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T H E

AU TO B I O G R A PH Y

O F A N U N K N OW N

I N D I A N

N I R A D C.

C H AU D H U R I

INTRODUCTION BY

IAN JACK

N E W Y O R K R E V I E W B O O K S C L A S S I C S

T H E A U T O B I O G R A P H Y O F

A N U N K N O W N I N D I A N

NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI (1897–1999) was born in the town of Kishorganj in East Bengal in the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. His first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian , was published in 1951 and was followed by many others, including The Continent of Circe , for which he won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, and Thy Hand Great Anarch! , a second volume of memoirs. Chaudhuri moved to England in 1970. In 1992 Queen Elizabeth II conferred upon him the title of Honorary Commander of the British Empire.

IAN JACK began his career in journalism in Scotland in the 1960s. For many years he was a reporter, editor, feature writer, and foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Times , mainly in the Indian Subcontinent. He was cofounder and later editor of the Independent on Sunday and has edited Granta magazine since 1995.

This is a New York Review Book Published by The New York Review of Books 1755 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, USA

Copyright © 1951 by Nirad C. Chaudhuri Introduction copyright © 2001 by Ian Jack All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 1897– The autobiography of an unknown Indian / Nirad C. Chaudhuri ; introduction by Ian Jack. p. cm. Originally published: London : Macmillan, 1951. ISBN 0-940322-82-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 1897–2. Bengal (India)—Civilization. 3. India—Civilization—1765–1947. 4. Historians—India—Biography. I. Title. DS435.7.C5 A3 2001 954'.14031'092—dc21 2001004271

ISBN 0-940322-82-X Cover photo: Raghubir Singh, Man Diving and Swimmers, Banaras , 1985 (detail) © Raghubir Singh Cover design: Katy Homans

Book design by Lizzie Scott Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

October 2001 www.nybooks.com

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N IRAD CHANDRA CHAUDHURI lived for a very long time and witnessed the decline of an empire—completely, the whole run of the clockface, from imperial high noon to postcolonial midnight. When he died, in Oxford, England, in August 1999, he was three months away from his 102nd birthday. He had published his last book only two years before. I knew him during his last two decades, as many others knew him at that time, as a deeply mischievous and superbly entertain- ing egoist. It is impossible to exaggerate these aspects of his char- acter, which are also fully present in his writing. The word “ego” held no shame or fear for him. As he sometimes said, it was the brute power of his ego that had driven him onwards and upwards. How else would he have lived so long and productively? His physique had nothing to do with it. He was always frail, with the bustling energy of a small bird, and never stood much more than five feet tall or weighed more than ninety-five pounds. His early circumstances were not promising. Birth and childhood in an ob- scure deltaic town in Bengal usually guaranteed the opposite of Western standards of longevity, nor did they offer any obvious route to a literary career in the English language. “I am a striking illustration of the survival of the unfittest,” Chaudhuri would say. “It comes from self-assertion through writing. Otherwise I should be dead, or living on a clerk’s pension in some foul Calcutta slum.” Instead, and quite late in an average life span, he became India’s most majestic and pungent writer of English prose, possibly the finest Indian writer of English in the whole of the twentieth cen- tury (as one of his obituarists claimed), and certainly the finest in the first three quarters of it—before the burst of Indian writ- ing in English that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s

eyes, and which would not call for research? The answer too was instantaneous: I will. I also decided to give it the form of an autobiography. Quietened by this decision I fell asleep. Fortunately, this idea was not nullified by the de- plorable lack of energy which was habitual with me. The very next morning I sat down to my typewriter and drafted a few paragraphs.

The first pages took some time to write, but once Chaudhuri had fixed his “key and tonality” he was producing 2,500 words a day before and after his short two-hour shifts at the radio station. By the spring of 1949, the book was finished; Chaudhuri reckoned that the total number of days spent writing it came to nine months. He later wrote that this “exercise of will” was helped by the “in- toxication” of recalling from half a century before his early life in East Bengal—a place he hadn’t seen for twenty years. But the book was also helped, or, more accurately, its mood somberly in- formed, by the large events that were shaking India while Chau- dhuri sat before his typewriter and re-created his life from 1897 to

1921. The British Raj ended at midnight on August 14–15, 1947, when the Subcontinent was partitioned into an independent but shrunken India and a new state, Pakistan, the boundaries between them decided by the religious majority, Hindu or Muslim, within adjacent territories. East Bengal became the eastern wing of Pak- istan (now Bangladesh), so that the Hindu Chaudhuri’s ancestral home suddenly lay in a foreign and predominantly Muslim coun- try (he never went there again). With Partition there came waves of homeless refugees and savagery—mass murder, rioting, and looting, some of it in the streets of Delhi outside the writer’s win- dow. Mahatma Gandhi, of whose followers Chaudhuri took a skeptical view, was assassinated in the city on January 30, 1948. And there sat Chaudhuri tapping away at his book as his country was convulsed and transformed, writing “with the consciousness of decay and destruction all around me.” The turmoil of India in 1947–48 doesn’t wholly explain his theme of decay, however. Chaudhuri was an upper-caste Bengali, born the son of a lawyer in the town of Kishorganj in the district of Mymensingh in the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee,

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1897. The British had a longer and deeper and more socially com- plicated impact on Bengal than on any other part of India. Their first Indian capital, Calcutta, was located there; since the early years of steam navigation, their steamboats had paddled up and down the great delta formed by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra; coal mines were sunk and tea plantations established in the higher ground; out of the lower came the cash crops of indigo, opium, jute, and rice. A new kind of Indian arose: urban, professional or entrepreneurial, newspaper-reading, Anglophile, and almost in- variably high-caste Hindu—the components of what has been called the first middle class in Asia. Out of this class, from the 1820s onwards, came religious and social reform movements and a cultural phenomenon known as the Bengali Renaissance, which produced painters, musicians, writers, and scholars. The first Indian novel was a Bengali novel; the first Indian scientists were Bengali scientists; the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize (Rabindranath Tagore) wrote in Bengali. Calcutta, which had been little more than a stockade at the beginning of the eighteenth cen- tury, grew to become the largest city in Asia by the end of the nineteenth. Bengalis could look in the mirror and consider them- selves the most educated, sophisticated people in India—“the French of India”—as some of them still do. But with education and aspiration came nationalist agitation, and the British reaction to it. Bengal was divided by the British into eastern (mainly Muslim) and western (mainly Hindu) provinces in
1898. The division, which prefigured the later partition of India an d Pakistan, turned out to be temporary: Bengal was united again in
1899. But in 1912 the British moved their administrative headquar- ters to Delhi and Calcutta ceased to be a capital. As British power waned in India, so did Bengali enterprise; not because Bengalis were imperial lackeys—Bengal produced some of India’s fiercest and most violent nationalists—but because the economic fortunes of Britain and Bengal were so intertwined and because they were both essentially Victorian societies, and past their peak. When the final partition came to Bengal in 1947, Calcutta lost its great river- ine hinterland to the east, the home of so much jute and rice and of so many Hindu mansions, and never subsequently recovered. Bengal’s decay, at least in Chaudhuri’s view, became complete.

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does—the complex, underlying nature of India might ultimately bear more responsibility for the Indian condition than British imperialism. Or that the British quit out of their own weakness rather than Indian strength. The book’s dedication to the British Empire (to which its Indian subjects owed “all that was good and living” within them) brought outrage in India, as Chaudhuri almost certainly knew it would (and perhaps helped make it a favorite book of a great opponent of Indian independence, Winston Churchill). The shame of this was that it encouraged Chaudhuri in his later life to be a dedicated controversialist and tended to obscure his greatest gift, the intimate writing of his own history. In this book, a far corner of an old empire is made real, from the rare van- tage point of the ruled rather than ruler. It pays testimony to the transforming power of a distant culture and, via Chaudhuri’s abid- ing love of exactness, reveals the richness that lies in the everyday and the specific. In nonfiction, no other Indian writer had done this for twentieth-century India; the foreign writers who tried were hampered by all the usual obstacles to the outsider: ignorance, lan- guage, the comedy of the little understood, the distortions of the downward glance. Fiction was different. Stories that gave insight into India were published in Indian languages—Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, and so on—but they remained largely unknown outside their separate linguistic audiences. A friend of Chaudhuri’s, the Bengali writer Bibhuti Banerji, wrote one of the most famous, Pather Panchali , about a village childhood. A few years after The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published, another Bengali, Satyajit Ray, took Banerji’s story as the subject for his first film, the first great film to come out of India, the first to show what India was like. This book is of that film’s stature, and, at its best, of the same humanity. V. S. Naipaul called it “the one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter.” Chaudhuri knew very few English people and had never seen England when he wrote The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. He moved to Oxford from Delhi in 1970 at the age of seventy-three, and there, for the next twenty-nine years, cheer- fully found evidence at the old empire’s heart of a rich new seam of decay.

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Once he told me at his Oxford flat: “I am what I am on account of British rule in India. And have I shown myself to be worthless? My kind of human being was created. Doesn’t that show the no- bility of the project?” We were having lunch—roast beef prepared by his Bengali wife, Amiya. The Chaudhuris were far from rich, but a splendid effort had been made. Different glasses for the red and white wine, for the water, for the cognac. I gripped one of them by the bowl. A small Bengali hand, created far away in Kishorganj in 1897, reached across the table and slapped me on the wrist. Chaudhuri scowled. “Don’t you know that one always grips a hock glass by the stem? What a nation of illiterate and unman- nerly creatures Britain has become.”

— I A N J A C K

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