Nirad C. Chaudhuri
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| Nirad C. Chaudhuri | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 23, 1897 Kishoregunge, Mymensingh, British India (presently Bangladesh) |
| Died | August 1, 1999 (aged 101) Lathbury Road, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom |
| Pen name | Balahak Nandi ( sonibarer cithi ) outsider ( now ) |
| Occupation | writer and commentator on culture |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Writing period | 1930s-1999 |
| Genres | Literature,Culture,Politics |
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চন্দ্র চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) (23 November 1897 – 1 August 1999) was a Bengali Indian writer and a commentator on culture. He was born in Kishoreganj, then in the Mymensingh district of East Bengal (formerly East Pakistan, now Bangladesh).
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[edit] His life
He was educated in Kishorganj and Kolkata (then known as Calcutta). For his FA (school leaving) course he attended the Ripon College along with famous Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Thereafter, he attended the prestigious Scottish Church College, Calcutta, where he studied history as his undergraduate major. He graduated with honors in history and topped the University of Calcutta merit list obtaining a first class first, which was a rare distinction in those days. At Scottish Church College, he attended the seminars of renowned historian Professor Kalidas Nag. Later after graduation, he enrolled for the M.A. level course at the University of Calcutta. He did not attend all of his final exams of the M.A. programme, and therefore did not earn his M.A. degree.
He started his career as a clerk in the Accounting Department of the Indian Army. At the same time, he started contributing articles to popular magazines. His first article on Bharat Chandra (a famous Bengali poet of the 18th century) appeared in the then most prestigious English magazine [[[Modern Review] (Calcutta)|Modern Review]]. He left the job in the Accounting Department shortly thereafter, and started a new career as a journalist and editor. He was involved with the editing of the then well-known English and Bengali magazines [Modern Review], [Probasi] (Bengali) and [Sonibarer Chithi] (Bengali)
He started two short-lived but highly esteemed Bengali magazines, Samasamayik and Notun Patrika.
This time he was a boarder in a mess at Mirzapur Street near College Square , Kolkata. There famous writer Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder was his co-boarder.
In 1938, he got a job as the secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, a famous political leader during the freedom movement in India. As a result he was able to interact with the then renowned political leadership of India -- Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the more famous brother of Sarat Chandra Bose - Subhas Chandra Bose, the future Netaji. This resulting familiarity with the workings of the inner circle of Indian politics led him to be skeptical about its eventual progress, and he became progressively disillusioned about the ability of Indian political leadership to chart a new course for India's future.
He married Amiya Dhar in 1932 and had three sons. Amiya Chaudhuri was also a well known writer in her own right.
Apart from his career as a secretary, he continued to contribute articles in Bengali and English to newspapers and magazines. He was also appointed as a political commentator on the Kolkata branch of the All India Radio. In 1941, he started working for the Delhi Branch of the All India Radio.
Throughout his life, he followed the dicta of the great English Neoclassical poet, Alexander Pope:
| “ | This long disease, my Life | ” |
| “ | The Proper Study of Mankind is Man | ” |
He was a productive and prolific writer till the very end; publishing his last work at the age of 99. Casting a dyspeptic eye on Indian Independence in 1947, he wrote his autobiography, which spanned the height of the British Raj in India to its eventual dissolution. His wife Amiya Chaudhuri died in 1994 in Oxford. He died in Oxford, England two months short of his 102nd birthday in 1999.
To his last day, he remained the quintessential Victorian English country gentleman, if not by birth, then by knowledge, habit, refinement and taste. He lived by the genteel standards of a Victorian squire until he breathed his last.
[edit] His major works
His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (ISBN 0-201-15576-1), published in 1951, put him on the short list of great Indian English writers. He courted controversy in the newly independent India in the dedication of the book itself which ran thus:
| “ | To the memory of the British Empire in India, Which conferred subjecthood upon us, |
” |
The dedication, which was actually a mock-imperial rhetoric, infuriated many Indians, particularly the political and bureaucratic establishment. "The wogs took the bait and having read only dedication sent up howls of protest", commented Chaudhuri's friend, the editor, historian and novelist Khushwant Singh. Chaudhuri was hounded out of government service, deprived of his pension, blacklisted as a writer in India and forced to live a life of penury.
Chaudhuri comented later that he had been misunderstood. "The dedication was really a condemnation of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in the Granta article. Typically, to demonstrate what exactly he had been trying to say, he drew on a parallel with ancient Rome. The book's dedication, he said "was an imitation of what Cicero said about the conduct of Verres, a Roman proconsul of Sicily who oppressed Sicilian Roman citizens, although in their desperation they cried out: "Civis Romanus Sum".
Although his autobiography was a brilliant attempt at a subaltern view of Indian history, the free and forthright views of Chaudhuri were not appreciated by the political establishment. Soon after publishing that book, he had to give up his job as a political commentator in All India Radio as the Government of India promulgated a law that prohibited employees from publishing memoirs.
In 1955 the British Council and the BBC jointly made arrangements to take him to England for eight weeks. He was asked to contribute lectures to the BBC. He contributed eight lectures on British life. Later these lectures are collected in the Passage to England modified and edited. E.M Forster reviewed it in The Times Literary Supplement. It is his largest selling book to date.
His 1965 masterpiece The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, which was a rare honour for an Indian writer as he was the first, and still the only Indian, to be selected for the prize. In the board, V.S Naipaul was there to appreciate Chaudhuri's work for its insightful prose.In the prize giving ceremony he opined that a writer only can play the role of a Ganesha.
In 1972, he was the subject of a Merchant Ivory documentary, Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization.
He published a sequel to his autobiography, entitled Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, in 1988.
In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE).
In 1997 he published his last book [Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse]. This is the only book recorded in history to be written by a writer at his 100th.
[edit] His idiosyncrasy and discernment
- Chaudhuri wrote in Patterns of world politics – “I gave my interpretation of the international situation by describing the Soviet-American rivalry as the latest cycle of a very old European conflict – such as had taken pace periodically between the greatest World Power and the greatest Continental Power of Europe. The first cycle was fought between England and France, and the second cycle between England and Germany. The United States had taken place of England and the Soviet Union that of France and Germany. These conflicts had shown that the Continental Power never won against the World Power, in spite of possessing overwhelming military superiority on the continental mass. If a war do come about, the United States will ultimately win, whatever ups and downs in the interval”.
- Chaudhuri wrote in his Autobiography – “Working within the emerging polity of the larger Europe, the Anglo-Saxon can be expected to lay claim to a special association with India on historical grounds. In plain words I expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United States and the British Commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India”.
- He was a connoisseur of wines
- He liked Gregorian chants and listened to it regularly.In his last rites also it was played upon his will
- He was well versed in the different languages like Sanskrit,Hindi,Bengali;Greek,Latin,English French,German.Thus he was able to taste Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, in the original Latin and Italian and sought solace from them when faced with the ravages of modern life.
- The English language used by him was prolix, prosaic, Victorian, riddled with French, Latin, Italian and German phrases without any translations. His work was intended for a highly sophisticated and culturally literate readership familiar with the stylistic nuances of those languages..
- He used a very highly Sanskritized and stylistic version of Bengali language or the Shadhubhasha (সাধুভাষা) for his prose works in that language. He had little respect for the proletarian language {Choltibhasha (চলতিভাষা ) or Cholitobhasha (চলিতভাষা)} which he regarded as being plebeian in taste and scope. His language was largely free from Arabic, Urdu and Persian words and expressions.
- Although he was highly critical of the post-independence Congress party establishment, he was more sympathetic to the right wing Hindu nationalist movement in India. He refused to criticise the destruction of Babri structure - "I say the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 AD every Hindu temple from Kathiawar to Bihar, from the Himalayas to Vindhyas had been sacked and defiled."
- His views on Hindutva, like those of other scholars like V.S. Naipaul and Koenraad Elst although widely disseminated in the Indian media were not widely appreciated. To this day he remains a controversial figure.
- He was also deeply distressed by what he saw as the deep hypocrisy in Bengali social life and in particular those that resulted from class and caste distinctions. His historical research revealed to him that rigid Victorian style morality of middle class Bengali women was a socially enforced construct, that had less to do with religion, choice and judgment, but more to do with upbringing, social acceptance and intergenerational transference of values. Being a scholar in the comparative-historical mode, he could see very clearly that the excessive suppression of sexuality in modern India was actually counterproductive and counterintuitive. In this, it could be argued that he was a student of sociology and was following the footsteps of Max Weber, and to a certain extent, the psychology of Sigmund Freud. Yet in another way, he was also a feminist although he rejected dogmatic feminism quite early in his scholarly career.
- His second son Kirti N. Chaudhuri is an acclaimed historian at the University of London.
[edit] Books
He wrote the following books in English:
- The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951)
- A Passage to England (1959)
- The Continent of Circe (1965)
- The Intellectual in India (1967)
- To Live or Not to Live (1971)
- Scholar Extraordinary, The Life of Professor the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muller, P.C. (1974)
- Culture in the Vanity Bag (1976)
- Clive of India (1975)
- Hinduism: A Religion to Live by (1979)
- Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987)
- Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997)
- The East is East and West is West (collection of pre-published essays)
- From the Archives of a Centenarian (collection of pre-published essays)
- Why I Mourn for England (collection of pre-published essays)
He wrote the following valuable books in Bengali also
- Bangali Jibane Ramani (Role of Woman in Bengali Life)
- Atmaghati Bangali (Suicidal Bengalee)
- Atmaghati Rabindranath (Suicidal Rabindranath)
- Amar Debottar Sampatti (My Bequeathed Property)
- Nirbachita Prabandha (Selected Essays)
- Aji Hote Satabarsha Age (Before a Hundred Years) (A Hundred years ago)
