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Nirad Chaudhri's Passage to England.

Vivek Iyer
Sir John Collings Squire- the bete noire of the Bloomsbury group and the Blimpish Magazine
editor of whom T.S Eliot said that nothing good could be published in England if his views
prevailed- nevertheless raised up an unknown Indian into the ranks of the great autobiographers
in the English language.

He wrote to his old College chum, C.R.R Reddy

‘I spent five days and nights reading a manuscript for Macmillan (this is between ourselves)
called The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The author’s name is Chaudari — though I
don’t think I have spelt it properly. I wish that you had been here when I read it. He has his
defects, for instance, he has never been out of Bengal, and although he has drawn spiritual
sustenance from all the great English authors of the past, and thinks that any Indian revival must
come from Europe and mainly from England, he has met very few Englishmen, and has a certain
resentment against the commercial community in Calcutta, who I don’t suppose would suit me
any better than they suited him….my dear Reddy, the man is a sage; he is as familiar with all the
arts of the world as he is with the religions and philosophies. His English is so good that one is
tempted to think that he must have had a translator; but a translator as good as that would never
have bothered about translation, but have written great works of English prose on his own. This
“unknown Indian” hovers above our globe, and sadly scrutinizes the fluctuating fortunes not
merely of India with her succession of invaders, but all of mankind…He could meet any of the
great thinkers of the past on equal footing…if his book comes out, as I hope it will, it may put
India into an uproar. But it will certainly enlighten all historically-minded men.”

It seems, it was not the bien pensant metropolitan elite, but this cricket playing, genially toping,
arbiter of taste for Literary England's 'Squirearchy' who gave a leg up to the sort of Bengali Babu
his caste was supposed to despise. More strangely yet, it is precisely the elitist erudition, the
Francophilia, which the Squirearchy abhorred in the modernists, which their leader found
compelling in a man some fifteen younger than himself from a very much more modest
background.

Though Nirad never knew who it was who had recommended his book be published, he wrote,
some five or six years later in 'a Passage to England,'

It does not become an

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Nirad belonged to the Kayastha- or writer- caste but, under the Raj, to do well, this caste had to
keep up its knowledge of Persian while regaining and expanding its knowledge of Sanskrit. At
the same time, the Kayastha was required by his British master to invest in the creation of a large
and instructive body of vernacular Bengali literature. Of course, the Indians were welcome to
learn English of a useful sort. What was not desirable was that they turn English literature into an
esoteric Babu jargon unintelligible to all but its authors.

I should emphasize that traditional Brahmins were not supposed to have much love for secular
literature- more particularly of an erotic sort. They were expected to just stick to Scriptural and
Devotional works. Princes, too, should never develop an unmanly addiction to phrase making.
They should be vigorous of body and virile of conception but maintain a bluff indifference to the
hypertrophied literary culture which had marked the decline and decadence of the Mughals and
the Nawabs who succeeded them. Merchants, like Gandhi, were welcome to learn enough
English to do well in the Courts but what was required of them was factual arguments and a
mastery of the Rules of Evidence, not ornate or recondite eloquence.

The English tutors of Princes were ex-Army men who spoke the various vernaculars in a
dignified enough but essentially utilitarian manner. They might wax loquacious over the port in
describing a martial engagement, but eschewed 'poodle fakery' in the presence of ladies.

It is interesting that Sir Syed Ahmed, the inheritor of Mughal erudition and founder of Aligarh
Muslim University, demanded that instruction in the Humanities be given in plain and simple
English. Why? Urdu's convolutions and euphony rendered young brains barren.
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Both the Indians and the British rejected both 'Babu English' as well as the preciousness of
Walter Pater and his school. Wilde, it is true, could be very funny- and a sense of humor is
important- but Wilde walked the primrose path to perdition. Let the French, who had
decriminalized sodomy during their Revolution, go in for a Mallarmean cult of pure language.
As for the Bengali bhadralok, buddhijivi, who had always shown an attraction to France and its
Roman Law tradition, let them continue to live in a mental universe where Dupliex not Clive,
had prevailed. It was a small compensation for their continuous loss of power, prestige and
money which had been going on since the 1840's. With the coming of Independence, many East
Bengali Hindus- and Nirad was from East Bengal- lost everything. First Ranajit Guha and then
Nirad himself emigrated to the UK and took British citizenship. During the Fifties, the French
supported Nirad because he was the only brown man from South Asia who was saying that the
White man should come back and rule his patch of swamp where men were as mosquitos.
Nirad's Francophilia justified the French attempt to keep their Empire by selectively granting a
few colored people the status of being 'evolved' and thus notionally equal to proper French
citizens. Later it would be Spivak who would take up this torch albeit in an even more solipsistic
and senseless manner.

Was English literature the 'wife' of the Englishman? No. At best, she was a kindly Aunty or elder
sister. Work was his wife and Sport his recreation. Literature was a return to the Nursery with its
brightly colored books only while the rain bucketed down.

Nirad forgets that Jeeves was the creation of a younger brother of a great Theosophist in India
who, for a time, was the tutor of Jeddu Krishnamurthy- the Universal Messiah promoted by
Annie Beasant. Jeeves is a jeeva-mukt- liberated soul- or pratyeka (hidden) Buddha. He has
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achieved Spinozan univocity. Wodehouse's genius is to give him a conatus and an oikeiosis of a
shrewd and commendable sort. He has humanized a Divine Comedy and given his readers many
sunlit hours when golf is impossible because the rain keeps bucketing down.

Indians, to contribute something to England- in the same manner that Armine Wodehouse
contributed to India- had to do what the English had done in India- viz. find profitable
opportunities for trade and industry or novel methods to enhance the value of what already
existed. The only ties that matter in a Common Law- as opposed to Roman Law- jurisdiction are
those of a Contractual, mutually beneficial, kind. Meaning- artha- is concerned with having the
means to achieve desirable ends.

England would briefly become a nation of Asian shopkeepers. Then the children of those
shopkeepers started to rise up through education and a more complicated, technological type, of
enterprise. We don't ask of Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak that they be able to recite the Faery
Queene. We expect them to do a good job for us so that our economy recovers from COVID and
Brexit and whatever yet worse calamity is waiting for us around the corner.

As for Indian visitors to England- like other visitors- they want to see cricket and football
matches and go shopping and take selfies and enjoy the chocolate box perfection of the Home
Counties' sunny vistas.

Interestingly, Nirad's own son- who was later to fulfil his father’s destiny as the Braudel annalist
of the East India Company- seems to have been a typical 'Public School' type-

Nirad was destined by nature to be a Professor of Military History. Sadly, he didn't get the
distinction in his MA that he deserved- a case of 'exam nerves' I suppose- but he did get a very
good berth with the Department of Military Accounts. Nirad's own auto-didacticism soon put
him in a position such that he could correspond with people like Liddell Hart. He had the
soldier's ability to imagine an entire topography and thus to understand the deeper strategic logic
of military engagements. In 'Passage to England', Nirad repeatedly gives proof of this essentially
aesthetic aspect of the soldier's eye. Yet, precisely because his destiny had not been to be a
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soldier or to rise high in the Defense hierarchy of even one of the native princes, this
aestheticism was linked to nothing but Hippolyte Taine's bogus 'race, milieu, moment'.

Nirad rose to public prominence first through his articles on the military situation and then
through his broadcasts for All India Radio. After the publication of his 'Autobiography', he lost
his Government job but the French were happy to take him on as a client. This forced the Brits to
do something for Chaudhri in their turn. Though they had hoped for praise of their Welfare State
and had received instead a welter of incomprehensible erudition and arcane literary allusion it
was the beginning of a beautiful romance. Here was a genuine dhoti-wearing Bengali whose
great love for England and Europe, though entirely bookish and abstract, was delightfully, dottily
combative and cross-grained. There was a bluff and Blimpish soldier hidden within that small
but upright form. Had India made a proper use of his ability, he would have travelled across its
length and breadth so as to form a better idea of its defensibility and capacity to project force. In
that case he wouldn't have written nonsense of the following sort-

The truth is quite different. The Europeans ensured that their forests and mountains and fjords
and islets could not become centers of resistance. They abolished their 'Zomias'- the 'fracture
zone' of their Empires- and invented a type of forestry management which was later imported
into India. Brahminic civilization eagerly embraced the Universal Empires promoted by the
Shramanic religions- indeed, most Jain and Buddhist monks were of Brahmin origin- and thus
the exclusion from the town which Nirad remarks on, only obtained where Muslim rule was
enforced with a heavy hand. Had Nirad visited South India, he would have seen with his own
eyes that Temple towns were as ubiquitous as European Cathedral towns. Thus Radhakrishnan,
felt at home in Oxford- though maintaining orthopraxy- precisely because it was a sort of more
cosmopolitan Kumbakonam. Indeed, the Tamil who reads G.U. Pope- who did much to revive
our language in its pure form- feels he is reading the work a Tamil scholar who happens to
belong to the sect of St. Thomas which had arrived on our shores some two thousand years ago.
Indeed, we eagerly keep alive the notion that Alfred the Great's emissaries, who had come to us
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seeking a relic of that Saint- whom Oscar Wilde thought should have been the patron of the
skeptical English- had received a fond welcome.

India is, of course, much larger than Britain- indeed its population was already twice that of
Europe and, with the exception of the Gypsies who had come to Europe from India many
centuries ago, nowhere, save amongst recent New Commonwealth immigrants, was there visible
any difference of race or religion either in the faces or the clothes of the population.

What Nirad is remarking is a somewhat unique feature of South Asia- viz. 'jati' based endogamy
which seems to have halted gene flows between populations some 2000 years ago. The
differences in costume reflected differences in Religion, region of origin and occupation.
However, these have tended to erode and disappear over time.

Why did Europe move towards homogeneity whereas India did not? The answer of course is that
Western Europe moved to a market economy and increased the power of the State while
ensuring this power would be used to accelerate economic progress. This meant a substantial
investment first in oceanic trade and then manufacturing trade so as to gain an even larger profit
on that maritime commerce. Properly speaking, the East India Company was forcibly exporting
'invisible' services to Nirad's Bengal. His own class prospered by it- forgetting Persian in the
process. But, when Independence came, there was a terrible reckoning. The Hindus were forced
out of East Bengal as, a little later, they- and other Indians- were forced out of Burma. Nirad's
own class was able to leverage its erudition into well paying jobs in Academia and Scientific
Research and the higher branches of International Banking and Corporate Management. But,
other 'educationally forward' classes from ex-colonies did something similar. What set the
Bengali apart was the knowledge that they had reached a peak of affluence and cultural influence
even before the noon-tide of the Raj. Ever since they had witnessed nothing but decline which-
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as Nirad chronicled- began to extend to the arts and the Humanities from the Twenties onward.
Still, unlike most other 'subaltern' peoples, the Bengali buddhijivi had had his day in the Sun.

Back in 1977, my father was posted to London. He sent us eloquent letters describing the beauty
of a City enjoying one of its finest Summers. My sister and I were completing our O and A levels
respectively so as to be able to get into good schools. I was not considered smart enough to do
Eng Lit and so had to settle for a special paper in English language designed for non-first
language candidates. I still only managed to get a 'B' despite private coaching.

It was at this time that Mum made me read 'Passage to England'. It made little impression on me-
other than confirming in me a fanatical hatred of English literature- but there was one golden
passage in it. Indeed, it was for the sake of finding that passage that I took the trouble today to
skim through Nirad's worst book.

Here it is-

The odd thing here is that Nirad's description of the behavior of the Indians he met in bus queues
in Delhi is very similar to what he observes in the English cat. On seeing a small, very learned
looking, Bengali gentleman, elderly Indian men become terribly loquacious. They inform him
about all the members of their family and the details of the legal case they have come to Delhi to
fight. They want to send him mangoes from their own orchard but he is able to escape in time.
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But there's another side to this. A man on a bus tries to pull the Bhagvad Gita Nirad is reading
out of his hands. Nirad resists. The man says 'But this is a Holy Book! If you don't want to give
it, then I want nothing to do with it!' Nirad says he is made to feel a pariah.

Obviously, for a Hindu, the sudden realization that you are in fact a pariah has an immediate
soteriological effect. The scales fall from your eyes. You repent your delusive egotism. Salvation
has come to you on the DTC bus. However, what is even better is if a cat suddenly jumps
through your window and starts playing with your computer mouse. Enough with the bile-filled
blogging! Go find something tasty to offer this English incarnation of Shashti Devi. Don't try to
compete with a Bengali bhuddijivi in uttering encomiums upon the Anglo Saxon cat. Your
passage to England will forever remain incomplete.