| Chaudhuri, Nirad C (1897-1999)
author and scholar, born in kishoreganj.
After completing his education from Calcutta University, Nirad C Chaudhuri
started his career as a government servant. In 1942 he shifted to New
Delhi to work as a broadcaster and political commentator at All India
Radio. A close associate of Netaji subhash
chandra bose, Nirad Chaudhuri served as secretary to sarat
chandra bose for some time during his stay in Calcutta. In
1951 he published The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, his first
book and the book by which he is best known.
Chaudhuri dedicated The
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 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" (I am a British citizen) because
all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened
by the same British rule'. The sympathy and admiration for the British
contained in the book made Chaudhuri controversial in India. Soon
after the book appeared, Chaudhuri was fired from his position in
All India Radio. |
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Nirad C Chaudhuri |
In 1955 Chaudhuri was invited to England by the British
Council and the BBC. The five-week trip produced A Passage to England
in which he praised the British way of life and western culture. In 1970,
he settled permanently in Oxford, England.
Much of Chaudhuri's writing was more or less a deliberate
attempt to undermine Indian nationalists. His work was first roundly abused,
then ignored by Indian critics and readers. Critics called him the last
British imperialist. But Chaudhuri said his backhanded criticism of the
British was never understood by his countrymen. In 1997 his British publishers
reprinted the Autobiography, still calling it one of the great
books of the 20th century and deleting its quixotic dedication to the
memory of the British Empire.
For all his failings, Nirad Chaudhuri was a superb writer
of exact and precise descriptive prose. The first few chapters of the
Autobiography, which describe his upbringing in rural Bengal at
the turn of the century under British rule, provide a lively, insightful
description and commentary on Bengali customs, family structures, and
caste, as well as the relations between Hindus and Muslims and between
the Indians and the British. At the age of 90 Chaudhuri wrote a second
autobiography entitled Thy Hand, Great Anarch. In 1997 he
wrote his last book of essays: Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,
which was an indictment of what he called India's failed leadership and
a lament at the decline of the country he had adopted. Chaudhuri published
his first Bangla book, Bangali Jibane Ramani (Women in Bengali
Life), in 1968.
Nirad Chaudhuri received many literary awards and prizes,
including the Duff Couper Memorial Award (1965), the Ananda Award (1989),
the Vidyasagar Award (1997), etc. Oxford University conferred an honorary
DLitt degree on him in 1989. After his death in Oxford at the age of 102,
his son gifted Chaudhuri's books and paintings to Calcutta Club which
has opened a Nirad C Chaudhuri Corner.
[Syeda Momtaz Sheren]
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