An Interview with Sasthi Brata

Amitendu Bhattacharya: A stunning sentence, perhaps a quotation, in your novel Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater reads: ‘“A Writer” is one who writes, not someone who has written or is going to write.’ Why is it that one does not get to read you anymore?

Sasthi Brata: I think the reason is, reading is a matter of fashion. When I wrote my first book My God Died Young, it was something which was completely new. Nobody had done that kind of thing before. I was 29 years old and I had presumed to write an autobiography. That, in fact, was its intention. What it didn’t do was to concentrate on a style in which I had written it. I found that rather disturbing. Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater was regarded as salacious. In fact, I have written somewhere else that people who were looking for porn wouldn’t find it and people who were looking for enlightenment wouldn’t find it. It was a straight-forward confessions, a young man trying to make sense of his life. Incidentally, you might include in whatever you want to write, Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater was a pun on Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Nobody got that joke. Nobody! Not in England, not in America, not in India.

AB: You have lived the life of a rebel rejecting many of the things that people take for granted or believe in unquestioningly because they are born into a certain pattern of thinking and reasoning which they find difficult to shake off... [he interrupts]

SB: Well, you can’t be a rebel at 70 or near about 70, can you? That’s what they call me. Who am I to object?

AB: In your autobiography My God Died Young you have clearly stated that you wanted to change your fate. The protagonists in your fictional works, which are thinly veiled autobiographies, express the same sort of desire – to make their presence felt in this world. Have you been able to change your fate? You are at an age now when this question can perhaps be fairly put to you.

SB: Yes, I think I have. Remember, I grew up in a fairly rich and well-established home. And since I left I haven’t been exactly rich. So, of course, I have changed my fate. And to the extent to which I have been able to speak and write and, I think, [I] have made an international name for myself. Yes, I have changed my fate.

AB: At the end of your Confessions you have already presented an answer to the question that I am going to ask you now. But I would still like to know from you: Who do you write for? I mean, how do you view the question of readership? Where is your constituency?

SB: Yes, yes... if I recall [it] right, I haven’t got the book in front of me, I said it was a question that Sartre asks. Is that right?

AB: Yes.

SB: Well, I am a very personal writer. I don’t think of a big audience. I mean, I would like a big audience but actually I am a personal writer. That book [Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater] was written almost as a love letter to various different women. And it is something which people did not wish to accept or understand. I write because I want to write and I couldn’t care a damn as to what other people think. I would like huge numbers of people to read my books and some of them have. But it’s a personal thing, my writing is personal.

AB: A well-known critic has said this about your writing: ‘If mere frankness were everything in literature, these stories would have deserved a high rating.’ How would you react to this comment?[1]

SB: I think that I am responding immediately. It’s a load of nonsense. Some idiot on the street can be ‘merely frank’ and he is an alcoholic and he is roaming about. ‘Mere frankness’ does not make him a writer. No. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t function. In order to be a writer you have actually got to write. And if you have written, people will judge you for the elegance or the inelegance of your style or the way you put your thoughts together. Just ‘mere frankness’... it’s ridiculous. It’s like saying, you know I went to have a tea yesterday. How does that make him a writer? No, no, it doesn’t.

AB: You have touched upon various existential themes in both your fiction and non-fiction. Existentialism has, of course, been a strong aesthetic force in twentieth century literature. Were you aware that you were borrowing from a particular tradition which can perhaps be traced back to the nineteenth century or even further behind? An offhand example would be My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London.

SB: No, I wasn’t. But remember, I had read many Existentialist writers. I had certainly read Sartre and I had read Heidegger. And so these people did influence me. I am now not so certain that Existentialism is necessarily the answer. I shouldn’t presume to instruct you but there is a difference between Essentialism and Existentialism. Essentialism is an Indian philosophy, an idealistic [one] saying we have an essence which precedes [our] existence. Existential says, well, we are what we do. If I am talking nonsense [it’s because] I am a nonsensical person. [Laughs]

AB: Autobiography seems to be your preferred vehicle of literary expression. Why so?

SB: Well, because it involves very little research. [Laughs] I am a lazy man and I know myself to the extent to which anybody can. Freud, of course, said nobody can know himself. I use my material and I mine it. And I don’t have to go to libraries to find out.

AB: Your works largely deal with issues such as Man-Woman relationship, the East-West encounter – the colonial subject’s problem of belonging or not belonging, a search for home and identity, the dynamics of multiculturalism in the West, commentaries on Indian social and cultural life and many other matters which have now become sites of vigorous literary and critical investigation; especially with the emergence of concepts like the Diaspora, postcolonialism and with a paradigm shift in our understanding of sexuality. Can you tell us why an author who is so very relevant today has practically been written off and forgotten?

SB: I think the reason I have being written off is because I haven’t published anything recently. That’s one. And two, I am no longer fashionable because what I said and what I wrote about have now become [the] norm. You know, a rebellion becomes an establishment and what I said has now become the accepted norm. So nobody wants to hear of me because it’s all accepted.

AB: You are right. If I may remind you, Khushwant Singh’s The Company of Women appeared almost 3 decades after your Confessions was published. There was not a word of protest regarding the book’s content. There certainly was a mild controversy surrounding the book release function but that’s another story.

SB: I haven’t read it. I am sorry.

AB: There is a strong opinion that you have objectified women in your books. Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater, She and He and Encounter are a few examples to name. It is important to remember that you were writing around the time when the Feminist movement in the West had attained maturity. How do you respond to this criticism?

SB: Objectified? Like a doctor with a slab of meat or a dead body in his lab. Is that what you are saying? [I utter an ambiguous grunt] Yes, I think you are saying that and I think you are wrong. Objectified? I think it’s absolutely wrong that I objectify [women]. If you read Confessions, for example, the women are, if my memory serves, very much alive. They are not slabs of meat on a couch. I don’t think. I can understand why this is being said. Because people want to label you, they want to put you in pigeonholes. They are incapable of thinking, they are incapable of analyzing, they are incapable of saying: ‘Why is he saying this? Why is he writing this?’ No. ‘Ah, he is talking of women as if they were slabs of meat’. Well, that’s a nice little pigeonhole. Let’s put it there.

AB: Aubrey Menen, Ved Mehta and you constituted one of the first groups of Non-Resident Indian English writers. Yet, so far as the style and content of your books go you can more easily be compared with the late Nirad C. Chaudhuri... [cuts me short again]

SB: Aubrey Menen? I have heard of his name. He is somebody who had mixed parentage, isn’t it? No, I don’t know him. I certainly have met Ved Mehta. I won’t call him a friend but I know of him. I know him. I have met him 3 or 4 times. I really don’t like to be put in a tribal category. I write. I am a writer. Yeah? If somebody else writes like me or agrees with me that’s their problem or difficulty. I really don’t see why I should be included in some kind of club. I don’t belong to a club.

AB: Do you think your self-imposed exile has enabled you to look at India impartially?

SB: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible to look impartially at a place in which you were born, and I was there till I was twenty – getting on to twenty-one. In fact, if you have read my books you will find, the reason I live abroad is not in order to look impartially or partially at India but because I find it more comfortable to live here. That’s all. There is no mechanical reason for it. I am more comfortable here, and uncomfortable in India. I was there last year. In order to get from A to B it’s a huge burden. I don’t like those kinds of things. I have grown accustomed to the comforts, not the comforts, sorry, the convenience of Western life. I wouldn’t like to disown it. I do occasionally go back and stay in India but that’s occasionally. It’s not something which I would like to do continuously.

AB: Oh, that’s a disheartening statement! Because in my next question I wanted to ask if you have made your peace with India and whether we could hope that some day you will return to India, I mean, permanently.

SB: No, I don’t think so. I will certainly return to India, for example, at the end of this year. No, not permanently. It’s too uncomfortable for everything. And I am not talking about comfort in physical terms. It’s difficult. I have spent a whole life thinking about things in great, great depth. Even the most intelligent and the most civilized of people in India don’t seem to grapple with the fact that things have moved on. They are not static. They have moved on. That’s about all I can say.

AB: Now this question is from my father. As a college-going man he had bought all your books and read them with great delight. It is also important to point out that he is not a literary sort of person. He was particularly moved by an incident in your life in which you had decided to abandon your religion but before you actually did so you were persuaded to read the Upanishads and after your reading you announced that you were not ashamed of being born a Hindu and a Brahmin at that. So his question is: Do you still believe in the assertion you had made in your book My God Died Young? And how does it relate to your own definition of yourself as a ‘radical traditionalist’?

SB: Well, yes, I get his question. I understand it. The thing is, remember, I wrote in my book that I went to a Methodist school and I was going to convert to Christianity and all that. And then my uncle said, ‘Well, read your own stuff.’ And I did. Contrary to what people think, I have actually done a great deal of reading within my own... [religious tradition]. I read the Rig Veda, I read the Upanishads and so on. I don’t believe in any of that. I think they are a load of consolum. But if I were to choose between the so-called simplistic Christian-Judaism of the Western world and the Eastern world, I would certainly choose the Eastern world. No doubt about it.

AB: Your language is very poetic. In fact, in the early years of your writing career you had published a collection of poems. Why did you move away from poetry to prose?

SB: I think I was inadequate. That’s all. I was an inadequate poet. I recognized that very early on. In order to be a poet, a genuine poet of any distinction, one has to have a poetic sensibility which I don’t possess.

AB: A lot of people are surprised to know that you actually studied Physics at college.

SB: Ah! Norman Mailer studied Mechanical Engineering. Are they surprised about the fact that he wrote The Naked and the Dead? So what’s wrong with studying Physics? I read Physics and I got a first class in it, although I didn’t finish it. [Laughs] So what? I was enamoured with Physics. I was absolutely in love with Physics. It’s a beautiful, beautiful subject.

AB: Who are your literary inspirations? I mean to say, who are the authors you admire?

SB: [Laughs] Who are the authors I admire? Okay, I admire Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, William Golding. That’s about it.

AB: And who are the Indian writers you like to read?

SB: I haven't read any Indian writers except Ved Mehta. I have only read one of his books called Walking the Indian Streets and I have read Dom Moraes’ Gone Away. And I have also read his autobiography My Son’s Father. That’s about it. And I am not so sure that I would like to be drawn into answering that question because it would sound as if I am very pompous. I am not. I am just a humble person. I write myself and if there are Indian authors doing very well, let them go about and do it. I am neither envious, nor jealous, but nor do I want to read them.

AB: My previous question compels me to ask: What is your take on Indian Writing in English? How do you view the adulation it has received globally in the last two or three decades?

SB: Well, I think that’s a very good thing. Remember, the person who actually wrote the best English, the Indian who wrote the best English... who do you think that is?

AB: I think it was Nirad Chaudhuri. [I answered hesitantly.]

SB: [Laughs] Well, I don’t agree with you. I think it was Jawaharlal Nehru. If you read his Discovery of India you will find, it’s a beautiful, beautiful prose. And that was long, long before Nirad Chaudhuri ever was even born.[2] Anyway, Nirad Chaudhuri writes a kind of pedantic... [prose]. I am not downing it. I also have the audacity to say that in terms of English prose my prose is not too bad. It’s rather pompous to say that. I would say that the Indian who wrote the best English prose was Jawaharlal Nehru. It’s beautiful, it’s absolutely lucid prose. I admire English style, I really admire English style and he’s got it. This man should have been a writer. He bungled everything that he did in politics and [was] an absolute nuisance elsewhere. But as a writer he was brilliant. Not [just] brilliant, he was great.

AB: Do you think that after the Rushdie phenomenon happened in the West the forbearers of the genre of Indian Writing in English have practically been sidelined?

SB: I don’t think. You see, you’re still trying to pigeonhole people. There are individual writers writing and some of them are good, some of them are atrocious. But some of them have been elevated beyond their worth because they are Indians. I think that will go away. That noxious view that ‘Oh, he is an Indian and therefore we must worship him’, that will go away. It will take time but it will go away. And what will be left is a kind of sieved mechanism where the best writers will remain, Indian or otherwise – it doesn’t matter.

AB: Are you right now involved in any project of writing?

SB: Yes, I am. I am trying to finish a book. I am a very lazy writer. I started it about 20-25 years ago and I am trying to finish it.

AB: So when can we hope to see it in the bookstores?

SB: Well, I don’t know. If I finish it. I am 70 years old and I may not even be able to finish it. But I am half way, well, quarter of a way through. [Laughs] Incidentally, if you want to write it down, it’s called Damned by the Rainbow. D-A-M-N-E-D. Damned! Damned by the Rainbow. [Laughs]

AB: What is your daily schedule like?

SB: I read, I watch TV and go to the pub in the evening and get drunk. I tend, tend in fact, to write at night after I have had a few drinks. [Laughs]

AB: Finally, what is your advice for budding authors in India?

SB: No, advice is the most noxious thing to give. Get on with it and that’s it.

---

[1] The quoted sentence appears in M.K. Naik’s seminal work A History of Indian English Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982.).

[2] This statement is factually incorrect and, perhaps, need not be taken literally. Chaudhuri was born in 1897, roughly 8 years after Nehru was born. When Nehru’s works started getting published Chaudhuri was well into his thirties.

Indelibly Khushwant

Khushwant Singh has been a towering figure in the field of Indian journalism and literature for more than half a century now, and given the extraordinary amount of publicity that surrounded the release of Absolute Khushwant: The Low-Down on Life, Death and Most Things In-Between, one would have thought that even at the ripe old age of 95 the enfant terrible of Indian letters has many new and exciting things to say. But the book spectacularly fails to live up to the high expectations whipped up by his publishers and the print media before its formal launch.

Despite Khushwant Singh’s claim that he will continue writing as long as someone does not invent a condom for the pen, the sting has definitely gone out of his Cross ballpoint. The Juvenal of post-independence India has no new satires to sing; the Orwellian tone that once characterized his critique of modern Indian society is no longer trenchant. This book, like some others that came before it, contains the same old stuff in a new package. In fact, those who are familiar with Singh’s writing will surely have a feel of déjà vu―certain sentences and passages appear exactly as they do in his earlier books. For several years now, some of his close friends and admirers have competed with each other in bringing out anthologies of his writing and presenting them to the world as though they were fresh products of his factory. After Rohini Singh, Nandini Mehta and Sheela Reddy, it is now Humra Quraishi’s turn. Whether she has done a good job of it or not, we shall come back to the question later.

The present volume records Singh’s various life experiences, his thoughts on how to live, his opinion of some remarkable men and women, and his views on religion, politics and writing. But these are precisely the kind of things we have read before―his stories about Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Nirad Chaudhuri are pretty well-anthologized. The few paragraphs on Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi and Varun Gandhi that many might consider as new additions to his anecdotal corpus too had figured in the two syndicated weekly columns that he writes.

So, why is it that his popularity has never waned in spite of the fact that all his non-fictional books have become more or less repetitive? He himself admits―without being boastful―that whatever he writes gets published. This frank acknowledgement on his part is the reason behind his enormous success. It is his honesty, transparency and fearlessness which have ensured that he ticks along nicely and have earned him generations of loyal readers.

In the fashion of Montaigne and Bacon (some of the pieces in the collection carry titles, such as, “On Happiness”, “On Work”, “On Honesty”, and “On Death”; thereby making my attempt to compare him with the two celebrated essayists all the more tenable), Khushwant Singh has perfected the art of writing about himself. There is no other living Indian writer who can beat him in this game. At one time it was of course Nirad Chaudhuri who was the greatest practitioner of the autobiographical mode of writing but his prose was most pedantic and he was obsessed with exhibiting his scholarship. On the other hand, it is the directness of Singh’s writing which has touched the correct nerve. Even if one reads an old piece of his, it is never a boring exercise. He certainly knows how to charm the reader. He is the saqi who generously pours his vintage wine into the cups of the drinkers but also knows how to keep the thirst alive in their hearts so that they return to him again and again. More often than not, he has new nuggets to add to the things he has written before. To illustrate, he makes the sensational disclosure that he was cuckolded for twenty-odd years!

Contradiction has been a permanent feature of Singh’s literary architecture. On one page he remarks that his wife was a jealous person and resented his casual meetings with women, and on another he writes that though they sometimes embraced and kissed him in front of her she did not mind at all. But more than textual inconsistencies it is the editorial slip-ups which are an eyesore. The piece that was supposed to speak of his regrets in life concludes as a long diatribe against L.K. Advani. Penguin India and Humra Quraishi should have been more careful.

Although there is nothing splendid about the book, the diverse themes covered in it are integrated by Khushwant Singh’s unique voice and he emerges as an honest, tolerant and humane person who has, in these days of rampant fanaticism, uncompromisingly defended the excellent values of his liberal training.

Postcolonial Destitution

While going through the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, edited by Vinay Dharwadker and A.K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: OUP, 2007), I came across this Tamil poem entitled "Situation" by Kaa Naa Subramanyam. It has been translated into English by the poet. I quote the poem in its entirety:

Introduced
to the Upanishads
by T.S. Eliot;

and to Tagore
by the early
Pound;

and to the Indian Tradition
by Max Mueller
(late of the Bhavan);

and to
Indian dance
by Bowers;

and to
Indian art
by what's-his-name;

and to the Tamil classics
by Danielou
(or was it Pope?):

neither flesh
nor fish blood
nor stone totem-pole;

vociferous
in thoughts
not his own;

eloquent in words
not his own
('The age demanded...').

[Page 101]

Doesn't this poem effectively show how rootless we Indians are nowadays? Doesn't it compel us to think how our understanding of our culture, customs and traditions is not through our own modes of experience but through the works of Westerners? Even the language in which you and I think, talk and dream is not our own. It is the English language that we have learned to worship. I am not completely at ease with the argument that English has stayed long enough in the country to be regarded as an Indian language. I believe such arguments are made by those who have a knowledge of the language and who stand to gain if a special status is accorded to English. It is certainly not the view of that overwhelming majority of the Indian population who speak, think and dream in the "vernacular" languages. But the other side of the story is that we cannot really do without English. It is the only cement that can hold together a linguistically-divided India. English also presents itself as the lone weapon to keep in check the ever-rising menace of Hindi chauvinism. But I don't want to go into the question of English in India. Since the topic is too vast and nuanced, I will reserve it for some other time.

Anyhow, we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs. And we have two centuries of British colonisation to thank for it. Professor D. Venkat Rao, my teacher at the English and Foreign Languages University, would perhaps describe the strange condition as "postcolonial destitution", where "destitution in matters of thinking concerns the inability to know what questions to ask, what inquiries to pursue," and "European cultural intellectual past continues implicitly and explicitly to regulate postcolonial attitudes toward the host culture." "Host culture" in our context is India. What we need at the moment is a synthesis of ideas both Eastern and Western. Mind you, I mean the best ideas in both the cultures. Does that sound familiar? Yes, of course. The leaders of the Bengal Renaissance advocated that sort of an arrangement. So, it's more than time that we follow their advice. Let us not ape the West blindly all the time. We have our own systems of thought and knowledge and we would do well to go back to them. Parents who think it is fashionable to make their children babble and wail in the English language may kindly take into account the fact that if one knows the mother tongue well other languages can be learned without much effort.

"Ash'ar" by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

It would indeed be pompous and pretentious of me if I tried to introduce Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Who doesn't know him? It's probable that one may not have read him but I doubt if there is a single educated person in the Indian sub-continent with even a passing interest in poetry who hasn't heard of him. Suffice it to say that he is regarded as Pakistan's greatest poet, one of the last practitioners of the glorious tradition of Urdu poetry writing that included such greats as Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Assadullah Khan Ghalib, Bahadur Shah Zafar and Mohammad Iqbal. His poetry is much noted for its secular and socialist content. But he has also composed such gems as "Aaye kuch abr kuch sharaab aaye", sung beautifully by the Ghazal King Mehdi Hasan. As I write (rather type), I have before me a gem of a book Poems by Faiz, translated with an introduction and notes by V.G. Kiernan published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi (2007). Kiernan has been a close friend of Faiz and the translations are approved by the poet. I could post all his poems on this blog, because they excel each other in quality and it is difficult to make a choice. However, I have chosen the very first poem in the collection. It's called "Ash'ar" and appears in Naqsh-e-faryadi, translated as Remonstrance or 'Complaining Image'. The poem in its original goes like this:

Raat yun dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aayee
Jaise viraane mein chupke-se bahaar aajaaye
Jaise sahraaon mein haule-se chale baad-e-naseem
Jaise beemaar ko be-vajh qaraar aajaaye.

Now I present to you Kiernan's translation of it. He translates it in two different ways. The first is titled "Last Night" and goes like this:

Last night your faded memory filled my heart
Like spring's calm advent in the wilderness,
Like the soft desert footfalls of the breeze,
Like peace somehow coming to one in sickness.

The second version is titled "Verses" and is translated as follows:

Last night your lost memory so came into the heart
As spring comes in the wilderness quietly,
As the zephyr moves slowly in deserts,
As rest comes without cause to a sick man.

(Image of Faiz Ahmed Faiz taken from www.getpakistan.com/home/celebrity/faiz.htm)

Nirad C. Chaudhuri: A Victorian or a Bhadralok?

Following is my article that was published in Jawaharlal Nehru University's Journal of the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies (Vol. XI., Spring 2009 issue, p 68-79), under the title "Nirad C. Chaudhuri: A Voice of Dissent in ‘New Literatures in English’". I know a blog is not the place where you should be posting your research articles but, frankly speaking, I have run out of ideas and didn't know what to post on my blog. So this one fills in the gap nicely. Besides, not everybody reads "scholarly" journals and my action should be seen as a humble attempt at demystifying the aura of highbrow inapproachability that surrounds such publications. Moreover, 23rd November is Nirad Chaudhuri's 112th birth anniversary and it's a tribute to him. And lastly, I present it to you for the simple fact that I want to show off my "knowledge" and "wisdom". Please acknowledge the source if you happen to quote from it. Plagiarism is simply not done. Therefore, I have removed all notes and references. Anyway, here goes:

The Jaico Publishing House’s copy of Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian contains an advertisement for the book in the very beginning. It is given in the form of an excerpt from a favourable review Glasgow Herald carried on the book when it was first published by Macmillan and Co., London in 1951. It evaluates the book as an extraordinary one “written by a Hindu of East Bengal who has never been in Europe, yet with a command of English that is not exceeded by Mr. Nehru himself”. For many in the West, and also in India, Nehru is an epitome of the Anglicized Indian. He is, perhaps, the best example of the breed (“…a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”) Macaulay envisaged to raise through the introduction of English education among Indians. In 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru is reported to have said:
India is in my blood…. And yet I approached her almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her as a friendly Westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity. And yet doubts rose within me.
But Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s attitude, as revealed in the dedication of his Autobiography, is one of total supplication and indebtedness to everything British. He dedicates this debut book “to the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus Sum’ [I am a British citizen], because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule”. With this one sweeping stroke Chaudhuri obliterates every possibility of arriving at a contrapuntal analysis of India and its history. Nehru, despite his deeply-etched Anglophilia, adopts a sympathetic tone in regard to India. All the negative and critical assessments taking shape in his mind are relatively neutralized by the effect of “doubts” arising in his heart about his own judgements on India’s past and its present.
While Nehru is remembered as an ardent nationalist, Chaudhuri (born in 1897, the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria) has remained an uncompromising Victorian and a staunch Bengali Bhadralok throughout his life. The painstaking zeal with which Chaudhuri maintains these two identities as part of his overall personality probably explains the self-contradictory stances that he often appears to adopt in his writings. The history of this Victorian/Bhadralok double-role has had its origin in his childhood. The early story of this unique personal development – the impressions, ideas and influences that shaped his later life and his intellect – is vividly recorded in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.
The Autobiography begins with a detailed and analytical account of the author’s childhood days in Kishorganj, his place of birth; his ancestral village Banagram and his mother’s village Kalikutch. The manner in which the life and the landscape of these places – their rivers, seasons, houses, flora and fauna, men, rituals, fairs and festivals – has been depicted is at once evocative and most fascinating. In Khushwant Singh’s view, the book offers “the most beautiful picture of Eastern Bengal that anyone had ever painted”. It would perhaps be wrong to claim that nobody else has portrayed East Bengal so beautifully in writing, for there exists a great body of writers and poets who have done that commendably in Bangla. But it is certainly true that the beauty of the land found expression for the first time in English on the pages of Chaudhuri’s Autobiography. These passages describe what may be termed the ‘timeless Bengal’ and as a consequence, hold infinite appeal to anybody who has ever lived in or loved the backwaters of Bengal. The value of the minutely presented facts of family and social life in the book, as William Walsh points out, is enhanced by a deep anthropological and historical learning that the author disgorges in his narration. The evocative spirit of the prose is not restricted to the description of semi-urban/rural Bengal alone. In 1910, the author moved to Calcutta for the purpose of his education and lived there till 1942. And therefore, a major part of the book deals with Calcutta, as seen by him in the second decade of the twentieth century. When he went there Calcutta was still the most important city of India and the Second City of the British Empire after London. It has also been the birthplace and seat of modern Indian culture. Though puzzled initially at the grandeur and complexity of the city, nothing misses his ever-perceptive eye. He records the cityscape and the dynamics of Calcutta’s social, political and cultural life at great length which is not just absorbing but, because of its sheer quality, outstanding. More than half a century after the publication of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Anita Desai in her Foreword to Krishna Dutta’s book on Calcutta remembered how she, as a young person, was enamoured by Chaudhuri’s description of Calcutta. He also brings out the differences and discords between the characters of East Bengali and West Bengali society remarkably well – aspects which are lesser known to most outsiders even today.
Born into a family of Brahmo Samajites, the conditions of his upbringing have been multifarious and therefore, exceptional. The climate of his nuclear family house at Kishorganj, comprising his parents and siblings, was free of corrupt and superstition-laden practices of Hinduism. But he came in direct contact with elaborate religious ceremonies at his ancestral village Banagram. These rituals left a permanent impression on his mind and laid the foundation of a life-long interest in Hinduism. His father, a lawyer, and his mother, a plain home-maker, were liberal-minded and had intellectual inclination which helped young Chaudhuri broaden his outlook and initiated him into the world of knowledge at a very early age. The many Western classics (mostly by English writers) kept on his father’s bookshelves, the reproductions of paintings by Western artists hung on the walls of his house, and the various Bengali journals his mother subscribed to (which frequently printed translations of stories from the Western mythology) were strong formative influences on him. As a bright student at school, he was never satisfied with what he was prescribed to read. He voraciously read from his elder brother’s school text-books and got himself steeped in English literature. His father personally introduced him to Shakespeare and the modern Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. True to the spirit of Brahmoism (Chaudhuri equates it to the English Protestant Reformation), he grew up actively participating in and reciting folk dramas and modern Bengali poems respectively on the one hand and English drama and poems on the other.
Though Chaudhuri’s ideas of Shillong (which also formed part of his early environment by virtue of its being always present in the deliberations of his maternal relatives, because one of his maternal uncles lived there) were shaped by gestalt, no such looseness was possible in his imaginings of England. It was the most powerful component of his imagination, always kept alive and supplemented by his reading of English literature. England, therefore, was a more concrete and stronger presence in his mind than Shillong. It was as great an influence on him as any of the places viz. Kishorganj, Banagram and Kalikutch that formed part of his early environment. But the effect of such a reading is sometimes dramatized in the Autobiography, to the extent that it seems like exaggeration. One example would suffice. When Chaudhuri and his elder brother read Webster’s poem ‘Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren…’, their imagination was excited and they wondered what a magic country England must be where bird, ant, field mouse and mole gave decent burial to friendless bodies by covering them with leaves and flowers and rearing hillocks over them. But when they approached the last two lines: “But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again,” “boyish animalism” crept into them and they fell to scratching the earthen floor of their house. This fascination for England generated by childhood reading was heightened when he finally made a visit to England at the age of 57. What he saw of England during the visit kept him spell-bound and resulted in the production of his second book, A Passage to England. A tone of admiration that runs through the book is indicative of the fact that the author deeply cherished the experience of his pilgrimage to England. It was nothing less than a pilgrimage because it was the first time he was physically experiencing the land which had till then remained an influence which could only be “evoked by imagination”. He settled at Oxford at the ripe age of 73 and continued to live there till his death in 1999 at the age of 101.
Doris Lessing has rightly pointed out that Chaudhuri is a product of the period when Indians were nourished by English literature, law and thought. Macaulay in his 1835 Minute on Indian education advocated the creation of a class of Indians who with their knowledge of the English language would not only serve to reduce the administrative expenses of the Imperial Government by seeking employment in its lower ranks but also form an important strata of the Downward Filtration theory, originally propounded by Warden in the Bombay presidency, by the help of which the “vernacular” literatures of the country could be enriched with European learning. While the first argument in the Minute is overly emphasized in the present day academic discourses, the latter has tended to be overlooked. Macaulay wanted an elite class of Indians who would act as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. Though he is much blamed and maligned for the imposition of English on hapless Indians and the creation of the Babu class, it was not the express concern of his “Minute” to produce a bunch of ‘intellectually sterile’ clerks. It is the Bhadralok class he wanted to raise who would be well-versed both with Oriental and Western learning. This class was already in existence at that time and the Bhadraloks were the chief propagators of the Indian Renaissance which began with the establishment of the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1817. The “Minute” only aimed to multiply their number through the introduction of English-language education. It is important to state in this connection that this language policy did not yield results according to what was originally perceived. Interest in English learning was motivated by job concerns and thus the quality of English learning suffered a setback with the students showing interest only in learning rudimentary knowledge in order to find work as clerks in the Government. And it was these students who later became the infamous Babus in the British administrative set-up and became reputed for their ‘bad English’ as opposed to the Bhadraloks Macaulay desired to cultivate. Though Chaudhuri took up the job of a clerk in the Military Accounts Department after his graduation from the University of Calcutta, he almost immediately resigned from the service in order to pursue a career as a writer. In fact, he aspired to be “an epitome of universal knowledge.” He preferred to become a Bhadralok and not to remain a Babu. Chaudhuri actually belongs to the generation which sincerely believed in assimilating the best of the values from the Western and the Eastern cultures. Consequently, he imbibed a refined taste in both the cultures; that is to say, he inculcated Britishness and the Bengali character in equal measure and of the highest degree. This clearly explains the reason behind his adoption of a two-fold identity – one of a Victorian and the other of a Bengali. Given the circumstance, it is not surprising that while most people like to address him as “the last Englishman,” Rudrangshu Mukherjee argues that he is actually “the last Bengali.” Mukherjee is of the opinion that Chaudhuri’s admiration for and things English is essentially a Bhadralok trait and adds that “there was a time in the intellectual history of Bengal when the ideals and standards Chaudhuri set for himself were not exceptional.” But it is long since “insularity” and “half-baked knowledge” overtook the Bengali race. In this hour of death in Bengali life, Chaudhuri stands out as “a representative of a time when Bengalis could be proud of their intellectual attainments.”
The teaching of a language and its literature is the most potent medium of transmitting the culture of that society. It was with this intention in mind that English-language education was introduced in India and in other non-English speaking nations under British domination. This led to the acquisition of the English language by the subjects of these nations and eventually these nations produced writers who could use English as a medium of their literary expression. These literatures emanating from the erstwhile Empire have now come to be recognized as ‘New Literatures in English’ (NLE). Apart from their knowledge of English, most writers belonging to this category are characterized by their knowledge of another language (the language they were born into). Chaudhuri, a colonial subject, with his knowledge of both English and Bengali (he also writes in it) can be firmly placed among the writers of NLE.
He explains his purpose of writing in English in the preface to his Autobiography. He says “I have written the book with the conscious object of reaching the English-speaking world”. This is exactly what writers of NLE presumably do – they employ the English language to interpret their culture to the English-knowing world – and Chaudhuri is no exception. His works are firmly rooted in the land of his birth; a case that Nayantara Sahgal fervently argues for in ‘The Ink is Soiled,’ which according to her is a recipe for good literature. In an interview to The Pioneer Nirad Chaudhuri on the eve of his 100th birthday said, “If there remains an interest in English and in India, I will live….My books will be read.” It is no hollow boast for his books remain indispensable to anybody who has sought to understand twentieth century India and her relationship with Britain. Neville Maxwell has commented that though Chaudhuri’s intellectual range is immense, it is the theme of the relationship of the Hindus (read Indians) with the British that is pre-eminent in his writings. His Autobiography, naturally, concentrates on the Indo-British encounter. In the Preface to the book, he declares, “The story I want to tell is the story of the struggle of a civilization with a hostile environment, in which the destiny of British rule in India became necessarily involved”.
It is hardly surprising that V. S. Naipaul in The Overcrowded Barracoon rates Chaudhuri’s Autobiography as “one great book to have come out of the Indo-British encounter”. In it he notices a significant shift from the “unsatisfactory and one-sided” way in which Indians have until then written about India. “At long last India has produced a writer who did not cash in on naive Indianisms,” observes Khushwant Singh, much enthused by this development in the field of Indian writing. According to Naipaul, the achievement of the Autobiography lies in the fact that it has commendably “contained within itself both India and the West”. He says, “No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West – and, by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another – will be or can now be written”. Naipaul has no reason to grumble, for in Chaudhuri’s book he does not find a neglect of the immediate environment which was so intensely felt in his reading of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. He is highly unsettled by “an obsession with vows, food experiments, recurring illness, an obsession with the self” that The Story of My Experiments with Truth parades at the expense of describing the London city of the late Victorian period. It appears ridiculous to him that “a series of small spiritual experiences, the vows of vegetarianism and chastity” are given more importance than the city of the 1890s. The anguish is understandable. It is the sensitiveness to the surrounding and a person’s (or the author’s) reaction to it that constitutes the bed-rock of Naipaul’s writings. Naipaul’s own character and personality was made by the influence of various environments and a good account of his earlier life can be found in the “Prologue to an Autobiography” in Finding the Centre.
V.S. Naipaul belongs to a family of Indians whose ancestors came and settled in Trinidad as indentured labourers. At his grandmother’s house he saw all “…the (Hindu) rituals and social ways of village India” being performed. This house is reminiscent of Chaudhuri’s ancestral home at Banagram. India, itself, remained distant and unreal for him, something similar to the ideas of Shillong Chaudhuri had in mind. In this house of his grandmother lodged innumerable relatives and acquaintances and Naipaul, as a child, was almost lost in this crowd and chaos. He found peace when his family shifted to the colonial town of Port of Spain where his father had taken up the job of a journalist and everything there seemed clean and organized than the surrounding environment at his grandmother’s house. The streets of the town with colonial names did not evoke any disgust in him which Nayantara Sahgal felt while growing up in colonial Allahabad. On the contrary, he quite liked the municipal order of it. Though the environment of Port of Spain bore marks of colonial rule, yet the child’s mind never revolted against it as Achebe’s did on the sight of a little post-office in the village of his childhood. Commenting on the British rule in Trinidad in An Area of Darkness, Naipaul says, “It was a system we did not feel to be oppressive.” As was the case with Chaudhuri, Naipaul also was initiated into the study of English literature by his father. The paternal influence on Naipaul was as powerful as in the cases of Chaudhuri and Hanif Kureishi. They inherited the intellectual properties of their fathers, assimilating something which was given. Later, like Chaudhuri, Naipaul went to a colonial English school and learnt the music of the English language as easily as Ngugi wa Thiong’o learnt Gikuyu. No violence was inflicted on Chaudhuri’s and Naipaul’s minds with this learning of English as it happened to have taken place when Ngugi went to school which laid emphasis on English rather than on his own tongue. When Chaudhuri and Naipaul went to Calcutta and Oxford respectively, the rigours of English higher education opened up for them the vast intellectual and mental resources of the Imperial world to dwell in. This shift on the intellectual plane, a shift from one culture to another, and even physical movement played a role in distancing them from their native civilization. The uncomfortable displacement left them with an urge to search for ‘civilization’ and it is this search which is predominant in their works. While writers of NLE have come to make peace with the belief in a globalized world, taking it to be the solution of this discomfiture, Chaudhuri believes that redemption lies in the movement towards West, whereas Naipaul’s preoccupation is in ‘finding a centre.’ A decentralized world, the desire to breakdown stereotypes of personal identity (Chaudhuri wants to maintain his identity as an English writer and a Bengali writer as split yet integrated, and Naipaul asserts that he is a British writer) do not hold any charm for them. Chaudhuri’s dictum is “Always go West.” He has followed this in his own personal life – from the eastern bank of his town he moved westwards to Calcutta and via Delhi, he finally settled in Oxford.
Khushwant Singh has commented, “No Indian, living or dead, has written the English language as well as Nirad Chaudhuri….As a matter of fact, there are few English writers who have the same mastery over their mother tongue shown by this Bengali Bhadralok in the books he has written”. In fact, while most writers of NLE interpret their culture and society through the English language for the convenience of the West so that it may understand the traditions and philosophies of the countries they represent, Chaudhuri goes one step further – he uses English and parameters embodied in the Western philosophy to analyze the society and culture of his birth. The range of Western scholars he draws upon to prove his contentions is enormous. His writings are liberally sprinkled with quotations in Greek, German, Latin, French and Italian (in most cases left untranslated). Shashi Tharoor is of the view that, by doing so, Chaudhuri has carried the Macaulayan fantasy to its absurd extreme. More often than not, a lay reader runs the risk of getting floored when faced with his bombast and language-jugglery.
An example of Chaudhuri’s technique of looking at or analyzing India by Western standards is to be found in his dedication of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian which has been quoted in the paper earlier. The term “citizenship,” mentioned in the dedication, is a Western idea. India, till very recently, had no such concept. ‘Family’ and ‘community’ form the core of Indian society. The concept of ‘individualism’ is also alien to it. Although these ideas have recently been borrowed from the West, they had to be accommodated by reordering the elements of ‘citizenship’ and ‘family’ in the society. Even in his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse he writes about the corruption in the nature of individualism, democracy and nationalism (they are concepts of Western origin) that have brought about decadence in India. The pages in the Autobiography, following the dedication, show how he looks at the Indian experience, at every stage, from a Western viewpoint or sometimes citing Western examples. To illustrate, when describing his birthplace Kishorganj Chaudhuri in the very second line of the first chapter says, “The place had nothing of the English country town about it”. It is the French philosopher Rene Descartes who said that a nation is to be built on reason alone and emotion has no place in it. The close pattern of reasoning that is displayed in the works of Chaudhuri is clearly an influence of the classical tradition of Western criticism. Even his learning of Sanskrit literature is through the works of the nineteenth century Orientalists.
Since in the very beginning of the book Chaudhuri has laid down the principle that “environment shall have precedence over its products,” it is but natural that the Autobiography describes more of national history than of personal history. He claims that by the time he attained the maturity to think for himself he had lost his faith in, what he calls, “myths” generated in India. As a result of this, his views on Indian culture and history that are expressed in the book, especially in the last chapter titled “An Essay on the course of Indian History”, are not only unconventional but also provocative. This disagreement with the orthodoxies of Indian history initiated in the Autobiography is documented in the form of a full-scale book, The Continent of Circe. Here, he not only challenges the dates set down by historians as marking the beginning of the Aryan civilization in India but also denotes it as a land with hostile environment which dehumanizes every settler. The Aryan and the British alike underwent dehumanization in India. Yet he looked upon the British Empire as a benevolent presence and “the best political regime which had ever been seen [in India], in spite of its shortcomings and positive evils.” Dispossession, which is a major theme among the writers of NLE, does not merit Chaudhuri’s attention. Writing an obituary on Nirad Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra hails him as a man “attached to no cause or institution.” But Mishra’s estimation of Chaudhuri is fundamentally wrong. When he was bestowed the title of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen of England, Chaudhuri said, “I am glad you have given me the honour. I am a dedicated imperialist.” His eloquent advocacy of the Empire is lucidly illustrated in the chapter titled “My Faith in Empires” in the second volume of his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!. In this chapter he says that it is human to be imperialistic. But it is to be noted here that though he eulogizes the British Empire, he is disdainful of the class of Englishmen who ruled India. In his view, the best Englishmen never came to India. Again, he is all praise for the Indian Renaissance and considers Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as a great intellectual and historical figure, but Chatterjee’s nationalistic writings seem to have made no impact on him. In actual fact, Chaudhuri in his narration of Indian history subverts the concept of ‘cultural self-determination’ which is so much in vogue among the writers of NLE.
At this point, it would be interesting to compare Derek Walcott’s view of the New World with that of Chaudhuri’s. Walcott in “The Muse of History” highlights the point that history of the New World ought not to be understood in the fashion of the scientific and rational methods of the West. He also says that the “myths” of the New World are more reliable than the “facts” of the Western culture. It is Western colonialism that has created a disparity between “reality” and “myth.” In order to recollect the past, it is essential to depend on the “myths” of the land, which is only a partial recollective mechanism for the race, than the “facts” provided by the colonizers. With his Western mode of narrating Indian history of and a total disbelief in the “myths” of India, Chaudhuri’s opinions stand in total contradiction to those Walcott’s.
The West-centric mode of analyzing a nation can also be traced in the writings of V. S. Naipaul. In the book dealing with his first visit to India, An Area of Darkness, Naipaul presents a gloomy picture of India. He comes to an exhausted and feeble India under Nehru which has not yet been able to recover from the shock of defeat it faced at the hands of the Chinese. The Nehruvian idealism had left the country. Arriving from England Naipaul finds India failing by all Western standards. Yet, interestingly, he castigates everything Indian by calling it “mimicry” of the West. Naipaul felt that his gaze on the colonial history of India could not be made complete without drawing a link with colonial Trinidad where he grew up. He is beholden to the British Empire which “anchored us [the Trinidadians] within a wider system.” In India, he is disgusted by the bureaucratic set-up (incidentally, it is a legacy of the Raj), the behaviour of common men, and almost every sight he sees. A man lifting up his dhoti to relieve himself on the road on Marina Beach in Madras and many such instances invite his pitying scorn. Khushwant Singh, who personally took Naipaul around for sight-seeing during the latter’s first visit to India, has noted in his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice, that Naipaul seemed to be obsessed with the filth and squalor of India than the pleasant sights it had to offer. His response, therefore, is one of immediate disgust and fear and an urge to escape from the maddening scenario. His inflated dreams of travelling the land of his ancestors are shattered, very much like the way Paul Scott lost patience when he came to visit India. Like the disappointment Chaudhuri voices in the dedication of his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian at the uneven equation between the Indians and the British, Naipaul sees the Indo-British encounter as an abortive one. In desperation Naipaul says, “India must progress, must stamp out corruption, must catch up with the West.”
Commenting on Naipaul and Chaudhuri, Keki N. Daruwalla has said, “Naipaul is like a mother bird rummaging in a nest of doubts. Nirad is blessed with certitudes that reek of arrogance”. It is undoubtedly arrogance of opinion that most Indians have attributed to the writings of Nirad Chaudhuri. He has invited admiration and wrath in equal measure. After the publication of his Autobiography, while Winston Churchill thought it to be one of the best books he has read and Doris Lessing considered it to be one of the great books of the twentieth century, in India the reaction was one of terrible anger. It is undeniable that the book, and especially its dedication, hurt the nationalistic sentiments of a newly-born Indian nation. Chaudhuri was labelled an ‘Anglophile’ and an ‘anti-Indian.’ Defending Chaudhuri, Khushwant Singh says that those who criticized him only knew him as the author of the offensive dedication and not the author of five hundred-plus pages of remarkable prose that follow. Shashi Tharoor’s attitude is unsparing. He says, “The mind boggles at the thought of Nirad Chaudhuri’s omissions, both of the millennial Indian civilizational and intellectual heritage and of the exactions and injustices of British colonial rule. Any author who can put such a thought into the dedication of his first book is not merely being polemical; he is advertising his allegiances, and deserves to be taken at his own xenolatrous word” . The absence of any mention by Chaudhuri of the atrocities committed by the British on the Indians is also argued by Mulk Raj Anand in his obituary on Chaudhuri, one of Anand’s famous contemporaries. But Anand’s reaction to Chaudhuri is not as vituperative as that of Tharoor’s. He, in fact, offers adequate praise to the “odd genius.” Salman Rushdie in the Introduction to the Vintage Book of Indian Writing in English, which he co-edited with Elizabeth West, has this to say about Chaudhuri, “The autobiographer Nirad Chaudhuri has been throughout his long life, an erudite, contrary and mischievous presence ….That he has swum so strongly against the current has not, however, prevented The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian from being recognized as the masterpiece that it is.” But Chaudhuri’s view on Salman Rushdie is not as flattering as Rushdie’s is towards Chaudhuri. When asked to comment on Rushdie, Chaudhuri said:
I won’t trample on him. What is he? Coward. Living under police protection. If I did not have the courage of my conviction I would not have written it [The Satanic Verses]. He has apologized. Coward! He thought he would make money. Then when he found himself in a tight corner he squealed. One thing I dislike about writers is cowardice and this is a damned coward. What does he write? Rubbish.
And when inquired about what he thought of Arundhati Roy, Chaudhuri simply asked, “Who?” His estimate of other Indian authors in English is equally dismissive. On being asked whether contemporary Indian authors write the best books in English, he said: “Nonsense. They can’t write English.”
Chaudhuri is also contemptuous of the Indian community in Britain, where he started to live during the last years of his life. When most writers belonging to the New World who reside in Britain make a fervent plea in support of Multiculturalism, Chaudhuri looks down upon the immigrant community as an adulteration in the English population. In Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse he says that in England the difference between adulteration and enrichment has practically been forgotten. When Professor Amartya Sen was appointed as the Master of Trinity College at Cambridge, Chaudhuri fumed, “When an Englishman loses his prejudices, he is no longer an Englishman.” The question of giving aid to the isolated and non-privileged ethnic groups in Britain to promote the cause of Multiculturalism there also comes under his scrutiny and he scoffs at the proposal saying that the very act of giving aid to such people is to confirm them into that status for ever.
When most writers of NLE are demanding the relaxation and expansion of ‘Britishness’ as an entity to impart a unified identity to all sections of the population in Britain, Chaudhuri till the moment he breathed his last strictly adhered to the old idea of ‘Britishness’. Ian Jack has pointed out, “Britishness as an 18th-century construction, the result of industrialism, empire, and the protestant faith, and consequently waning as an identity as Britain lost its factories, colonies and habits of church-going.” But Chaudhuri never forgot the true Englishman in him. During his stay in England he lamented the fact that the Britons have forgotten their own culture and it is rare to find an English gentleman who eats Blue Stilton and reads The Wind in the Willows. Before his death he had to bear the sight of the English civilization crumbling in front of him – the ideas of a civilization he had imbibed as a child and so enduringly preserved during his entire life-time.
In the very first chapter of The Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse Chaudhuri acknowledges the fact that many dub him as a “controversial writer.” He explains that it is but natural for scholars to hold different viewpoints. He says that “difference of opinion has been coexistent with opinion itself”. His views might be at variance with other ‘postcolonial’ writers, but he cannot be discarded in any serious discussion on NLE because though he belonged to the same camp he has always given contrary viewpoints. The world is what one perceives it to be. Needless to say, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s opinions have added vibrancy and diversity to this emerging field of New Literatures in English. In fact, he is a voice of dissent there.