THE LAST VICTORIAN
Pryce-Jones, David
The Last Victorjan Nirad Chaudhun, 1897-1999 By David Pryce-Jones Nirad Chaudhuri was a scholar and artist, an exile, a man with a tragic view of life but also a comedian, in every way a free...
...It was inexplicable, for that Japanese attack had been one of the worst days of his life...
...Fame was immediate...
...In the sitting-room on the ground floor was a disorder of books, a word processor, an elaborate music center...
...Exploiters, we had taken everything and given nothing...
...He was born in Kishorganj, a village in Bengal, in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, just in time to see the British Empire in its heroic mode as ruler of a sixth of the globe and with a self-imposed duty to see that all its subjects would be free and equal under the rule of law...
...He was rightly proud to publish a A writer in England, David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor of National Review...
...In reality, they were defenseless against tyrants claiming to speak in their name...
...He's written a book, Self-Destruction, in Bengali, about the last hundred years in Bengal...
...And why did the British rat in India...
...book at the age of 100, and up to the last days before his death on August 1 at age 101, he was still reading and writing and listening to great music...
...Decolonization was a statesmanlike adjustment to the sensibilities of Africa and Asia...
...An underlying assumption was that the natives knew no better and had to be allowed to get on with it...
...Their will had suddenly failed for no good reason...
...The appropriate compliment for Nirad Chaudhuri—in a world now, after a hundred years, without him—comes from the poem composed as the epigraph for Stalky & Co...
...lets the curtain fall / And Universal Darkness buries All—the very prospect Chaud-huri had in view...
...In Thy Hand, Great Anarch...
...But probably his greatest work was the volume of autobiography he published in 1987, Thy Hand, Great Anarch...
...His laugh is a most appealing high cackle...
...Just five feet tall, he filled the room with the solar energy of his extraordinary personality...
...Then he decided he had to learn French, to read Rémy de Gourmont and Sorel...
...There he researched and wrote a life of Max Müller, the great nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar and philologist...
...He weighed modern British society, and found it wanting...
...This Nozze di Figaro has the best contralto he's heard...
...Their civilizations were exhausted long ago...
...Their success, he feared, would only set Hindu and Muslim against one another...
...We are all guilty, they chorused, and must do penance for history itself...
...Indians were not ready to listen to such a critique, and to this day Chaud-huri seems to many of them a scandal...
...The Oxford house in which he lived was beyond a little garden with flowerbeds, an English retreat, as set out in a thousand novels...
...But he was not content to be learned and ornamental...
...The Second World War seemed to him a moral crusade...
...I do not say that the British made us...
...Worse than flawed, nationalism of this sort appeared to Chaudhuri to be outright betrayal, making common cause with inhumanity...
...And so, in response, he composed after the war—at age fifty-three—his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, simply mailing off to Macmillan's in London the manuscript...
...The British, he argued, "gave us a new mind, a new life...
...Far from feeling pleased that they were not living up to the responsibilities they had freely assumed for so long on behalf of others, the British, he insisted in a favorite word, should understand that they had ratted...
...Some weeks after I had seen those gray silhouettes in the dawn, the Japanese had sunk them with all hands, and I witnessed grown-ups sobbing as a result...
...The engine of Indian nationalism was gathering steam...
...He liked to compare different recordings of musical masterpieces...
...He was appalled by the misnaming...
...On May 13, 1989, I went to visit him...
...And we all praise famous men, Kipling wrote, for they taught us com-monsense...
...And post-colonial nationalism—imported and misunderstood—had led to catastrophe rather than independence: communal riots, a million killed, partition...
...to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: Civis Britannicus sum, because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule...
...Chaudhuri had at one time been secretary to Bose's brother...
...On erotics, he's penned a footnote in Greek, commenting, "That's mischief-making...
...England expects that every man will beat his breast...
...Chaudhuri took a look at Gandhi and Nehru, and did not care for the power-hungry politicians he saw...
...usually they were embarrassed but respectful...
...What he couldn't foresee, he wrote, was that Western culture as a whole would become decadent so quickly, and take down with it all other cultures into a mindless void...
...India would never have been colonized unless it had been ready to be...
...And German too, for Ernst Bern-heim's Lehrbuch der historischen Methode...
...He poses a series of social enigmas from Jane Austen, backed with quotations from Mérimée's Colomba...
...Poor saps, he was implying, they took seriously the imperial nonsense the British once loved to spout...
...So why should I be ungrateful to it...
...A student of strategy and armaments, he followed it closely—working, for the first time, as a public commentator and broadcaster...
...No longer quite Indian but not quite English either, they were, in his eyes, creatures of mimicry and make-believe rather than authentic representatives...
...It deeply upset him that in 1940 Gandhi could write that Germans of future generations "will honor Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more," and that Subhas Chandra Bose could volunteer to join his self-styled "Indian National Army" with the Japanese to fight the British...
...Winston Churchill, no less, let it be known that it was one of the best books he had ever read...
...The Indians began to display fossilized minds about fifty years ago, and this might have a physiological basis, hence he's only eaten English food since then...
...Throughout the Empire, thuggish nationalists were seizing power, destroying the society with nothing to put in its place, substituting massacre for the previous order and law...
...One of his characteristics was a militant sense of right and wrong...
...His answer was steadfast...
...The British in those years had rid themselves of the Empire...
...Chaudhuri's view of history was determined by a belief that the Hindus and Muslims had, between them, brought the India of old to a stop...
...The Last Victorjan Nirad Chaudhun, 1897-1999 By David Pryce-Jones Nirad Chaudhuri was a scholar and artist, an exile, a man with a tragic view of life but also a comedian, in every way a free spirit...
...I returned to write in my diary: He moves at a run with now and then a wobble in it to suggest that the movement might end in accident...
...But as a boy, according to his memoirs, he used to wander along the banks of the local river declaiming in English the speeches of Edmund Burke, the poems of Matthew Arnold, and even Nelson's message to the Trafalgar fleet: "England expects every man will do his duty...
...Its title comes from lines of Alexander Pope: Thy hand, Great Anarch...
...The British had no idea what to make of someone like Chaudhuri, this person in their midst proclaiming his devotion to the very highest ideals of their own philosophers and poets...
...To Chaudhuri, this was damaging nonsense and patronizing humbug...
...Malcolm Muggeridge, the national jester of that moment, was fond of repeating a bon mot that Indians are the last Englishmen...
...We made ourselves on account of the British law...
...Cutting loose from India, he settled in Oxford in 1969...
...In Calcutta he attended university, afterwards finding a job as a clerk...
...he had made a mistake, rare for him, saying that in December 1941 the Japanese had sunk two battleships, the Prince of Wales and the Renown, when the second ship was actually the Repulse...
...I wanted to tell him that when I was a boy, the grown-ups had woken me up to watch from the Tangier shore as the two ships slipped out of Gibraltar on that last journey to the Far East...
...By colonizing what was in effect a mere space devoid of intellect and creativity, the British had done the people of India a favor, putting them in touch with the greater world and universal values...
...Its dedication says everything, in a trumpet blast: To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship...
...He could rise to the cadences of the great men whose prose and verse he had shouted in his boyhood down by the reeds of the river...
...Gandhi and Nehru were failures...
...Socialists, Fabians, Bloomsburies, liberals, and even Tories—everyone who was anyone—agreed that this was only right...
...Bengali, Sanskrit, and Prakrit were the languages of his own culture...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 47
