It is an autobiographical work in which Nirad C. Chaudhuri not only talks about his personal life but also discusses the socio-political, economic, and religious practices that he observed in India from his birth in 1897, till 1950. The Autobiography is divided into four parts with each part having four chapters. The first part describes three places, his birth native place, Kishorganj, and his ancestral village. Banagram, and the village of his mother Kalikutch. This book is dedicated to the memory of the British Empire in India because it made shaped and quickened, that was a good life for Indians. Nirad wrote his autobiography not for Indian readers but for academic circles in the West under whose influence he grew up and to whom he owed all his intellectual and academic attainments. It may appear as if Nirad was trying to woo the Western audience while criticizing and showing contempt for Indian society and civilization. Nirad believed that India cannot grow and develop without foreign influences. He commented, "I expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United States and British commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign domination of India."
Summary of The Autobiography of an Unknown India:
Nirad’s father was a successful criminal lawyer and the Vice-Chairman of the Kishorganj municipality of Bengal who made enough money to buy unlimited quantities of books for his children. Thus, Nirad. C. Chaudhuri grew up in a literary environment. His parents were influenced by Brahmosamaj and were followers of the teachings of Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Nirad did not learn Sanskrit and did not also read the existing English translations of Sanskrit texts but he did read a lot of English literature since his childhood. He read about Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, Burke, Warren Hastings, Wellington, King Edward VII, and others. Nirad did read about Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Vivekanand through modern Bengali literature.
Influence of Bengal Renaissance: Nirad describes the religious influence in his formative years in four stages; first, the most elementary and elemental belief in ghosts and spirit and animistic duties and the routine of magic and ritual organized around this belief, secondly a polytheism both anthropomorphic and pantheistic and on the whole sunny and benign, thirdly the Brahmo monotheism, fourthly the pseudo-scientific. Chaudhuri talks of Brahmo Samaj as an organization whose morality was derived from Puritan Christianity. It led a moral crusade attacking four vices namely sensuality, drunkenness, dishonesty, and falsehood. Chaudhuri tells us that none of these vices had reached diabolic proportions, since feebleness and passivity permeated even the vices. Chaudhuri was evidently not a follower of the Brahmo Samaj. He was imbued with the ideas propagated by the new cultural movement mainly based on the formula of a synthesis of the values of the East and the West, which passes under the name of the Indian Renaissance. The great Bengali reformers from Raja Ram Mohan Roy to Rabindranath Tagore spearheaded the Indian cultural Renaissance in the early part of the 19th century. After their death, Nirad says that the idea of the Indian Renaissance was suppressed and the real villains were Nehru and especially Gandhi, who threw over the opportunity of their youthful experience in England to deny all that could have revitalized India.
During his childhood, he read works of Toru Dutt, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a wealthy Bengali who converted to Christianity. Chaudhuri calls him the greatest exponent and greatest martyr of Bengali humanism and a great scholar. Once his father enquired him to beam by heart some passages from Michael Madhusudan Dutt's famous epic poem Meghadnaradhya Kakya. He wrote "We received a valuable critical lesson from our perplexities over Dutt's treatment of the Ramayanic theme. Henceforward we never forgot."
The author was hugely influenced by British literature and social practices and criticized the Indian ways in a way that showed a need for improvement.
Nirad depicts the poverty-stricken urban life of Indians under the British Raj Kishorganj. He informs that the villagers used to drink water from the same river where they took baths along with other animals like cows and elephants. They had to live in squalid conditions; moths, ants, and centipedes were their constant companions. In the rainy season, they had to deal with flies, while in winter, mosquitoes made their life troublesome, and they did not have any preventive measures for such conditions. Whenever the children got the insect bite, the only remedy they could get was a mixture of mustard oil and slaked lime which was worse than a disease in itself. They had to live in such unhygienic conditions that resulted in diseases like Cholera which was a very frequent visitor in their life. Nirad described population explosion as one of the most severe problems for India because population explosion also becomes the sole cause of many other challenges in Indian society such as lack of food, hospital facilities, and jobs, and consequently the people have to live in very disappointing conditions. The problem of sanitation is one of other several problems in over-crowded cities throughout India in general and in a city like Calcutta in particular. The sewage system of these cities does not suffice the need for overpopulation, and in the rainy season, the situation becomes worse. Nirad also mentioned the issue of gender bias in Indian society. When the matter of the status of women comes into context of the Indian society, it is considered no better than that of a mere object. They have no right to speak or do anything according to their own choice. They have always been exploited in the name of the pride of family or in the name of tradition. The same is the case with the family of the author. Nirad mentioned that when his aunt became a widow at an early age, a marriage proposal came from the richest landlord of the town but he was considered rather inferior in status by the author‟s family. Nirad mentions how his grandfather responded to the proposal by saying, “I would sooner cut her up and feed the fishes of the Brahmaputra with the pieces.” One may think that Nirad was criticizing the caste system, however, Nirad made no critical viewpoint against the caste system in the entire book and while he mentioned Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sharat Chandra Bose, Nehru, and others in his autobiography, he curiously left out Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and didn’t mention him throughout the book. Yet, Nirad criticized the class consciousness of Indian society. Class consciousness is explicitly revealed by the author when he describes the customs of his family. It is told that the author‟s family always avoided having meals with those families who were inferior to them in status. Nirad criticizes the superstitious society of India and believed that their superstitions encouraged British society to discriminate against them. He mentions a case in his autobiography that once a Brahmin contractor's cow was strangled to death accidentally and all the other Brahmins gathered and punished the contractor for committing the sin, he was treated worst then than an animal. All these drawbacks of the Hindu culture persuaded Britishers to the evil deeds toward Indians.
Hindu-Muslim Riots:
In his autobiography, Nirad discusses the bloody partition and ensuing Hindu-Muslim riots in 1947. he explains that the Britishers were not the sole reason behind this catastrophic conflict, though as rulers of the country, they profited from this conflict. According to the author, the seed of this conflict was hidden in the past which was sown long ago in the history when the Muslims invaded this country and vanquished the Hindu kings, and afterward ruled for a long time. Therefore, according to the author, the enmity between Hindus and Muslims was present there since the beginning. Nirad believed that Pan-Islamism was the greatest danger facing Indian society, and for this reason, during the Turco-Italian War and the two Balkan Wars when most Indians were pro-Turkey, Chaudhuri was anti-Turkey.
Nirad divides Indian History into three cycles(I) The Beginnings of the first of the three historical cycles of Indian history can not be doted. It came to light with the commencement of the third century B.C. when historical records properly so called began to reveal the sequence of events in Indian History. (II) The second cycle begins with the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan by Muhammad Gori in 1192 A.D. and comes to a close in 1757, the year of Plassey. (III) The third cycle began towards the middle of the 18th Century and is still continuing. About foreign influences on Indian History Chaudhuri writes, "The foreign influences in Indian History are exceptional in their character and are also exceptional in their operation and results."
On the subjugation of India by Muslim invaders, Nirad says that Muslim rulers, as long as they remained strong, had no Hindu rebellion to fear. Provided they paid a commensurate reward they could count on being able to enlist any number of Hindus to act as administrators, army commanders, suppliers, and advisors. Hindus would even advise them of the best means of bringing other Hindus under subjugation. However, Hindu homes and kitchens were out of bounds for Muslims even as Hindu society tightened rules against intermarriage during the period of Muslim rule. Chaudhuri quotes Sarat Chandra Chatterji who summed up the underlying principle of Hindu behavior with the example of a woman who has a low caste paramour and who boasts that although she has lived with him for twenty years, she had not, for a single day, allowed him to enter her kitchen.
On Decline of Mughal Empire:
Chaudhuri refutes the argument that Islam declined in India because of Aurangzeb's intolerance. Other Muslim monarchs were less tolerant of Hinduism. Tolerance or no tolerance, Indian Hindus were never reconciled to Muslim rule. The empire ceased to receive new administrators and soldiers from Iran and Turkestan and the resident Muslims were too denigrate.’ In short, the decline of the Moghul Empire was not due to uprisings by the Marathas or the Rajputs. Globally Islam had declined and this decline took India in its stride. ‘The revolt of the internal proletariat against Muslim rule was only the ass’s kicking of the sick lion.’
On Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi:
During the civil disobedience movement of 1930, Chaudhuri was a passionate supporter of Gandhian methods. However, in the late thirties, he moved away from what he calls ‘Gandhism ideology’. Nirad worked as a private secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, an important Bengali Indian National Congress Leader from 1937 to 1942. Sarat Chandra Bose was the elder brother of Subhash Chandra Bose. Rabindra Nath Tagore died in 1941, and Subhash Chandra Bose left Indian National Congress and joined the Axis powers as leader of the Indian National Army. With the Japanese just east of Bengal and the political leadership of Bengali Hindus eclipsed by Bengal's Muslim majority and, at the national level, by non-Bengalis like Gandhi and Nehru, Nirad felt that he can hardly have any place and decided to leave Bengal. He began working as a freelancer in Delhi and soon accepted a position as a writer of propaganda for the Government broadcasting system in Delhi.
On Decline of British Raj:
Nirad liked British culture but he mentioned British rulers as tyrants, racists, and oppressors. He has compared the teaching attitude of Indians and Britishers and found that Britishers produce only machines and mechanically talented scholars whereas Indians produce human brains with their own identity. In Thy Hand, Great Anarch, which was a sequel to The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, and was published in 1987, Nirad claims that the British rule in India did not come to an end on account of Gandhi, that Gandhi had nothing to do with the departure of the British, that the British left out of sheer exhaustion at the hands of Hitler. The British willed their own end when they felt that they could not continue to rule over India in the postwar world. He further mentions another flaw of the British government in India that led to the downfall of the British Raj and says that the British ignored the function of cultural proselytization which was the secret of the success of ancient Roman emperors and modern French colonizers. In the sequel, Nirad criticizes Gandhi as a 'great anarch’ and piss poor pathetic for his lament over the independence of India and says: “It appeared to me that his entire ideology was driven by a resolve to abandon civilized life and revert to a primitive existence.” The title of the sequel was inspired by the concluding couplet of Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, and thus, Nirad portrays Gandhi as a Dunce.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English Literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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