrence and Churchill were writers who were men of action.
and since I could not take part in real action I conceived of my role as an observer
in which case you need to actually observe what is happening, not write any nonsense which comes into your head.
with a practical purpose, that of being a Cassandra giving warnings of calamities to come.
Cassandra was ignored. She wasn't a writer.
I began to utter them from the very beginning of my career as a writer,
which was largely unsuccessful till he started telling Racist Europeans what they wanted to hear
and many of them will be included in this book. Therefore, the events that provoked them could not be excluded from it. But there are also more matter of fact rcasons for making it some sort of a historical narrative. I have now come to the conclusion that no true history of the disappearance of the British Empire in India will ever be written.
The Brits ensured their settler colonies would become self-administering and self-garrisoning by about 1880. They hoped to turn India into a Federation which would protect minorities. They failed. An East Bengali Hindu should have examined how the disaster of partition might have been avoided. The truth, I suppose, is that it could not. There would be ethnic cleansing in East Bengal and then in Burma. Would this also happen in Assam? That was the question facing Niradh when he wrote 'Continent of Circe'.
For one thing, none of those who are now writing full or partial histories of this epoch have any personal experience to be able to appraise the events correctly,
There were plenty such. S. Gopal, through his father, knew many of the leading personalities of the period.
far less to be able to recreate the spirit and atmosphere.
That spirit and atmosphere was to be found at the meetings of the Indian National Congress. Niradh had the worm's eye-view of a Calcutta worm.
All of them were too young, and many not even born when the events were happening.
I suppose Niradh thought that Macaulay was a pal of William & Mary. Gibbon often dined with Roman Emperors.
This objection would at first sight seem to be wholly pointless because most historians write about events they have not seen' and even those which are far removed from them in time. But these historians have the means by which they can reconstruct the past,
historians of British India have plenty of archival and other material to work with.
both factually and imaginatively, in adequate source material, to interpret which they can bring to bear on them some analogous experience.
Experience of contemporary India supplies apt analogies.
Both are absent in the case of recent Indian history, in spite of its recentness.
No. Both are abundant. What is more, there is great continuity in Indian politics such that from generation to generation the same issues crop up and the same methods of organization are used.
To deal with the question of sympathetic reconstruction.
It is sufficient to see what the leader of a particular party is saying today. He will himself refer to leaders who had raised the same questions fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.
The Indian nationalist movement had such a peculiar character and atmosphere
which persisted after Independence. Moreover, there were several strands to that movement each of which has a modern day representative.
that nobody who has not lived through it
Niradh did not live through it. He didn't go to jail. Though earning some money as a publicist, he kept apart from it and buried his head, ostrich like, in European books.
can have a true idea of what it was like, and nothing like that has been seen in India after it had gained its object, or elsewhere at any time.
British Viceroys found it easy to understand India and to achieve their objectives even if they had never been to the country before.
It must be said, Indian historians tended to neglect local archives. They preferred to do their research in the India Office in London. William Dalrymple has pulled up our historians for this neglect.
The historians of today have to depend almost exclusively on the official papers written during British rule and preserved in the record office of the Governmcnt of India and in the library of the India Office in London.
This was a choice they made. It must be said, an earlier generation of Indian historians- Sarkar, Sardesai, etc- had been more eclectic. Moreover, they knew more Indian languages and were able to access private archives.
One more point about the inadequacy of the records, printed or in manuscripts, must be made.
It is a point which can be made of any archive anywhere.
The proceedings of the numerous conferences and formal discussions never gave any idea of the real motives and thoughts of the participants.
But the participants wrote and talked to their friends or supporters about their real motives and much of this information is available in printed interviews or memoirs of the period.
They were all concerned to present a case, attempting at best only plausible advocacy.
But their opponents were quick to point out their true motivation.
Let me give one example, that of the voluminous records of the discussions on the partition of India.
In 1946, Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the League which was committed to the creation of Pakistan. That was the actual outcome. Nothing could have averted it.
No one will find in them any evidence as to the real forces at work to bring about the catastrophic event, nor of the motives which made the parties concerned accept it.
Everyone will find that Jinnah wanted Pakistan and got Pakistan. His motive was clear. He wanted to be master in his own house. He didn't want to play second fiddle to a Hindu.
Given all these insufficiencies in the source material, it is not surprising that most of the historical works which profess to give a scholarly view of the events of this period are arid, shallow, uninspired, totally devoid of atmosphere, and at times even false.
Niradh clearly hadn't read 'Freedom at Midnight'. No one can say Dominique Lapierre wrote in an arid manner.
The only accounts which have colour are the Indian nationalist myths, but even their luridness is made dull by the crudity of style of the writers.
Nehru was very crude. S. Gopal was notorious for inventing lurid sexual escapades for the subjects of his biographies. Then it turned out his Dad was pretty promiscuous.
As if that was not enough, this period of Indian history has become the lush pasture of the intellectual fops who want to air their cleverness or earn money by selling historical tinsel to an ignorant, Western Indophile readership.
Fuck off. Indophiles want books about Hindu spirituality. They didn't greatly care about Aurobindo's politics. If they settled in Auroville, it was to do Raja Yoga or some other such mystical shite.
The pictorial presentation, whether in films or TV serials, is the most spurious of this merchandise.
He was thinking of Attenborough's Gandhi & maybe 'Jewel in the Crown' or other such dreck. The Brits of the older generation who, during their stint of 'National Service', had to kill Commies in Malaya or Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, were heartily grateful to Atlee for ending the Raj. On the other hand, 'It aint half hot Mum', made light of the sufferings of British soldiers in malaria infested Burma. I firmly believe that the original script was written by H.N. Goshal- an intellectual fop who had viciously attacked 'Browderism'.
The Indians, on their part, do not need comfort, they congratulate themselves as the legatees of the British, and they cannot be critical about the demise of their political father, even if his death was due to political delirium tremens and political tertiary syphilis.
If daddy was rich and we inherit his money, we may not be sorry at all that he has popped his clogs.
But in some Indians there is another compulsion. Most of the young historians who are writing about the period are the sons of officials who served the British Government in India 'loyally',
they also served Indian administrations loyally after 1937. I suppose Niradh thinks officials should be disloyal.
and when they are not, they are in any case sons of the 'loyal Indian gentlemen' who remained on the safe side.
Every side was safe save that of the Revolutionary. True, the Congressman had to queue up meekly to go to jail from time to time, but there was a big pay-off for doing so.
They have all to make up great deal of arrears of loyalty to the nationalist movement, more especially, to the Congress.
They did so immediately once Provincial autonomy came into force. Interestingly, British ICS officers were equally loyal to their new Indian masters. I may mention that Nehru's cousin was a senior ICS officer. Braj Kumar and his Jewish wife got on very well with Jawaharlal and Indira. Indeed, most Indian civilian servants benefitted greatly from Independence.
They, therefore, show a partisanship in regard to both which is all on the surface and often extremely unpleasant.
Actually, they tended to go in a Marxist direction.
Some of them indulge in taunts and sneers at the British in a manner which in British days not even the more uneducated Indian journalist of extremist persuasion aired.
Nonsense! Indian journalists were very vocal- more particularly if they were safely overseas.
Their writings do not shed any dignity on the nationalist movement or its leaders. They reduce both to their own mental level.
Niradh's mental level was that of a three year old screaming his lungs out.
Some of the greatest of modern Indians have been pitiable victims of their shallow biographers.
S. Gopal was not shallow.
In reality, the Indian nationalist movement was too stark and elemental a movement to be understood by mediocre minds.
It was easy to understand. Sadly Niradh did not have even a mediocre mind.
Whether quiescent or in eruption, it had an evil grandeur, redeemed only by an apocalyptic faith in the advent of political independence for India.
India became independent. There was no apocalypse save for minorities. But Niradh was safe in Delhi where it was Muslims who faced ethnic cleansing.
The spectacle which the hatred and faith presented in combination was like that of a volcano against the light of dawn, the red of the foreground burning more lurid against the white background.
That volcano would look more lurid during the night.
So far as British rule had a psychological aspect and a civilizing mission in India, its greatest achievement was seen in
Punjab. The Brits were proud of the prosperity they had created in the Canal Colony towns. Kipling, when in Burma, would jump down from the train and go to hug any Sikh he spotted so as to have the pleasure of exchanging a few words in Punjabi. Hansard contains many speeches by senior politicians praising the Punjabi and speaking of their own fond memories of the place. Bengal was not liked. The climate was humid; the human element not comely. But, at one point, it generated a lot of wealth.
Bengal. That was the renovation of the culture and mental life of a people who had become almost fossilized culturally.
Sir William James pays a condign tribute to the scholars of Nawadwipa. Calcutta would become the centre of Sanskrit and Persian studies. Ghalib was impressed by it.
British rule, by bringing European cultural influences to bear on Indian life, created what was virtually a new culture.
The Brits encouraged vernacular languages. Tamil and khadi boli Hindi were big beneficiaries. Bengal too developed a literature. Sarat and Tagore were widely translated into other languages. But Michael Madhusudhan Dutt was left severely alone. It is notable that Sarat and Tagore weren't well educated in English- a matter of choice in the latter case.
Its cradle and centre of diffusion was Bengal.
Bengali did not become the lingua franca. Khadi boli did. Previously, Bengal had been a backwater. It became so once again as its wealth diminished.
Its quality, too, was very fine, in spite of its limitations and weaknesses.
Calcutta university did produce some fine scholars and scientists. Sadly, most of its graduates were blathershites.
But it was created and preached by the Bengalis,
Bengalis liked scolding each other. But scolding is not scholarship. Indeed, it isn't even Socioproctology.
and not by the British administrators or the British community. With the exception of a very small number of very wise British administrators, and the missionaries generally, this new culture and its creators, i.e. the Bengalis, were hated by the local British.
Bengalis were not greatly liked by other Indians unless, like Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Tagore or Prabhupada, there was a spiritual side to them.
They did not like the adoption of their culture by the Indians,
They didn't want to lose well-paid jobs to 'natives'.
and displayed throughout British rule an unmeasured rancour against the activity.
Their grievance was that the Bengalis did not want to emulate the martial qualities of the British. There is little point sharing your profits with a partner who will run the fuck away in the event of a fight.
Then, the Jugantar revolutionaries- who, as patriots, wanted no share in Imperial profits- started displaying great valour. Tegart, who crushed the movement, was careful to pay a condign tribute to Bagha Jatin's courage and fighting skill. The plain fact is, the Brits needed soldiers. They feared that Bengal could only supply barrack room lawyers. At a later point, the Pakistani Army would show even greater contempt to the Bangladeshi.
In this lay the greatest failure of British imperialism in India,
they couldn't recruit a single soldier from 40 million of their subjects- or so Churchill said. (He was wrong. Bengalis had been recruited during the Great War.)
for no empire can last without
lots of soldiers
practising cultural proselytization.
Fuck off! The Brits recruited Gurkhas precisely because they retained their own culture so thoroughly.
The British in India rejected this role.
No. They had no objection to Indian Christians or Parsis or Maharajas from becoming Europeanised. They even set up 'Chieftain's Colleges' for the martial aristocracy and, at a later point, welcomed them into Sandhurst. What no Empire- or country for that matter- needs is yet more blathershites.
Their attitude presented a total contrast to that of the Romans, who were true imperialists. They felt proud to have given peace to the Mediterranean world, but were not ashamed to confess that the conquered Greeks conquered them culturally.
Aurobindo had written some stupid shite about how Indians should be like the Greeks who civilized the Romans. That's what happens if you send a lad to St. Pauls and Cambridge. The plain fact is the Greeks had already Hellenized the Syrians and the Jews and the Egyptians. Byzantium, the second Rome, would be administered by Greek logothetes.
It is true that the East India Company initially resisted the arrival of missionaries but it soon itself embraced Evangelical religion. Though the Indian converts to Christianity gained nothing material by doing so, it must be said that they showed great devotion to uplifting their fellow Indians. Bengali Christians are worthy of all praise in this respect. Niradh, sadly, did not understand that Europe is profoundly Christian.
What inspired the Anglo-Indian with horror was the prospect that some College graduate would chuck a bomb into his carriage.
Even this inspired them with horror, and their abuse of the Bengalis and other Indians who were assimilating European culture was not only unrestrained but indecent and aggressive.
They were rattled by the activities of the Revolutionaries. They put the blame on seditious scribblers who had imbibed Anarchist ideas from the Continent.
This behaviour is unparalleled in the history of all civilized peoples in ancient or modern times,
Nonsense! Apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow in America was much worse.
and even for the study of this perverse phenomenon, Bengal is the most suitable region in the world.
No. Plenty of Bengalis were given knighthoods. One was put into the House of Lords.
I think I have now produced enough justification for the historical aspect of this book.
Bengal wasn't special and it didn't much matter. No doubt, to a Bengali, it is very important. But Niradh has not shown that it mattered to England or even the rest of India. Yes, there had been a foolish agitation against the Partition of Bengal. But, as Tagore noted, this would cause a breach between the Hindus and the Muslims. In the end, the Hindus would insist on Partition. Its subsequent fate was that of relative decline and a disastrous period of Communist rule. Still, East Bengal faced worse.
Indian independence was a great boon for Niradh Chaudhuri. The 'emic' Indian perspective- more particularly the perspective of its impecunious intelligentsia- became a source of interest for those concerned with the Cold War game of dominoes. Perhaps, the mental pathology of a dim witted Bengali dwarf could offer material for 'Psy Ops' or what would later be called 'Operation Camelot'- viz. the attempt to recruit Social Scientists for the purpose of capturing 'hearts and minds' in Indochina and Latin America. At any rate, this explains Edward Shils interest in Niradh.
But I also think that my personal life has a relevance to the general human situation today which has been created by
technology. Economics is 'ergodic' not path-dependent. What drives it is technological change. Hysteresis tends to cancel itself out. What Pareto called 'Residues and Derivatives' matter less and less. Tardean mimetics- imitating those who are doing better- means some will rise because they chose good mimetic targets while others will fall. Bengal fell.
history. I shall make no mystery about it and shall set it down in plain words without beating about the bush. The problem which I had to face in my personal life was how to pass through an age of decadence without being touched by it.
He passed through an age of great technological change which put an end to European hegemony. He was six years old when the first aeroplane flew. He was eight years old when Japan defeated Russia. He was twenty when the Bolsheviks came to power.
Meanwhile, his own family was rising in the world. His father had not gained a University degree and thus could only practice on the criminal side in a mofussil town. Niradh and his brothers received good educations. One became a Doctor trained in Germany. Another practiced law in the High Court. A third became a senior engineer. Their children would do even better. Niradh's grandson, like Warren Hastings, attended Westminster school. Had he joined the Tory party, perhaps he- rather than Rishi Sunak- could have become Prime Minister.
At the end of my life I have come to the conclusion that civilized human existence all over the world is completing the latest cycle of its history by descending into its natural Avernus.
Cycles of history don't end in the extinction of the species. One may speak of a dark age when life becomes cheap and the lamp of learning fails for want of fuel. But Niradh's life saw a great expansion in education and scholarship of every type.
I think our times are comparable to the fifth century of the Christian era when St Augustine saw the Graeco-Roman world crumbling all around him.
Those barbarians converted to Christianity quickly enough. Anyway, China and India were doing very well at that period.
The present situation of humanity is different from that only in this, that the scale is larger and the decadence universal.
Affluence was rising. Technology was improving. China, embracing the market, was beginning to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. India, to a lesser extent, would follow suit.
It embraces even the Americans who are in fact a young nation in point of age, and are placed in the van of human progress.
Where they remain, though China might overtake them.
In any case, the whole point about the decline and fall of Rome is that it yielded to something better and more universal- viz. Christianity. If you love Europe and choose to settle there, why not admit this? You don't have to convert. It is enough that you appreciate the source of so much that is good in the culture that you have made your home.
I was born and brought up in a class of Bengali society
he belonged to the Kayastha caste of scribes and lawyers
which had been dominant through the ages, and became even more dominant during British rule.
No. Soldiers were dominant. Kayasthas were useful to the dominant class. The British policy of breaking up big estates enabled some to become 'Chaudhuries'- i.e. land-owners. But they were rather low down in the ritual hierarchy.
Again, the class which dominates India today is some sort of an extension of the Bengali class to which I belonged.
No. The political class dominates India. But, a bigger and bigger portion of it is from 'educationally backward' castes. Still, it must be said, Kayasths did well in politics. West Bengal, at that time, was ruled by a Communist Kayastha.
Thus, if I speak of alienation from a world, that does not mean social or personal alienation. Tocqueville once said that when he talked to a gentilhomme he felt that he belonged to the same family, although he shared none of his opinions, wishes, or thoughts, whereas a bourgeois was always a stranger.
The Kayastha is petit-bourgeois. He isn't an aristocrat.
It has been the same with me. Although I have rejected the whole ideology of the dominant order in India, I am socially at home only among them.
I am socially at home only with the Royal Family. Sadly, King Charles refused to believe me when I told him I was his Aunty Edna, Duchess of Donerkebab.
I could have shared their position and prosperity if I had wanted that, and if I have not, that has been my free choice. Therefore, I have never been under the compulsion to go on that wild goose chase which in these days is called 'discovering one's identity'. I never lost mine, and never had any doubts about it.
Niradh is asking us to believe that a baby born in rural Bengal would inevitably develop an identity as some sort of European aristocrat gravely distressed by the rise and rise of Asiatics and Africans.
My own impression is that Niradh was a mainstream nationalist till about 1937 when he, like many Bengali Hindus, woke up to the fact that Muslims might take over the province. The next turning point was in 1946 when Suhrawardy and the League were the big winners.
.. in the middle of 1946, I wrote three articles in quick succession like the last three symphonies of Mozart, but alas! all in the dark minor keys.
This Babu likens his prose to Mozart's symphonies! Sadly, all the other Indians are Salieris.
I sent them to the New English Review, then edited by Douglas Jerrold
a staunch supporter of Franco and a 'die-hard' Tory
and Sir Charles Petrie.
another admirer of Franco who was also a Jacobite- i.e. a supporter of the Stuart dynasty!
All of them were accepted and published in three consecutive issues of the magazine - those of November and December, 1946, and January, 1947. Their titles were respectively: 'The Future of Imperialism';
he thought it would be resurrected. He truly was as stupid as shit.
'Permanent Conservatism'; and "'Stasis" in England'.
Why not simply say that the Labour Party would turn into a Gestapo?
At that time my mind was oppressed by a malaise over two questions: the possibility of the disappearance of British rule in India;
it was a certainty. The Americans wanted the Brits to fuck off. Britain was too poor to go it alone.
and the decline of the greatness of the British people.
Niradh thought that the British working people were very evil. They had voted for a Government which would put their interests first.
In 1946, I was not wholly sure that the withdrawal from India was imminent.
To be fair, Indians didn't know what Wavell had been telling Whitehall- viz. the Brits would have to evacuate the place. It had become ungovernable.
Nonetheless. I could see that the British will to keep India, which had been reiterated to the point of stupidity during the two previous decades,
not by Labour.
was collapsing with equal stupidity. It seemed to me that the balance sheet for the liquidation was being drawn up and the winding up was only a matter of time.
Niradh does not seem to have noticed that, under the 1935 Act, the Indians could have cobbled together a Federal Government and, de facto, have become a Dominion. This was the only question in 1946. Would there be a Federal India or would there be Partition?
This irritated me, but being compelled to face the prospect, which had become virtually a certainty, I tried to make myself resigned to the end of the Indian Empire by defiantly proclaiming my faith in empires as creators and preservers of civilization in the first article.
I suppose, this nutter thought George Washington had destroyed European Civilization in North America.
As this historical conclusion lay at the back of my mind while observing the process of that disappearance as it unfolded, I shall make the thesis of the article the prologue to my account of the process of disintegration.
In other words, he will repeat stupid shite he was foolish enough to believe forty years previously.
In this chapter I shall describe how I continued my thinking on the domestic situation of the British people,
they faced severe rationing and bombed out homes and factories.
deep misgivings about which had arisen in my mind with the elections of 1945.
The Brits didn't want Churchill dragging them into pointless wars. America had saved Britain's bacon once. They wouldn't do it again.
On this subject, I had by that time arrived at two conclusions which took me further from the tentative ideas of 1945. In the first place, I thought that only one choice of political principle and party lay before the British people in their new predicament, and that was Conservatism and the Conservative Party;
Douglas Jerrold had observed that the Tories preferred to take over the manifestos of other parties so long as they could run things themselves. This was the secret of the 'Butskellite' consensus of the Fifties and Sixties.
next to that, I thought that the character of English party politics had changed basically although retaining the old pattern outwardly.
Under Baldwin, the Tories had repositioned themselves as pragmatists able and willing to give the voter what they really wanted- viz. Peace and Prosperity.
It had now become a class conflict, to which I gave the Greek definition 'Stasis'.
That could have been said of the 'Great Strike'. Baldwin would regret taking his fellow Harrovian, Winston Churchill, into the Cabinet.
I shall summarize the arguments of the two articles in reversed order, dealing first with the class conflict. I called British Leftism a 'reactionary movement'with no role in the future.
It was progressive and would dominate British politics in the Fifties and Sixties.
The magnitude of the Leftist movement in 1945, I said, was a seasonal feature.
No. There had been a steady rise in the Labour vote. Moreover, by 1945, it could supply from its own ranks law officers and other specialists to take charge of different Departments of Government.
In its European aspect, British Leftism was a reaction against Fascism and Nazism,
It pre-existed both. Niradh knew no history.
and was fulfilling its historical function of cancelling the legacy of these two aberrations.
Moseley led the British Union of Fascists. He had been a Labour MP.
It was, I added, 'a short-term mobilization of short-term and easily grasped ideas for the sole purpose of continuing the war in the sphere of ideas'.
There was no such war. There was nationalization of the 'commanding heights' of the economy and the creation of a National Health Service.
In its domestic aspect, the strength of British Leftism
The Left (I.L.P) was different from the Trade Union movement which is what dominated the Labour Party. Bevan was a fierce anti-Communist and 'Cold Warrior' much admired by the Americans.
lay in the urge for reform, the reform of certain specific ills which were felt in the
late nineteenth century which is when the 'new unionism' was born and from which the Labour party began its political rise.
inter-war years but in that period of strange stagnancy of English political life were left unattended.
Britain's economic ills were well understood. The problem was that all administrations- even Labour led ones- took balanced budgets as an article of faith. The origin of the British Welfare State stretch back to 1906. With hindsight, Governments in the Twenties and Thirties should have switched from minimum wage laws to Family Allowances. Also, Churchill should not have put Britain back on the gold standard. It was then that British people realized there was a financial penalty to having an Empire.
'ln this aspect sturdy English Labour', I observed, 'was no more frightening than Thomas Hardy's Farmer Oak married to the widowed Bathsheba.'
Oak is a shepherd. English Labour was unionized and industrial.
But the doctrinaire Leftist I equated with Sergeant Troy.
Bathsheba's husband who was shot dead by another admirer of hers. Troy might be compared to Churchill. Harold Laski didn't go in for sword play nor did he get servant girls pregnant.
My final judgement was that even at its best English Leftism was a past-regarding movement.
That could be said of Churchill and die-hard Tory Imperialists. It could not be said for the Unions which were wholly concerned with the present. There were English Communists like Rajni Palme Dutt. They didn't matter in the slightest.
As I put it: 'Although Labour itself is working under the joyous belief that its ideas are the ideas of tomorrow,
In the case of India, they were the ideas of tomorrow. It was said that a chair was always left empty for the ghost of Harold Laksi at meetings of the Planning Commission.
an outside observer gets the impression
that it had won a big majority because it knew what the voters wanted. Churchill didn't.
of seeing the past reversed in a mirror.
No. It saw that the Trade Union movement had been growing steadily for over a century. But voters were concerned with bread and butter issues. They didn't care about ideology. Labour's mistake was to not get rid of rationing.
I set down emphatically: 'The Labour administration is going to close an era, not open a new one.
It created the NHS which remains British Politics' one sacred cow.
But by reason of its very power through office
there had been two previous Labour dominated administrations. Niradh hadn't noticed.
the Leftist movement had other implications. The Labour Party, I said, was not homogeneous
like the Tory or Liberal party
and I further observed: 'The party lines in English politics have still to take their final shape.'
They had done so by the time Ramsay MacDonald was expelled from the Labour party.
An examination of the composition of the Labour Party, I said, led to the discovery that
the Unions dominated it.
the more destructive part of Labour activities were due to a particular section.
Like whom? Atlee? Cripps?
The great majority of Labour members, I wrote, were safe party men, and had no inclination towards 'stasis' or class conflict.
No. The great majority wanted nationalization of the commanding heights. That's what they got.
But there were others for whom this 'stasis' was the very breath of their nostrils,
There was no stasis. Labour won. The 'idle rich' stopped being idle or else they stopped being rich. In 1910, one tenth of the population had a private income and another tenth were their domestic servants. By 1950, few households could afford even one domestic servant.
the soul of politics. They were the so-called doctrinaire socialists, a majority of whom were maladiusted scions of the ruling class.
Atlee went to Haileybury. Then he served as a missionary in the East End and became convinced of the need for Socialism. Fuck you Atlee! Fuck you very much!
Atlee's Secretary of State for India, Pethick Lawrence was an old Etonian. He was sent to jail because of his connection to the suffragettes. This was not 'maladjustment'. This was being ahead of the curve. The upper class realised that women should have the vote. They should be equal partners in all things.
Their hatred of the parental association was making them forget even thc instinct of self-preservation.
It was the Tory Lords who showed that instinct in the highest degree. Sadly, Mrs Thatcher beat them to death with her handbag.
Niradh, wittingly or unwittingly, was providing Jerrold with 'Elders of Zion' type paranoid nonsense. He wrote-
'A man with the normal outlook and character of an Englishman might ask what use it was defending the Persian Gulf after the Mediterranean, Egypt, Suez Canal, and India were lost.' But, of course, I knew the answer and wrote: 'Persian oil was necessary for Russia.'
Jews control the Kremlin and Wall Street. It isn't the British Navy which depends on Persian oil, it is actually the Russians who have plenty of that commodity on their own territory.
The same aversion to the parental association, I continued, was at the bottom of 'the clamour for a second front at a time when it would have proved disastrous to the British people without benefiting anybody.'
It was FDR who unilaterally made unconditional surrender the war aim of the United Nations and who most vociferously supported a second front in Europe. He did this because he feared Stalin would make a separate peace. The Brits had to do what the Americans wanted. Fortunately for India, their obsession with supplying the KMT in China 'over the hump' meant their air-force was available for General Slim's reconquest of Burma and points East.
And I added: 'After the war the self-same emotional predisposition is impelling British Leftists to make common cause with everybody who wants to injure and humiliate Britain.'
The Brits made common cause with everybody who wanted British people to complete reconstruction and regain prosperity. They didn't give a fuck about darkies weeping and whining and demanding that Viceroy Sahib should kindly come and wipe their bums.
I wrote: 'Whether it be a white, yellow, brown, or black enemy of Great Britain, for everyone of these the British Leftist seems to have a fellow-feeling which he does not have for the parental clan.'
The British Leftists had been deathly opposed to Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. They also hated Douglas Jerrold's pal, Franco.
This, I thought, would lead in the first instance to the destruction of the external greatness of Great Britain.
Britain was no longer the workshop of the world and thus could not be its maritime hegemon. The British Empire had been a gift from the Senior Service. When Britannia ceased to rule the waves, it had to wave goodbye to its Empire. Blame Churchill, as Chancellor, for taking a shilling off Income Tax rather than spending it on the Navy. Blame Baldwin for prioritizing the air-force over the fleet. Don't blame Labour or the Left. They weren't in power when these decisions were made.
'I have a feeling that Labour's Indian policy is being shaped entirely by its Left wing,
it was shaped by Wavell. The Left listened to people like Saklatvala who said that Congress was bourgeois and would grind down the faces of the workers and the peasants. On the other hand, the Communists supported partition as being consistent with Stalin's doctrine of nationality.
or at all events by the fear of the Left wing' and that the India Office is having to provide the ransom for the Foreign Office.'
The India Office was being told by Wavell- the man on the spot- that India had become ungovernable. Whites must be evacuated. The other problem was that the Americans wanted Indian independence. Having read 'Discovery of India', they thought Nehru was a man they could do business with. He would borrow money from Wall Street and give fat contracts to G.E and G.M and Dow Chemicals. British concerns like ICI would cry their little eyes out.
'The presence of an element with a definite frustration bias
e.g. that of Douglas Jerrold or Dorman Smith who longed for a return to the good old days when proles knew their place
within the governing party of today,' I observed, 'is a very significant development in English politics. This is without precedent.'
There had been two previous Labour led administrations. However, there had been greater Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century.
And this' I thought, was threatening English party politics with a fatal retrogression - a class war aimed at the establishment of an one-party dictatorship.
Churchill, in a drunken radio-speech, had said the Labour party might create a Gestapo. This lost him votes.
Having arrived at this view in my attempt to understand the nature of English party politics as it revealed itself after the general election of 1945, I followed the bent of my character by preaching a sermon to the British people about the choice of a party. I called it 'Permanent Conservatism'-
i.e. stagnation
and took an aphorism of Pascal's as its text.
It is his most foolish
It was the following: 'Cesar etait trop vieil, ce me semble, pour s'aller amuser conqurir le monde...
Caesar was not too old to conquer the world. He was killed before he could make any such attempt. Augustus closed the gates of the Temple of Mars three times. This was not because he had grown old. It was because those countries which could be conquered had been conquered. Alexander himself turned back from India while still a young man.
' And the hortatory message derived from it was as follows: 'There is surely a hint for the English people in this subtle aphorism of Pascal's.
Yours is an ancient nation. Do not seek to amuse yourself by further war or conquest.
Perhaps the moral could be made more explicit. It could be put in the form of a proposition that a time will soon come, if it has not already arrived, when the sole choice of political principles and methods left to the English people will be Conservatism of one sort or another.
Because you will be senile and incapable of change save for the worse.
At the present stage of their national evolution, and in the existing state of their relationship to the rest of the world, Conservatism will be for them both a virtue and a necessity.'
Nothing wrong with 'Little England' Conservatism. Cultivate your own garden and stop bothering about Baluchistan or Burma.
This view of mine was based on the realization, as I put it then, that 'a politics of adventure is the natural politics of a young nation which has developed a large reserye of power in isolation and thereby acquired an egocentric preoccupation.'
Adventures, in youth or old age, should increase your wealth. Otherwise, they are an expensive lesson in the virtue of staying at home and cultivating your own garden.
Secondly, I added, 'a politics of adventure
is Churchillian. The English wanted none of it. He could only return to power after a stroke had reduced his natural pugnaciousness.
is a practical policy for those states alone whose territories and population are geographically concentrated and who can throw themselves on the outer world without risk to large external interests.'
That is a description of Hitler's Germany, or Tojo's Japan, not the British Empire. If you win valuable territory, well and good. But there is always the risk of defeat.
What the British people should aim at in the existing conditions of their national life was 'repose in strength'. '
Build up your air force. Get nukes and a delivery system. Let the Empire turn into a Commonwealth.
The main task,' I observed, 'was to rescue English politics from a fussiness and sentimental effervescence unbecoming of its maturity and endow it with a mellowness, serenity, and ease consistent with that maturity.'
The main task was to create a National Health Service and 'homes fit for heroes' and Comprehensive Schools which would enable working class children to enter University- if that is what they wanted to do.
'There could be no greater pity in history', I said, 'than for a great nation to have its maturity wearing only the flippant simper of the demagogue
says a simpering blathershite
or the drawn unloveliness of the doctrinaire.
Mrs. Thatcher was very doctrinaire.
Every great nation expects its maturity to be crowned by a golden Augustanism. Perhaps it may still come, but the signs are not propitious.'
England had had its Augustinian age. What its people wanted was Social Democracy. That is what they got.
So, it will be seen that I was anxious about the future of the British people. My fears were due to my deep distrust of Socialistic fanaticism.
Atlee was a fanatic. He tried to chop off the head of the King Emperor.
Referring to the claim of Labour that they had a policy and a plan,
It was the Beveridge plan formulated under the coalition government in 1942. Which party could be better trusted to slay the 'five giants; idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want'? The answer was Labour, because many of its MPs had personal experience of these things. Tory grandees might feel Christian charity or a warm spirit of noblesse oblige, but they didn't know the nature of the beast which had to die if the British people were to live and breathe free.
and the Tories had none, I observed that 'if it is a question of laying down the law for the imponderable and unforeseeable, of throwing a Utopia
the Beveridge Report was commissioned by the Government.
at the head of the unknown, the Leftists have an arguable case.
They created the National Health Service. Sensible Tories saw that great benefits would flow from this. Employers wanted well-educated, healthy, workers who lived in comfortable Council Houses not noisome slums. Moreover, Reconstruction could be more cheaply financed by the State. Something like 'indicative planning' was necessary to solve the underlying coordination problem more particular because Global Capital markets would remain frozen up by Exchange Controls. It would be a long time before European countries could let go of the Bretton Woods straitjacket and allow their currencies to float.
There they have an advantage, not only over the Conservatives but over all denominations of scientific intelligence, because they can confuse a theory of historical evolution with the fact of historical evolution and,
Theories explain facts.
while the rational mind is painfully manipulating a searchlight to find out what lies ahead out in the darkness, they can switch on the cinema projector of their doctored brains to see a perfectly formed picture.'
A film may deal with 'the shape of things to come'. But no searchlight can show us what hasn't happened yet.
But my preference for Conservatism was not to be confused with any partiality for the official Conservative Party. I had seen what it was capable of doing from 1922 to 1939, and had no respect for it.
I suppose, he means he didn't like the 1935 Act which gave provincial autonomy to Bengal.
One morning in October 1956, I read the news of the Suez adventure. I clearly remember my exclamation as I saw the headlines and just dipped into the news. I cried out audibly: 'The last chance for the British to regain their position in the world.' Before that I had been thoroughly dismayed by the British retreat from one position to another. The supine acceptance of the forfeiture of British oil interests in Persia by Mossadegh,
Prof. Zaehner & Kim Roosevelt toppled Mossadegh and restored the Shah. That turned out to be a mistake.
the absence of even a knee-jerk - as I would call it in the neurologist's language - to the seizure of the Suez Canal by Nasser confirmed me in my view that the British will was broken. Here, however, was one wholly unexpected spurt of self-assertion, as if even the worm had turned.
Eden had gone mad. He though Nasser was Hitler.
I felt elated. At that time I was connected with the French Embassy in New Delhi as a part-time worker, besides being treated as a friend by the French Ambassador, Count Stanislas Ostrorog. I went to the Embassy in high spirits, burst into the room of the Counsellor, M. Costilhes, and cried out: 'Great news from Suez!' He looked at me quietly and said coolly: 'They are mad.' Of course, he included his own government in that. I was taken aback by this remark, which revealed a strange revulsion from military adventure in a Gaul.
The French are realists. They knew that Uncle Sam would take a dim view of their antics.
I entered into an animated argument, when the Ambassador himself came in. To my further dismay, Count Ostrorog
who had strong family connections to the Levant.
sided with his Counsellor. However, he spoke more in the spirit of realism than defeatism. He fully approved of the British withdrawal from India in 1947, and he himself negotiated the transfer of the French possessions in India to Indian sovereignty.
The Indians liked him. He spent 9 years as France's ambassador in Delhi.
Once before we had a discussion on the British action, and I had told him:'If the British had the guts to spend only one thousand cartridges in 1947, they would have kept their Empire for two hundred years more.'
Wavell had expended many more cartridges in 1942 during the Quit India movement. His opinion, as a soldier, was that India could not be held for much longer.
To that he gave a reply which was very cogent: 'But would those one thousand cartridges have been allowed to be fired?'
Not by Wavell. Like Allenby in Egypt, he knew that independence could not be safely postponed.
I knew how true that was. 'The British people who endorsed the firing of seventeen hundred cartridges on an unarmed and defenceless crowd of Indians in 1919
after Europeans had been attacked. That type of reprisal would have occurred in 1947 if British women had been attacked.
and thought that they had saved that Empire by their action,
nobody thought that. Dyer went on to help win the third Afghan War after which his career ended. Geddes axe spared few. Many officers were left to sink or swim on Civvy street.
were not ready to spend one hundred cartridges even to prevent the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indians by Indians themselves in 1947,
power had been transferred by then. Jinnah and Nehru were in charge. The Brits could not be blamed for their acts of commission or omission.
let alone to save the Empire.
It was transformed into a Commonwealth.
I still hold vcry strongly that the policy behind the Suez venture was right, and what went wrong was its execution.
The Brits and French pretended they weren't in league with Israel. But the truth was obvious. Eden had lost his marbles. Macmillan was on the same page as Eisenhower in this matter.
Had it been carried through
It was carried through. The question was whether Israel would be allowed to keep Sinai and the French and the English would be allowed to keep the canal. The answer was no.
none of the sinister aspects of the Middle Eastern political situation today would have emerged.
Had America done nothing the Canal would have been blocked- as indeed happened. Thousands of British and French soldiers would have died in a war of attrition. More importantly, the oil pipeline from Iraq was sabotaged and so Britain needed dollars to buy oil from the US. That's the reason the operation collapsed.
But I was startled by the British and French incompetence in military action. And, of course, I was infuriated by the American treachery to the West.
Macmillan wasn't. The Brits realized their PM had lost his marbles. Eden was a sick man. He had to go.
But I now have the satisfaction of seeing that it is the United States which is having to pay the full price for its folly.
There was and is no price. Their aim was to get Israel back to its pre-1967 borders. They did get it to give up Sinai and make nice with Egypt. The problem is the Palestinians who won't settle for anything less than the whole territory 'from the river to the sea'.
Its standing among non-European peoples has sunk so low that half a dozen American cowards can drag through the mire the honour of a country which has enough impersonal power to destroy the rest of the world in ten minutes.
Nonsense! Vietnam was a blow- I grant you that- but the American 'cowards' who didn't want to fight there were vindicated. That was a wholly pointless war. But so was the occupation of Afghanistan.
The only record that the United States has succeeded in establishing in diplomacy is that of being first among all nations in known history in betraying friends.
Nonsense! Under the Tripartite Treaty, the US was obligated to come to Egypt's aid if it was attacked. Moreover, American lawyers considered Egypt to have the right to nationalize the canal, provided compensation was offered, under 'eminent domain'. The Indians had proposed an international commission to control the canal and this may have been acceptable to Nasser. Dulles, it has been said, was maladroit in his diplomacy. Still, the scheme was hare-brained. It should have been obvious that the Canal could be easily blocked and the pipeline sabotaged.
And the irony of the Suez fiasco lies in the probable fact that it was an expression of the jealousy between Eisenhower and Montgomery. If Montgomery could not hold his tongue, Eisenhower would no more hold his hand.
This is ignorant rubbish. Monty opposed the Suez invasion just as Eisenhower did. Militarily, it made no sense. Diplomatically, it was an unmitigated disaster.
Multi-ethnic empires may be good at protecting minorities and it would be perfectly reasonable for an East Bengali Hindu to point out that the end of the Raj was a calamity for his people. But this is not what Niradh does.
The ruler's point of view I learnt from Virgil's famous exhortation to the Romans, which closes with the words: pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.'You, O Roman, govern the nations with your power- remember this! These will be your arts – to impose the ways of peace, To show mercy to the conquered and to subdue the proud.
Virgil was writing at a time when Romans had a lot of power. Britain did not after the War. It needed American money to stay afloat. If it squandered blood and treasure trying to keep its Empire, its own people would suffer economic privation before having to acknowledge military defeat.
When I was studying for my BA degree, Dr Kalidas Nag, my teacher of history,
his Doctorate was from the Sorbonne. Perhaps if was from him that Niradh took his love of French literature.
in spite of his ardent nationalism, recited the lines in the English translation given in Warde Fowler's book on Rome with unbounded enthusiasm, forgetting British rule in India while teaching Roman history. But as it happened, just at that time I also read Bryce's comparison between the Roman Empire and the British Empire in his Studies in History and Jurisprudence.
The Roman Empire was land-based and involved military service as part of Romanization. The British Empire was maritime and mercantile. Once the hegemony of the Royal Navy was challenged, the Empire was bound to disappear. The question was whether it could be turned into a Commonwealth of free nations.
The subiect's point of view I learned from Acts of the Apostles, which I was reading at the same time. Paul's invocation of his Roman citizenship on various occasions made a profound impression on me, although I was only eighteen years old then.
St. Paul wanted protection from his former co-religionists. The King of Jerusalem was Herod Agrippa II. St. Paul thought he'd get a fairer trial in a Roman court. The analogy here would be Nehru demanding to be tried by a court in British India, where he was born, rather than the court of the Maharaja of Nabha.
Besides, I was perfectly familiar with the views of the greatest Indians
he means Bengali compradors who got rich working with the Brits
of the nineteenth century on British rule in India. In my young days these opinions had not been pushed out of nationalist ideology by the negative rancour of the Gandhian brand of nationalism.
Bengali Hindu rancour was worse. It alienated the Muslims- as Tagore pointed out.
These great men were all conscious of an antithesis between the natural desire of all Indians to become free from foreign rule and the welfare and progress of the Indian people.
The fear was that India would revert to anarchy as plundering Pindaris or murderous Thugees roamed the land. Niradh says he was a mainstream Nationalist- he thought an Indianized administration would work yet more assiduously for the welfare of Indian people- but began to doubt this in the Thirties. Why? The answer is obvious. Indian rule would be majority rule. His class would be displaced by the more numerous agriculturists and industrial workers. Nobody would give the time of day to a blathershite quoting Pascal.
The attitude to the Indian Empire which could be called genuine British imperialism had disappeared long ago
I suppose the 'White Man's burden' is meant. The fact is the Brits only liked the Empire when it was making money for them. They had no desire to die of dysentery while preventing Hindus and Muslims from killing each other.
It was severely practical, and its theoretical justification was
economic and geopolitical
a mixture of humanitarianism, Evangelism, Utilitarianism, and Liberalism.
They were irrelevant. You could do humanitarian or evangelical work in a place you didn't rule. If your utilitarian economists and liberal political scientists were any good, you could export them to Japan and China and Ottoman Turkey.
That old imperialism
didn't exist. A commercial enterprise ruled India.
had been replaced by the end of the nineteenth century by a wholly shoddy theory, which was nothing better than boastful verbiage.
As opposed to hysterical verbiage variegated by humiliating confessions.
By 1920, even that had been discredited, and the Empire in India survived only as a practical reality supported by vested interests.
It survived as a functioning government. Could Gandhi & Co paralyze the administration? Perhaps, but they would be risking anarchy. In the event, Gandhi unilaterally surrendered just at the time when the Egyptians and the Irish and the Afghans got what they wanted.
I despised that, and yet the degencration of British imperialism could not reconcile me to the disappearance of British rule in India.
He was happy enough when C.R Das became Mayor of Calcutta. It was only later on that it occurred to him that Muslims would rule.
I knew full well what would follow. Thus in that article, to begin with, I set down my view of the British Empire in India, and the words I used were
foolish.
defiant: 'The British Empire in India
was the product of Naval supremacy. When that supremacy was lost, the Empire had to end.
is no marginal fact of English history,
nor is it particularly important. The industrial revolution, on the other hand, fundamentally changed the country. The Empire only matters now because it explains why White British people are now a minority in London. Fortunately, third and fourth generation sub-continentals show little interest in their ancestral tongue.
no irrelevant frill, no sowing of wild oats by the exuberant youth of Britain, no dead, tumorous growth on an otherwise healthy polity nor even a preserve of British economic interests
Nope. Britain's interest in India was economic. What mattered was whether the country would remain in the Sterling zone after independence.
. . . it was and remains one of the central facts of universal history
like the Dutch in Indonesia. But it is not a fact which greatly matters to anybody save Indians or Indonesians.
and the concrete evidence that the British people have discharged one of their primary roles in history.
It is a role a cretinous Bengali babu randomly assigned to them. Why is Viceroy Sahib not coming to wipe my bum? Oh. It's because Nehru said mean things to him and he ran away to England crying his little eyes out. Fuck you Nehru! Fuck you very much!
They could not disinterest themselves in it without abrogating their historical mission
to wipe Niradh's bum or at least publish his shitty books.
and eliminating themselves from one of the primary strands of human evolution.'
One look at Niradh would be enough to convince anybody that evolution in East Bengal had proceeded in the wrong direction. If he represented British civilization in India, the Raj richly deserved to be put out of its misery.
The odd thing about Niradh is that he studied History at University for five years. Yet he could write-
'There is no empire without a conglomeration of linguistically, racially, and culturally different nationalities and the hegemony of one of them over the rest.
The Chinese Empire did have Manchu or Mongol rulers at particular times. But, for long stetches, it was homogenous and the ruler was of the same ethnicity as the ruled. The same is true of India and Iran and Russia and so forth.
The heterogeneity and the domination are of the very essence of imperial relations.
Not in China. What about the Mauryas or Marathas in India? Historians believe their origins of these dynasties were quite humble.
An empire is hierarchical.
All organized societies are hierarchical.
There may be in it, and has been, full or partial freedom for individuals or groups to rise from one level to another; but this has not modified the stepped and stratified structure of the organization.
So, an Empire is like a Democracy or a business Corporation. Incidentally, the Church, too, has a hierarchy.
An empire is not, inter-racially or internationally, egalitarian.
It may be. It may not be.
A true empire may confer citizenship on its subiects, but does not set them up in independent states.
It may do. It may not. The Habsburg Emperor was also the King of Hungary and Bohemia and so forth. King Charles is the King of Canada and Australia and so forth. His mother was once the Queen of Pakistan.
'If history reveals anything, it reveals that
an Emperor is a dude who has some Kings and Dukes and Counts under him.
the emergence of every new civilization and of every new value in human life is accompanied by and is inseparable from the domination of a particular human group.
Nonsense! Every 'new civilization' sees one group lose dominance while another gains it. In ancient Rome, Roman Emperors gave way to those born in distant lands- e.g. Phillip the Arab. The same thing happened to the Islamic Caliphate where Persians, Turks, Albanians etc. took power from Arab rulers.
What Niradh has said is just 'where there is domination, some human beings dominate others'. That is a tautology.
This has been seen cycle after cycle of human history and at every stage the area over which it has operated has grown wider than before.
Nope. It now appears that virtually every part of the globe was settled by human beings 20,000 years ago. There were one or two exceptions- New Zealand, Madagascar, etc.
The domination of a nation and civilization has not been checked by any counter-principle, but by purely mechanical factors, e.g. the state of transport and communications.
Domination arises by purely mechanical factors- e.g. who is better at killing or who has more money to hire mercenaries.
When these were not adequate to sustain a single imperium in the whole of the known world a group of empires has existed side by side.
Or not side by side but separated by 'Zomias'- shatter-zones for Empires.
Only those people have escaped imperialism (and with it civilization) who were in utter geographical isolation, but even they had local empires of a rudimentary and primitive sort.
Primitive people have primitive forms of Government. Another tautology from a tosser.
Empires have died when they ceased to create or defend values associated with them,
Values are irrelevant. Empires come to grief when they go off a fiscal cliff or when the invader has superior military technology.
but they have died only to yield place to other empires.
Or Democratic Republics- e.g. the USA.
I said that on the moral plane imperialism could be justified on the ground on which St Thomas Aquinas justified the exercise of authority of all kinds, which he said was moral if it was for the subject's good or the common good.
However, Aquinas granted that if exercising authority is not in your own interest then you are not required to do it. This was the crux of the matter. The Brits could have squandered blood and treasure on trying to retain an unprofitable Empire, but, quite rightly, they told the thing to fuck the fuck off.
I went further and said that exercise of imperial authority was necessary for the protection and survival of civilization.
Yet France and America were republics. Did Niradh consider the French to be uncivilized?
History, I argued, had shown empires as protectors and reclaimers of civilization, and empires had taken over the keepership of civilizations when its creators had become incapable of maintaining them.
In which case, they were failed civilizations.
In saying this I had, of course, in mind our own Hindu civilization.
Like that to be found in Nepal. It hadn't been conquered because its people were courageous.
There could be no doubt that British rule in India was responsible for a new awareness of the ancient Hindu civilization and for a revival of its highest values.
That awareness and revival advanced greatly after Independence.
I emphatically rejected the idea that empires were opposed to human dignity, because I held that it really sustained the dignity. I said that, while the fashionable modern democracies - the dictatorships being as democratic as parliamentary governments - got their opponents killed, history records that even autocratic emperors acted according to the idea of a commonwealth based on equity and freedom of speech, which, above all, cherished the freedom of the subject.
Why not simply say 'I'm an East Bengali Hindu. The Brits protected my people. If they leave, we will face ethnic cleansing'. That is plain and simple enough. Why pretend that autocrats permitted freedom of speech? None have been known to do so.
Many will be able to see that in writing this I was paraphrasing the actual words of an autocratic emperor. The true antithesis was between imperialism and nationalism, which latter, if both were evil, is now seen to be the greater evil of the two.
Only by minorities who got ethnically cleansed.
The anti-imperialistic chatter of these days does not intimidate me because it has a comical aspect.
Why chatter about something which ceased to exist long ago?
The Americans who were and still remain the most anti-imperialistic people in the world are being stigmatised every day as imperialistic adventurers by the rulers of the only true empire of today, namely, the Russians, and to make the accusation actually ludicrous this is believed implicitly by all the non-European peoples liberated from European imperialism partly at least by the force of American opinion.
Reagan called the Soviet Union an 'Evil Empire'. Nothing wrong in that.
I would say that in this the Americans are getting only what they have deserved, because their anti-imperialism has a very repulsive side. It completely ignores the fact that the United States itself was created by the most cruel form of European political expansion, i.e. colonialism.
No. It was created when the 13 Colonies decided to throw off the yoke of Mad King George. It was then that any limit to its own expansion was lifted.
I never forget the distinction between European imperialism and European colonialism.
There were settler colonies and there were Imperial protectorates or directly administered Provinces with little in the way of permanent European settlement.
Imperialism, far from being the enemy of subiect peoples, has always protected them.
Sadly, Churchill refused to let the Japanese Emperor come and protect the Bengali people.
This was first shown by the creators of true imperialism, the Achaemenid Persians,
Whom the Athenians and the Spartans refused to welcome with open arms. Fuck you Themistocles! Fuck you very much!
and the British in India only continued in the same tradition.
No. Theirs was a wholly different tradition. The fact is either Persia would dominate its neighbourhood or it would be dominated by some other Empire. The East India Company was a money making venture.
Let me give only one example. In May 1766, when British rule in Bengal had not even been consolidated, the Directors of the East India Company,
who kept demanding more and more money be sent back
supposed to be a body of rapacious traders, wrote to their agents in Calcutta: 'It is now more immediately our interest and duty to protect and cherish the inhabitants, and to give no occasion to look on every Englishman as their natural enemy.' This was written to explain their refusal to permit monopoly of certain trades to their factors in Bengal.
It was written to deceive. A Corporation may pretend it is actuated by the noblest motives. But what it truly values is a bigger dividend for the shareholder.
Niradh studied worthless shit and wrote worthless shit. Had he become a Doctor or an Engineer or had he written great poetry or works of scholarship, his own people would have admired him. Even in East Bengal, he may have been safe.
'In order to feel the full impact of the malevolence of the backward,
Niradh was backward relative to Gandhi, Nehru, Das, the Bose bros. etc.
you have to live among them.
Or you can read Niradh on the beastliness of those Indians who had won the esteem of their fellows and who replaced the departing British in the great offices of State. Consider Prafula Chandra Sen, who was the same age as Niradh and a batch-mate of his at Scottish Church College. He gave up the chance to train as a Chartered Accountant in England so as to join the freedom struggle. He spent ten years in jail and his social-work earned him the title of 'Gandhi of Arambagh'. He became a Minister in 1947 and Chief Minister of West Bengal, 15 years later. Not only did he live among the poorest Bengalis, he improved their lives. He was a staunch anti-Communist.
You have to see how you are hated by these have-nots for a little extra efficiency, extra power of thinking, extra ability to make life worth living;
No. The 'have-nots' will look up to you if, by your efficiency and superior intelligence or education, you make their life better.
in short for a little extra quality in life. You have to register hourly mementos which tell you that as soon as they have the power to do so the Yahoos will fall upon you and tear you to pieces.
Tearing Niradh to pieces would not lead to any great loss to the community. It must be admitted that Indians showed little desire to tear the British to pieces at this time. There was an awareness that, in the main, these were men and women who had worked hard. They were patriots of their own country to which they longed to return so as to repair the damage done by the war.
On accepting this article, Mr Douglas Jerrold himself wrote to me on 27 August 1946: 'I was very greatly impressed, if I may say so, with your article and found myself largely in agreement with it.'
He was delighted to find an Indian mouthpiece for his own crazy views. Still, at that time, some Tories may have hoped that the British working class would swallow the story that Atlee had given away 'the jewel in the Crown' and this would mean a decline in their own standard of living. The problem was that the British were war weary. Nobody wanted to be sent to India to keep the peace in between bouts of malaria and dysentery.
I don't agree that Great Britain is leaving India because she has been forced by circumstances to do so. I think she is leaving India because she has lost the will to remain there
dysentery can have that effect
and she has done this because she no longer possesses, as you point out, any understanding of the moral basis of imperialism
which is that dying of dysentery is part and parcel of the White Man's burden.
or the responsibilities which it entails.'
Once you start shitting out your own entrails, you will curse those responsible for sending you to India.
There was, however, no real disagreement between us. So far as I was concerned, the article relieved me from a great burden of mental irritation. I thought that having made a clean breast of it I should be able to go through the full unfolding of the process I was seeing with calmness. Neverthelcss, I was not prepared for the actual squalor and shame of it. This will now be described.
Jerrold had given Niradh the pat on the back for which he had been craving all his life. It was at this moment that this 'Scholar Gypsy' found his literary vocation. It would consist in saying what no English man could say without being accused of being a sore loser or an irresponsible fantasist. Jerrold thus became responsible for Niradh's rewriting his whole life so as to make it consistent with three articles he wrote in 1946 when, as an East Bengali Hindu, he felt a natural anxiety for the fate of his own people. Parents used to tell their children not to grimace or pull faces because if the wind changed direction, that grimace would remain frozen upon their countenance for all time. It was Niradh's good fortune that the White's preferred the grimace to the face he was born with. Though his knowledge of history was slender and he lacked the capacity to reason, he received a leg up from the die-hard Tory before himself becoming the recipient of affirmative action in multi-culti Britain.
Alternatively, perhaps the whole thing was an imposture. He knew he was a fool and thus played the fool with, not a straight face, but that of a squinting gargoyle.
I suppose what he himself said of Tagore (and here he was seconded by William Rothenstein and Yeats)- viz that first there was a real poet and then a wholly unreal prophet created by and for the market- could apply equally to himself. He had been quite a successful jobbing journalist, or publicist, who then became a broadcaster compiling and presenting useful enough information. Then, in 1946, Douglas Jerrold turned his head and a false persona was created- a sort of dingy Jeremiah or Jonah crying woe unto, not Nineveh, but Nehru's India.
On Tagore, Niradh said -
The more (Vishva-Bharati, the Art College Tagore set up) looked like a total failure, the more he clung to it. It became a femme fatale for him, his Manon Lescaut.
He created it spending a lot of his own money. He also created what he hoped would be an Institute of Agronomy which was taken over by his friend Leonard Elmhirst. Shantiniketan did create good livelihoods for some of its more talented students. It was never disreputable in any way.
By contrast, there was something disreputable about Niradh writing for a die-hard Tory rag. Perhaps he was overawed by Jerrold's famous literary forebears and high position in the English publishing. What is certain is that his concern for the fate of his own people excused his foolish articles. It was something he should have put behind him. Instead he re-wrote his whole life to become what he had falsely presented himself as- viz. a darkie deeply grateful for the Raj and who desired nothing more than that some new Brigadier Dyer be sent to India to machine gun the revolting natives.
But this Manon, instead of dying in his arms and leaving him to his regrets, drove him to death, while she herself not only survived but, leaving behind all her past escapades, became a sordid and commonplace housewife.
There were no escapades. Tagore created Shantiniketan and kept it on the straight and narrow. Later the Central Government took it over and made it a conventional University.
But his literary life ceased to be his only life, and to some extent it became even secondary to his public life. Thus, during the last thirty years of his life there existed two Tagores, one true and the other false.
The true Niradh was the one who had written the INC's position paper on the need to Indianize the Army. The false one was elicited by a pat on the back from Douglas Jerrold.
This dichotomy was at the root of the tragedy that his later life was.
His tragedy was the loss of his wife and two young children some years before he got the Nobel.
Yet the false life unfolded in such a chain of circumstances, interacting with his character, that the outcome seemed to be inevitable.
He didn't have the money-raising skills of the Hindu Saint who can successfully shake down the Marwari, if not the American, billionaire.
In contemplating it one is driven to believe in fate. As his disillusionment grew so did his bitterness against fellow-Bengalis. The language in which he wrote about them reminds me of the lamentations of Job.
They remind us of Niradh's fulminations. He quotes the following from a letter by Tagore written in 1931-
There was a question in your letter whether I have engaged paid agents to spread my fame. This sort of suspicion is possible only in Bengal. It is here that people whisper that I won the Nobel Prize by a trick, and the English of the poems which brought me fame was written by a certain Englishman.
It is well known that all these so called 'Englishmen' are actually from Ludhiana. Did you know Shakespeare's real name is Sheikh Peer? John Milton is actually Janardhan Mishra.
In a footnote, Niradh makes a similar complaint-
I might add that when my autobiography got excellent reviews from such literary figures as Harold Nicolson,
Hemchand Narang. He was a boy in my class. He couldn't speak even one word of Inglis. How he can be writing 'review'?
Raymond Mortimer,
claims to be 'Anglo-Indian'. His real name is Ramchand Mehta. He does know some curse words in Inglis. This comes in useful in his line of work. Like Hemchand, he is a pimp.
Sir John Squire
also a pimp. Real name Jitendra Singh.
and others, fellow-Bengalis said that my literary agent had supplied all of them.
Bengalis are very gullible. As a Madrasi, I can tell you there are no books in Inglis langwidge. Prof Goswami claims otherwise. But he also claims to have got PhD in Inglis from Cambridge University! There is no such place. Kumbakonam does have a Government Arts College but not a University. Everybody knows that best Inglis is spoken in Kumbakonam only. My maternal great-grandfather studied there and this knowledge has been passed down to me through four successive generations. Niradh, sadly, did not have my advantages. Writing of Tagore's death, he says-
With his faith in an eternal afterlife
he was a Hindu. He believed in reincarnation. He just didn't want to be a Bengali in his next birth.
he looked forward to the eternal peace that would be his. But without that faith death could only bring him his Nirvana - extinguishment.
release from the bondage of re-birth. That's all a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Jain asks for.
In any case, for us he personally is no more.
He is still with his readers or, more intimately, with those who sing his songs.
His life as lived with its achievements and trials remains only in its records as the concern of living generations.
Shantiniketan has lived on. It continues to produce great men and women. The citizens of two countries sing the National anthems Tagore penned.
Here it is that the tragedy continues: his real personality will not be recalled as an example,
it is recalled well enough in his earlier work before he turned into a professional scold.
and his work will be like a buried city of the past.
No. It will remain an open book. We can skip over the scolding and stick to what was lyrical or heart-felt.
Only the fetish Rabindranath will remain, but not for the purpose for which it has been created by his people.
I suppose, this was Niradh's fate. He has been claimed by the 'Grievance Studies' po-co crowd.
It will hang round their neck as punishment,
the English men of letters who praised Niradh are well punished for their vain desire to see their own countenance in the 'cracked looking-glass of a servant'.
like the albatross round the neck of the Ancient Mariner,
it was fastened there, instead of the cross, by the other sailors.
and it will not drop from there
till the mariner sees the beauty which exists in all God's creatures- even the slimy denizens of the Ocean deep. The moral is-
He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all
because the Bengalis will never be able to pray for forgiveness for their sins against him.
Niradh, who pretends Tagore took to crime so as to feed Shantiniketan's insensate desire for luxury, did not pray for forgiveness. There was much self-love in Niradh's heart but that self was false.
If there was a false Tagore, created by the world-wide success of 'Gitanjali', it was redeemed by his quite genuine piety and devotion together with his determination to raise up his own people with such resources as he possessed.
Niradh Chaudhuri chose to become an entirely false creation which, briefly, may have flattered the Imperial vanity of a Jerrold, or even a Churchill. But his passion was for a Christendom without Christ, a Britain only considered great while it dragooned darkies and kept the proles in their place. Still, in worldly matters he, as he repeatedly affirms, did better, in material terms, than many of his contemporaries whose abilities and prospects greatly outshone his own. His life was a comedy but only because his laboured lucubrations were a ludicrous combination of 'uchvas' bombast and 'rasabhasa'- the inappropriate mixing or adulteration of emotions. I suppose, I could say the same of myself. But I am genuinely stupid and lazy. Niradh wasn't. Indeed, few Bengalis are. That is why it is important for them to heed the wise words of Sheikh Peer- 'To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man". I have often thought of visiting Sheikhji in Bradford-on-the-A1 where I hear he is employed as a kasai. I feel more Indian origin people should follow my example and gain some knowledge of Inglis langwidge. French, however, should just very kindly go marry its Drama Teacher and get slapped silly by her.
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