Open Writing

After schooling in Kishorganj, Nirad Chauduri shifted to Calcutta (today’s Kolkata) for college education. He joined the Scottish Church College for his BA with History Honours, and topped the Calcutta University - a leading University of repute in the British Empire. This was no mean distinction. Yet, he could not or did not appear in all the exams for his MA, and never got a post-graduate diploma. Yet, most of his works are today subjects for doctorate and post-doctoral research, which shows that academic distinction (and excellence) does not depend on the suffix or prefix to a name.

There was always historical perspective with an incisive analytical approach in most of Nirad Chaudhury’s work. Many may disagree with his views, but none can question his intellectual integrity. In fact, he was at one time one of the most unpopular writers on India in India - not least in political and bureaucratic circles. But, at the same time, he was one of the most widely read columnists and writers in this country. It was easy to disagree with him, but impossible to ignore him or his views. It only goes to prove that there was an uneasy element of truth in the essence of his criticism of his country. Nirad Chaudhuri was a patriot who loved his country, but hated hypocrisy and cant which he found in ever increasing measure as he moved along in life.

Hero worship is a habit of which none can accuse Nirad Chaudhuri. In a country where Mahatma Gandhi is viewed with the same reverence as the Buddha, he had his own clinical analysis of the man and his life. In fact, he wrote a premature obituary of Gandhi in 1943, when he undertook his fast. It was largely laudatory, but not an eulogy. As for Nehru, he admired the man’s modern outlook and impatience with typical Indian tendency for ambivalence. This is what he wrote on Nehru in an essay on India after Independence on Nehru, after quoting the adage “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”:

“Yet, the man who on the day of independence became virtually the dictator of India, was not himself a scoundrel or even a counterfeit. He was wholly genuine, as an Englishman of radical views. But he was not endowed with practical political capacity. As soon as with independence he abandoned his former role of demagogue, he became an ineffable ideologue, flapping his wings against the bars of the cage in which he was put by the bureaucracy.

The political programme which he himself wished to put into effect was to make India a Soviet Union in technology, and a parliamentary democracy in governance. He alone did not realise that he was really a dictator without the will to exercise his dictatorial power. I said so publicly in an article published when he was living.”

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