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‘He was a champion exhibitionist’
On the occasion of Indian writer Nirad C Chaudhuri’s 110th birthday, Dr Fakrul Alam talks to Sanam Amin about the courage and tragedy of Chaudhuri’s stubbornness and his fondness for provoking people
New Age: What place does Nirad C Chaudhuri hold amongst other Indian writers in English?
Fakrul Alam: You can look at Chaudhuri in many different ways. He is one of the earliest South Asian writers in English. His Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is a document of cultural history. And his prose is very remarkable. He was very conservative by temperament; people who haven’t read anything else of his except for the Autobiography say his writing is Victorian. I personally think that it is characteristic of writing in the first half of the 20th century rather than Victorian.
NA: When you call him a South Asian writer, is it not overriding his own statement that ‘I am not writing as an Indian or an Englishman. I am just a writer. Writers know no nationality’?
FA: He can claim whatever he wants to. But after some time, every writer finds a place in literary history. Historians always want to give labels. We label Shakespeare as Elizabethan, but I think Shakespeare would have been amused at being called Elizabethan.
NA: Does he strike you as a comic figure? He used to dress in suits in India and in dhotis in England.
FA: I think what people don’t understand is that he was a poseur. He liked to play to the camera, he liked to pose. He was a champion exhibitionist. And thirdly he likes provoking people; he often used to deliberately provoke people.
NA: Why does he offend Indian sensibilities?
FA: What he basically says is that the height of Bengali culture came during the Bengal Renaissance when it came into contact with western culture. That the greatest flowering of Bengali literature came because of that contrast. He calls Rabindranath the last Renaissance man. He was stuck in history. What made him so controversial was that I think deep down he never accepted the partition of Bengal. An issue of Desh magazine with his writing was banned a few years ago. He thought that this contact between the west and the east brought out the greatest in Bengal and that nothing before was as great nor would there ever be anything to compare.
He also felt that both side, both the British and the Indians were too hasty. It’s not that he’s saying the British shouldn’t have left. He was in fact quite critical of contemporary England, in the 1940s. And when he was young he had quite revolutionary sentiments. His stance is a lot more complex than people think. Most people haven’t read Autobiography and assume a lot of things about his position. In fact his stance was quite complex.
NA: Was he ahead of his time, then, for not taking up a simplistic one-sided view of imperialism?
FA: I don’t know whether he was ahead of his time or not but certainly he had the courage to take a position and stood by it, even amidst so many controversies. The tragedy of the man is that he took a position and stuck to it stubbornly. He has become a caricature. He should be seen in a more complex light, and not in simplistic black and white terms.
People should read other things by him. His works are documents of intellectual and cultural history. The Autobiography is a very vivid record of his times, of the nanabari, dadabari in Kishoreganj. And his Passage to England is such a wonderful act of a very educated writer.
After the age of 99, 100, his mind remained clear. He always saw things very clearly; the sad thing is that he hardened into a position. Even though he was 100, he maintained the same views. Although when he was older, in the 1990s, he began to write in Bangla. He felt he had to explain things to the Bengalis; he wrote for Desh and these articles were read by many people. His books too came out in Bangla.
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