The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
On Nirad C. Chadhuri, imperial education, and the unfinished genesis of the Imagination
Nirad C. Chaudhuri's memoir The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) is something of a misnomer. There is certainly nothing unknown about Chaudhuri saheb, at least not in the sense of his personhood and journey being that of a generic and unremarkable distinction. Quite the contrary, Chaudhuri's coming-of-age was vital, vibrant and ultimately rather singular. While his intimate knowledge of backwater East Bengal is perhaps uncommon, and extremely enlightening, the town of his birth, where they lodged, Kishorganj was self-avowedly a town from which many a successful metropolitan denizen was based from. Not to mention his own upper caste background which he passes through its privileges with not discernible feelings of discomfort.
It is Chaudhuri's singularity that captivates, connecting town, village and metropolitan Calcutta life following the crest of Indian revolt and the development of the nationalist movement amongst the educated Bengali middle classes. To say that Chaudhuri eruditely exhibits his Ausbuildung would be an understatement. At the height of English expression, in equal measures florid and curt, Chaudhuri displays the enculturating success of the British imperial project in its full breadth. Matthew Arnold's theory of culture fully evinced. For flavour:
“For us the irony of the situation lies in the fact that the very existence which has created the values whose passing I regret has also created the agencies which are destroying them. The catastrophe has unfolded inexorably from the environment I have described and the experiences I am going to relate. There is a unity, an unbroken chain of cause and effect, running through the whole process, which if it has a fatalistic cast is fatalistic only in the sense that character is fate. We began the journey towards where we have arrived from what we did and experienced in our early years, which is only another way of saying that in this autobiography I shall have no phase of pure growth to set against a phase of unrelieved decay. In our existence growth and decay have been intermingled and parallel: we have seen life and death interlocked in an inseparable embrace; we have lived with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage. But the house has come when life, if there has been any principle of life in us, must part company with its baleful mate and go its way. The marriage can no longer endure. Either we end it to be restored to cleanness, or it ends itself in a witches sabbath.” (130)
A latter-day Victorianism, which nonetheless expresses itself in a matter of anticolonial revolt, however contrary and idiosyncratic a position Chaudhuri may have ultimately pursued.
He openly remarks that while this is an autobiography, it is also intended to be a wider ethnographic account, written from the perspective of one actor from whom we can gauge a wider socio-political landscape given his self-expressed self-consciousness of the wider historical forces at play. While the early sections on the town and villages of his birth and ancestry clearly fit this model, his ideas of the Bengali Renaissance, visions of England and education in Calcutta should all also be treated as of ethnographic interest.
His tracking of being-becoming, instilled both through institutional means and stringent familial life, is intended to be read as an insight into the backbone of the Indian nationalist movement, and its middle class educated intelligentsia. Interestingly Chaudhuri fails in the academic route, in spite – or because of – his intellectual prowess and ability. He claims his over-ambitiousness, coupled with ill health, scuppered his ability to navigate the narrow demands of the university. Instead, after a period of clerical and political work for some of the prominent figures of Indian nationalism, he decides to set down the course of his ontological development, and by some extension the course of the nation's emergent life, and in doing so is met by the accusation of native informant.
Chaudhuri develops a singular theory of history, one routed in the adamant belief of India as a Hindu nation, however ill-defined, committed through three cycles of history: Sanskritic-Vedic period, the Islamic period, and the British period. In each case the cycle of history was triggered by an outside, foreign culture capturing the subcontinent, instilling and blending with the locals, although each cycle trades in diminishing returns. This nationalist form of historiography ultimately buys into a conservative Partition narrative of duelling nations, with Hindus and Muslims taking on the shape of ethnic-nationalities, however far-flung the sovereignty of that social formation may really hold, judged by standards set in the fulcrum of European nationalism. His theory of history also naturalises a debasement of the subcontinent through crude orientalist extrapolations of geography and climate:
“... but there is perhaps not one other which so irresistibly draws civilisations to it, and strangles themes as irresistibly as does the Indo-Gangetic plain. It is the Vampire of geography, which sucks out all creative energy and leaves its victims as listless shadows [...] so far no foreigner in India – Aryan, Turk, [sic] or Anglo-Saxon – has been able to escape the consequences of living in the Indo-Gangetic plain. His energy has been drained, his vitality sapped, and his will and idealism enfeebled [...] In this process the internal proletariat has played a passive part. It has only risen to the surface like scum in stagnant waters.” (502-503)
His secularism seems to be really an archaic and quite eccentric learning from British education, particularly learnt through liberal political theory and classical texts. The eccentricity of it was actually rather typical, and points to the dissimulated aspects of the nationalist, anticolonial movement – the failed bourgeois revolution and the failed socialist revolution on display, portending to a fragmentation of feeling and structure.
That said, Chaudhuri's great Britannia-philia reminds me of a certain other anticolonial intellectual, CLR James. James, in his latter-day Victorianism – perhaps best exemplified in Beyond a Boundary, his opus on cricket – exhibits a rather common phenomenon in British intellectual culture; namely the radical turns towards the English canon as the site of turning the world upside down. From the nonconformism of Milton, via the Romanticism of Shelley and Wordsworth right through to the modernism of Prynne, all exhibit these traits of reanimating the canon to reveal the true discordant, antagonistic core that all too often lapses into middle-brow banality.
James and Chaudhuri as formed in the British colonial idiom represent players in this nonconformist tradition, albeit the former developing a much more coherent and acerbic structural analysis in comparison to the latter's more limited ossification. In any case, it speaks to the question of colonial mimicry and peripheral thought vis-a-vis the genuine relational imperial co-production of epistemology and ontology. There is a genuine case for the development of the educated individual in Chaudhuri's account which develops ideas of liberalism far beyond the scope of its modern-day charlatans, even more so than his colonial overseers it should be said. And in the embrace of freedom, one is led away and against forms of institutionality.
In thinking about this conundrum that unveils itself when consciousness is raised via a system one ultimately finds reprehensible and banal – Fanon too should come to mind – I stumbled back upon Ammiel Alcalay's writing, a man suffused with an independence of thought that carries his work from the vernacular modernism of New York across the grammars of Sephardic Mediterranean. Here he reflects upon Juan Goytisolo, the great deconstructor of Spain:
In a curious way, the political consciousness and involvement, as well as the historical position on language from which Goytisolo initiates his art, place him well outside the scrutiny of most of the insular and self-reflexive modes of critical theory now practiced [...] To state this more clearly, Goytisolo's writing can be called “inaugural”; in other words, it is the kind of writing that creates the conditions for the invention and emergence of its own idiosyncratic critical language, refusing at every twist and turn the imposition of a preordained discourse that cannot possibly take into account the particular circumstances of its generation.
— Ammiel Alcalay, “The war was ending, the diasporas beginning”, Memories of our Future, (Citylight books, 1999), p. 148
Alcalay goes on, making the move from political commitment to the interrogation of subjectivity. He quotes Wilson Harris, who beseeches us to “draw upon unsuspected resources within an unfinished genesis of the Imagination”.1
This unfinished genesis of the Imagination is the sort of scale that takes us out of the technocratic realm of the (neo)liberal and social democratic, and away from the doldrums of institutionally-oriented cultural-politics, and away from the line of anticolonial to nationalist to post-imperial civil actor. How does one account for personal interiority and social formation beyond a limited bureaucratic causal relationship that a worn-out rationalism has bestowed upon us. It is an enduring, discontinuous question; a calling perhaps.
[1] Cited as Wilson Harris, from “Profiles of Myth and the New World,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, Zach, Goodwin, eds (Stauffenberg Verlag), p.85