Nirad C. Chaudhuri (–1999)

At many levels this is a terrible book.

What does it prove? It does prove that he had considerable felicity with the English language. Did he use it well while writing this book? No. He weaves in and out of topics like a river flowing down to the delta. Except that, unlike the river, there is no consistency in what he writes. It is virtually impossible to follow his train of thought.

He is undoubtedly well read and, even if I put the writings in the context of the historical research available in the 1960's, I would say that he prefers to put his own prejudices ahead of research. I do not, for instance, why he insists that Hindus have traditionally hated Muslims, or vice-versa. This is incorrect

The only area where I do agree with him, is when he debunks the myth of Indian pacifism

Thankfully, this book will fade away and just be regarded as an exercise in oddity… (mehr)

Nirad C. Chaudhuri was a well-known Bengali intellectual, a writer, editor and literary journalist who had worked for the independence activist Sarat Chandra Bose in the thirties, but later became rather critical of the politics of post-independence India, an attitude that often left him marginalised and - probably unfairly - branded as "pro-British" in later life. He moved to the UK in the 70s.

Chaudhuri was educated in Kolkata at a time when the curriculum was heavily weighted towards British literature and history: he probably knew the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser and Sidney much more intimately than most of his contemporaries who had been through the British school system, not to mention being on familiar terms with Horace, Virgil and Racine. He quotes Hardy or Grey's Elegy at the drop of a cowpat, and takes his ideas of country-house tourism from Elizabeth Bennet's holiday in Derbyshire. But he obviously also knows what he's talking about when it comes to Hindu culture and history. He's clearly not a socialist of any kind, and seems to take a perverse pleasure in caricaturing himself as something like a 1950s embodiment of Kipling's Babu.

You would imagine that it must have been quite a shock for someone like that to arrive in England for the first time in 1955 as the guest of the British Council and the BBC, and find himself in the world of the Welfare State, British Railways and the National Trust (not to mention Angry Young Men and Anthony Eden). But he robustly resists any temptation to be disenchanted by what he finds. He's on holiday and he's determined to have a good time. And he takes a huge pleasure in discovering that the English are still just as enthusiastic about their cultural heritage as he is, even if they don't always know very much about it. He is happy to pay his half-crown at Knole, Kenwood and Penshurst Place and to see Sir Laurence doing Twelfth Night at the Old Vic. He notices non-obvious things about England that are strikingly different from India - how silent the British are, and how few of them you see out in the open; how much more difficult it is to judge social status from the way people dress, talk and act; how the softer light makes the effect of depth stand out more in what you see; how coy the English are about anything to do with making money and how open they are about sex. But he doesn't complain - in fact, he criticises Indians who go to England and then moan about how no-one spoke to them on the Underground - he enjoys digging into the differences.

In an odd way, the book that this most reminded me of is A.G. MacDonnell's semi-fictional account of 1920s England as seen by a young man from the wilds of Aberdeenshire, [England, their England]. Chaudhuri isn't quite so funny or so sentimental, but he's essentially putting forward the same conclusion, that although the English differ in surprising and sometimes disconcerting ways from what you would expect having only met them in books, those practicalities aren't enough seriously to upset the myth of Englishness that everyone subjected to a colonial education has been fed from an early age.… (mehr)