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The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

by Nirad C. Chaudhuri , Ian Jack (Introduction)

3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 · rating details · 275 ratings · 15 reviews

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is an astonishing work of self-discovery and the revelation of a peerless and provocative sensibility. Describing his childhood in the Bengali countryside and his youth in Calcutta—and telling the story of modern India from his own fiercely independent viewpoint—Chaudhuri fashions a book of deep conviction, charm, and intimacy that is ...more

Paperback , 560 pages

Published September 30th 2001 by NYRB Classics (first published 1951)

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Jan 17, 2009 Claire S marked it as to-read

Recommended to Claire by: Aamir Khan's blog

Shelves: fiction-not-at-all , form_complexia , global , historical , g_india-and , pol-historical , a-2-interest-wo-urgency , f_interpretations , politics-learning , pol-paradigm-shift-pssbl , pov-content_global-of-location , id-constructs-race-gender , class-relations , f_truth-mixt-q , islam , obama-term-1 , war-mltry-conflt-occ

His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (ISBN 0-201-15576-1), published in 1951, put him on the short list of great Indian English writers. He courted controversy in the newly independent India in the dedication of the book itself 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 His masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (ISBN 0-201-15576-1), published in 1951, put him on the short list of great Indian English writers. He courted controversy in the newly independent India in the dedication of the book itself 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.”

The dedication, which was actually a mock-imperial rhetoric, infuriated many Indians, particularly the political and bureaucratic establishment. "The wogs took the bait and having read only dedication sent up howls of protest", commented Chaudhuri's friend, the editor, historian and novelist Khushwant Singh. 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.

Chaudhuri comented later that he had been misunderstood. "The dedication was really a condemnation of the British rulers for not treating us as equals", he wrote in the Granta article. Typically, to demonstrate what exactly he had been trying to say, he drew on a parallel with ancient Rome. The book's dedication, he said "was an imitation of what Cicero said about the conduct of Verres, a Roman proconsul of Sicily who oppressed Sicilian Roman citizens, although in their desperation they cried out: "Civis Romanus Sum".

per Wikipedia:

# Although he was highly critical of the post-independence Congress party establishment, he was more sympathetic to the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement in India. He refused to criticise the destruction of Babri structure: "I say the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 AD every Hindu temple from Kathiawar to Bihar, from the Himalayas to Vindhyas had been sacked and defiled."
# His views on Hindutva, like those of other scholars like V. S. Naipaul and Koenraad Elst although widely disseminated in the Indian media were not widely appreciated. To this day he remains a controversial figure.
# He was also deeply distressed by what he saw as the deep hypocrisy in Bengali social life and in particular those that resulted from class and caste distinctions. His historical research revealed to him that rigid Victorian style morality of middle class Bengali women was a socially enforced construct, that had less to do with religion, choice and judgment, but more to do with upbringing, social acceptance and intergenerational transference of values. Being a scholar in the comparative-historical mode, he could see very clearly that the excessive suppression of sexuality in modern India was actually counterproductive and counterintuitive. In this, it could be argued that he was a student of sociology and was following the footsteps of Max Weber, and to a certain extent, the psychology of Sigmund Freud. Yet in another way, he was also a feminist although he rejected dogmatic feminism quite early in his scholarly career. ...more

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May 05, 2014 Anil Swarup rated it 3 of 5 stars

This voluminous presentation by Nirad Babu is much more than his autobiography. The book leaves the reader in no doubt about the levels of erudition that the author had achieved and his command over the English language. First half of the book deals with his personal life and is the more difficult part from reader's perspective. His elaborate description of the days spent in the village and then his ruminations about what he found in Kolkata are perhaps for the purists and not a casual reader. H ...more

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Sep 24, 2015 Anurag rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biographies

This once controversial book now appears to be a must-read to understanding the extent of Indian colonialism. Although it is dedicated to the memories of British empire, it is hardly an account of railways, town halls or the administrative paraphernalia - things that we attribute India's modernity to. It is an account of the Indian ambiguity towards the empire's legacy.

The account is beautiful in the way Chaudhuri's life is intertwined with that of the Raj. His excitement about Queen Victoria c This once controversial book now appears to be a must-read to understanding the extent of Indian colonialism. Although it is dedicated to the memories of British empire, it is hardly an account of railways, town halls or the administrative paraphernalia - things that we attribute India's modernity to. It is an account of the Indian ambiguity towards the empire's legacy.

The account is beautiful in the way Chaudhuri's life is intertwined with that of the Raj. His excitement about Queen Victoria coincides with his youth while his days of remorse and sadness occur when British brutally suppress the spirit of Indian nationalism. The boring self-centered details of his own life turn out to be allegories to the empire - which remains an uncertain force in his life. As described in the dedication note, it is a force that had shaped what's good in Indians and yet denied them a sense of belonging. This is subtly aligned with his own relationship to his mother.

The legacy of the empire has indeed been ambiguous to Indians. It'll probably take more time to understand the ever-lasting effects of colonialism. Without its postmodernist clutter, what post-colonial writing has explained us is that the distance from natives is at the heart of poverty and class divisions in the developing world. Poverty, isn't then merely a lack of resources - it is a far deeper problem.

Why Chaudhuri's book is still relevant - is the way he describes the Indian enjoyment in decimation of their own culture while creating this distance from natives. His birthplace, Kishoreganj, retains memories of a Sanskritic past, but his present is transformed into a confusion of languages. Indian Hindus, he finds, are left with nothing but an immense sense of loss and often find themselves seething with anger for having witnessed their culture being destroyed by invaders. In dire poverty, they don't have the institutions to save or create within the ancient cultural framework which they claim to embrace.

What empire had unwittingly done was to expose Indians to the cannon of Western knowledge and in some ways reinvigorate this classical Sanskritic spirit. Chaudhuri eloquently describes an unrequited love for British institutions, but he also describes how this love is limited by the petty racism in the empire.

Even to this day, a Savarkar-style utilitarian withdrawal from the material aspects of Indian culture and a revenge-seeking politics that emanates from it - are at the heart of Indian nationalism. Chaudhuri only has disgust to offer for the kind of nationalism that Gandhi had tactically negotiated for. Much later than this book was written, Naipaul, in a similar tone, would take a disparaging angle at the Indian hypocrisy - by pointing out for example, that Radhakrishnan (the first Indian president and a public intellectual) believed that Sanskrit ought to limit itself to platonic spirituality - shunning the aspects of human love which poets like Kalidasa had talked about.

The experience of Turkish or African nationalism can be compared to that of India - but it is not as easy to explain why a Chaudhuri-style reminiscing of the empire or an internal conflict with Gandhian nationalism still exists in India. The foremost explanation seems that the ideas of nationalism hadn't really picked up amongst Indians - who are not violent by nature - or that Indians are in some ways thankful to the British for the railways (which is indeed the popular belief in Britain). But only a deeper understanding of the Indian mind can explain why a pan-Indian nationalist identity was never felt necessary in India.

The historical and somewhat personal reality which the book offers as explanation is that Indians simply didn't feel as oppressed or weak during the empire - at least not as much as we often extrapolate from studying economics. The real problem with the colonized world was that people seemed content with their withdrawal from the material culture. As they aligned themselves to their economic realities of the time, they had yielded some ground to the foreign rule. Troubles only started when the foreign rule was gone and attempts to reclaim that material ground were being made.

Chaudhuri correctly predicts a lot about decolonization before it had started. However, he is often inaccurate and falls short of theorizing the power hierarchies operating in the West itself. He finds the underlying hatred for invaders in the Hindu as somewhat fundamental but he fails to comment, probably consciously, on the power-hierarchies operating in the Western world - the way Foucault would later have. His generalization about Hindus is not once concerned with the Hindu culture in Southern India which wasn't directly affected by either the British empire or the Islamic rule and has done well after the independence from the British.

Despite its flaws and idiosyncrasies, Chaudhuri's book is proof that Macaulay's legacy in India had left a fine product of colonialism in form of the educated class that Chaudhuri was a part of. Despite how much we lament the loss of this scholarship, we have to come to terms with its disappearance in history. Indians can only be as ambiguous and reminiscent about this benign educated class of Indians as they are about the brutalities of the empire. In realizing this, we are where Chaudhuri once was. ...more

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Jun 10, 2011 Sean de la Rosa rated it 3 of 5 stars

More than 500 pages of autobiographical work on the life of Nirad Chaudhuri, an unknown Indian born in 1897 in Kishorganj, a small town in present Bangladesh.

For the book: it relays wonderful facts, tales, myths and superstitions about India in the early twentieth century. He also refers to the works of Ghandi and Tagore quite a bit which I enjoyed.

Against the book: I found Chaudhuri patronizing in places with the endless use of unnecessarily long words and quotes in French and German with no More than 500 pages of autobiographical work on the life of Nirad Chaudhuri, an unknown Indian born in 1897 in Kishorganj, a small town in present Bangladesh.

For the book: it relays wonderful facts, tales, myths and superstitions about India in the early twentieth century. He also refers to the works of Ghandi and Tagore quite a bit which I enjoyed.

Against the book: I found Chaudhuri patronizing in places with the endless use of unnecessarily long words and quotes in French and German with no English translation to follow. The text was overdone and went off on tangents a lot (I sensed Chaudhuri had spare time on his hands to re-write large portions of his work – this did more harm than any good).

A few quotes I really enjoyed:
It is only the exceptional man, the genius and the creator, who brings something of his own which can be distinguished from the common legacy.
He that commits repeated sins, even the Ganges makes not pure.
A system is only worth as much as the men who work it.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Nothing great was ever achieved by cleverness.
The great paradox in this hostility of the general mass of Indians towards the things of the West is that nearly all our great men of the nineteenth century were not able to gain any recognition from their countrymen nor exert any influence over them until they were recognised in the West...Tagore was looked upon almost as an illiterate person before he received the Nobel Prize.

I dislike giving scores of 3, but I think that is what this book deserves. ...more

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Jan 29, 2014 Srikanth rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a Magnum opus in the real sense, I wish i had any other word to convey the meaning. It isnt exactly his story but a story of his surroundings also. A brutally honest in your face book.I say that anyone who loves his country will have the balls to write about her fallacies which Nirad has done. Tit bits like how sarojini naidu refused to give back the costly pen, that she signed an autograph. He was the right man at the right places at the right turn of events. A must read. Good english ...more

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Mar 09, 2014 Mohit Sharma rated it 5 of 5 stars

Nirad Chaudhari clearaly has great behavioural insight. Although he gives some form of historical perspective most of the book revolves around the author's young life and how his surroundings affected his views and thoughts. It's indeed a fascinating read if you're interested in the social and political stratum around early 20th century.

Here's my favorite quote from this book "I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from est ...more

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Feb 20, 2009 Gregory rated it 4 of 5 stars

Wonderful account of growing up in mid 20th century India, from the dynamics of family life in rural villages to the political dynamics during the time of Gandhi. The first half, concerning childhood, was especially entertaining for me, and I happily soaked up every little detail about a family life that differed so much from my own.

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Sep 13, 2015 Soumya rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A complex mind, a declared anglophile, an encyclopedic, a historian with penchant for objectivity and a tendency to ruffle feathers - Nirad C. Chaudhuri represents all of these. His voracious criticism of the national movement from 1905, the English in India and life in Calcutta and his views on Indian nationalism and history can interest people as well as enrage less liberal minds. He was a strange contrast of a man who fell in love with the Bengali countryside and yet looked at England as the ...more

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Jan 26, 2014 Tom Leland rated it 2 of 5 stars

Very rare that I don't finish a book -- perhaps 10 times in 30 years; I now know much about growing up in Bengal (now Bangladesh) at turn of 20th century, but other than that I couldn't muster interest for this chronicle of his life/study of his people and their theologies. Word choice is often odd to me, and it's old enough that I'm sure much has changed - and since I'm not bent on getting into Indian life of the last 50 years or so, which would help me understand what's transpired since this b ...more

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Sep 18, 2014 Tarun rated it 3 of 5 stars

The quality of writing is superb. Nirad C. Chaudhuri style reminds me of the English of India's founding fathers. His grasp on the language is unwavering.That said, I couldn't finish the book. The first half was quite interesting but my desire to go on petered out somewhere after the middle.

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Jul 22, 2012 Karan rated it 1 of 5 stars

Boring, partial and very descriptive. It was one of the books I loved even before I began reading it, but have been slowly and reluctantly grind into a critic.
Nirad Chaudhuri comes across as one of the foremost intellectuals of the country, but his overly descriptive writing style (which I suspect springs out of his desire to make this a historical record of the times and places that he lived in) and his unsubstantiated deductions (often right wing, though I do not consider myself an anti right ...more

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May 27, 2013 Dayanand Prabhu rated it 1 of 5 stars

This book should probably be renamed as 'The Autobiography of a arrogant Bengali'. This book starts out beautifully with the spot on description of a Indian village. After that it doesnt live up to it expectations at all. The author rambles on and on and what surprises you is how the authors 'India' is consistently restricted only to Bengal.

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Jun 27, 2013 Shelagh Plunkett rated it 4 of 5 stars

A delight to read, this book offers insight into the everyday lives of South Asians disrupted by the 1947 partitioning of India.

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May 17, 2011 Aniket Patra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Till now Addictive.

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Oct 03, 2012 Manish Katyal rated it 5 of 5 stars

Fantastic.

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About Nirad C. Chaudhuri

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: নীরদ চনদর চৌধুরী Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) was a BengaliEnglish writer and cultural commentator. He was born in 1897 in Kishoreganj, which today is part of Bangladesh but at that time was part of Bengal, a region of British India.

He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's ...more

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Books by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

The Continent of Circe: An Essay on the People of India

Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India, 1921-1952

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