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Literary Review
Epistles from a multi-lingual scholar
AFICIONADOS of the Statesman newspaper are familiar with its anglophile propensities long after the sun had set on the British Empire and its ownership got transferred to Indian hands. Even after Independence, it had some fine Englishmen-editors such as Arthur Moore, Ian Stephens and Lindsay Emmerson — the last after an interregnum of Indian editors. All of them kept aloft the great traditions of fierce independence and critical support to Indian aspirations set by its legendary founder, Robert Knight who started it in 1875. (He also founded the Times of India in Bombay in 1861.)
Though the Statesman has had a Delhi edition since the early 1930s, it is essentially a Calcutta paper with a reluctant presence in the upstart Capital, when in 1911 Calcutta ceased to be the seat of power — an outrage that no Bengali has ever forgiven. Its Calcutta moorings were particularly evident in its literary pages, where the symbiotic relationship between English and Bengali used to produce some excellent writing characterised by a critical literacy rarely to be found in Indian newspapers. These pages were avidly read by the dhoti-clad, anglophile bhadralok of Bengal, who combined a fierce nationalism with a profound love of the English language and its literature. These loyal readers of the Statesman shared — though they may not avow it in public — Nirad Chaudhury's provocative dedication of his autobiography in which he defiantly declared that he owed all that was best in him to the British Empire.
For its part, the Statesman kept alive its Englishry in several ways. The Times Crossword, a daily torment, eagerly endured to this day, had many addicts, though over the years it has itself changed. The regular reproduction of articles from the same newspaper was another link with the adopted mother country. But the best loved of such nostalgic connections was the weekly "London Notebook" filed by successive Statesman hands in retirement (exile?), such as James Cowley. These pieces, written with brilliant journalistic panache and brimming with wit and humour, were a Sunday indulgence which long-living readers of Statesman will recall with delight.
William Radice had thus a formidable tradition to contend with when he accepted the Statesman's invitation in 1998 to write a weekly letter from England with the purpose, as he puts it, "of opening every fortnight a window on an unexpected aspect of British life." Radice's own credentials to write such letters are formidable but they are not journalistic, as were Cowley's. He is a poet, translator (among others from Bengali and German), a lecturer in Bengali at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London, an authority on Rabindranath and an indefatigable seminarist across continents. This background determines the nature of these letters. Chatty but serious, informative without any striving after journalistic or literary effect, its unstated target audience is, unlike Cowley's, the more self-consciously literary elite of Bengal.
Radice has wisely chosen a format very different from Cowley's: it is not a "notebook" miscellany of several items strung together providing an easy read but "a letter" of a scholar, who takes time off from his more serious preoccupations to write a gossipy letter to a serious minded friend about happenings, largely literary, around him. The range of subjects dealt with is mind-boggling. English and Bengali literature, theatre, cinema, music (with doubly arcane byways in it such as "Indeterminacy in Rabindra Sangeet"!) and many other subjects too numerous to mention. But on all these, Radice has robust and sane things to say. These letters are also enlivened by a number of interactive devices that Radice had dreamed up: among them are competitions for the reader. A "Limerick Competition" (September 23, 1999) and another, (October 3, 2002) a translation contest: readers were asked to do a Bengali or English rendering of, of all things, a poem by Apollinaire on rain ("Il Pleuit"). Could anything be higher brow than this? The interesting thing was that there were contestants! An unintended interest was added to this contest by an error in Radice's transcription of the poem!
Though nominally from England, these letters of an exceptionally peripatetic scholar with an astonishing range of interests deal with literary and other events in a hundred different locations: among them are Sarajevo (for a production of Tagore's "Post Office" in the local language), Prague (where Radice attends an European conference on South Asian studies, and, of course, Dacca and Calcutta. Though originally avowed as apolitical, politics keeps intruding in these pages. There are some excellent pieces of analysis by a non-professional political commentator, who, however, has taken the trouble to do his homework by boning up on the subject before writing. The piece on Saddam (April 7, 2000) and another on Bosnia (July 19, 2002) are two instances among many more. Another letter (March 8, 2000) deals with a libel trial over a book that attacked one David Irving who had apparently tried to prove that Hitler's notorious Jewish holocaust was largely a myth.
In all candour, on their first appearance, these letters must have been found heavy going, by the less "bookish" among the Statesman's readers. If one permits oneself an imaginary analogical situation, these letters would have been more appropriate for the Times Literary Supplement than for the daily Times. In their present book form, these letters pose a different kind of difficulty — their wide diversity of subject, requiring constant readjustment of one's focus. The best way to savour the delights of this book is to make it a bedside book to be dipped into at random.
Finally, a grouse: for a book containing references to books, journals, events and places literally in the hundreds, isn't an index elementary courtesy to the reader?
A Hundred Letters from England, William Radice, Indialog Publications, 2003, p.505, Rs.395.
N.S. JAGANNATHAN
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