November 23 was the 100th birthday of the Oxford-based writer whose works evoke intense adoration and provoke savage hatred. A tribute to the intellectual oddball who has happily if unquiely reconciled India and England.

By Swapan Dasgupta

It was a refusal to buckle under contemporary fashion that first catapulted Nirad Chaudhuri to notoriety. His controversial dedication to the British Empire in India which fashioned "all that was good and living within us" led to his ostracism by the elite of a newly-independent India which saw itself in the vanguard of decolonisation. Imbued with Jawaharlal Nehru's optimism over the future, they were unwilling to countenance the fact that the history of the British Raj in India was not an unbroken record of evil. Yet, in viewing the 190 years of British rule as a mixed blessing, Nirad Babu was not being a contrarian. He was essentially echoing the conventional wisdom of his childhood in Bengal when the peace and social stability offered by the Raj was favourably contrasted to the anarchic conditions prevailing under the later Moghuls. British rule gave the Hindus of Bengal a respite and an opportunity to regain their composure ...

Nirad Babu always had the ability to distinguish between nationalism in the abstract and the Indian nationalist movement. He was among the earliest who detected what has subsequently been mythologised as the "subaltern" current in the freedom movement. Its venality and narrow-minded fanaticism alarmed him. However, his distrust of the Anglicised upper-middle classes which controlled the Congress was equally marked. As he wrote in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, "I had found its members weak in character, mediocre in intellectual ability, and totally lacking in idealism and public spirit." In a sense, Nirad Babu anticipated the moral fragility of the post-independence order and its inability to take India forward.

Nirad Babu was savage in his dislike for the new class of Anglicised Indians who stepped into the shoes of the departing British in 1947. This facet of his personality may even seem inexplicable to those who see his avowed Englishness as merely a social style. The confusion is legitimate if Nirad Babu is judged in terms of the identity the Modern Indian has deemed appropriate for himself: cosmopolitan, pan-Indian, agnostic and superficially westernised.

Unfortunately, Nirad Babu was none of these. "When I hear my foreign friends speak of 'an Indian' or 'Indians' I sometimes interrupt them breezily," he wrote in Continent of Circe, "Please, please do not use that word, say 'Hindu' if you have in mind a human type common to the whole continent ..." Elsewhere, in his Bengali writings, he has described himself as both a Bengali and an Englishman. At the same time, Nirad Babu revels in the fact that he is always known as Nirad Babu not Nirad sahib -- a subtle but crucial distinction between one type of Bengali bhadralok and another ...

The question of Nirad Babu's self-identity is complex and easily misunderstood by those Indians who are unfamiliar with Bengali society. The traditional Bengali, since Raja Ram Mohan Roy, has straddled the worlds of Bengaliness and Englishness with remarkable ease and without any apparent sense of conflict. He may be fastidious about his western apparel, particularly the cut of his suits, the knot on his tie and the make of his shoes -- as Nirad Babu quite certainly is. He may even know about the streets of London and the shires of England without ever having been there -- as Nirad Babu did. But he would rather stay at home than attend a Bengali marriage or the Durga Puja celebrations in anything other than a dhoti -- preferably pleated -- and a punjabi, preferably crimpled. "I never put off my dhoti for bathing until I came to Oxford in 1970, and I have to do so here because it is very difficult to dry a dhoti," he wrote in 1980. There is a Nirad Babu who will walk through town dressed as an English gentleman ought to be dressed, but the same Nirad Babu will be immaculately turned out in dhoti while receiving visitors at home. There is a Nirad Babu who will sneer at a westernised Indian who does not know French, but he will be equally contemptuous of an educated Hindu who is untutored in Sanskrit. Nirad Babu is the personification of Bengali high culture -- a happy marriage between the traditionalism of England and the traditionalism of Bengal. The upholder of Bengaliness sees no contradiction in a culture and lifestyle that has been the bhadralok ideal for at least 200 years. The conflict is in the eyes of those who are either deracinated or avant-garde. Nirad Chaudhuri appeals to neither. He personifies the most vibrant and enlightened face of Bengali Hindu conservatism.

Which brings the subject to the equally complex issue of Nirad Babu's relationship with England, his home since 1970. Simplistic theories abound. I have met one former colleague of his in All India Radio who swears that Nirad Babu took him aside in early 1948 and whispered in his ears: "Mark my words, in two years the British will be back!" In Unknown Indian, he wrote about the possibility of the "United States and the British Commonwealth ... re-establish(ing) and rejuvenat(ing) the foreign domination of India". By this logic, Nirad Chaudhuri is an orphan of Empire who just had no place in independent India. In a lengthy article in Bengali, Nirad Babu offered his own explanations which largely centred on climate and convenience. He was keen to dispel an impression that it was an inability to earn a livelihood in India through his writings that nudged him westwards. In short, while he may well be an intellectual exile from conformism, he is not an economic refugee. When he arrived in Britain in 1970, he turned to his wife and remarked: "I am feeling as if I was a soldier coming home from leave from a battle-front."

"Coming home" may be another of Nirad Chaudhuri's polemical over-statements, but the expression is nevertheless an accurate expression of the bhadralok's enduring love affair with England that even withstood Kipling's "banderlog" jibes. It is a relationship that constitutes the flip side of those Englishmen who go "native" after India. Nirad Babu is an uncompromising devotee of English institutions, including the monarchy, Parliament and the Church of England. He admires Empire and sees England as a nation that had those qualities to build the greatest empire in the world from nothing. He is fascinated by English history and England's heritage which he has systematically imbibed since childhood in Kishorganj. At the same time, he is disgusted and repelled by the England he sees around him. He is appalled by the promiscuity, by the moral laxity of the welfare-state generation and the lack of commitment to the values that once made England great. To him, England does not deserve itself. "I have now been driven back on the conclusion," he wrote in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, "because I can in no way resist it, that the greatness of the British people has passed away for ever, and the only question now is whether their last days would be serene and honourable and, hoping for the best, will be lit up by the glow of a sunset."

Mapping decline through the grand sweep of history has been at the heart of Nirad Babu's concerns -- though not, as he always hastens to add, because of his advancing years. He has witnessed Bengal's fall from grace, its effortless jettisoning of its Raj inheritance and the consequent degeneration of its culture into triviality and envy. He has been unable to reconcile himself to the self-flagellation and effete defeatism of the Hindus -- a reason why he detected a glimmer of hope in the Ayodhya movement. He has been angered and frustrated by Britain's willing acquiescence in a new order that negates the very essence of its history. And he sees in the rise of America the evidence of the moral collapse of western civilisation.

There is a strong temptation to dismiss Nirad Chaudhuri as a quaint but inconsequential anachronism who harks back to an ideal age when Empire and enlightenment blended harmoniously. It should be resisted. Nirad Babu is indeed an oddity, but his exceptional status stems from his readiness to show us what we would rather not face up to. In the 100 years of being an Indian -- despite all temptations to belong to other nations -- he has straddled two Indias. One shaped all that was "good and living within us"; the other provoked Pope's imagery of collapse. We may not agree entirely, but it is difficult to find another Indian who can match his grand sweep, his erudition, his accomplishments and his penchant for having the last laugh. If you disagree, just look around.

Extracted from Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The First Hundred Years; A Celebration (HarperCollins Rs 250).

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