1965
*The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by M. K. Gandhi, translated by Mahadev Desai, 1966.
Punjabi Century, by Prakash Lal Tandon, 1963.
My Public Life, by Mirza Ismail, 1954.
A Passage to England, by Nirad Chaudhuri, 1959.
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, by Nirad Chaudhuri, 1951.
The Last of the Aryans
YOU DON’T have to wait long for the characteristic Nirad Chaudhuri note in The Continent of Circe. It occurs, unmistakably, almost before the book begins; yet it has the effect of a climax. There is a frontispiece with two views from the author’s verandah in Delhi: one looking up to clouds, one looking down to refugee tents. The title page has a Latin device: “De rerum indicarum natura: Exempla gentium et seditionum.” The motto—“Know Thyself”—follows, in five Indo-European languages. Seven detailed contents pages come next. And then we come to text: six pages, a chapter almost, headed “In Gratitude.” Chaudhuri begins by thanking Khushwant Singh, “the well-known Sikh writer, good companion, and man-about-town, for the loan of his portable typewriter.” This seems straightforward enough; but it soon becomes clear that we have to do with an incident.
It is like this. Chaudhuri is tapping away on Khushwant’s machine. He is nearing the end of one of the sections of his book and his gratitude to Khushwant, as he says, is at its highest. A “public print” comes his way. It is “the official publication of the American Women’s Club of Delhi.” It contains “An Interview with Khushwant Singh”:
INTERVIEWER: Who is the best Indian writer today?
KHUSHWANT SINGH: In non-fiction? Without a doubt Nirad Chaudhuri … A bitter man, a poor man. He doesn’t even own a typewriter. He borrows mine a week at a time.
Chaudhuri is “struck all of a heap”:
My poverty is, of course, well known in New Delhi and much further afield, and therefore I was not prepared to see it bruited about by so august a body as the American Women’s Club of Delhi.
Khushwant explains. His statement has been given the wrong emphasis. He thought he was only entertaining a lady to tea; he had no idea what her real intention was. He offers Chaudhuri a brand-new portable typewriter as a gift:
I tried to show that I bore no grudge by again borrowing the machine after the publication of the article and by most gratefully accepting the present of the new typewriter.
And a footnote adds:
Having read Pascal early in life I have always tried to profit by his wisdom: “Si tous les hommes savaient ce quils disaient les uns des autres, il n’y aurait pas quatre amis dans le monde.”
So much about the typewriters on which the book was written; the Americans, though, continue to receive attention for a whole page.
IT IS impossible to take an interest in Nirad Chaudhuri’s work without becoming involved with his situation and “personality.” This has been his extra-literary creation since the publication in 1951 of his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. The book made him known. But in India it also made him disliked. Cruelly, it did not lessen his poverty; this mighty work, which in a fairer world would have made its author’s fortune and seen him through old age, is now out of print. So, persecuted where not neglected, as he with some reason feels, he sits in Delhi, massively disapproving, more touchy than before, more out of touch with his fellows, never ceasing to attract either the slights of the high or the disagreeable attentions of the low.
His fellow passengers on the Delhi buses wish to know the time. Without inquiry they lift his wrist, consult his wrist-watch, and then without acknowledgement let his wrist drop. Sometimes he walks; and, in a land of “massive staticity,” where when men walk it is as if “rooted trees were waving in the wind,” he walks “in the European manner, that is to say, quickly and with a sense of the goal towards which I am going.” Elderly people shout after him, “Left! Right! Left! Right!” Boys call out, “Johnnie Walker!” Sometimes they come right up to him and jeer in Hindi: “Aré Jahny.” It is not even the Johnnie Walker of the whisky label they refer to, but “a caricature of him by an Indian film star”:
Friends ask me why I do not go for these impertinent young fellows. I reply that I retain my common sense at least to the point of forcing myself to bear all this philosophically. But being also a naturally irascible man, I sometimes breathe a wish that I possessed a flame-thrower and was free to use it. In my conduct and behaviour, however, I never betray this lack of charity.
Indoors it is hardly less dangerous. The London Philharmonic Orchestra comes to Delhi. Chaudhuri talks music to Sir Malcolm Sargent; an English lady whispers to Mrs. Chaudhuri, “What a bold man he is!” He goes to the concert the next day; the British Council has provided tickets. He finds that he is separated from his wife by the aisle. An upper-class Indian lady claims that he is sitting on her chair. She is wrong; she objects then to his proximity; she calls the upper-class usherettes to her aid. He yields; he takes his chair across the aisle to join his wife.
The extra-literary Chaudhuri “personality” is more than a creation of art; the suffering, however self-induced, is too real. Nearly seventy, he is a solitary, in hurtful conflict at every level with his environment.
FAILURE: it is Chaudhuri’s obsession. There is the personal failure: twenty years of poverty and humiliation dismissed in a single, moving sentence in the Autobiography. There is the failure as a scholar, recorded in the Autobiography and echoed in the present book.
I shall mention the names of four men whom I regard as truly learned. They are Mommsen, Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Harnack, and Eduard Meyer. When young and immature I cherished the ambition of being the fifth in that series. So I could not have been very modest. But a standard is a standard.
There is the failure, or rather the futility, of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Bengali culture, Chaudhuri’s own, set against the larger futility of British rule. These were the interwoven themes of the monumental Autobiography. Now Chaudhuri addresses himself to a more encompassing failure: the failure of his country, his race and the land itself, Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans.
He has called The Continent of Circe an “Essay on the Peoples of India.” But his subject is really the Hindus; and his starting-point is the incomprehension, rapidly giving way to rage, which the Hindus have immemorially aroused in non-Hindus. Even E. M. Forster, Chaudhuri says, is more drawn to Muslims; and for all his pro-Indian sentiment, “there are few delineations of the Indian character more insultingly condescending” than those in A Passage to India. Forster’s plea for Indo-British friendship reminds Chaudhuri of the poem:
Turn, turn thy hasty foot aside,
Nor crush that helpless worm!
The frame thy wayward looks deride
Required a God to form.
“This massive, spontaneous, and uniform criticism by live minds … cannot be cancelled by afterthoughts which have their source in the Untergang des Abendlandes.” And Chaudhuri wishes to cancel nothing. He seeks only to explain. But the act of explaining frequently drives him to rage. Where the Autobiography was analytic, detached and underplayed, the Essay is strident and tendentious. Chaudhuri’s sense of failure and vulnerability, that personality, comes in the way; and it is as a display of personality that The Continent of Circe is best to be relished. It is at its most delicious when it is most passionate; and it is most passionate when, one suspects, it is most personal: in the account, for instance, of the “sob-chamber” of Hindu family life, where the only competition is in gloom and people can legitimately consider themselves provoked if they are told they are looking well. So, in Chaudhuri’s essay as much as in the work of any uncomprehending foreigner, “Hindu” ends by being almost a word of abuse.
Hindus pacifist? Rubbish, says Chaudhuri. Hindus are militarist, have always been; it is only their inefficiency that makes them less of a menace to the world. To prove this he gives selective historical examples and interprets the frontier conflict with China in a way that will not be faulted in P
eking. Again: “The industrial revolution in India at its most disinterested is an expression of anti-European and anti-Western nationalism.” This is possible; but it cannot be squared with what immediately follows: “a far stronger force, in actual fact the positive force, is the Hindu’s insatiable greed for money.” This, at first, seems too meaningless a statement even for simple denial. But he is making an important point; he is speaking of what some people in India call the “pigmy mentality” of the Indian capitalist:
The American industrialist is the old European Conquistador in a new incarnation … But the Hindu money-maker can never be anything but his paisa-counting sordid self … His spirit is best symbolized by the adulteration of food, medicine, and whatever else can be adulterated.
So that the Indian industrial revolution, so far from being an expression of anti-Western nationalism, turns out to be a very petty, private thing indeed. Its cynicism might appear to some to be an extension of caste attitudes. And it might be expected that Chaudhuri would be critical of caste. Not at all. He asks us to keep off the caste question if we don’t want to pound India to dust. Caste is the only thing that holds Indian society together. It is “a natural compensation for man’s convergent zoological evolution and divergent psychological evolution.” Caste did not suppress mobility; that came only with the Pax Britannica. And the Chaudhuri flourish is added:
If the system suppressed anything it was only ambition unrelated to ability, and watching the mischief from this kind of ambition in India today I would say that we could do with a little more of the caste system in order to put worthless adventurers in their place.
It might seem then that Chaudhuri, in an attempt to make a whole of Hindu attitudes, has succumbed to any number of Hindu contradictions. But I also feel that Chaudhuri, living in Delhi, enduring slights and persecution, has at last succumbed to what we might call the enemy. He sees India as too big; he has lost his gift of detachment, his world view. He seeks to expose where exposure is not really necessary. He has been taken in by the glitter of “the diplomatic” at Delhi, the flurry of visitors, the cultural displays of competing governments. He exaggerates the importance of India and the interest taken in India. People in England, he says, “are still longing after [India] with the docility of cattle,” and the words make sad reading in London in 1965.
BUT THIS is the theme of his polemic: that tropical India is the continent of Circe, drugging and destroying those whom it attracts, and that the Aryans, now Hindus, were the first to be lured from a temperate land, “denatured” and destroyed. Their philosophy is the philosophy of the devitalized. It is rooted in secular distress, the anguish of flesh on the Gangetic plain, where everything quickly decomposes and leads to tamas, a comprehensive squalor:
The tragedy of all the systems of Hindu philosophy is that they confront men with only one choice: remain corruptible and corrupt flesh, or become incorruptible and incorrupt stone.
Be neurotically fussy about cleanliness; or—the greater spirituality—show your indifference to the extent of being able to eat excrement. Hindus are not philosophers; nor do they reverence philosophy. “What we respect are the sadhus, possessors of occult power.”
In Chaudhuri’s argument it follows without contradiction that a people obsessed with religion, really a “philosophy of sorrow,” are obsessed with sex. It is the great anodyne. “Defeat was on the fleshly plane … Rehabilitation must also be in the flesh.” The sex act in Hindu sculpture is not symbolic of any sort of spiritual union, as is sometimes said: it is no more than what it appears to be. With a loss of vitality this celebration of the senses declines into the “sex-obsessed chastity of the Hindu, which is perhaps the most despicable ethical notion ever created in the moral evolution of any people”:
Their admiration of the supposed superior sexual knowledge and dexterity of the Hindus is putting ideas in the heads of a particularly depraved set of Occidentals, who are coming to India and working havoc with what sexual sanity … we still have.
Well said; but it is on the subject of sex that Chaudhuri becomes most fanciful. Tracing the decline of vitality, he makes too much, one feels, of the emphasis in Sanskrit erotic writings on the pleasures of the purushayita or reversed position. Wasn’t it in such a position, if one reads right, that Lucius and Fotis first came together in The Golden Ass?
Chaudhuri writes of India as though India has never been written about before. He pays little attention to received ideas; he mentions no authorities:
I am old, and I cannot spend the few years that are left to me tilting at theories which I have taken a lifetime to outgrow … I must therefore be resigned to being called a fool by those who believe in ghosts … Historical conferences in India always remind me of séances.
He places the Aryan settlement of the Gangetic plain in the seventh century B.C. This will be offensive to those Indians who think of India as the Aryan heartland and, playing with millennia, like to think of Rome as a recent, and peripheral, disturbance. He allows no civilization worth the name to the indigenous Australoids, whom he calls the Darks. Rigid barriers were set up against them, and Chaudhuri—going back on some of his old views—claims that no significant intermingling of the races took place. The Darks, in their free or servile state, remain to this day genetically stable; and to this day, it might be added, the burning of a giant effigy of a Dark is the climax of an annual Hindu pageant-play. Hindu apartheid quickly gave the Darks the psychology of a subject race. Chaudhuri retells a story from the Ramayana, the Hindu epic. It is reported one day to Rama, the Aryan hero, that the son of a brahmin has died suddenly. There can be only one explanation: an act of impiety. Rama goes out to have a look and, sure enough, finds that a young Dark has been performing Aryan religious rites. The Dark is at once decapitated and the brahmin’s son comes back to life. In later versions of the story the Dark dies happily: death at the hands of an Aryan is a sure way to heaven. Not even slavery created so complete a subjection.
So that, as Chaudhuri tells it, the continent of Circe has played a cruel joke on the Hindus. The first white people to come into contact with a black race, and the first and most persistent practitioners of apartheid, they have themselves, over the centuries, under a punishing sun, grown dark. The snow-capped Himalayas have become objects of pilgrimage; and some Hindus, in their hysteria, look beyond that to the North Pole, of which modern map-makers have made them aware. There, someone will tell you in all the blaze of Madras, there at the North Pole lies the true home of the Hindus:
The theme of paradise lost and regained is one of the major stories of Hindu mythology, and it must date from the Iranian sojourn of the Indian Aryans. In the stories the gods recover their heaven … But in history paradise is lost for ever; and the curse begins to work: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
This is the true Chaudhuri mood; and, for all Chaudhuri’s fanciful flights and parenthetic rages, it must be respected: the Hindu sense of exile and loss is real. Yet the layman must ask certain questions. Chaudhuri places the Aryan settlement just two or three generations before the birth of the Buddha. Could the philosophy of sorrow and the devitalization of the Aryan have occurred so soon? Could the Aryan, even the settler in the South, have undertaken the colonization of South-east Asia a thousand years later? The reader of Chaudhuri’s book, working from Chaudhuri’s clues, might easily come to a different conclusion from Chaudhuri. He might feel that the Hindus, so far from being denatured Aryans, have continued, in their curious and self-willed isolation, to be close to their elemental Aryan origins. For the Aryan in India, Chaudhuri says, both sensibility and effort became parts of piety; and this surely makes many Hindu attitudes less mysterious. The attitudes remain; the gloss varies with historical circumstance. Chaudhuri writes with some sharpness of Hindus who now use European rationalism to excuse their “irrational urges and taboos.” Yet we have seen how he himself uses a borrowed language to defend caste, a primitive institution. Hindus can be found today to defen
d Gandhi’s assassination on the grounds that the assassin was a brahmin. This is outrageous; but it becomes intelligible and logical if we see it as an extension of the old Aryan approval of Rama’s slaying of the impious, and complaisant, Dark in the Ramayana story.
And there is the erotic sculpture. It cannot be ignored. It cannot be talked away. It is too widespread, too casual. It is of a piece with the open sensuality of the Rig Veda, the earliest Hindu sacred book. This has been called the first recorded speech of Aryan man. Chaudhuri translates a sample:
He achieves not—he whose penis hangs limp between his thighs; Achieves he alone whose hairy thing swells up when he lies.
It is Indrani, the Queen Goddess, who speaks; and she is a match for her consort who, for his lechery, was punished by the appearance all over his body of a thousand pudenda muliebria. This is a campfire, peasant lewdness. And when all is said and done this is what aryan means: he is one who tills the soil.
Chaudhuri’s plea that Hindus should turn their backs on Asia and recover their Aryan or European personality is, if narrowly interpreted, meaningless. Part of the trouble is that Chaudhuri makes “Aryan” and “European” interchangeable. But “European” surely needs to be more closely defined, and dated. It is a developing concept; “Aryan” is fixed. And Chaudhuri’s plea becomes very thin indeed when we find that for Homo europaeus in his present predominant and proliferating variety Chaudhuri has no high regard:
Literary Occasions: Essays Page 16