#nirad chaudhuri

[indianskeptic]

Nirad Chaudhuri on Santiniketan

“This place with its counterfeit cosmopolitanism became the center of all that was false, affected and weak in contemporary Bengali culture”

Nirad Chaudhuri on Tagore’s Santiniketan

[indianskeptic]

Yet at the same time, Mahalanobis was also representative of a specifically Indian rationalist tradition. Sankhya meant not only ‘number’ but something like a rational understanding of the universe. Mahalanobis’s family, from the famous small Brahmin gentry of Bikrampur in East Bengal, had converted to the rationalistic strain of the reforming Brahmo Samaj. His father was an activist in the widow re-marriage campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century. Mahalanobis himself was connected with the Samaj throughout his life, opposing the reintroduction of rituals and paying homage to the memory of the founder of the Samaj, Rammohan Roy. In fact it is striking how many of the Bengali intellectuals of the Independence generation, including Satyajit Ray, the film-maker and Nirad Chaudhuri, the self-declared ‘Unknown Indian’, were Brahmos or were influenced by the Samaj. For his part Mahalanobis declared that he was not a Hindu, but added paradoxically, a ‘Brahmo by religion.’ He also revered the great Bengali sage, Rabindranath Tagore, himself a covert Brahmo. So Mahalanobis’s cultural and religious stance stood on that intriguing Indian cusp between pantheism and what might be called ‘pan-atheism.’ As he once said, the human race would be improved by ‘thinking about him who cannot be known, by trying to know.’

C.A.Bayly, Development and Sentiment: The Political Thought of Nehru’s India The Brahmos have always had an unconcealed hostility to traditional Hindus.   

[indianskeptic]

“About 25 words in an inscription of Asoka, have succeeded in almost wholly suppressing the thousands in the rest of the epigraphy and the whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus among whom is not one word of non-violence in the theory and practice of statecraft”

Nirad Chaudhuri quoted by Perry Anderson

After Nehru, London Review of Books, 2012

[emissions]

This demand of comprehensiveness is not all new. Beginning with “An Area of Darkness” in 1964, V. S. Naipaul wrote three books about his journeys around India, two of which were so sharply observed that Indian readers still bleed from the cuts they inflicted. Naipaul too was scolded for not telling the whole truth, whatever that may be. The poet Nissim Ezekiel, assessing “An Area of Darkness,” titled his essay “Naipaul’s India and Mine,” elaborating his point that he knew Indians very different from those Naipaul had met.

Ezekiel reached in turn for Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who had mused in 1951 that in India, “so vast and so populous, the individuals who form the exceptions may well run into millions.” How then do you write about India, where the remarkable can be faulted for being unrepresentative of the country, and where the unremarkable, while thoroughly representative, can be discussed only in easy generalizations? The persistence of this complaint invites a thought about the complete India book the world awaits: Perhaps no such book has been published because no such book can exist.

-- Samanth Subramanian reviews Deb's The Beautiful & The Damned in the NYT.

If you know me, you know how much pleasure those two paragraphs give me.

[emissions]

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" BECAUSE ALL THAT WAS GOOD AND LIVING WITHIN US WAS MADE, SHAPED, AND QUICKENED BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE

Nirad Chaudhuri's opening words in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

I wanted to post this on 08/15 but no that would've been predictably perverse.