Nirad C.Chaudhuri: The End of an Era
Nirad C.Chaudhuri's death on August 1 1999 did not come as a total surprise, and yet it shook the intellectual world.
By VICTOR A. VAN BIJLERT
Born on 23 November, 1897, in Kishorganj, Mymensingh district, East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Nirad was the second of eight children of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri and Sushila Sundari Chaudhurani. The first half of his long life was spent in what was then British India. For most of this period he lived and worked in Calcutta. After studying history he took up a job as clerk in Military Accounts. In the twenties he became active as editor of magazines like The Modern Review and the Bengali journal, Shonibarer Cithi. He married Amiya Dhar in 1932. Between 1934 and 1939 the couple had three sons (one of whom is the famous historian K.N. Chaudhuri).From an early age Nirad C. had been an eyewitness to the rise of Indian anti-colonial nationalism in British India and the changes it brought about. He had seen all the leading figures of Indian nationalism ranging from Aurobindo Ghose in 1908, to Rabindranath Tagore in the twenties and Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru in the thirties and the forties, in action. In 1937 he was secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, brother of the militant nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. During the Second World War Nirad C. was commentator for All India Radio in New Delhi. The approaching independence of British India filled him with grave misgivings.
In May 1947 he began writing his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian which made him widely known after it was published in 1951. The book is representative of much of his later work: enormous erudition and the unashamed display of it; sharp wit; keen observation; relentless criticism of his fellow-Indians; deep-rooted concern about cultural decadence (he was influenced by Oswald Spengler!); an elitist view of life; a genuinely Victorian sense of morality and propriety; and hence generous and well-argued praise for what he considered to be noble aspects of British rule in India (but he was caustic about British lapses). His alleged admiration of the British Raj especially never failed to elicit strong condemnatory reactions in India. In The Autobiography Nirad Chaudhuri not only told the story of his life and intellectual development but also displayed with marked insistence his indebtedness to the great canonical figures of the Bengal Renaissance: Rammohun Roy, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and to European literary heroes like Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Homer, and Virgil. For Nirad Chaudhuri, Rammohun, Bankim and Vivekananda represented the best minds of modern liberal Hinduism. These figures could and did speak to Europeans as their equals. Much to Chaudhuri's regret, this heritage of Hindu liberalism as indeed the best of European cultural heritage was ignored or despised in later times by an intellectually lazy Indian nationalism. In this connection Chaudhuri saw Mahatma Gandhi as a problematic figure whose saintly politics were often misunderstood and abused by his numerous declared followers. In Nirad Chaudhuri's view Indian nationalism had taken wrong turns virtually since the beginning of the twentieth century. This he felt to be a perpetual source of deep anguish. His diatribes against his fellow Indians can be explained by this anguish. In this matter it seems Nirad Chaudhuri followed in the footsteps of Swami Vivekananda and Bankim, who also castigated their contemporary Indians in order to rouse them to patriotism and sacrifice for the nation.
As a sequel to his autobiography Nirad Chaudhuri wrote the voluminous Thy Hand, Great Anarch published in 1987. In the meantime he had settled in Britain. Among his numerous English works are biographies of Max Müller and Clive, volumes of essays on Indian life, history, culture, and politics, and a long essay on Hinduism. His latest book, called Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, appeared only in 1997. All these books are written in a classical English style for which he was justly famous. In 1968 Nirad Chaudhuri began once more to write in Bengali. He published six books in his mother-tongue. The most well-known among them are Atmaghati Bangali (The Suicidal Bengali) and Atmaghati Rabindranath (The Suicidal Rabindranath). Chaudhuri's Bengali essays frequently evoked a spate of indignant reactions in the Bengali press. Nirad Chaudhuri was the only Bengali author who could write classical Bengali as it was written in the nineteenth century, the so-called sadhu bhasha. Nirad Chaudhuri lived for a full century and was among the few Indian intellectuals of note to have witnessed the apogee and the fall of the British Empire and half a century of independent India and commented on all these events. With the death of Nirad Chaudhuri an era has come to an end.
Some recent quotes from Nirad Chaudhuri:
'A man who cannot endure dirt, dust, stench, noise, ugliness, disorder, heat, and cold has no right to live in India.'
'The Beeb does not have the faintest idea of Victorian norms and etiquette. They play to the popular culture. Britain is a corrupt civilization now.'
'Licentiousness. In this sphere decadence is showing less degradation in India than in England and is not becoming a force for destroying the family. This is due to the fact that traditional Hindu society provided a wide scope for licentiousness within family relationships as a safety valve. The only restriction imposed on licentiousness was that it should be secret, always assumed but never paraded. This makes the licentiousness which is now being seen in India less significant than that which is rampant in England.'