Dr. Jaspreet Singh Boparai may have studied at Oxford, Cambridge, the Courtald Institute, the Warburg Institute, the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and so forth. Yet, he remains a simple Punjabi bumpkin who doesn't get that peeps with phoren degrees in non-STEM subjects are required to write utterly illiterate or unreadable English. Otherwise, people will think they are stupid or that they are 'coconuts'- brown on the outside, white on the inside- who have become indifferent to the opinion of us desis.
In an essay for Antigone magazine he claims that
Satyajit Ray and Nirad Chaudhuri both demonstrate, in their own ways, how completely an Indian could master the English language in the 20th century, and make it his own, without ever having to leave home, or submerge, compromise or deny his identity, his ancestral culture, or his heritage.
This is bizarre. The Dutt family was writing better, more natural and idiomatic, English in the mid nineteenth century. Ray didn't write much in English. His detective stories were in Bengali. Chaudhuri started to publish in English after he had given up on his 'ancestral culture' and heritage. Indeed, from 1946 onward, he was engaged in bitterly denigrating both. He didn't have to leave India but he chose to leave India at the age of 73 and, settling in England, was very happy there. Ray, the nephew of Nitin Bose- who introduced play-back singing to Indian cinema- loathed Indian movies and wrote long articles asserting that they were crap. As an auteur, he owed nothing to the Indian cinematic tradition- even in instances where that tradition drew on German or American directors.
If you compare Niradh's writing with that of his old boss, Ramananda Chatterjee's, you understand why people said the standard of English at Calcutta University began to fall from around 1905. Ramananda got his MA in English seven years before Niradh was born. He had the intellectual self-confidence to devote himself to making himself useful to his country. He did not curse his fate for having not having been born in Paris. He held no grudge against his own people for not being Frenchmen of the Eighteenth Century. That's why any article he wrote was highly effective in advancing the cause he had adopted. True he relied on statistics, rather than irrelevant quotations from Pascal, but, like Dacca Muslin, his prose was pellucid. The idea he wished to convey was never encumbered by yards of fustian or weighted down by gaudy ornaments.
There is an obvious reason why standards, at least as regards English prose, fell during the Twentieth Century. The Calcutta graduate would increasingly interact only with other Indian graduates, not with Englishmen. There is nothing to be ashamed of, or to be apologetic about, for this development. True, some fools continued to write in ludicrous 'Babu' fashion, but those who mattered moved towards a spare, logical, prose style of a wholly utilitarian type. That was a good thing. The Georgian style of a Jerrold or Sir John Squire was anathema to T.S Eliot and George Orwell. Why? Because it was shoddy. It was stupid. It was the reverse of Augustan. Its practitioners, in themselves, constituted a crapulous Dunciad.
These men were able to accomplish all this, and create works of lasting importance, thanks not only to the self-confident intellectual society within which they arose,
Prior to about 1905, there was intellectual self-confidence in Calcutta. That's why poorer rustic lads like M.N Roy or Dhan Gopal, coming to Calcutta for higher education, could embrace a Revolutionary creed and end up, by the early Twenties, in New York or Berlin or Bolshevik Moscow, playing an equal part in the politics of the future. Sadly, once parents- like Niradh's father- discovered that Education could become the path to political exile, they heartily endorsed a re-infantilization of the University. What mattered was that their sons get clerkships- unless they were smart enough to do STEM subjects- and that they lack intellectual self-confidence for the excellent reason that the thing was misplaced. India was as poor as shit. The economic substructure was too slender to support much in the way of a parasitic intelligentsia.
and the first-rate institutions that educated them,
Indians wanted the Universities to become second-rate and then third-rate and finally morph into places where ambitious young people could acquire valuable work-skills- e.g. beating people with hockey sticks or, for those who wished to serve society by becoming legislators, raping and stabbing all and sundry.
but also to a literary tradition that was already over a century old when The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published.
Being interested in religious matters, Raja Ram Mohan Roy did learn Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Arabic. He already knew Sanskrit and Persian and learnt English quite quickly. His writings were important in that they provided ammunition for the Unitarians. But Roy & Tagore's Brahmo Samaj dedicated itself to being as boring as shit and to scolding anything which moved. Ray and Niradh firmly believed that being boring and scolding their fellow Bengalis was the path of virtue.
Boparai thinks Chaudhuri had a good knowledge of English literature. This isn't true. To be fair, he hadn't taken the old BA (Arts) degree which did have papers on Eng Lit. Instead he joined the new History department though, sadly, he couldn't get his MA. There was a great vogue for Anatole France in the early Twenties in Calcutta and he did apply himself to learning French- perhaps because his tutor at the Scottish Church College was Dr. Kalidas Nag whose Doctorate was from the Sorbonne. But Niradh, unlike Bibhuti, was not widely read in contemporary English literature. To take one example, Niradh didn't understand that the words Apu utters on first seeing the rustic girl he would marry- 'they breed Goddesses at Slocum Magna!'- was a reference to a recent English novel which highlighted the charms of a, somewhat isolated, rural part of England. In context, the quotation was highly apposite. Niradh thought it must be a reference to some obscure poem.
Chaudhuri managed to capture and encapsulate an entire culture at the moment of its passing,
Nonsense! He was a good friend of Bibhuti but failed to appreciate his adventure stories or his stories of the occult. He showed no awareness of the accomplishments of his contemporaries- Swamy Prabhupada was a batchmate at Scottish Church, or Hemanta Kumar Sarkar who was his age but who got the gold medal for MA Sanskrit in 1919. Niradh's coterie was initially rather narrow, but he was employed by Ramananda Shastri and all doors were open to him. He just wasn't very interested in what was happening behind them. Thus, he can't answer any question Indians interested in the period might have even about authors like Sarat, whom he met. The man had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. There were some fascinating personalities whom he must have interacted with- e.g. Dr. A.K Mukherjee & his wife, Savitri Devi- but, about them, he is wholly silent.
unconsciously and almost in spite of himself.
The reverse was the case. He was a thrifty fellow and recycled everything he had written as a jobbing journalist. But he was long on bombast and short on observation.
He was an honest observer with a shrewd eye, an excellent memory and a scrupulous, fastidious attentiveness to detail, all of which enabled him to chronicle the complexities, paradoxes and contradictions of the society that made this work possible.
He wasn't Proust. Indeed, he doesn't seem to have read Proust. He fancied himself a Sainte- Beuve though, it was obvious that the fellow had praised mediocrities while dismissing Balzac, Hugo & Baudelaire.
This is the secret to the author’s grandeur – not his attempts to sound like a Cabinet minister under the Marquess of Salisbury.
Salisbury's ministers were aristocrats who had no interest in sounding like a pederastic Don or a provincial barrister on the make. I suppose, Arthur Balfour is meant. But he had a keen intellect and was something of a philosopher.
Niradh suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to return to his parent's home, after getting into debt during a period when his father financed his stay in separate lodgings while he prepared to re-take the MA exam. He was rescued from rural idiocy by the publication of an article he had written- based he says on one of Pascal's provincial letters- lambasting some other literary upstart. This was not grandeur, it was a sort of megalomania such as may afflict a tormented mind. Still, if writing rubbish of that sort would get him back to Calcutta, he would gladly do it. No doubt, people were laughing at him. But it is better to be laughed at because you have a mania for Pascal rather than that you are laughed at because you are a drooling maniac.
At its best, the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian avoids abstractions in favour of vivid anecdotes and reliable experience:
No. It embraces gossip- the man was after all a journalist- but it is wholly unreliable.
you trust Chaudhuri’s judgment when he generalises, because you
are a Punjabi. You have a low opinion of Bengalis.
know he is not trying to marshal evidence for some theory or other.
He was Bengali. He didn't need no stinkin' evidence.
Ray's first film was faithful to Bibhuti's text and was a box office hit in Bengal precisely because audiences had grown up reading Pather Panchali. His second wasn't faithful and did not do well. He tells us that it was then that he started to think of the foreign 'Arthouse' market as a way to break even. With 'Charulata' he was careful to be faithful to the text, or if that was impossible, at least to be careful with the mise en scene.
What is Ray showing us in Charulata, and what is he trying to tell us?
He is showing us what Tagore wanted Bengalis to see. Don't steal money. It isn't a nice thing to do. Also, instead of just banging on about the greatness of Gladstone, maybe you should have bang your wife once in a while. Some women want to have babies of their own, you know.
Why should Classicists be interested in this, beyond the pleasure, satisfaction, intellectual enrichment and moral insight always to be gained from the work of a great artist?
The theme of the neglected wife isn't Classical. It is Romantic and rather bourgeois. Jaspreet doesn't answer his own question. I will. Tagore is referencing Madhusudhan's reworking of Aeschylus's Agamemnon in which Clytemnestra refuses to cook hilsa curry for her hubby thus causing him to die of a broken heart.
Jaspreet shows a commendable ignorance of India in this article but, for a man with a very thorough English education, I am puzzled by his ignorance of England.
Throughout the 19th century, it was impossible to enter the Indian Civil Service, or be called to the Bar, without a good command of Latin and Greek; as it happens, the Hindoo College offered instruction in neither language.
The ICS exam, like the current UPSC exams in India, allowed you to choose from a number of subjects- e.g. Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Maths and Science.
Greek and Latin favoured younger candidates fresh from Public School. The Bar did not require Latin though it would be helpful for the Roman Law paper. But cramming was all that mattered. It must be said that the cramming establishments were a vast improvement over the 'grinders' who had previously got boys through their exams. At a later point, when the Army introduced similar exams, crammers sprang up all over the place. Since there was a good chance that a disgruntled student might kill you with a single blow, tutors developed novel and innovative methods to educate their students while still keeping up the success rate of the institution.
In India, nowadays, there are plenty of such crammers all over the place. Some are very good. Others are only marginally better than the average Government College. Nevertheless, this is a 25 billion dollar industry. The Bengali bhadralok, it must be said, owe nothing to such places. Children may receive private tuition at home but, speaking generally, they had no difficulty in passing exams without additional assistance.
Back in the Eighteenth Century, Calcutta had a Bengali Greek community which had its own priests and a school for young people. The great Indologist Demetrios Galanos, was engaged by an agent of that community in Constantinople to come to Calcutta as a teacher of ancient Greek and Latin. He arrived in Calcutta in 1786 and stayed for six years before settling in Benares and devoting himself to the study of ancient Hindu texts. His was the first European translation of Chanakya-niti. He died in 1833. My point is, if your city is wealthy, learned foreigners settle in it and you can learn their ancient languages for them without any great trouble or expense. Indeed, the Renaissance was sparked by the influx of Greeks fleeing Islamic persecution. It has been suggested that, in England, the visit of the Byzantine Emperor, seeking help against the Turks, in 1400 led to some Greek Orthodox scholars settling in England where they may have been sought out by Lollards. There does not appear to be any evidence for this. Still, the fact is, Greek learning only took off after it became profitable to print books in Greek- more particularly after 1559 when the country officially became Protestant. I suppose Elizabeth I's love of Greek set the fashion of the period. Still, leaving aside the question of religious persecution or royal patronage, the plain fact is England did not possess a broad enough market for Greek learning till the middle of the sixteenth century. The earlier enthusiasm for the language, remarked by Erasmus who, being too poor to journey to Italy, first came to England to study Greek, appears to have been a localised phenomena centred on charismatic teachers who had studied in Italy. It seems this set a trend where new Grammar Schools would have in their Charter the stipulation that Greek must be taught, if suitable instructors could be found. In other words, there was a slow build up of 'effective demand' which finally crossed a financial threshold such that print capitalism could itself remove the bottleneck to expanding the market. I suppose the triumph of the Protestant faith and increasing maritime and then manufacturing opulence did ultimately permit the attainment of 'critical mass' such that the Romantic movement could be nourished by a more purely Greek Paideia. In particular, the practice of learning Greek through Latin could be abandoned such that the passion of the original burnt through its pious or prudish veils and, naked, enter English hearts.
Thus gaining an Empire greater than that of Rome, English literature could leap its Latin fence only to discover what lay beyond was ha-ha followed by ha-ha.
One may say something similar happened in India. Those who wanted more English or Urdu or Tamil or whatever campaigned to get the thing made compulsory in schools so that 'effective demand' would rise and thus the market would find it profitable to supply the commodity more and more cheaply as economies of scope and scale kicked in. Once this happened, supply would create its own demand because of the signalling value of costly 'credentials' which henceforth support a 'separating equilibrium'. The problem is that a thing which is used as a signal may have no utility whatsoever. Indeed, the 'handicap principle' may operate. Higher education, of a literary type, may be a type of brain destroying activity which only those of great natural superiority, with plenty of grey matter to spare, can endure without turning into gibbering imbeciles. Of course, the same thing may be said of popular culture.
There was a time when parents nodded approvingly if their child was poring over the pages of a vernacular novelist. By the time I was born, Granny would snatch such volumes out of your hand. Read Enid Blyton, you little shit. After that, you can graduate to Agatha Christie or P.G. Woodhouse. If you are super smart, and bound to get into IIT or IIM, we will buy you Archie Comics so you can get a head start in assimilating American culture.
At one time Educational credentials served a rationing purpose. But, as general purpose productivity began to rise, to use 'handicaps' (e.g. having wasted four years studying obsolete shite at Collidge) for signalling purposes, became counter productive. Maybe the guy who studied Classics was always stupid. He couldn't have hacked any other type of course. Alternatively, he was a pederast and should be employed at the sort of very expensive school to which parents who hate their kids send them.
In India, fathers obeyed Chanakya's maxim- indulge your son for the first five years, discipline him for ten, and then turn him into a friend. Thus they did not wish for more than ten years instruction in useless shite. Ideally, their lads should get a job at the age of 17 or 18 and get married and become self-supporting soon after that.
I may mention, the Hindoo student was welcome to get coaching in Latin and Greek or anything else from Professors and Padres in the City. If this was directly linked to professional advancement, then money would be found for it.
If the Hindoo College offered only English-language instruction, and offered its students Classical texts only in English translation, then how could a Bengali of the period develop any skills in Latin and Greek
pay for tuition. Alternatively pretend that you really really want to convert to Catholicism and get free instruction from the Jesuits or Benedictines or whatever. I think the canny Presbyterians and even cannier Anglicans insisted you convert first before you gained any benefit. This is because the Catholics take catechism seriously. Apparently, it has nothing to do with being catty. This is the only reason I am not the new Pope.
– or pass the exams necessary to qualify for the Bar, or the Indian Civil Service,
those exams were held in England where plenty of crammers existed. You had to eat dinners for three years to become a Barrister. That was the difficult part. The cramming was easy. You could get it done in a month. It simply isn't true that anybody needed to be good at Latin and Greek in order to succeed in any field save that of the pedant. Mathematics and Statistics on the other hand did become more and more useful and gained in prestige over the course of the Nineteenth Century. The Nedwigate winner was as likely as not to turn out to be a moron. The same was true of the Senior Wrangler but none dared voice that suspicion.
or other professions where classical knowledge was a non-negotiable requirement?
There were none such. The Brits opened Medical and Engineering schools in India. If you did well there, then you might get a scholarship to study further in England. Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, Gandhi's first sponsor, came to England on a Medical scholarship. He also qualified as a barrister but made his money in the gem trade in Burma. He wrote in Gujarati, not Latin or Greek.
In Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s case, the process involved being kicked out of the Hindoo College, then spending three years at Bishop’s College, a missionary institution set up by the Anglican Church in 1820 to train preachers, catechists and schoolmasters. Such a path was unavailable to anyone unwilling to convert to Christianity – to which many major figures in the Bengal Renaissance were cool or sceptical, to the point in some instances of open irreverence (if not outright hostility).
Jaspreet does not understand that the teachers at Bishop's College were poor. They would gladly come to your house and teach you anything you liked, two or three times a week. There were some Indians who became what the English, at that time, considered 'Classicists' in that they translated from Greek verse to English verse and vice versa and sought to reproduce classical metres in English. Sadly, if you had nothing interesting to say, nothing you wrote could command much of a market. On the other hand, if you did have something interesting to say, nobody wanted you to adopt an absurd Latinate diction peppered with obscure allusions to Hesiod or Homer. The Classics didn't matter then to Indians nor do they matter now. Madhusudhan is valued by some Bengalis because of his contribution to blank verse. Aurobindo is valued because he was a freedom fighter and then a Guru. However, his interminable verse is little read. His elder brother, a Classicist like himself, did receive some recognition as a poet in England but Indians did not like him.
A quite separate subject is Indian Christians who contributed to translations of scripture into vernacular languages. They made a significant contribution to comparative philology though, to my best knowledge, no systematic study of the subject has been made. I may mention that there are some Brahmin Mimamsaka families who took to the Law and who, for many generations now, have kept up a scholarly knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Latin and Greek as well as at least two or three modern Indian languages. As far as I can see, these accomplishments, though admirable, don't translate into having anything interesting to say. Still, I imagine, back in the heyday of the Theosophical Society when folk had faith in a Philosophia Perennis or some Casaubon type key to all mythologies, their collective mental lives, if only to themselves and in such fugitive moments of leisure as the Courts spared them, must have glittered like Indra's net of pearls.
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