Nirad C. Chaudhuri

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Nirad C. Chaudhuri
non-fiction

Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri CBE (23 November 1897 – 1 August 1999) was an Indian writer.[1]

In 1990,

Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[2]

Biography

20 Lathbury Road, the former home of Nirad Chaudhuri, with its blue plaque.[3]

Chaudhuri was born in

British India (now Bangladesh), the second of eight children of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, a lawyer, and of Sushila Sundarani Chaudhurani.[4] His parents were liberal middle-class Hindus who belonged to the Brahmo Samaj
movement.

After passing the FA examination, he was admitted to Ripon College (now

Calcutta University in 1918, he graduated with honors in history and earned his place in the merit list. He participated in the Scottish Church College seminar with renowned Indian personality and historian Professor Kalidas Nager
. After obtaining his bachelor's degree, he was admitted to Calcutta University for his master's degree. But he could not get the postgraduate degree because he did not appear in the examination. This is where his formal education ended. Meanwhile, in 1917, he wrote a theoretical article titled Objective Methods in History.

Chaudhuri was a prolific writer even in the last years of his life,[5] publishing his last work at the age of 99. His wife Amiya Chaudhuri died in 1994 in Oxford, England. He too died in Oxford, three months short of his 102nd birthday, in 1999. He lived at 20 Lathbury Road[6] from 1982 until his death and a blue plaque was installed by the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board in 2008.[3]

Dr. Sumantra Maitra named him the forgotten visionary of British India, in a review essay for The Spectator.[7]

Major works

His masterpiece,

independent India
due to the dedication of the book, which ran thus:

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 Britannicus sum"
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.

It is sometimes stated that 'Chaudhuri was hounded out of government service, deprived of his pension, blacklisted as a writer in India and forced to live a life of penury'. However, as sociologist Edward Shils, who helped Chaudhuri immigrate to the UK, stated in his article 'Citizen of the World' (American Scholar, 1988), Chaudhuri retired at the compulsory age of 55 but was not eligible for a pension because he had not completed sufficient years of service. It is also stated that - 'Furthermore, he had to give up his job as a political commentator on All India Radio as the Government of India promulgated a law that prohibited employees from publishing memoirs.' This is not the case. There was a pre-existing rule that employees must get clearance before publishing anything. Chadhuri was refused an extension of service. He was not asked to prepare any more talks on a free-lance basis because of severe criticism directed at him by senior figures - like Krishna Menon. However, he did publish in non-Government magazines. Chaudhuri argued that his critics were not careful-enough readers; "the dedication was really a condemnation of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in a 1997 special edition of

Civis romanus sum".[8]

At the age of 57, in 1955 for the first time Chaudhuri went abroad. After coming back he wrote A Passage to England (1959). In this book he talked about his visit of five weeks to England, and more briefly about his two weeks in Paris and one week in Rome. During this time away from his home in Delhi, he visited museums, galleries, cathedrals, country houses, and attended plays and concerts. Chaudhuri reflects on his experiences from the perspective of a man who had grown up in the British Empire and was now the citizen of an independent India.

His later works include personal essays, biographies and historical studies.

Contemporary discussions of Chaudhuri's works

  • R. K. Dhawan's Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The Scholar Extra Ordinary (Prestige Books, India, 2001; )
  • Hemant Kumar Jha's Nirad C. Chaudhuri: His Mind and Art (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014; )
  • Ian Almond's The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss (Cambridge University Press, 2015; )
  • Shakti Batra's critical study of Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Surjeet Publications, India, 2019; ).
  • Alastair Niven provides a fresh view of Chaudhuri and his work, Knowing the Unknown Nirad C. Chaudhuri, which is due to be published for the 25th anniversary of his death (2024).

Honours

Books

  • The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951)
  • A Passage to England (1959)
  • The Continent of Circe (1965)
  • The Intellectual in India (1967)
  • To Live or Not to Live (1971)
  • Scholar Extraordinary, The Life of Professor the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muller, P.C. (1974)
  • Culture in the Vanity Bag (1976)
  • Clive of India (1975)
  • Hinduism: A Religion to Live by (1979)
  • Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987)
  • Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997)
  • The East is East and West is West (collection of pre-published essays)
  • From the Archives of a Centenarian (collection of pre-published essays)
  • Why I Mourn for England (collection of pre-published essays)

References

  1. ^ "Nirad C. Chaudhuri | Bengali author and scholar". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  2. ^ The Unrepentant Vision (Television production). Doordarshan.
  3. ^ .
  4. required.)
  5. ^ Voices of the Crossing - The impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. Ferdinand Dennis, Naseem Khan (eds), London: Serpent's Tail, 1998. Nirad Chaudhuri: p. 177 "Afterword."
  6. .
  7. ^ Nirad C. Chaudhuri. The Spectator.
  8. ^ .
  9. ^ "The Nirad C. Chaudhuri Page". Stat.stanford.edu. Retrieved 11 July 2012.

External links