Homeward journey abroad: Nirad C. Chaudhuri and the tradition of twentieth century Indian national autobiographies

Abstract

This article seeks to place the autobiographical works of the maverick intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri within the context of twentieth-century Indian national autobiographies. It begins by tracing the trajectory of exile and homecoming that forms an integral part of the structural convention of this genre. It explores the conventional notions of “Indianness” and “West”, and village and city that act as opposite poles in the national autobiographies, orienting the journey of exile and return. The article then goes on to show how Chaudhuri’s works deconstruct the India/West and village/city binaries by reversing the conventional spatial direction of the life’s journey while paradoxically conforming to the same pattern of exile and homecoming.

Introduction: Autobiography as national history

Sisir Kumar Das in his history of Indian literature observes how individual identity and the image of India were the two main concerns that dominated the literary scene during the first half of the twentieth century (1995: 417–8). One of the literary forms in which these two concerns powerfully came together was the national autobiography. It emerged as a significant new literary genre during this period when numerous autobiographies and memoirs were produced by such prominent personalities as Lajpat Rai, Surendranath Banerjea, M.R. Jayakar, M.K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad. ¹ In all these texts written by people engaged in the anticolonial struggle, the personal life histories provided the template for inscribing the history of the ongoing nationalist movement and the “growth” of the nation towards freedom. Hence, these narratives remain characterized by a fusing together of the project of individual self-fashioning and the project of fashioning the destiny of the emerging nation. In them the articulation of the self-identity of the protagonists merges with the fate of the nation as a whole, and even in texts where the “I” of the autobiography and the image of India are not seamlessly joined, they are at least perceived by the authors to be inextricably related (see Israel, 1994). ²

Nirad C. Chaudhuri is perhaps the last and definitely the most prolific representative of this tradition of national autobiography. This statement, however, might seem to be somewhat inaccurate given the fact that unlike the other practitioners of this genre Chaudhuri was never a politician in the strict sense of the term. However, since he extensively makes use of the tropes that otherwise characterize the Indian national autobiographies of the twentieth century, his narratives can be legitimately considered as examples of that genre. Moreover, though not precisely a political figure, Chaudhuri himself claims that he was writing from within a social milieu where nationalist politics were all-engrossing and, as he writes, “I could no more help absorbing politics than I could avoid breathing air” (1964: 332). ³

Born in 1897 in a small town called Kishorganj, Chaudhuri socially belonged to the English-educated bhadralok intelligentsia that had emerged in Bengal during the course of the nineteenth century (see Sarkar, 1983: 65–8). After graduating as a student of history from the University of Calcutta, Chaudhuri went on to take up a series of jobs that ranged from being a clerk in the accounting department of the Indian Army to being a staff in the news division of All India Radio in Delhi. His fairly inconspicuous existence in the first five decades of his life changed dramatically when, at the age of 54, the publication of his second book Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in 1964 brought him to the attention of an international readership and also made him one of the most reviled figures in his own country. The dedicatory lines of this autobiography published just four years after India attained independence claimed, “all that was good and living within us was made and shaped by the […] British rule” (v), and declared in bold letters “CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM” (v). Unsurprisingly, this earned him among his fellow countrymen the lasting reputation of being a singular oddity, an anomaly, and even a disease (Chellappan, cited in Ranasinha, 2007: 83) whose works are characterized by a “lonely and perverse intent” (A. Chaudhuri, 2008: 50). But as Chaudhuri himself notes, the label that has most persistently stuck to him since the publication of his first autobiography is that of being an “anti-Indian” writer (1987: 917).

Nevertheless, this anti-Indian reputation of Chaudhuri is in marked contrast to the way in which he conflates the idea of nation with the articulation of self in his various life writings. Thus, for instance in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian he claims: “I have only to look within myself and contemplate my life to discover India […] I can say without the least suggestion of arrogance: l’Inde c’est moi” (517–18). More than three decades later, while writing his second major autobiographical work, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, he re-emphasizes this interweaving of his life story with the national history in the prefatory chapter:

Actually, this book has three elements in it: first, my personal life which I have made the framework of whatever history I wish to offer; second, my thoughts and feelings about the public and historical events through which I have passed; and third, an account of what happened in India in the political and cultural spheres in the period from 1921 to 1964, free from the current myths. (1987: xiv)

This intertwining of the personal and the national histories reveal Chaudhuri’s autobiographies to be integrally associated with the tradition of national autobiographies. However, in these works, Chaudhuri not only uses the tropes of the national autobiographies but also significantly modifies the underlying form of this genre along which the graph of the personal life is plotted. In what follows, I show how Chaudhuri achieves this by transforming the two poles of “home” and “exile” between which the genre of national autobiography conventionally operates.

National autobiographies and the trajectory of homecoming

Philip Holden in his book on postcolonial life writings notes that “[n]ational autobiographies as a genre… follow a common structural ‘grammar’ of a journey, a time in the wilderness of exile, and then a return” (2008: 5). Reading this “grammar” of a circuitous journey of exile and return in the broader context of Indian postcolonialism brings out various resonances. Amit Chaudhuri (2008) for instance writes about a similar journey of exile and homecoming informing the Indian quest for modernity whose beginning he locates in the life and career of the nineteenth-century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Dutt in a way typified his milieu of early nineteenth-century Calcutta where the influence of Western learning, canalized through the institute of Hindu College and through teachers like Henry Derozio, produced among the young educated elites a spirit of extreme social and religious non-conformism. Dutt, who harboured the dream of becoming an English poet, rebelled against his father, converted to Christianity, and imposed upon himself an “inner and actual exile” (A. Chaudhuri, 2008: 40) from his homeland, his religion and even from his mother tongue. Disillusionment, however, soon set in and the poignant voice of the poet became one of the first in colonial India to utter the pains of exile and the burning desire to return to the motherland — an anguish that has been immortalized through his Bengali sonnets. Referring to Dutt, Amit Chaudhuri writes that such journeys of exile and homecoming were to become one of the most characteristic patterns underlying modern Indian literature.

Inscribed into his life is another narrative, to do with the secular, middle-class Indian self’s struggle between disowning and recovering its — for want of a better word — “Indianness”, a struggle that, […], I found was a paradigm around which a substantial part of “modern” Indian literature and culture was structured. (2008: 40)

This “paradigm” of the prodigal son’s repentant return from exile to “Indianness” also informs the national autobiographies, most importantly those written by the two preeminent nationalist leaders, Gandhi and Nehru. Both of them had spent a substantial part of their formative years in England, marked by an extravagant wastefulness, ⁴ before returning to India (via South Africa in the case of Gandhi) to become two of the most representative voices of Indian nationalism. However, lesser-known autobiographies like Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom (1959) also depict this same underlying pattern of exile and homecoming (see Ahmad, 2000).

The spatial dimension that underlines this journey into exile and subsequent homecoming reinforces the pattern of breaking away from tradition in search of modernity followed by a return back to “Indianness”. In the case of Gandhi’s, Nehru’s and Azad’s autobiographies, the journey to exile is a journey to the West followed by a return home to India. However, within the wider context of Indian postcolonialism, this journey between India and the West is in many ways the circuitous journey between one’s native village and the colonial cities writ large. Such journeys to the colonial city began in the nineteenth century when a new concept of urban space emerged in India, as cities came to be defined more as centres of colonial political economy than as important sites of pilgrimage. These new cities built by the European colonizers were effectively spatial representations of the West in India. London was the archetypal city of the British Empire and colonial cities like Calcutta were, to quote Chaudhuri, the “half-caste offspring of London” (1959: 64). Hence, if for a privileged few the journey to modernity involved a journey to the West, for the overwhelming majority it took the form of a journey to the city.

Writing about the lure of the cities Ashis Nandy states that these Westernized modern spaces in the subcontinent wove and continue to weave “a dream of total freedom for the individual and the reasoning self” (2001: viii), as did the West for individuals like Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Abul Kalam Azad. A journey to the city from the village has thus come to signify in India, “a journey from a self buffeted by primordial passions and an authoritarian conscience — the village is seen as the repository of these — to a self identified with fully autonomous ego function” (Nandy, 2001: viii). However, the city in spite of assuring a “fully autonomous ego” has also been seen in India, since at least the nineteenth century, as a place of moral and even physical degeneration. Absolute freedom carries with it the fear of absolute depravity, and in this the city is perceived, again like the West, as a space of debauchery and indulgence in excesses. Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj (1986/1909) repeatedly juxtaposed the immorality of the Western civilization with the immorality rampant in the cities from where one contracted the “disease” of Westernized education and of modern technocratic civilization. This negative connotation of the city as a place of exile, a place where, allured by the dreams of autonomy, the self becomes atomized and fragmented, has stuck. As Nandy observes, “[f]ew seem to love the city in its own terms in India, even among those who would prefer to lose their identity among its anonymous masses and seem eager to extol that loss” (2001: 28). ⁵ Hence, the journey to modernity that takes one to the West or to the colonial cities within India also gives rise to the desire of making a return journey home — which as an antithetical space to the impersonal and anonymous city gets associated with a utopic village of imagination. A journey to the village is thus a nostalgic return journey from a city of atomized individualism to a pastoral home that is imagined as a “utopia of an idyllic, integrated, defragmented self” (Nandy, 2001: 13), as well as “a prototype of Indian civilization” (Nandy, 2001: 29).

The journey of Nirad Chaudhuri’s life, narrated in his several autobiographical works, apparently reverses this trajectory of exile and homecoming that so thoroughly informs the genre of national autobiography and the broader quest for modernity and self-identity in India. First, the direction of Chaudhuri’s journey does not trace the familiar pattern of the prodigal son’s homecoming to India but rather it begins in India and ends on the English shores. Second, it is also not a Gandhian journey from the city to village but rather from a very small country town located in the far-flung colonial periphery of East Bengal to the centre of the British Empire. Third, far from being a journey towards “Indianness”, Chaudhuri’s journey is unabashedly motivated by his xenophilia and his desire to escape what he regarded as the corrupting influence of India and its hoi polloi. However, in spite of this xenophilic curve of Chaudhuri’s journey, which presents itself as an absolute antithesis to the journeys underlining the national autobiographies, I would argue that his journey nevertheless conforms to the same pattern of exile and homecoming. This is achieved through a subtle questioning of such constructs like “home” and “foreign land” and through geographically re-aligning the poles of exile and home. In the sections below, I trace the vicissitudes of this unique journey of homecoming from Chaudhuri’s native village in East Bengal to the university city of Oxford.

Exiled at home

Chaudhuri begins Autobiography of an Unknown Indian with a description of the small country town of Kishorganj in East Bengal in which he was born. He portrays it as an ambiguous space where the urban is precariously located at the edge of the rural and constantly tends to merge and disappear into the latter:

Altogether, the town did not mark too hard a blotch on the soft countryside. Besides, the huts were flimsy. They creaked at almost every wind, and one strong cyclone was enough to obliterate the distinction between country and town. (3–4)

The river that flowed across the country town and gave it its identity also attracted people from villages, and Chaudhuri narrates how “peasant women with earthen pitchers appeared off and on out of the dark jungle, walked into the water and bent over it, filling their gurgling vessels” (5). Yet this physical proximity to the villages and the villagers in Kishorganj did not reduce its self-consciousness of being an urban centre and Chaudhuri recalls how, even as children, “we had a sense of the city and citizenship in a very specialized form” (40).

This sense of urbanity was reaffirmed with every visit to his ancestral village of Banagram, which, to Chaudhuri as a child, was an absolute contrast to the spirit of city life that characterized Kishorganj. One of the major differences that distinguished the urban life as led in the country town from the life at the ancestral village was the distinct daily routine of the former, which was governed by the disciplinary clock time. ⁶ Chaudhuri remembers the Kishorganj of his childhood being almost entirely bereft of old men. He explains that this was because only those who were pursuing some profession or were employed in the government offices inhabited the country town. Anyone who had retired would normally have gone back to his ancestral village. As a result the entire parental generation of the author consisted of middle-aged professional men. The children of these men were all school-going and they too did not have great variation in age. This demographic character of the town had a profound impact on its daily life, tuning it to the urban clock-time of work and studies: “It was a routine of steady, unremitting and regular work for everybody, all round the year, except during the two yearly vacations” (46). In contrast to this urbanized daily routine of hard work, Chaudhuri portrays the ancestral village, which he regularly visited as a child during his vacations, as a place of uninterrupted leisure. In the feudal landowning families, to one of which Chaudhuri belonged, “work” was entirely the domain of “serfs, who gave us domestic service as a matter of hereditary obligation” (64). The family members, at least the males, are in fact described by Chaudhuri as spending almost all their time lounging in the hut especially decorated to serve the purpose of a retiring-room: “This was the place for every lazy fellow, and everybody was lazy” (65).

There was also another significant difference that distinguished the urban life in Kishorganj from the rural existence of Banagram, and that was the difference in social relationships. In the ancestral village there was no purely social relationship and everyone with whom one could socialize belonged to the family. In contrast, the urban life of Kishorganj was completely devoid of such extended family ties, and Chaudhuri explains that what brought the people together was not a common blood line but a sense of loyalty to the city and the idea of a shared citizenship — a “cohesive power belonging to the town in the abstract and exerting its influence on everybody who came to live in it” (40–1). According to Chaudhuri, this feeling was “social as distinct from tribal” (40), and he would reserve the word “tribal” as a contemptuous adjective every time he had to describe the institution of large joint families that characterized the village homes (see Chaudhuri, 1971). As a child, these subtle yet profoundly felt differences in the lifestyle of the village and the city contributed to his awareness of the urban Kishorganj as being his home, and he writes that with each return to Kishorganj after trips to the village, “we felt as if we had come back to our native element” (40).

Interestingly however, an essential part of growing up in Kishorganj was also to learn that it was not his home but only a place of temporary residence:

[…] I hardly remember one single adult who thought of his Kishorganj life as his whole life, who considered it in the light of anything but a sojourn […] In our perception of duration Kishorganj life was ever fleeting present, and the past and the future belonged to the ancestral village. (55)

Following the grown-ups, the children too had to carefully bear in mind the different answers to the questions “Where do you lodge?” and “Where do you live?”. The Bengali noun basha generally translated as lodge, as opposed to bari or home, “conveyed the suggestion of temporary lodgings” (55) and thus for Chaudhuri, the answer to the first question was Kishorganj and to the second it was inevitably Banagram. This feeling of being detached from a village home became even more accentuated when Chaudhuri finally moved from the semi-urban space of Kishorganj to the metropolitan city of Calcutta. When he first went there as a student, he observed the same sense of a missing but ever-present ancestral homestead in the village informing the consciousness of all the resident students who had come to Calcutta from outside. Chaudhuri describes the institution of “messes” or boarding houses where students like him would stay. They were typically basha or lodges where one resided only temporarily, but even this temporary residence bore the unmistakable stamp of the more permanent provincial homes of the students. “Thus” Chaudhuri writes, “the messes could be regarded as little colonies in Calcutta of the different districts of East Bengal” (330). They were, to use his own category, “tribal” encampments like the ancestral village houses where “even when a young man was personally a stranger his family was sure to be known to the others by report” (330). These ties of belonging to common districts in East Bengal played an important role in retaining one’s provincial identity, which was regarded as one’s true identity. It was from these rural provinces that one came to the city and it was there that one went back to. Thus, “the shedding of provincialism was considered ‘unpatriotic’” (330).

On the other hand, these provincial identities of the resident aliens were also regarded disparagingly by the “gentry of Calcutta” (401), who looked upon everyone coming from outside the city as absolute country bumpkins. Curiously, Chaudhuri himself seems to subscribe to this notion held by the city gentry. While in the section in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian describing Kishorganj and his ancestral village he had painstakingly opposed the urbanity of the former to the rural character of the latter, in the section describing his Calcutta life he unquestioningly, even eagerly, takes on the identity of a young man who is socially and culturally moored in the village, and who takes pride in his pastoral roots. Chaudhuri declares that he “was semi-savage when [he] came to Calcutta” (283) and though the city polished off the rough edges he was successful in retaining the “rustic core” (283). The city, he tells, made him “dependent upon urban sanitation and urban amenities” (283) but it could not reconcile him to the city life. Rather, Calcutta made him into a loner and developed in him “a violent dislike for crowds” (283). In spite of staying there for more than three decades Calcutta never became home to him, just as it was not home for most other sojourners like him who came there from East Bengal to study, and who were perfectly happy to go back to their village homes “the same rough diamonds they had been [with] a diploma of some kind to earn a living” (330).

However, this return to the village home was uniquely complicated in Chaudhuri’s case. Though it had been inculcated in him from early childhood that Banagram was their bari or home, he had also imbibed from his parents a strong dislike for this family home: “my father personally seemed never to feel quite at home in his ancestral village. He even disliked it positively, and this dislike was shared by my mother” (80). The revulsion of his parents towards Banagram, though eminently palpable, was never quite explained to Chaudhuri as a child. But he surmises that it probably had to do with his father’s belief that “to live in Banagram was to live only in the empty shell of the past” (84). What was regarded as “the empty shell of the past” was primarily the patriarchal joint family structure, about which Chaudhuri heard his father often speak in a deprecating manner. The journey from the ancestral village in Banagram to the city life of Kishorganj thus takes the form of a journey to modernity in the writings of Chaudhuri. In fact its interpretation as a progress from a primitive kinship-based rural society to an urbanized society based on individual citizenship remarkably resembles Henry Maine’s influential nineteenth-century social evolutionary theory depicting modernity as a passage from “status” to “contract” through the “gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation in its place” (1870: 168). It is difficult to know whether Chaudhuri’s father was conversant with Maine’s theories of social evolution but Chaudhuri himself was certainly aware of them. In fact Maine remained a hero to Chaudhuri throughout his life and was considered by him to be one of the ablest British administrators ever to have come to India (1987: 671). Thus, it is possible that Chaudhuri was interpreting his father’s move from Banagram to Kishorganj through the lens of a social evolutionary theory that he only later acquired through his own reading of Henry Maine. ⁷

Yet whatever the motive behind the move, there was a genuine sense of discomfort that Banagram evoked in his family. Chaudhuri tells how his father had gone to Banagram three times with the intention of settling down but each time he had to come back to Kishorganj. Thus, in spite of paying lip service to the ancestral village as their home, it had ceased to be so even by Chaudhuri’s father’s time. It is therefore unsurprising that when Chaudhuri left Kishorganj forever in 1910 and went to stay in Banagram for a short while before moving to Calcutta, it evoked in him the peculiar emotion of becoming homeless despite the fact he was returning to the ancestral village: “Although I was coming to the village of all my known ancestors, where Chaudhuris had lived for no one knew how many hundred years, I felt as if I had left home to trudge forever along a public road” (281). With his coming to Calcutta the sense of homelessness was complete:

once torn up from my natural habitat I became liberated from the habitat altogether; my environment and I began to fall apart; […]. It is said that to be once bitten is to be twice shy, I suppose to be once déraciné is to be forever on the road. (285)

Thus, Chaudhuri’s autobiography begins not so much with home as with a sense of homelessness. The semi-urban provincial town of Kishorganj, the rural ancestral home of Banagram, as well as the colonial city of Calcutta were all, for him, replete with a sense of exile, and he would have to undertake a long and circuitous journey that would ultimately lead him to his “roots” — not in India but in England. However, though this “homeward” journey to England would physically take place much later in his life, the conflation of an imagined England with the idea of home was already achieved in his early childhood days when he was still in his parents’ house in Kishorganj.

England as the imagined pastoral home

Chaudhuri’s year of birth coincided with the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and the imperialist propaganda marking this event ensured that even a child growing up in the distant corner of East Bengal would know the queen and her consort as “the paragon of every virtue” (Chaudhuri, 1964: 111). Names of English military heroes such as General Roberts and General Kitchener too were familiar to Chaudhuri from the two “panoramic pictures of the Boer war” (29) which hung in one of their huts in Kishorganj. However, the most important representation of England in his parents’ house was the collection of English books that was exhibited in a glass-fronted cupboard along with China vases, flower decorations and various other knick-knacks, adding to the reverential image that Chaudhuri had developed as a child of the English civilizational attainments. These familiar names, pictures, and books all created the impression in young Chaudhuri of an England which in spite of its distance was ever-present,

very much like the sky above our head, without, however, the sky’s frightening attitude of vast and eternal silence, for it was always speaking to us in a friendly language in the knowledge of which we were improving day by day. (109) ⁸

Interestingly however, the image of an all-powerful British Empire with its centre in England did not evoke for Chaudhuri the corresponding image of the city of London as the great imperial metropolis. The visual image that accompanied his conceptualization of England was not urban at all but almost wholly rural, and these pastoral images were supplied by English literature. Chaudhuri mentions that Mary Mitford’s Our Village (1893) was one of his favourite reads as a boy. This popular children’s book, first published periodically in the 1820s and 1830s, vividly describes the rural life of a village in the home counties, and begins with the assertion, “Of all situation for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country” (1893: 3). Such evocations of the image of a village as home exerted a strong pull on Chaudhuri as a young man and must have presented a redemptive vision of rural dwelling in a way that the ancestral home at Banagram did not. This redemptive pastoral space that was located in the England of imagination was even more powerfully visualized through the aid of another of his favourite childhood books, Palgreave’s Children’s Treasury, which introduced him to the world of English poetry. Chaudhuri writes,

Reading these […] [poems], our hearts warmed up with a faith that could be described as the inverse of Rupert Brooke’s. He was happy in the conviction that if he died in a distant land some part of that foreign soil would become for ever England. We had the feeling that if we died in England what would become for ever England would be a little foreign flesh, and with that faith there was happiness in perishing in an English glade, with the robin and the wren twittering overhead. (126–7)

These lines can easily be regarded, following one critic, as “[a]bject colonial self-obliteration…exaggerated to the point of parody” (Sabin, 1993: 38). Yet such a critical judgement does not quite explain how the pastoral image evoked by British poetry could cast such a spell on a boy from a small country town in the backwater of the British Empire, as to make him dream of dying in the English glades. It is however explained if this pastoral space is read as an anxiety-free rural haven that is familiar like the ancestral village yet free from the fear of regressing into a rustic backwardness, which was associated with Banagram. This bucolic vision is located at the heart of England from where was spoken the “friendly language in the knowledge of which we were improving day by day” (109) and in Maine’s scheme of evolution it represented the most progressive of human societies. The English countryside of the literature thus became for Chaudhuri the village of nostalgia to which it was possible to “return” without the fear of losing either individuality or affiliation to Western modernity.

This juxtaposition of rural England with the idea of home is made even more clearly evident in Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (1987). In this second autobiography, Chaudhuri describes a moment of epiphany when the known landscape of rural East Bengal — the landscape of his “home” — gets magically transformed into the landscape of the English countryside, and this time the catalyst is not poetry but the paintings of one of the greatest English landscape artists, John Constable. This epiphanic moment, which occurred in 1927 during his very last stay in Kishorganj, proved to be so significant a turning point that Chaudhuri describes it as “an experience which I can regard as ‘conversion’ in the religious sense” (1987: 210). He tells how while strolling at the edge of the town he suddenly came across a cluster of huts hedged in by bamboo clumps, with a pond before it reflecting the clouds that had taken on the red and pink tint of the setting sun:

The whole scene was like one of Constable’s landscapes, and I can confirm the impression after seeing the Constable country. It came to me in a flash that the Bengali scene too had a particular beauty of its own, very intimate, but not less moving for that […] it was like enlightenment bestowed in a blessed moment. (1987: 210)

It is significant that Chaudhuri refers to an English painter in relation to the Indian rural landscape, but not in an attempt to exoticize what is mundane and already familiar. It is also significant that the specific English painter evoked in this passage is John Constable, who is renowned for his depictions of thoroughly familiar rural homesteads such as Willy Lott’s Cottage in The Hay Wain, and not exotic scenes of medieval ruins or of wild desolation as was more common in early nineteenth-century English landscape painting. Hence, Constable transforms this Bengali landscape not by making it look foreign but rather by making it appear even more homely and more intimately known to Chaudhuri. Thus, in this passage too, as in the previously quoted passage referring to Rupert Brooke’s poem, there is a juxtaposition of home and foreign land as the English pastoral landscape is merged with rural East Bengal. The moment of “enlightenment” dissolves the home/exile binary, as the iconic village homestead, which marks the place for return in the conventional journey of exile and homecoming, is perceived not located in the anxiety-laden space of the ancestral village of Banagram, but in “Constable country”.

Once the poles of home and exile are reversed, the journey too changes direction. For Chaudhuri, then, a journey to England becomes not a journey into exile but rather an expedition of homecoming. Yet he does not make this journey guided by his intimate subjective realization alone. His conviction that l’Inde c’est moi, which makes his life writings representative specimens of national autobiography, also makes him search for a more objective basis in the history of India which would justify this reversal of the familiar direction of the homeward journey. He finds it in the hotly disputed theory of Aryan migration, which provides him with the ideological ground from which to argue that as a putative Aryan he is racially akin to the Englishmen. Whereas Mary Mitford and Constable had magically transformed Chaudhuri’s idea of village home, the Aryan migration theory and its proponent Friedrich Max Müller transforms him racially and makes it possible for him to claim the rural England of his childhood imagination as his real homeland.

Of mythic ancestors and foreign homelands

It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the German philologist Friedrich Max Müller proposed his theory of Aryan migration. He argued that Aryans, said to be a race of fair complexioned people speaking a proto-Indo-European language, migrated from their common homeland in two different directions. The group migrating to the north entered Europe while the other group migrating to the south entered India through Iran where they encountered and conquered the dark skinned natives and turned them into slaves. Extending this same theory to the contemporary period he argued that the colonizing Europeans were Aryans returning to India for a second time to be reunited with their Hindu “brethren” who too had come as colonizers thousands of years ago:

it is curious to see how the [English] descendants of the same [Aryan] race, to which the first conquerors and masters of India belonged, return[ed]… to their primordial soil, to accomplish the glorious work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their Arian [sic] brethren. (Müller quoted in Trautmann, 1997: 177) ⁹

As Romila Thapar observes, Max Müller, in proposing this theory of Aryan invasion, “used a number of words interchangeably such as Hindu and Indian, or race/nation/people/blood/ — words whose meanings would today be carefully differentiated” (1996: 6). Yet it was perhaps because of this ambiguity, which allowed one term of reference to effortlessly slip into another, that Max Müller’s theory of Aryan invasion had such widespread appeal in India, especially among the Hindus. ¹⁰ In his biography of Müller, Chaudhuri too refers to this phenomenal popularity that the German Orientalist enjoyed in India and he mentions how even as a child growing up in East Bengal he had learnt from his father how “Max Müller had established that our languages and the European languages belonged to the same family… and that Hindus and the Europeans were both peoples descended from the same original stock” (1974: 5). This lesson learnt in childhood that the European colonizer and colonized Hindus had the same blood running through their veins later became pivotal in shaping Chaudhuri’s self-identity as well as his relationship with the Indian society and with England, and it was in the essay collection The Continent of Circe (1965) that he most elaborately dealt with it.

In this book Chaudhuri adds a very unique elaboration of his own to Max Müller’s theory of Aryan invasion. He argues that the Aryan homeland was “somewhere between the Danube and the Volga” (1965: 48), and though a concrete memory of it has faded with time, Hindu life to its present day is informed by a subconscious longing for this Aryan homeland, which they have had to leave behind. According to Chaudhuri, one of the ways in which this longing is manifested is through the cult of cow worship, which he connects, with some degree of ingenuity, to the faded memory of the lost Aryan homeland. He argues that the hump-backed cows were brought to India by the Aryans and were not indigenous to this land. Thus the cows were “as much a part of their Aryan heritage as the Vedas. It was and remains an Aryan heirloom” (1965: 172). This is apparently the reason why in the daily routine of a Hindu there was once so much emphasis given to the care for cattle:

in the cult of cattle the deepest reverence and the most poetic quality were to be found in the daily routine, and that routine of care was at its best in relatively humble homes, for instance, a homestead of thatched cottages with yellow corn ricks, by a sluggish and reedy stream or a large shining tank, in which ducks swam about, a place in which the sons of the family, home from their hostels in Calcutta could forget not only examinations but also time. (1965: 176–7)

Chaudhuri does not mention it, but the village home as presented here is clearly a composite image drawn from his childhood memories of Kishorganj and Banagram. In this image, the river of Kishorganj with its reeds and ducks merges with the ancestral home of Banagram where the urban clock-time strictly regimenting work and studies gave way to uninterrupted leisure.

He goes on to describe the daily routine of caring for the cattle in this village home by vividly depicting a scene of a girl going to put the lamp in the cowshed — a scene that must have been very familiar to him from his childhood days:

The girl goes in, puts the lamp on a pillar of mud near the pen of the calves […]. Then she stands still in reverie, minding neither the reek nor the pungent smell of oilcake.

The cows on their part stare at her, with their large liquid eyes […] [and] tears of all things appear to gather in those eyes. At last a very faint voice comes borne on the darkness, and if it is piercing that is because of its pain. It says from ever so far away: “Daughter! Come back to me from your dread Hades. Come back to Europe of the living. Come where you like — to the snow-covered Russia, pine-covered Germany, or corn-covered Sicily. Only come back Persephone, Persephone, Persephone!” (1965: 178)

This description of a village girl in East Bengal moved to tears along with her cattle on remembering the Aryan homeland that has been left behind some 3,000 years ago is a ludicrous flight of fancy, but it is also something more. This image, like the previous quotation describing the village home, reveals the personal subtext to the more impersonal narrative of Aryan invasion as elaborated in The Continent of Circe. The village girl in her cattle pen might not have heard the voice calling her back to Europe but this voice was most definitely heard by Chaudhuri as a child in his Kishorganj home, coming from his Palgreave’s Children’s Treasury, urging him to return to England and assuring him that “there was happiness in perishing in an English glade” (127). ¹¹ This village home in which the girl takes her lamp to the cattle pen is thus a site doubly laden with nostalgia. It is not only the place where she listens in her reverie to the call to come back to her “real” home in Europe, but it is also the village home that the Calcutta student in his hostel — and Chaudhuri was just such a student — dreams of returning to. Thus, here again, as in the passage on finding Constable country in Kishorganj, the nostalgic urge to return to the village home is juxtaposed with an urge to return to Europe.

Chaudhuri makes this personal aspect even more evident in the concluding chapter of The Continent of Circe where he refers to his own journey to Europe as an attempt to “return” to the Aryan homeland:

the memory of some past which I could not bring up to the surface of consciousness lurked within me and kept me struggling, until I remembered one day who and what I was. The notion that we Hindus were Europeans enslaved by a tropical country became a conviction when I paid a short visit of eight weeks to the West in 1955 at the age of fifty-seven. (1965: 307)

This journey was followed by two more visits before Chaudhuri, at the age of 73, finally made Oxford his home. In 1994, just three years before he died, he published a collection of autobiographical essays in Bengali, entitled Amar Debottor Shampatti, which contained the following curious passage. Having described how in Oxford “it is possible to see rural scenery just on leaving the city” (1994: 106, my translation) he mentions that each day during the course of his morning walks he is regularly brought back to the Kishorganj of his childhood:

In a short distance from my previous house, there was a large park […]. Remarkably enough there began a cornfield from the edges of this park. I used to get out of the park and take to the footpaths within the cornfields, walking down for three or four miles. At the end of the road there was Cherwell River and climbing a bridge on top of it I would see, just like in Kishorganj, a river with clusters of reeds along its banks and with ducks floating by. (1994: 107, my translation)

This passage completes the circle of exile and homecoming in Chaudhuri’s autobiography, cumulatively narrated over a period of more than four decades and across numerous works. At the end of his life he is again brought back to the idyllic “home” — a hybrid place rooted both in Bengal as well as in England where the city leads on to the village and the sluggish river of Kishorganj,–in this home the remembered pastoral sceneries of the ancestral village and the Constable country perfectly merge together and coexist in harmony.

This “return”, which concludes in its own unique way the trajectory of exile and homecoming that characterizes twentieth-century national autobiographies also brings Chaudhuri’s autobiographical works to the threshold of yet another category of twentieth-century literature —the postcolonial diasporic narrative. His journey from India to England, which breaks away from the geographical pattern that underpins the national autobiography, forms part of what Homi Bhabha has referred to as the twentieth-century “dissemination” of the people of the global south (1994: 139) that has formed the basis of postcolonial diasporic literature. Indeed, the passage quoted above from Chaudhuri’s Bengali autobiography resembles the same weaving together of childhood memories that has become characteristic of the postcolonial authors’ attempt to create in the metropolis, in the words of the novelist Zoë Wicomb, “‘another land of counterpane’ […] with which to keep at bay the Northern chill” (2005: 152). Looked at from this perspective, Chaudhuri’s life starts shedding the aura of being an oddity and begins resembling the life trajectories of the more celebrated mainstream Indian authors like Dom Moraes or Salman Rushdie, who too arrived in Britain driven by the lure of a “dream-England” that beckoned to them from the pages of the English books that they read as children in India (see Moraes, 1968; and Rushdie, 1991). In fact, the latter’s attempt to construct the Bombay of his childhood in Midnight’s Children (1981) while looking out at the streets of North London (1991: 10) distinctly echoes Chaudhuri’s attempt to re-view Kishorganj while looking at the Cherwell in Oxford. It is therefore no wonder that Rushdie, who is perhaps the most iconic Indian author of our times, should regard Chaudhuri’s “mischievous presence” as a significant influence that shaped the Indian literature of his generation (1997: xv).