Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

Reading Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian fifty years after it was first published, one cannot but remember the controversy, the “howls of protest,” from the “wogs,” in Khushwant Singh’s memorable phrase, that greeted its release in 1951. The primary cause of the outrage was, of course, Chaudhuri’s dedication of the book: “To the British Empire.”

Even today, half a century on, one cannot quite suppress a frisson of discomfort at the apparent tribute to a colonial power that held not only India, but many other nations across the globe in subjection for centuries, draining them in the duration of their wealth, their resources, and most cruelly of all, their self-respect and belief in themselves. One can well imagine the feelings of an Indian audience when confronted with such a dedication barely four years after independence. Chaudhuri certainly paid a heavy personal and professional price for his ill-timed iconoclasm: he was forced out of his job, deprived of his pension, and blacklisted, being denied even a place among the country’s intellectual elite, in whose ranks he naturally belonged. Eventually he left India permanently to settle in England, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1999 at the grand old age of 101.

The modern reader might be more favourably inclined than Chaudhuri’s contemporaries to appreciate the irony richly inherent in the full dedication, which becomes very apparent upon even a slight examination: “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.” Chaudhuri is clearly accusing the British Empire of unfairness in conferring subjecthood but withholding citizenship: he means that while the Empire made subjects of its people, it failed to give them the rights and freedoms of true citizens. Chaudhuri’s Latin invocation recalls a similar deprivation of the subjects of the earlier Roman Empire. The subsequent lines suggest that such adversity as is experienced by those under foreign rule, brings out the best in those so subjected, for only by nurturing our best and highest natures and qualities can we hope successfully to oppose a force as powerful and far-reaching as Empire.

This kind of reading supports what Chaudhuri later called his “backhanded criticism,” of the British Empire, the nuances of which, he lamented (with some justice) his countrymen failed to appreciate. Are we then to assume that Chaudhuri has been profoundly misunderstood and that he was, in reality, an unequivocal critic of the British Empire? Were the many Indians who, reading but the opening dedication, criticized Chaudhuri as a toady of the British, totally in error and did him a gross injustice? If we were to examine Autobiography in its entirety, would we reach a radically different conclusion?

Rather dampingly, perhaps, the answers to all three questions must finally be “no,” or at least “far from it.” Chaudhuri was no critic of the Empire; on the contrary, he believed it to be, in spite of all its faults, a force for good, certainly a necessary evil, having united a miscellaneous congeries of weak, warring, and decadent princely states under a strong central government. Similarly, Chaudhuri praises the Roman Empire and the Islamic Empire, arguing that these empires constituted in their time the only “vital,” “virile,” and “living” forces capable of shoring up cultures in decline, at a low point in their development and therefore fundamentally unfit for self-rule.

Chaudhuri’s perpetual apologia for British rule leaves crater-sized lacunae in his analysis of that rule – great gaping vacuums that, to a generation educated and enlightened by the tireless research of postcolonial, feminist and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, seem so astonishing as to be downright ludicrous.
Nowhere in Chaudhuri’s interpretations of the British Empire do we encounter the basic definition of imperialism, its raison d'être as opposed to its raison superficielle – the real reason for empire being always plunder, exploitation and profit, and the official, or public reason being to bring stability (in modern parlance “freedom” and “democracy”) to the conquered territories. Chaudhuri accepts the second, overt but completely meretricious reason, and hence arises quite naturally the inversion in his thinking that leads him to claim the evils of the Empire as blunders, unfortunate but unintentional and perhaps inevitable in so giant an enterprise, and its benefits as the intended result of a great civilizing, stabilizing mission. Thus Chaudhuri finally presents us with a looking-glass image of empire, whereas, in the real world in which most of us are forced to dwell, a conqueror benefits the conquered not because he wishes to or because he has the best interests of the latter at heart, but because he needs a degree of order and stability to establish and perpetuate his larger aim of exploitation – in short, because he must.