Poles of recovery: From Dutt to Chaudhuri

The question of the 'audience' is a vexed one today for Indian writers in English, complicated by the ideas of post-coloniality, appropriation and authenticity. Although such choices are hardly ever deliberately or simply made, Nirad C. Chaudhuri's autobiography, written obviously with a Western audience in mind, makes nonsense of the claim that writing for such a market is necessarily incompatible with exploring the most subtle and recondite features of one's culture. The last of a three-part essay by noted writer AMIT CHAUDHURI.

NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian presents, on the other hand, a startling variation, even inversion, of the theme of disowning and recovery, exile and homecoming. With Dutt originated the desire of going outward, toward England and Europe, in flesh or otherwise; R. K. Narayan, for instance, unable to make the journey himself, sent the manuscripts of his first novel to a friend in Oxford, urging him to drown them in the Cherwell if they found no publisher.

Although Nirad Chaudhuri did not travel to England till he was 57 years old, his whole life, till then, had, in a sense, been a preparation for that journey. By the time he made it, he had already memorised the features of England and Europe from his reading, as he tells us in A Passage to England - "... my mind was not a clean slate ... it was burdened with an enormous load of book-derived notions". Thus, entering England, he compared the "authorised version" of the England he already knew with the makeshift version that was presented to him: "[t]he famous chalk cliffs did not stand out glimmering and vast, as Matthew Arnold had described, but seemed like white creases between the blue- grey sheet of the Channel ..." This predilection for attributing a veracity, or priority, to text or word over "actual" landscape or location seems to be a habit of the colonial mind. The multilingual Borges, situated mentally in both the Spanish language and the English texts of the colonial world, made this habit well known; in the story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the narrator remarks matter-of-factly that the eponymous place Uqbar exists in the intersection between text and vision: "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia ... misleadingly titled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia ...". Even before Borges, the habit had been made famous by another figure poised flamboyantly between the English language and another, colonial history; Wilde, in "The Decay of Lying", reminds us punctiliously: "Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps ...?"

By the time Chaudhuri made his journey, of course, he was, unlike Dutt, already famous in the language and country in which Dutt had aspired to make his name.

The Autobiography, which was published in 1951, had received some very favourable reviews in the British press. History, yet again, had almost come full circle with the writing of this book. Dutt had moved, about 100 years ago, from the English language to the mother-tongue, thereby, in a sense, inaugurating Bengali literary culture, and Chaudhuri now reversed the direction. At the time of his writing the autobiography, and even long after, it was unusual, indeed exceptional, for a Bengali to embark upon a literary project, major or minor, in anything but his own tongue; at the time, the Bengali language was, for the Bengali writer, the legitimate vehicle for cosmopolitan, middle-class expression. But the Bengal Renaissance, which was still coming into being when Dutt was writing, had obviously stratified sufficiently into a hegemony for Chaudhuri, who was born at its peak in 1897, and formed by it intellectually, to want to distance himself from it.

Chaudhuri had served a long apprenticeship as an "unknown Indian" by the time he published his autobiography at the age of 54. Gravitating from the small town, Kishorganj, to Calcutta to read History at the Scottish Church College, he stood first in the B.A. exams in Calcutta University, probably then the colonial world's premier institution of higher studies. As spectacularly, he proceeded to fail his M.A.. He then took up a series of jobs; and, for a time, notably, was secretary to the nationalist Sarat Bose. Yet he continued to feel uneasy with Indian nationalism, and with the post-Independence Bengali, and Indian middle class.

The Bengali bhadralok worshipped a good degree, but never forgave or forgot a bad one; it extolled professional success, and berated lack of ambition. Chaudhuri evidently knew what it meant to be judged by these standards; in his Preface, he said: "... after passing the age of 50 I am faced with the compulsion to write off all the years I have lived and begin life anew. My friends say I am a failure; and I dare say they will now think I am trying to excuse that failure; I will not concede the point". Dutt turned from English to Bengali with a similar refusal to accept failure; Chaudhuri turned from Bengali, and, in effect, Bengalis, in order to articulate a nuanced, but panoramic, picture of a Bengali sensibility; in both cases, the construction of "Bengaliness" is connected, in different ways, to English.

All his life, Chaudhuri strove to both express his Bengaliness and to escape it; he was profoundly a part of the Bengali bhadralok class, but could not bear to be a part of it; he fled to England in 1970, taking up permanent residency there. If Chaudhuri's first act of distancing was to write his autobiography in the English language, his second act of distancing himself from his intellectual antecedents in the Bengal Renaissance (which was also one of the principal authors of Indian nationalism) was his lapidary dedication itself, placed at the beginning of the book, which made him infamous in his own land:

TO THE MEMORY OF THE

BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA

WHICH CONFERRED SUBJECT

HOOD ON 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 QUICK

ENED

BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE

This 12-line signpost of Indian literary history, announcing its striking act of disowning while proclaiming its embarrassing allegiance, is absent, however, from the 1999 Picador reissue of the Autobiography; handling the book, I could not understand why it felt incomplete, why I felt something was missing. When I realised, at last, what it was, I phoned the publisher, Peter Straus; he confessed to being as surprised as I was, and said he would investigate. Later, he told me that the dedication had been lost somewhere in the course of the book's publishing history, and that Picador had just inherited the text the way it had appeared from its former publishers. Straus has since promised, of course, that the dedication will be restored. Why the dedication disappeared at all is mysterious; certainly, one has no reason to believe that Chaudhuri disowned, at some point, his own act, and proclamation, of disowning. Was it, then, censored, or excised, by a well-meaning Western publisher (my old Indian Jaico edition certainly has the dedication)?

In choosing English, Chaudhuri was, of course, offering himself to a worldwide audience, if by "world" we mean the Anglophone West. The "unknown" in the title, thus, is partly ironical, a slap in the face of a society he felt had largely ignored him. When Dutt published his epic, the Bengali readership was relatively amorphous and fluid, itself a kind of transitional text. Dutt could write to his friend: "Many Hindu ladies, I understand, are reading the book and crying over it". He could also relate to the same friend, Raj Narain, in another letter, an account, of an evolving readership, charged with mischief, subterfuge, and wonder, the poet himself parodying the acts of disowning and recovery, posing first as Westernised, Anglophone philistine, then proudly declaiming his own poem in Bengali:

Some days ago I had occasion to go to the Chinabazar. I saw a man seated in a shop and deeply poring over Meghanad. I stepped in and asked him what he was reading. He said in very good English; - "I am reading a new poem, Sir!" "A poem!" I said. "I thought there was no poetry in your language." He replied - "Why, Sir, here is poetry that would make my nation proud." I said, "Well, read and let me know." My literary shopkeeper looked hard at me and said, "Sir, I am afraid you would not understand this author." I replied, "Let me try my chance." He read out of Book 11 that part wherein Kam returns to Rati ... How beautifully the young fellow read ... I took the poem from him and read out a few passages to the infinite astonishment of my new friend. How eagerly he asked where I live? I gave him an evasive reply, for I hate to be bothered with visitors.

The question of the "audience", however, is a vexed one today for Indian writers in English, complicated by the ideas of post- coloniality, appropriation and authenticity. "Which audience do you write for?" is a question asked invariably and indefatigably, at readings, of Indian English writers published in the West, its underlying political presumption being that the only morally defensible answer is, "For an Indian audience". Although such choices are hardly ever deliberately or simply made, Chaudhuri's great autobiography, written obviously with a Western audience in mind, makes nonsense of the claim that writing for a Western audience is necessarily incompatible with exploring the most subtle and recondite features of one's culture; for in addressing the West, he is both defining himself against it, and also addressing a part of himself, in that the West is profoundly a part of the intellectual formation of the modern Indian.

If English, for Chaudhuri, is the language by which he disowns Bengaliness, it is also his sole, and most powerful, instrument of recovering and expressing it; every sentence in the book - in the unparalleled poetry of its descriptions of the East Bengali landscape, and its portrayal of middle-class Calcutta - is imbued with the Bengaliness it also implicitly rejects. For Chaudhuri, recovery begins, indeed, in the midst of acting as interpreter to a non-Bengali, non-Indian audience. For instance, in his small prefatory note, Chaudhuri refers to Kishorganj as a "little country town"; a page later, in the first sentence of the first chapter, he is already dismantling the canonical English and literary resonances of the phrase in order to convey a lived, but unacknowledged, reality. His description occurs, as we see, between two definitions, one disowned, the other recovered: "Kishorganj, my birthplace, I have called a country town, but this description, I am afraid, will call up wholly wrong associations. The place had nothing of the English country town about it, if I am to judge by the illustrations I have seen and the descriptions I have read ..." What, then, is the Kishorganj he posits against the English phrase? It is something in-between, a hybrid, a colonial construct, like "Bengaliness" itself: "one among a score of collections of tin-and-mat huts or sheds, comprising courts, offices, schools, shops and residential dwellings, which British administration had raised up in the green and brown spaces of East Bengal?"

But to embark upon the Autobiography in English was a solitary project. It was like being in an echo chamber, listening to your own voice. Dutt had had the "literary shopkeeper" to read his poem to; Chaudhuri had only himself. In an essay called "My Hundredth Year", Chaudhuri recalls how, when he began to write his book, the act of composing involved a play of echoes (audible echoes as well as literary ones) and a talking to oneself: "I read what I had written aloud and then also read a passage from some great work of English prose in the same way. If the two sounds agreed I passed my writing". The reason for this, as Chaudhuri puts it, was "an acute anxiety", a sense of dispossession, for "I did not learn English from Englishmen, nor hear it as spoken by native speakers of the language till late in life". Chaudhuri, like many of his generation and background, learnt English as a second language. English prose style, in the hands of writers like Chaudhuri and Naipaul, has been an instrument of ambivalence; neither of these two writers, among the greatest post-colonial stylists of English prose, came from the upper reaches of their respective societies. On the other hand, Rushdie's khichdi prose, with its "Bombay mix" of Hindi, English, and Indian English, is a hegemonic language, and the increased use of a similar English in films, books and advertisements signals the coming of age of an upper-middle class generation in post-Independence, post-liberalisation India. This is not to either praise or condemn it, but to point out that, in order to appreciate its comedy and excitement, it is important to remember that this khichdi language is very far from an African creole or pidgin, or being a language of the dispossessed. On the other hand, English prose style, in Chaudhuri's hands, becomes the measure of one who feels he does not quite belong; it is partly a language of suggestion, which is why sound and rhythm are such significant components of it. Chaudhuri believed in ideas, opinions and positions, but believed equally in the prosody of the English sentence: "There is no such thing as one standard rhythm of English prose. English prose rhythms are bewilderingly diverse ..." There is, thus, a greater tension between sense and sound, between the different resonances, audible and half-heard, of what Chaudhuri says, than either his readers or even he has given himself credit for. English prose style, and its auditoriness, becomes, for Chaudhuri, a mapping of an area between control and dispossession, between the authority of words and the suggestion of sound.

He moved permanently to England when he was 73 years old, living a suburban life with his wife on Lathbury Road in North Oxford. But he was never happy with a Britain that had lost its Empire and become a satellite of America. Disillusionment followed, and when he was approaching his hundredth year, he wrote in his last book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse: "... in 1970, when I came to England never to return to my country ... my premonitions of decadence in England finally became a conviction gaining with the years an accelerated force". Occasionally, you could see him moving about in Oxford in a tweed jacket or a suit, although one hears he also wore the traditional costume of the Bengali bhadralok, the dhoti and panjabi, to the end of his days. Style, for the modern, colonial Indian, is not only a feature of prose and language, but has also to do with a style of existence and a manner of dressing, the latter becoming a code through which, again, the negotiations of distancing and retrieval are made. Watching the film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray on television, my wife commented that Wilde reminded her of Madhusudan Dutt. It was the literary genius, the larger-than-life grandiloquence, and the tragic denouements the two men shared that she was speaking of; but she was also referring to, I think, how a style of existence and even dress can become, for the colonial, a self-definition. Dorian Gray is an allegory of self- division played out in the realm of appearance and visibility - the portrait. Wilde's exquisitely caustic observation, "Only shallow people do not judge by appearances", takes on an added resonance as a serious dictum about the colonial sensibility. Dutt himself was notable for his appearance, and that appearance seemed to provoke literary correspondences; its dark-hued majesty made contemporaries compare him to Othello. A story to do with dress revolves around his days as a Christian youth; as a student of Bishop's College, Calcutta, he wanted to wear the European long coat, which, however, only European students were permitted to wear; "native" students were to only wear the "national dress". In protest, he apparently wore such loud and "rainbow- hued" (an adjective used by a contemporary) versions of "national dress" that the exasperated authorities gave in, and allowed him to put on the long coat. Style, here, becomes a visible part of the process of disowning and recovery. Gandhiji's abandonment of Western dress for the loin cloth is well known; Nehru brought a personal dimension to colonial style, relinquishing Western clothes for an Indo-Persian suit, since then identified as the "national dress". Qurratulain Hyder suggests ironically in her novel, Aag Ka Dariya (River of Fire), that the "national dress" in India is, after all, a hybrid, Nehruvian construct. Tagore, in his middle years, dressed up as a holy man in a long, loose robe, while the middle-class Brahmo reformism of his poetry and prose kept pre-colonial Hindu India at arm's length. Chaudhuri, moving back and forth between bowler hat and dhoti, was a late, striking addition to the annals of colonial style, reminding one as much of its capacity for parody as of its serious intent.

Chaudhuri died in his hundred and first year, his small, unlikely figure having embraced an extraordinary century almost in its entirety, and having embodied, too, its strange contradictions and journeys; being a Hindu, he was cremated. There is, thus, no part of English soil that will be forever Kishorganj. His personal library was bequeathed, probably by one of his sons, to, of all places, the Calcutta Club library. This club is an elite social institution not particularly noted for its literary activities, and had been founded in the early 20th Century as a liberal response to the Bengal Club, where "dogs and Indians" were once "not allowed" - a nationalistic raison d'etre for springing into being that Chaudhuri would probably have not approved of. Visiting the library recently, I found a room with a glass door had been set aside on the upper level, furnished and decorated like the room of a suburban expatriate Bengali of a certain generation, where, along with a few bottles of wine and some artefacts, books were on display. Such exhibits of contemporary culture are relatively unusual in Calcutta, although the places of pilgrimage in this colonial city are secular ones - not the tombs of saints found in the more ancient cities, but the houses in which the poets and writers of the Renaissance lived, like Tagore's house in Jorasanko, or the graves in which they were buried. Dutt's grave in Park Circus cemetery is largely unvisited. The day my wife and I went to look at it, the bust of that fierce, moustached head stared determinedly into the distance; the only other person there was a woman from Europe or America, searching absently among the tombstones for some name that belonged to her genealogy.

* * *

Editing an anthology of Indian writing, I came upon, once more, the figure of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, or Michael, as he has often been called in modern Bengal. I remember him from the folklore I became acquainted with in my childhood; for the folklore that every Bengali child would have then become familiar with, even those growing up far away from Calcutta and Bengal, as I was, had as much to do with demons and kings, superheroes and villains, as with the figures who emerged with, and also brought into being, modernity in Bengal: the social reformers, nationalists, and writers who formed what is often called the Bengal Renaissance. These, besides Tarzan and the Phantom, were our superheroes; and we, without being entirely conscious of it, imbibed a narrative that told us of a constellation of supermen who had emerged from a seemingly androgynous race that the English once called "effeminate", a pejorative that the Bengalis had taken to heart. The monsters and villains they had once overcome, and now battled with again daily for our entertainment and instruction, were conservatism, greed, the caste-system, religion - indeed, the very condition, it appeared, of being Indian - and, of course, the coloniser and his language. (Ashis Nandy's subtitle, to his first book, The Intimate Enemy, "loss and recovery of self under colonialism", comes to mind. What is striking, however, is how active disowning, and not just subconscious loss, plays a part, right from the beginning, in shaping Indian modernity, and to what extent both disowning and recovery determine the artistic transactions of the modern Indian writer.) A relatively late instance, and variation, of this paradigm is to be found in the works and the figure of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who died in 1998; probably the earliest, and most powerful, instance is the figure of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (whom Nandy also writes about in his book). To compare the later writer to the earlier one is to see in what ways Chaudhuri's writing is both a corollary, and overturning, of this narrative, of rejection and recovery, of exile and citizenship.

Dutt's life - although it is full of both colour and tragic grandeur, its dimensions exaggerated to the point, sometimes, of being parodic - is prescient of the journeys made, decisions taken and moments of crisis in the lives of later, "post- colonial" writers.

Importantly, it would create a secular space in which tradition was no longer an autochthonic, hierarchical set of codes or orthodoxies that must be adhered to, but an inescapable part of the modern Indian self that was being constructed in the 19th Century, the renewing power of that tradition sanctioned by no higher an authority than the individual himself.

The struggle between the Freudian id and superego that marks the post-Enlightenment Western self is rewritten, in the formation of the secular Indian self, in terms of a struggle between the vernacular and English languages, secular and religious meanings.

Concluded

The first and second parts of this article appeared in The Hindu on July 15 and July 22.

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of A NewWorld and is one of India's leading novelists writing inEnglish.

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