Almost forgotten in the country to which his unabashed Anglophilia brought him three decades ago, Nirad C Chaudhuri, the Indian writer, will turn 100 in November. In India he has always had more baiters than readers; it is only the approaching centenary that has at last brought him official recognition from cultural bureaucrats willing to overlook his frequent references to India as a land of "barbarians." As for Britain, Chaudhuri's uncompromising intellectual elitism-he steadfastly refused to translate quotations from Latin and Greek in his books-has long lost him the few readers he had: none of his books, either the great Autobiography of an Unknown Indian or the biographical studies of Max Muellar and Robert Clive, are in print. Yet his fate is no worse than that of Ram Mohan Roy, another great Bengali, born 225 years ago and now lying buried in Bristol. Roy and Chaudhuri stand at the beginning and the end of one of the longest, if not most fertile, cultural relationships between two parts of the world which were not then supposed to meet. Roy was the first, Chaudhuri is the last, in the great line of 19th century Bengalis who believed that their own and India's future lay in apprenticing themselves to the modern west, specifically Britain, without detaching themselves from their cultural roots. Their belief, caricatured by a thousand institutions of education and culture across the country, lies at the very basis of modern India's cultural identity.
Roy's quest for a liberal British culture allied with a reformist Hinduism was to result in what is grandly called the Indian renaissance. Some of its leading figures, such as the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, went on to bigger things; others lay trapped in their country homes or Calcutta mansions in Chekhovian isolation, well evoked by the filmmaker Satyajit Ray-himself a late product of the Anglo-Bengali school.
The renaissance was not destined to endure; predictably, it led to no enlightenment. It was riven with internal contradictions, most notably the discrepancy between Britain's crudely exploitative policies in India and the refinements of Victorian high culture on which the Anglo-Bengalis were hooked. The racist excesses of the British before and after Lord Curzon made the Anglo-Bengalis culturally defensive; the partition of Bengal was the last straw for many of them. The Jallianwallah Bagh killings in 1919 prompted Tagore to renounce his knighthood and strengthened his attachment to a vague "internationalism." The Anglo-Bengali movement petered out; the idea of improving on the British through diligent emulation was replaced in India's cultural mainstream by the ideological tensions between the nativist Gandhi and the modernist Nehru.
What is remarkable about these developments (spanning more than a century) is the almost complete absence of any British contribution. There was the odd theosophist, the good-hearted missionary, the dedicated anthropologist, but they were exceptions. Given the length and intensity of the encounter between India and Britain, the cultural output on the British side was meagre. The sad record of Islamic depredations in India is at least balanced by the extraordinary art, music and architecture produced by the fusion of Islamic rule with existing cultures. In comparison, 200 years of British colonial rule were to yield very little of cultural value-for either side.
The reasons are not hard to find. For the British in Britain, India was a distant source of exotic goods, raw materials and little else; a thousand PhD students now strive for tenure in Anglo-American academia by speculating on why India is scarcely acknowledged in the major texts of the Victorian period. For most British people in India, the country was primarily the setting for personal profit and adventure. The local culture they fitfully encountered was a source of bewilderment, even revulsion. Indeed, the efforts of the earliest Indologists such as Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, or the later discoveries by British archaeologists and historians of India's lost artistic treasures, met with scepticism and discouragement. The Taj Mahal was widely believed to have been the work of a non-Indian. It was blithely vandalised and its wide porch used for dances, until Lord Curzon declared it a protected monument.
The philistinism of the British in India has a respectable intellectual lineage: Macaulay dismissed all of India's literature as not being worth more than a single shelf of a good European library, and called for the manufacture of an elite class of Anglicised Indians who would help the British maintain order.
The romance of being British and regnant in India is recreated and relived in a hundred Raj-revival and anniversary-inspired novels and television films. But one must still go to Kipling for the most accurate picture. The self-absorption of the British in India, the insularity of their daily lives, the provinciality of their world-view: Kipling-himself a fully paid-up member of that world-faithfully, almost mechanically, reflects these in his stories. The self-absorption found expression, most lastingly, in British architecture in India: those extravagant, Gothic government offices of Bombay or Delhi's ostentatiously arrogant domes and pillars, erected by Lutyens who loudly proclaimed his contempt for Indian architecture. The buildings still stand, slowly decaying, without past or future, or any links with the surrounding land. It is the same with much of the British creation in India, which expresses only a fantasy-laden notion of imperial power.
Other legacies of the British presence in India are-unlike the legacies of Islamic rule-neither religious nor artistic. Some of them have been cruelly mixed blessings for modern Indians. Created by the British, the labyrinthine Indian civil service was kept intact by the Anglophile Nehru. Fifty years later, it has succeeded only in perpetuating a ruling class of semi-Anglicised, semi-feudal Indians whose dealings with the Indian masses are tainted with the same mixture of contempt and paternalism displayed by the British. Another legacy is the continuing dominance of English as the language of power and privilege. Much has been made of the handful of Indian writers who have mastered the language to the satisfaction of their former colonial masters. But their few, extravagantly ballyhooed novels cannot compensate for the grievous social and psychological damage caused by the hegemony of a language few people in India know, or have the means of knowing well. Forced to learn a pidgin form of English-routinely burlesqued by British travel writers-and forced, in the process, to unlearn their first languages, millions of Indians dwell in a permanent twilight zone, exiled from the world of complex perceptions and responses that proficiency in any one language would provide.
The English language survives in its oppressive, debased form, but the people who brought it are, after just 50 years, sliding out of middle-class consciousness in India. For India's non-middle-class population, the British have always been remote, mythical figures. The bald, cruel villain with the funny Hindi accent in Bombay films represents the average British person to millions of Indians. The Anglicised classes, standard bearers of petit bourgeois British culture in India, have been supplanted by people more in tune with a globally diffused American culture. Enid Blyton has lost out to Nintendo; Somerset Maugham to John Grisham; Cliff Richard to Michael Jackson.
Anniversaries are never a good time for calculating the costs and benefits of any relationship. But, as celebrated in Britain, the 50th anniversary of Indian independence provided remarkably little occasion for sober introspection. Very often it seemed as if not India but the British achievement in India was being celebrated. Certainly, the loud presence of revellers from Britain at the summer-long celebratory party contrasted sharply with the hosts' shyness-a conspicuous Indian reluctance to gloat over five decades of unsteady evolution.
To a visitor from the subcontinent, much of the British television and newspaper chatter on India was bewildering. It also revealed astonishing ignorance. To give only one example of the incredible gaffes committed by the media, a Times editorial described the Indian prime minister as an "untouchable." This is a bit like calling Linford Christie a "slave"; as it happens, it is India's president, not its prime minister, who belongs to a formerly "untouchable" caste.
One learns to live with this sort of solecism, which is not quite on the same scale as the acts of political incomprehension-detailed in Patrick French's Liberty or Death-that led to the partition of India. The nature of these misjudgements, many of which were linked to a failure of personal perception, reveal just how little Indians were understood (even after 200 years) by the British men deputed to rule them. This absence of understanding at the most important levels was witnessed again two decades ago, when Michael Foot chose to support Indira Gandhi's imposition of dictatorial rule.
To Nirad Chaudhuri the inadequacies of Britain's engagement with India, past or present, have been a deeply personal matter. "When I remember," he wrote in his autobiography, "how until even ten years ago all those Englishmen who had anything to do with us or our country, as a rule, denied every capability and every quality in us, and when I set the interested superciliousness of yesterday against the interested complaisance of today I blush for the English character, and my shame is not lessened by the manner of the flattery. It is being ladled out to us with intellectual incompetence and vulgarity of language-a combination of poor knowledge, poorer logic, and the poorest conceivable English."
This was written in 1947. Few events have caused more bitterness and regret in Chaudhuri's long life than the failure of the Indo-British encounter, its inability to enhance either of the two cultures. One can safely guess what he would say about the anniversary-mongers of today. But Chaudhuri's anger, for all the virtues of its honesty, and its Gibbonian cadences, would be ill spent on them. In the last 50 years, both Indians and Englishmen have moved on, further away from each other and their own cultural ideals of the past. To a centenarian from a less hasty era, the change cannot but seem for the worse. Chaudhuri's new book is about "western decadence," the philistinism of the democratised classes in Britain and the US-a subject he has dealt with glancingly in previous books while discussing Indian barbarism. Not surprisingly, the book has not found a publisher in Britain. Chaudhuri is, in his 100th year, the last Indian of his kind, and also happens to be, by default, the last Englishman in the world.
