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, shaped, and quickened
by the same British rule.

When Chaudhuri wrote this, in 1951, he
was fifty-three years old. Independent India was only four—a
thin-skinned toddler, quick to slap back when slapped. “No
nationalist reader of my book needed to go further than the
dedication to acquire a strong
and unconquerable prejudice against
me,” Chaudhuri wrote some thirty-five years later. “This was not
simply heresy, but treason, and it was the high-placed Indians,
educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who resented the statement most
violently.” His words consigned him, in Delhi and Calcutta, to a
spittoon reserved for him alone and whose slippery sides he could
not scale. He became persona non grata, “a known un-Indian.”

In
the end Chaudhuri’s dedication, and the scandalous success of his
Autobiography in England and America, cost him his pension at All
India Radio, where for ten years he’d worked as a writer on foreign
and military affairs; AIR let him go, after a year of internal
intrigue, mere weeks before retirement benefits were to have kicked
in. Simultaneously, India’s Minister of Information and
Broadcasting, acting on a tip from AIR, met privately with those
Indian editors who’d welcomed Chaudhuri’s articles and told
them they could no longer do so. This media ban was not officially
lifted until 1970, when India was twenty-three
—the age, it seems,
that one becomes old enough to appreciate aphorisms. It was then
that the government invited Chaudhuri to write a propagandist tract
on his native East Pakistan. “The Government of India may have
lifted its ban on me,” he told his friend the Sikh writer
Khushwant Singh, “but I have not lifted my ban on the Government of
India.”

These are old stories, and they were told again last
summer, when Chaudhuri died, at age 101, on August 1. I read the
Indian newspaper obituaries with interest, for signs of further
mellowing in the official national attitude toward “Niradbabu.” Not
surprisingly, I found little. Most of the papers, acknowledging his
international reputation as a writer, asked one or another of his
admirers to write a warm, signed tribute. These, however, were
invariably accompanied by unsigned editorials that gave with the one
hand and took away with the other. The one in The Times of India was
typical. In “his pronouncements on Indian affairs,” it said,
Chaudhuri got the problems and the “assumptions behind them” right,
but “he slipped, and did so very often, on comprehending the reality
of modern mass politics.” He wrote brilliantly and with erudition
about Europe and England, but “it was one which was dead and buried
with Mozart, Jane Austen, and Lord Palmerston.” “He lived a life
devoid of compromises,” but he lived it, like a Bengali Don
Quixote, in a world “almost mythical and only partly real … an
India which was entirely his own mental creation.” In other words,
Chaudhuri was brilliant in his own sphere—but that sphere was a mere
soap bubble, coruscating high above a map of Victoria’s vanished empire.
He had nothing to say of relevance to modern India, or to the modern
world.

I can almost hear Chaudhuri cackling—
his laughter came in
gleeful, high-pitched bursts—and saying, as he had said once before, “Of
course my writings did not exert the slightest influence on Indian
opinion! I do not feel ashamed for that. I know the definition of a
prophet… . Even now my countrymen have not learnt to be afraid of
me, and pay no heed to my writing. That is because their minds are
so constituted that if they ever acquire an idea, whatever its
value, they become impervious to a second idea, as if they were ova
which, once they are fertilized by a racing spermatozoon, will at
once grow a hard coat to prevent the entry of another.”

In England, where Chaudhuri lived after 1970, the obituaries were
better—more detailed, more understanding, certainly more stylish.
The Independent, to its credit, said the necessary thing: that he
was, quite simply, “India’s most distinguished writer of English
prose in the twentieth century.” He was also “his country’s most
controversial commentator since independence: a lonely position he
never regretted, maintained with real courage, and indeed grew to
relish.” The Autobiography and its sequel, Thy Hand, Great
Anarch!
(1987), were not really anti-Indian: they were, “as more thoughtful
Indians realized, a heartfelt, often wonderfully lyrical pleading on
behalf of the best of Bengal.” They were also a forceful protest
against the decline of modern Indian culture, which, as Chaudhuri
never tired of saying, “was created by Indians … mainly Bengalis
who had received their education in English … during the British
rule, under the impact of European civilization.”

The British
papers, though, did as poor a job of handling Chaudhuri’s criticism
of the British as the Indian papers did of his criticism of the
Indians. It fell to Tunku Varadarajan, an Indian writing for The
Wall Street Journal, to hammer home the point that Chaudhuri’s
dedication of the Autobiography was as much a slap at the Raj as it
was at the nationalists who so effectively dismantled it. “To the
memory of the British Empire in India,” it reads, “which conferred
subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship”—or, in other words,
“which ruled us, which educated us in its ways, but which never
could accept us into its political life.”

As Chaudhuri writes in
Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, from the very beginning the British
community in India “opposed all political concessions to Indians,
and this they maintained until the end of British rule.” Beyond
that, “they aired their contempt for all classes of Indians
blatantly,” and “their rancor against any Bengali who wrote or
spoke English well was as unrestrained as it was irrational.”
As a result,
“they could drive all reasonable Indians to despair, but could not
intimidate those who were driven by hatred.” Chaudhuri could never
forgive the British, whose rule was “the greatest and most
beneficial economic and political phenomenon the world has ever
known,” for self-destructively inciting hatred among their subjects.
Nor could he forgive their caving into it—their abandoning India, tail
between legs, when the bombs began to explode. Worst of all, when
the British departed, “all the advantages which they had in India by
virtue of their Empire were bequeathed … to those who were
opposed to it, and not to those who supported it.” The pearls of
British India were fed, by the British, to the swine.

Chaudhuri had limitless faith in empires
—“empires as protectors and
reclaimers of civilization,” empires “whose imperialism is
consistent with moral principles, with freedom, and with human
dignity.” But he knew that “to speak in favor of empires, including
the British Empire in India, and
to live in [present-day] England,”
was “like being a Lutheran in old Spain under the Inquisition. Even
Torquemada’s ferocity to the reformers cannot be compared with the
zeal to burn which the British anti-imperialists have!” Little
wonder that Chaudhuri’s criticism of the British, both pro and con,
was given short shrift by the British obit writers.

“The creation of the new Indian culture”
—the culture which produced
Tagore and the Bengali Renaissance—was, said Chaudhuri, “the
greatest achievement of the Bengali people as well as the most
important product of the cultural interaction which [accompanied]
British rule in India.” The beauty and incompleteness of this
cultural creation—beautiful because it so naturally recast
traditional Bengali art into Western forms,
incomplete because there was no real political and
cultural cooperation between the Bengali people and the British—is
rendered poignant throughout all of Chaudhuri’s writing. The writer
himself was no doubt its finest flowering, as evidenced not only in
his two volumes of autobiography but also in his other books on the
Anglo-Indian encounter, especially his biographies of Robert Clive
and Max Müller, and his books on Hinduism and the peoples of India.

Chaudhuri is invaluable, and will forever be invaluable, as a
witness to what happened in twentieth-century India. He is invaluable,
too, in the words of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, as the very embodiment of
perhaps his chief literary subject, namely “how the highest
achievements of European culture can be effortlessly absorbed into
the Hindu personality without making it any less convoluted, deep,
wildly humorous, devious, or sublime.” For this reader, at least, he
is also invaluable as a great penseur, a later La
Rochefoucauld, a coiner of aphorisms that stick in one’s mind like a
burr. I leave you with three:

Unquestioning complacency; facile pessimism; chastened hope and
unrebelliousness; a stern, almost exultant despair—these are the
four stages in a man’s maturing outlook on life.

The distinction between a misanthrope and a moralist: A
misanthrope despairs of himself as well as of his fellowmen; a
moralist despairs of his fellowmen only.

There is no greater misfortune than for a man to die with a
sense of bitterness; he should die, not simply with reconciliation
even, but with a sense of triumph, whatever his worldly lot has
been.

“When I say triumph,” wrote Chaudhuri, “I mean triumph
over the worldly world.” Chaudhuri’s death, like the uncompromising
work he left behind him, was, on his own terms, a triumph.