Although, the book, ‘An unfinished revolution’, is

by nature an account of autobiography yet it is more

concerned with the story of the struggle of a
civilization with a hostile environment in which the
destiny of the British rule become necessarily
involved. It is about the maturity of a scholar’s mind
in that environment. It seeks to show how the mind
and character of a typical Indian were made, shaped
and quickened by the same British rule.
This Autobiography has been divided into four
different books in which each book has four chapters
about Nirad’s stay in Calcutta from 1910 to 1942
and the impact it had on his mind. Nirad’s school
education was a total disappointment. However, he
learned a lot from museums and libraries. This book
also tells about his failure in the M.A. examination
in History.
Book 4 is entitled “Into the World” and its four
chapters are :
Man and Life in Calcutta 
New Politics 
Vanishing Landmarks 
An Essay On the Course of Indian History. 
In this book, Nirad describes in details the life
in Calcutta, the different sections of society both
Bengali and English, the missions of the rich and the
houses of the middle class. The book also describes
the advent of Gandhi on the sense
and Nirad’s disillusionment with Gandhi’s passive
resistance movement because it degenerated into
mob-violence. Anyway, Gandhism was the victory
of a new kind of nationalism and nationality.
According to him, these new politics had destroyed
all the other form of Indian nationalism and the
moral awareness created by Brahmanism and the
new Hinduism of the 19th century. It also destroyed
the concept of synthesis between the values of “the
East” and “the West”. In the end, only the imitation
of the west emerged as the conspicuous feature of
our life.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri concludes his
best “Autobiography” with his views of “Indian
History”. He believes that that the tropical land of
India has ever been a corrupting influence on its
people. The land was rejuvenated only when foreign
invasions took place. He hopes that in the future the
USA alone or along or along with the British
Commonwealth may come to rejuvenate India again.
The Autobiography ends here; “In the words of
Nirad C. Chaudhuri himself”. It is more of a national
than personal history. The book also brings
out Chaudhuri as a great Anglophile.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s “The Autobiography of An
Unknown Indian” is a landmark in the development
of the Autobiographical genre in Indo-Anglian
literature. In fact, this literary genre in Indo-Anglian
literature came to its maturity in the period of the
Gandhian whirlwind (1920-1947) due to the
emergence of a large number of thinkers, political
leaders, whose lines interested the people and they
wanted to know about them from their own
method. Nirad had a balance and subtle motions for
the exclusive situation with exclusive men.
Nirad Chaudhuri was born
in Kishoregunj, Mymensingh, East Bengal, British
India (now Bangladesh), the second of eight children
of Upendra Narayan Chaudhuri, a lawyer, and of
Sushila Sundarani Chaudhurani. His parents were
liberal middle-class Hindus who belonged to
the Brahmo Samaj movement.
Chaudhuri was a prolific writer even in the very last
years of his life, publishing his last work at the age
of 99. His wife Amiya Chaudhuri died in 1994
in Oxford, England. He too died in Oxford, three
months short of his 102nd birthday, in 1999. He
lived at 20 Lathbury Road from 1982 until his death
and a blue plaque was installed by the Oxfordshire
Blue Plaques Board in 2008.
Why was he always in love with England, though he
had never visited the land before the age of 57?
Perhaps Nirad Chaudhuri was in search of a home
that he could call his own.
And perhaps this street in 1980s took him closer to
the novels of Hardy and Austen. Lovers of literature
not only see texts through their lives but also sculpt
live through the texts they read. His textual affinity
was coupled with the colonial aura he grew up with-
we must remember that he spent his first 50 years in
an empire where the sun never set.
His England stay was a realisation of certain
dominant sensibilities and visions he idealised but
they were far from reality. Places like 20, Lathbury
road makes me wonder why people choose to
migrate and why certain places receive more sanctity
than others. For Nirad Chaudhuri, England was
sacred and for some America is. The solution to this
onerous puzzle cannot be found in better living
standard or socio-economic conditions of higher
wages.
Furthermore, certain places celebrate certain people.
Nirad Chaudhuri would have been immensely happy
if he knew about the blue plaque as it would fit his
sensibilities perfectly. Even Oxford County Council
was happy enough to remember this “an original
thinker, forthright in his opinions and an
internationalist, in the sense of one who embraces
the best of all cultures but never loses his own.
Major works[edit]
His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown
Indian, published in 1951, put him on the long list of
great Indian writers. Chaudhari had said that The
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is 'more of an
exercise in descriptive ethology than autobiography'.
He is concerned with describing the conditions in
which an Indian grew to manhood in the early
decades of the century, and as he feels that the basic
principle of book is that environment shall have
precedence over its product; he describes its
affectionate and sensuous detail the three places that
had the greatest influence on him: Kishoreganj,the
country town in which he lived till he was twelve;
Bangram; his ancestral village; and Kalikutch, his
mother's village. A fourth chapter is devoted to
England, which occupied a large place in his
imagination. Later in the book he talks about
Calcutta, the Bengali Renaissance, the beginnings of
the nationalist Movement, and his experience of
Englishmen in India as opposed to the idyllic
pictures of a civilization he consider perhaps the
greatest in the world. These themes remains
preoccupations in most of Chaudhari's work, as does
his deterministic view of culture and politics. He
courted controversy in the newly independent India
due to the dedication of the book, which ran thus:
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"
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.
Chaudhuri was hounded out of government service,
deprived of his pension, blacklisted as a writer in
India and forced to live a life of penury.
Furthermore, he had to give up his job as a political
commentator in All India Radio as the Government
of India promulgated a law that prohibited
employees from publishing memoirs. Chaudhuri
argued that his critics were not careful-enough
readers; "the dedication was really a condemnation
of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he
wrote in a 1997 special edition of Granta.
[6] Typically, to demonstrate what exactly he had
been trying to say, he drew on a parallel
with Ancient Rome. The book's dedication,
Chaudhuri observed, "was an imitation of
what Cicero said about the conduct of Verres, a
Roman proconsul of Sicily who oppressed Sicilian
Roman citizens, who in their desperation cried out:
"Civis romanus sum".[6]
At the age of 57, in 1955 for the first time Chaudhari
went to abroad. After coming back he wrote a novel
Passage to England (1959). In this novel he talked
about his visits of five weeks in England, two weeks
in Paris and one week in Rome. He has given all
these figures only as he wants to show the intensity
and range of the experience he went through in these
eight weeks. During this period he visited statues,
paintings, plays and other work of arts. He also
visited buildings, landscapes and gardens and also
heard music and poetry.
Honours[edit]
Duff Cooper Memorial Award in 1967
Ananda Purashkar in 1988
DLitt from Oxford University in 1990.[7]
Vidyasagar Purashkar in 1997 by the Govt of West
Bengal
Desikottama in 1997 by Viswabharati
Books[edit]
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951)
A Passage to England (1959)
The Continent of Circe (1965)
The Intellectual in India (1967)
To Live or Not to Live (1971)
Scholar Extraordinary, The Life of Professor the
Right Honourable Friedrich Max Muller,
P.C. (1974)
Culture in the Vanity Bag (1976)
Clive of India (1975)
Hinduism: A Religion to Live by (1979)
Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987)
Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse (1997)
The East is East and West is West (collection of pre-
published essays)
From the Archives of a Centenarian (collection of
pre-published essays)
Why I Mourn for England (collection of pre-
published essays)

Some Excerpts from Nirad C. Chaudhuri- “The

Autobiography of An Unknown Indian

I am a Bengali and an Englishman.

I am a striking illustration of the survival of the
unfittest.
I am often asked: `We hear so many stories about
you. Are they true?' I reply, `If they are for me, you
should discount 95 per cent, but if against, the whole
of 100 per cent.'
When I write in English I am not writing as an
Indian or an Englishman. I am just a writer. Writers
know no nationality.
I would also set down, as a matter of moral
obligation, that I consider Kipling to be the only
English writer who will have a permanent place in
English literature with books on Indian themes, and
who will also be read by everyone who wants to
know not only British India but also timeless India.
The Beeb does not have the faintest idea of
Victorian norms and etiquette. They play to the
popular culture. Britain is a corrupt civilization now.
Do you know what religion is? It is a revolt against
death. A revolt against biology, a reaction against
decay.
A man who cannot endure dirt, dust, stench, noise,
ugliness, disorder, heat and cold has no right to live
in India.
Do we live at all? This would seem an absurd
question, for none of us commit suicide, though to
be honest, I would confess that I have come to feel
that a large majority of the persons I know should do
so, because I cannot see any point in their remaining
alive.
The conduct of American women, however, I cannot
even now understand unless I attribute it to the sad
but inexorable law of American impingement on
Asia that the United States will never export any of
its products to the East except those of which every
decent American is ashamed, taken with its
compliment that in retaliation, the East will set its
lowest adventurers on the distributors of American
money.
Salvation is never the object of religious
observances and worship of the Hindus. The main
object is worldly prosperity, and this absorption in
the world has made the doctrine of rebirth in it the
most appealing and strongly held belief among all
notions put forward by them about existence of life
after death. They so loved the world that they made
the possibility of leaving it for good even after many
cycles of rebirth as remote and difficult as possible.