Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri CBE (23 November 1897 – 1 August 1999) was an Indian writer.[1]

Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Born(1897-11-23)23 November 1897
Kishoreganj, Mymensingh, British India
(present-day Bangladesh)
Died1 August 1999(1999-08-01) (aged 101)
Lathbury Road, Oxford, England
Pen nameBalahak Nandi, Sonibarer Cithi, Outsider, Now
Occupationwriter and commentator on culture
NationalityIndian
Period1925–1999
Genreliterature, culture, politics, war strategy, winery

In 1990, Oxford University awarded Chaudhuri, by then a long-time resident of the city of Oxford, an Honorary Degree in Letters. In 1992, he was made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[2]

Biography

Chaudhuri was born in Kishoregunj, Mymensingh, East Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh), the second of eight children of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, a lawyer, and of Sushila Sundarani Chaudhurani.[3] His parents were liberal middle-class Hindus who belonged to the Brahmo Samaj movement.

20 Lathbury Road, the former home of Nirad Chaudhuri, with its blue plaque.[4]
The blue plaque for Nirad Chaudhuri in Lathbury Road, North Oxford.[4]

Chaudhuri was a prolific writer even in the last years of his life, publishing his last work at the age of 99. His wife Amiya Chaudhuri died in 1994 in Oxford, England. He too died in Oxford, three months short of his 102nd birthday, in 1999. He lived at 20 Lathbury Road[5] from 1982 until his death and a blue plaque was installed by the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board in 2008.[4]

Student historian Dipayan Pal wrote of Nirad C. Chaudhuri in The Statesman in 2016:[6]

Why was he always in love with England, though he had never visited the land before the age of 57? These questions perplexed me and the only answer I could decipher is that perhaps Nirad Chaudhuri was in search of a home that he could call his own.

And perhaps this street in 1980s took him closer to the novels of Hardy and Austen. Lovers of literature not only see texts through their lives but also sculpt live through the texts they read. His textual affinity was coupled with the colonial aura he grew up with- we must remember that he spent his first 50 years in an empire where the sun never set.

His England was a realisation of certain dominant sensibilities and visions he idealised but they were far from reality. Places like 20, Lathbury road makes me wonder why people choose to migrate and why certain places receive more sanctity than others. For Nirad Chaudhuri, England was sacred and for some America is. The solution to this onerous puzzle cannot be found in better living standard or socio-economic conditions of higher wages.

Furthermore, certain places celebrate certain people. Nirad Chaudhuri would have been immensely happy if he knew about the blue plaque as it would fit his sensibilities perfectly. Even Oxford County Council was happy enough to remember this “an original thinker, forthright in his opinions and an internationalist, in the sense of one who embraces the best of all cultures but never loses his own.

Major works

His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, published in 1951, put him on the long list of great Indian writers. Chaudhari had said that The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is 'more of an exercise in descriptive ethology than autobiography'. He is concerned with describing the conditions in which an Indian grew to manhood in the early decades of the century, and as he feels that the basic principle of book is that environment shall have precedence over its product; he describes its affectionate and sensuous detail the three places that had the greatest influence on him: Kishoreganj,the country town in which he lived till he was twelve; Bangram; his ancestral village; and Kalikutch, his mother's village. A fourth chapter is devoted to England, which occupied a large place in his imagination. Later in the book he talks about Calcutta, the Bengali Renaissance, the beginnings of the nationalist Movement, and his experience of Englishmen in India as opposed to the idyllic pictures of a civilization he consider perhaps the greatest in the world. These themes remains preoccupations in most of Chaudhari's work, as does his deterministic view of culture and politics. He courted controversy in the newly independent India due to the dedication of the book, which ran thus:

To the memory of the British Empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon 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.

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. Furthermore, 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. Chaudhuri argued that his critics were not careful-enough readers; "the dedication was really a condemnation of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in a 1997 special edition of Granta.[7] Typically, to demonstrate what exactly he had been trying to say, he drew on a parallel with Ancient Rome. The book's dedication, Chaudhuri observed, "was an imitation of what Cicero said about the conduct of Verres, a Roman proconsul of Sicily who oppressed Sicilian Roman citizens, who in their desperation cried out: "Civis romanus sum".[7]

At the age of 57, in 1955 for the first time Chaudhari went abroad. After coming back he wrote a novel Passage to England (1959). In this novel he talked about his visits of five weeks in England, two weeks in Paris and one week in Rome. He has given all these figures only as he wants to show the intensity and range of the experience he went through in these eight weeks. During this period he visited statues, paintings, plays and other work of arts. He also visited buildings, landscapes and gardens and also heard music and poetry.

Honours
  • Duff Cooper Memorial Award in 1967
  • Ananda Purashkar in 1988
  • DLitt from Oxford University in 1990.[8]
  • Vidyasagar Purashkar in 1997 by the Govt of West Bengal
  • Desikottama in 1997 by Viswabharati

Books
  • 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)

References
  1. "Nirad C. Chaudhuri | Bengali author and scholar". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  2. The Unrepentant Vision (Television production). Doordarshan.
  3. "Chaudhuri, Nirad Chandra". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/72657. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. Warr, Elizabeth Jean (2011). The Oxford Plaque Guide. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. pp. 34–35. ISBN 978-0-7524-5687-4.
  5. Symonds, Ann Spokes (1997). "The Chaudhuris". The Changing Faces of North Oxford. Book One. Robert Boyd Publications. p. 90. ISBN 1-899536-25-6.
  6. Pal, Dipayan (19 May 2016). "An unknown Bengali in Oxfordshire". The Statesman.
  7. Chaudhuri, Nirad (1997). India! The Golden Jubilee [Granta 57] (Spring ed.). Granta. pp. 209–210. ISBN 9780140141474.
  8. "The Nirad C. Chaudhuri Page". Stat.stanford.edu. Retrieved 11 July 2012.
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