Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (born November 23, 1897, Kishorganj, East Bengal, British India [now in Bangladesh]—died August 1, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) was a Bengali author and scholar who was opposed to the withdrawal of British colonial rule from the Indian subcontinent and the subsequent rejection of Western culture in independent India. He was an erudite and complex individual who acknowledged the British Empire’s role in modernizing India—a stance that polarized his contemporaries, who found it either objectionable or commendable. He seemed to have been born at the wrong place and in the wrong time. Distinguished Indian critic K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar clarifies this claim, stating: “The truth about him seems to be that he is at once more Indian than most Indians and more English than many Englishmen. With this double edge of sensitivity he achieves insights denied to most, but he also isolates himself from the crowd.”

Chaudhuri was the son of a country lawyer, Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, and Sushila Sundarani Chaudhurani. In his youth he read William Shakespeare as well as Sanskrit classics, and he admired Western culture as much as he did his own.

Prominent works

Chaudhuri’s debut on the Indian literary scene was fraught with controversy. He dedicated his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), to “the memory of the British Empire in India.” The work is divided into four books, chronicling the passage of his youth into adolescence. In it, he describes his birthplace, Kishorganj; his mother’s village, Kalikutch; and his ancestral village, Banagram, which he and his family visited each year during the Durga Puja season. He strongly believed that “all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.” Needless to say, this sentiment was far from popular in a newly independent nation trying to grapple with its insecurities in which anti-colonial sentiment was rampant. Chaudhuri’s book was excoriated, and he was hounded from his job as a broadcaster and a political commentator for All India Radio (AIR). Called the “last British imperialist” and the last of the “brown sahibs” (sahib was a term used to refer to British officials), he was ostracized by the Indian literati.

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Chaudhuri’s 1959 travelogue, A Passage to England, was based on his 1955 visit to Great Britain. In it he explores the contrast between ideas and reality, as well as between Indians and the British, arguing that their differing views set them apart, creating a division that reflects the distance between the two ends of the world. Chaudhuri’s work is the attitudinal antithesis of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). While Chaudhuri expresses a complex admiration for British culture within the context of colonialism, Forster critiques the very foundations of that colonial relationship, highlighting misunderstandings and cultural divides between the British and the Indians.

Chaudhuri’s work marks the trajectory of his views on imperialism, evolving from an initial admiration for British rule as a civilizing force to a more critical stance that acknowledges imperialism’s complexities and contradictions. In the charming preface to A Passage to England, he recounts his experiences in Europe and expresses his deep appreciation for European culture in these words:

The face of England remains smiling. When I was in England I felt this contrast, as well as the timelessness. If this book has any purpose more ambitious than the straightforward one of setting down a small number of impressions with some whimsical obiter dicta, it is the wish to convey a little of this feeling of permanence and antithesis.

In his 1965 work The Continent of Circe, Chaudhuri offers an ethnographic perspective on India, portraying modern Hindus living in the subcontinent as “exiled ‘Aryans’ ” from their original European homeland. He concludes the book by urging his compatriots to leave India and return to “the Europe of the living.”

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Later years

In the 1970s Chaudhuri chose to leave India for England. There he settled in the university town of Oxford. He had envisioned this move as a homecoming of sorts, but he found a much different place than the England he had idolized. He proved to be as much an oddity in England as he had been in India: the English—who, unlike the bulk of his countrymen, respected him—did not understand his unique combination of proud “Indianness” coupled with a deep nostalgia for the past glory of the British Empire. By the same token, Chaudhuri could not accept the metamorphosis that the English had undergone in the years since the decline of the empire, and he was appalled by what he perceived as the total lack of commitment of the English to the values that he believed had once made England a great nation. His disillusionment was reflected in his writings. In the final volume of his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987), which he produced at age 90, he wrote, “The greatness of the English people has passed away for ever.”

The essays in his last book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997)—published shortly before his 100th birthday—return to the subject of the decline of England and comment on what he saw as the degeneration of leadership in India. Only in his later years did Chaudhuri win widespread acceptance and appreciation in his homeland, where the final volume of his autobiography was lauded. In addition to his autobiographies and his English-language essays, he wrote a number of works in Bengali.