Revisiting "The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian," seventy years on

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• CHAUDHURI’S LIFE TOOK a decisive turn in 1920, when, incapacitated by stress, he refused to sit for his MA examination. This failure ended his dreams of an academic career. After this, he worked as a clerk in the military accounts department of the Indian government for some years.

• The job was obtained in the usual way, by nepotism, on the recommendation of a cousin.

• In 1937, he was offered the position of private secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, a leading figure (along with his brother Subhas Chandra) in the Bengal Congress.

• By this time, he had made a name for himself as a specialist on international affairs and military history, broadcasting reports on the Second World War from the Calcutta station of All India Radio.

• One day in 1947, in the bloody aftermath of Partition, in a city overflowing with refugees and permeated with memories of violence, panic and despair, he suddenly decided to write an autobiography—not just a memoir, but a lasting record of a place, a milieu, and one man’s intellectual development.

• The ideas in these two sentences are far from simple: the first criticises imperial Britain for withholding citizenship from Indians (the implied contrast is with imperial Rome and ideas of Roman citizenship).

• The second draws attention to one of Chaudhuri’s principal themes—the cultural and intellectual effects of colonialism in the light of history.

• Its dedication reads: To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subjecthood upon us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: “Civis Brittannicus Sum”. Because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.

• His pessimistic view of Indian culture was never likely to find favour with an intellectual elite that took the glories of the past for granted. The most famous exponent of this view was Nehru himself, in The Discovery of India.

• There is nothing to show that Nehru read the Autobiography, but he certainly disliked it. In 1951, Chaudhuri was close to retiring; he had hoped for an extension, but this was refused. A campaign of official harassment ended with the withdrawal of his retirement benefits.

• Chaudhuri was a writer who had only one book in him because he had only one subject: the elucidation of his relation to his time.

• None of them approaches his first book in quality or intensity.¹

• Chaudhuri’s life spanned the twentieth century, but his basic ideas remained those of a politically conservative, well-read autodidact of the Victorian age.

• Both of Chaudhuri’s parents came from families that adhered to the reformed Hinduism of the Brahmo Samaj, and the intellectual debate between reformers and Hindu traditionalists was to have a lasting effect on his thought.

• During frequent intervals of unemployment as a young man, he was dependent upon his father or his brothers; he describes the social and psychological humiliations engendered by this with an unerring eye.

• This, despite his very conventional veneration for the approved pantheon of Bengali letters—to the end of his life, he considered Rabindranath Tagore (whom Borges called “incorrigibly imprecise”) to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived—and his uncritical belief that Bengal was far in advance of the rest of India intellectually and politically.

• The long first section is a brilliant evocation of place—the countryside of East Bengal before the First World War, its villages, rivers, fields, fairs, boats, houses, seasons, festivals and social relations.

• In the second part of the book, Chaudhuri trains his eye upon Calcutta. To him, the most striking fact about the city was its ugliness

• Its best-looking parts were colonial in inspiration: chimneys, church spires, and, somewhat surprisingly, the cranes at the site of the Victoria Memorial

• At Calcutta University, Chaudhuri learnt Greek and Roman history. The visiting TR Glover’s lectures on early Christianity made a deep impression on him, but he did not take to university life.

• Bengali provided him with novels, poetry, literary criticism and polemics on politics and culture; in English, he read history and writers from Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy (his favorite was the highly coloured Charlotte Brontë); in French, apart from the historians, he quotes from La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Alfred de Vigny (but not Stendhal, arguably the greatest French novelist of all), along with a few moderns like Anatole France and Paul Valéry.

• Chaudhuri’s account of his intellectual development forms the third strand of the Autobiography.

• Chaudhuri does not boast, exactly, but his recurring lists and quotations have much the same effect.

• CHAUDHURI’S READING of Indian history makes free use of cultural generalisations that, by their nature, are impossible to substantiate.

• Since he judged Indian culture against the intellectual production of the West, he saw these achievements, culminating in the Upanishads and early Buddhist philosophy, as its apogee.

• From this standpoint, Indian, and especially Hindu, culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century resembled a wasteland—hermetic, inward-looking, anti-intellectual, unable to develop.

• Europe taught Indian intellectuals to understand their own past, to reform social and cultural practices, to reason in a new way, and to create a lasting literature in their own languages, using new forms and ideas.

• The Bengali Renaissance was the greatest expression of this synthesis.

• He divides its leading figures into two groups. The first, beginning with Ram Mohan Roy, sought far-reaching reforms in Hindu society. The second, led by Bankim Chandra Chatterji (the first “great” Bengali writer) and Vivekananda, sought to construct a new, self-confident Hinduism.

• Both groups transplanted European ideas into Hindu culture, differing only in the extent of their borrowing. The reformers sought to transform Hinduism to a greater degree, the traditionalists leant more heavily on the side of custom.

• To Chaudhuri, the nationalism that developed in Bengal by the end of the nineteenth century was marked, above all, by critical inquiry. Its goals of self-determination and ultimate independence were based on the recognition that India had much to learn from Europe, and an abiding resolve to reform Hindu society morally, ethically and spiritually.

• Despite his unqualified admiration for European culture, he had no time at all for Englishmen in India. He excoriates their racism, the reckless arrogance with which they treated Indians, their insistence on protecting their narrow interests at the expense of British power. Yet it was during the 1920s and 1930s, when the country was swept by successive waves of nationalist propaganda, that he developed his fierce critique of Indian nationalism.

• In his view, the Congress under Gandhi transformed older ideas of nationalism by rejecting European civilisation, turning inwards and abandoning critical inquiry.

• A conservative, he had no belief at all in the political sense of the poor. Politics was the business of educated men and women, to be confined as far as possible to legislatures and gentlemanly debates.

• These were marked by an entrenched snobbery against anyone “from the countryside” and an obsession with notions of purity and pollution.

• For most critics, Achebe stands at the fountainhead of a new literature born out of the colonial experience. This takes as its subject societies shaped by colonialism, showing them from the inside. The Autobiography belongs, in its distinctive way, to this tradition.

• He gets around the problem of using (and explaining) Bengali terms for cultural practices by adopting analogies from ancient Rome and Greece whenever possible. The result is a slow-burning, rhythmic prose that erupts periodically into irony, anger and emotion.

• Since Chaudhuri—in common with virtually every educated Indian—saw “India” in comparative terms, as a civilisation similar to the Greco-Roman, European, Chinese and so on, he was haunted by the spectre of inferiority.

• His answer was to accept this supposed inferiority and try to explain it. As a votary of Spengler, he had no belief that India could become great again, but he did believe that its culture could be revitalised by fusing it, more or less consciously, with that of the West.

• This attitude is partly a product of his time and place. Like Achebe and Baldwin, Chaudhuri was confronted with cultural condescension from early on, but he internalised its premises to a much greater degree than they did.

• High culture is markedly more exclusive, with a well-defined ceiling: it’s unlikely, for example, that a non-white critic in the West will be asked to write about anything other than race, multiculturalism or writers from similar backgrounds.

• THE SECOND ASPECT of Chaudhuri’s dilemma is more widely shared: many Indian (and British Indian) writers seem to find it much more difficult to square their accounts with Indian culture

• A House for Mr Biswas uncovers the claustrophobia and asphyxiating ignorance of family life in a Hindu household in Trinidad

• The God of Small Things deals, among other things, with misogyny, patriarchy and the deadening effects of caste on the individual conscience

• However we evaluate their literary merits, these works say something about Indian (and, more specifically, Hindu) society that we recognise to be true. Chaudhuri’s critique is more limited, but not the less devastating for that.

• Alberuni noted the widespread belief among Hindus that their culture was superior to every other, their obstinate refusal to share what they knew not just with foreigners, but also “men from another caste among their own people.”

• With much less discrimination than Nietzsche, Chaudhuri explains mentalities and history in terms of religion alone, to the exclusion of everything else.

• To Chaudhuri, the chief achievement of the men of the Bengal Renaissance lay in mastering this innate psychological hatred and recognising the liberating value of European ideas

• I’m not at all certain that Chaudhuri’s interpretations of Vivekananda or Chatterji will stand up to rigorous scrutiny, but, even if accepted, they were proved wrong long before Gandhi arrived—a fact he misses.

• It’s here that Chaudhuri approaches the heart of his critique: “I do not know of any nation besides my own which is held so relentlessly in the clutches of the past and is yet so incapable of contemplating and understanding it, and, consequently, profiting by its lessons.”

• What was Chaudhuri’s solution to the problem (as he saw it) of Indian politics? In essence, he argues that twentieth-century nationalists should have followed the example of Ram Mohan Roy et al in seeking a cultural synthesis with the West.

• The structure of the Constitution, which gave the states full responsibility for such vital subjects as education, healthcare and the environment, contributed to this neglect. Yet almost every state was governed by the Congress until the late 1960s, and Nehru, who harried chief ministers about so many things, never had much to say about this one.

• To Nehruvians, India’s destiny was self-evident: all it needed was the ballast of rationalism and industrialisation to become great again.

• However, the most successful adapters of the Western “model” recognised the basic equality of all citizens in terms of opportunity. In the countries of East Asia (Taiwan, China, South Korea, Japan), this acceptance lay behind the decision to make education and healthcare universal after the Second World War. But it was precisely this idea that nationalists in India were unwilling to consider. For them, substantive equality (as opposed to formal equality before the law) threatened to overturn a social order dominated by upper and middle castes; for that reason, they preferred to view equality as stemming from modernisation, rather than the other way around.

• In the discourse of Nehruvian nationalism, such things as caste discrimination, child marriage, dowry deaths, public lynchings and so on, were defects of the social structure, but not so deep-rooted that they would not wither once the economy had been transformed.

• Chaudhuri had nothing to say about these things either, but his searching interrogation of culture demonstrates that ideas are indissolubly linked to social practices, and must be reformed together if they are to be reformed at all.

• All his life, Chaudhuri waged war against the complacent, philistine and ignorant intellectual culture that emerged from this reality. As the middle class falls over itself to embrace authoritarianism and the cultural fantasies of the Hindu Right (much as Italians embraced Fascism in the 1920s), the unsparing honesty with which he confronted received ideas might usefully serve as an example.

Footnotes

1. None of his other books that is ↩