Facets Of India: A Quaint Indian" Englishman'' - Part Two
...It would not be hyperbole to say that Nirad Chaudhuri was an anglophile. In fact, he was an unabashed admirer of the English way of life, and tried to emulate what he considered the best of taste and culture in English life...
Hariharan Balakrishnan continues his endearing portrait of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a scholar extraordinaire and author of "The Autobiography of an Unkown Indian''.
This unknown Indian’s autobiography is a tome of some 400 pages in small print. I bought it sometime in the 1970s. While I was impressed by the meticulous detail of life in the Bengali village in the early twentieth century, and got the bonus of gaining knowledge of districts like Khulna, Borisal and Mymensingh of the erstwhile East Pakistan which is now Bangladesh, and vibed with the author in his ecstasy about the river Pabna, I was baffled by the liberal sprinkling of French and Latin that dotted this labour of love written in excellent English. “Maybe the venerable old man wants to over-awe the reader with his erudition”, is what I thought as a callow youth in his twenties. But then, later, as I read his “A Passage to England” and “Continent of Circe”, I found the same proclivity for the foreign phrase. I concluded “the man is the style”.
It would not be hyperbole to say that Nirad Chaudhuri was an anglophile. In fact, he was an unabashed admirer of the English way of life, and tried to emulate what he considered the best of taste and culture in English life. His penchant for dressing up in public like an immaculately well-dressed Englishman in India (complete with a top hat) made him somewhat of a public caricature on the streets of Delhi- not least because of his diminutive stature of “five foot and nothing”.
Winston Churchill found his Autobiography “one of the best books I have read”. The Oxford University awarded him a D. Litt. He was also conferred an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II - a rare honour for an Indian who migrated to England at an age past three score and ten. The reasons may be debatable, but the recognition was well deserved.
Yet, at home he was dressed like a quintessential Bengali bhadralok (gentleman) in the essential attire of his native Bengal which consisted of a dhoti and kurta made of cheese cotton or muslin. He dressed this way even “at home” in Oxford till the end. He also sat cross-legged on the floor in true Indian style while at home. This was one man who could recite lengthy passages from great works in Bengali, Sanskrit and English literature that mesmerized scholars of repute. They listened attentively to words that came out of this diminutive cerebral man of the century. Was Nirad Chauduri a contrarian?
The fact that he was an anglophile did not prevent Chaudhuri from criticizing the changing mores in Britain of the late 20th century. In fact, some of his observations of social life in modern England were scathing. Maybe it would be right to say that he loved England as it was, and not as it is today. In fact, he had a quarrel with the times in which he spent the latter half of his life, when India became a Sovereign Democratic Republic. Essentially, Nirad Chaudhuri was an antiquarian. Or was he?
H. Balakrishnan
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