Nirad C. Chaudhuri (Bangla: ???? ?????? ?????? Nirod Chôndro Choudhuri) (23 November 1897 – 1 August 1999) was a Bengali & English writer and a cultural commentator. He was born in Kishoreganj, which at that time was in the Mymensingh district of East Bengal.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1975 for his biography on Max Müller called Scholar Extraordinary, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters .
He was educated in Kishorganj and Kolkata (then known as Calcutta). For his FA (school leaving) course he attended the Ripon College in Calcutta along with the famous Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Following this, he attended the prestigious Scottish Church College, Calcutta, where he studied history as his undergraduate major. He graduated with honors in history and topped the University of Calcutta merit list. At Scottish Church College, he attended the seminars of renowned historian Professor Kalidas Nag. After graduation, he enrolled for the M.A. level course at the University of Calcutta. However, he did not attend all of his final exams of the M.A. programme, and therefore did not earn his M.A. degree.
He started his career as a clerk in the Accounting Department of the Indian Army. At the same time, he started contributing articles to popular magazines. His first article on Bharat Chandra (a famous Bengali poet of the 18th century) appeared in the most prestigious English magazine of the time, Modern Review.
He left the job in the Accounting Department shortly after, and started a new career as a journalist and editor. During this period he was a boarder at Mirzapur Street near College Square, Kolkata, living together with the writers Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder. He was involved in the editing of the then well-known English and Bengali magazines Modern Review, Probasi and Sonibarer Chithi. In addition, he also founded two short-lived but highly esteemed Bengali magazines, Samasamayik and Notun Patrika. He married Amiya Dhar, a well-known writer herself, in 1932 and had three sons.
In 1938, he obtained a job as secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose, a political leader from the freedom movement in India. As a result he was able to interact with the political leaders of India - Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and the more famous brother of Sarat Chandra Bose - Subhas Chandra Bose, the future Netaji. This familiarity with the workings of the inner circle of Indian politics led him to be skeptical about its eventual progress, and he became progressively disillusioned about the ability of Indian political leadership.
Apart from his career as a secretary, he continued to contribute articles in Bengali and English to newspapers and magazines. He was also appointed as a political commentator on the Kolkata branch of the All India Radio. In 1941, he started working for the Delhi Branch of the All India Radio.
He was a productive and prolific writer till the very end of his life; publishing his last work at the age of 99. His wife Amiya Chaudhuri died in 1994 in Oxford. He died in Oxford, England two months short of his 102nd birthday in 1999.
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:
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. Furthermore, he had to give up his job as a political commentator in All India Radio as the Government of India promulgated a law that prohibited employees from publishing memoirs. Chaudhuri commented 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, who in their desperation cried out: "Civis romanus sum".
In 1955 the British Council and the BBC jointly made arrangements to take him to England for eight weeks. He was asked to contribute lectures to the BBC. He contributed eight lectures on British life. Later these lectures are collected in the Passage to England modified and edited. E. M. Forster reviewed it in The Times Literary Supplement.His 1965 work The Continent of Circe earned him the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, becoming the first and only Indian to be selected for the prize.In 1972, he was the subject of a Merchant Ivory documentary, Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization.He published a sequel to his autobiography entitled Thy Hand, Great Anarch! in 1988.In 1992, he was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom with the title of Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE).In 1997, at 100 years of age, he published his last book Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse.
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 mosques: "“Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque in Ayodhya. From 1000 AD every temple from Kathiawar to Bihar, from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas has been sacked and ruined. Not one temple was left standing all over northern India. They escaped destruction only where Muslim power did not gain access to them for reasons such as dense forests. Otherwise, it was a continuous spell of vandalism. No nation with any self-respect will forgive this. What happened in Ayodhya would not have happened had the Muslims acknowledged this historical argument even once.”"
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 the rigid Victorianesque 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.
His prose was highly influenced by Sanskrit and the older version of the Bengali language, the Shadhubhasha (????????). He had little respect for the proletarian language, Choltibhasha (???????? ) or Cholitobhasha (????????), which he regarded as being common in taste and scope. He avoided the use of words and expressions originating from Arabic, Urdu and Persian that are very common in modern Bengali.
