Nirad Chaudhuri loved aphorisms. He reveled in their combination of wit, moral rigor, and compactness of expression; in what he called their “intolerance of commonplaceness”; in their ability to shock one into instant argument with their author and with one’s own assumptions about life. He loved how they stick in one’s mind like a burr, and, in nearly every sentence he wrote, he strove for the aphorist’s ideal of pith, truth, clarity, and nettlesomeness.
He achieved it often. It is, indeed, the characteristic Chaudhuri note. It is there in the first line of the first book he published, in the famous dedication of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian:
To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: “Civis Britannicus sum,” because all that was good and living within us was made, ...This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 October 1999, on page 76
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