Background

Ethnicity: Chaudhuri lived his first seventy-three years in India, but eventually moved to England and became a naturalized citizen there.

Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri was born on November 23, 1897, in Kishoreganj, Mymensingh, British India (present-day Bangladesh).

Education

Chaudhuri attended Ripon College (now Surendranath College). Following this, he attended Scottish Church College, Kolkata, where he studied history as his undergraduate major. At Scottish Church College, Calcutta, he attended the seminars of the noted historian, Professor Kalidas Nag. After graduation, he enrolled for the Master of Arts at the University of Calcutta. However, he did not attend all of his final exams and consequently was not able to complete his degree.

Chaudhuri received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1989, two years after the second half of his autobiography, Thy Hand, Great Anarch, was published.

Career

Nirad C. Chaudhuri started his career as a government servant. A dropout from graduate school despite his outstanding undergraduate record, Chaudhuri devoted most of his time to studying in the Imperial (now National) Library in Kolkata while supporting himself with a modest job in the Military Accounts Department. Mostly unemployed in the 1930s, Chaudhuri battled poverty and insecurity while trying to make ends meet. He later recorded the struggles of these years in the sequel to the Autobiography, called Thy Hand, Great Anarch.

In 1939, Chaudhuri became personal secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, a leading nationalist figure in Bengal and the elder brother of Subhash Chandra Bose. In 1941 Sarat Bose was arrested and sent to prison, and Chaudhuri again became unemployed. In 1942, he shifted to New Delhi to work as a broadcaster and political commentator at All India Radio. In 1951, he published The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, his first book and the book by which he is best known. Soon after the book appeared, Chaudhuri was sacked from his position in All India Radio.

In 1955, Chaudhuri was invited to England by the British Council and the BBC. The five-week trip produced A Passage to England in which he praised the British way of life and western culture. In 1965, he published The Continent of Circe, his critical introspection of independent India and its many ills. His first Bengali book, Babgali Jibane Ramani (Women in Bengali Life), appeared in 1968.

From 1970, he settled in Oxford, England and lived there until death. During the last thirty years of his long life, he was remarkably productive, writing both in Bengali and English, and generating storms of controversy with each work.

At the age of 90, Chaudhuri wrote a second autobiography entitled Thy Hand, Great Anarch. In 1997, he wrote his last book of essays: Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, which was an indictment of what he called India's failed leadership and a lament at the decline of the country he had adopted.

Achievements

• Nirad Chaudhuri is most commonly known as a superb writer of exact and precise descriptive prose. Chaudhuri received many literary awards and prizes, including the Duff Couper Memorial Award (1965), the Ananda Award (1989), the Vidyasagar Award (1997), etc. The University of Oxford honoured him with an honorary D.Litt. degree in 1989.
  
  After Chaudhuri's death in Oxford at the age of 102, his son, who is a renounced economic historian, gifted Chaudhuri's books and paintings to Calcutta Club which has opened a Nirad C. Chaudhuri Corner in his honour.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse

    (Chaudhuri shares the wisdom of his life as a dispassionat...)

    1997
  • Hinduism: A religion to live by

    (This book provides a description and interpretation of th...)

    1979
  • Thy Hand, Great Anarch!

    (The author looks back on his life and the history of Indi...)

    1987
  • Amar Debottor Sampatti

    (Autobiographical reminiscences by an Indian historian and...)

  • A passage to England 1959
  • The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 1951
  • Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Muller, P.C. 1974
  • The Continent of Circe 1965
  • Why I mourn for England

Politics

Much of Chaudhuri’s writing was more or less a deliberate attempt to undermine Indian nationalists. His work was first roundly abused, then ignored by Indian critics and readers. Critics called him the last British loyalist. But Chaudhuri said his backhanded criticism of the British was never understood by his countrymen.

Views

Chaudhuri considered the Bengal Renaissance (1860–1910) the high point of Anglo-Bengali encounters. His Anglicist side emphasized steeping oneself deeply in contemporary English and European letters. Chaudhuri quotes from Bankim Chandra Chatterji's novel Rajani to describe a casual conversation between two friends that includes references to classical historians Tacitus, Plutarch, and Thucydides, and the philosophy of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, T.H. Huxley, G.E.L. Owen, Ludwig Buchner, and Arthur Schopenhauer. His Bengali side showed a certain hubris and pride in the acquisition of Occidental knowledge and its articulate expression in modernist literature.

Quotations: "I always introduce myself as a Bengali Hindu or a Hindu Bengali, not as an Indian."

Personality

Impeccably dressed in European clothes when he went out, Chaudhuri always wore dhoti and kurta at home. He did not give up his Indian passport in the thirty years he lived in England. In his will, he asked his heirs to give his personal library to the Calcutta Club in Kolkata, not to Oxford University or the National (formerly Imperial) Library in Kolkata.

Connections

Chaudhuri married Amiya Devi in 1932, and they had two sons.

Wife:

Amiya Dhar

1896 - 1994

Son:

Kirti N. Chaudhuri

References

• Nirad C. Chaudhuri: The scholar extraordinary
  2000
• Nirad C. Chaudhuri
  1980
• Perceiving India: Through the Works of Nirad C.Chaudhuri, R.K.Narayan and Ved Mehta
  1986