A Writer's People (20 page)

So great was the enthusiasm for this successor to Gandhi that someone announced the creation of a university for the movement. Money was collected, and some time later people began to ask questions about the university. What were its courses? Who were its professors? Where was its campus going to be? When these questions were put to Vinoba he sensed that something had gone wrong, that he had been outrun by his fame; and he could only babble. He said, “The ground is there and I have had a well dug in it. The passer-by will be able to draw a bucket of water and drink his fill.” When he was pressed in less mystical or poetic words, he would say again what he had said; and his questioners knew that the walker from the ashram was no Gandhi, was completely at sea in the middle of his movement; and they left him alone.

It took some time for the excitement about Vinoba's landgift scheme to die down. But there was disappointment that India, so soon after independence, hadn't been able to support a second mahatma. People who had not gone into the first mahatma's origins and career saw it as a sign of the moral decay of the country. It is what often passes in India for thought: “I am all right, the country is rotten.”

There was, happily, a later career for Vinoba, not as a reformer, not as a wise man, but as a kind of holy fool, someone politicians at the very top wished to be photographed with and whose blessing they wished to have.

And still from time to time in the Indian press there is a cry for the Gandhians of today, and the regret that what had been “the greatest mass movement in history” should have vanished so completely. The unspoken feeling is that Gandhi
grew out of the Indian soil and the people who came after have turned away from wisdom that was open to them. There is little understanding that Gandhi had been created by the cultural incompetence of his three years in London and then by his embattled twenty years in South Africa; those extraordinary conditions cannot be repeated. Indians hardly know about the long South African years and are unwilling to read about them. They feel that, being Indians, they possess Gandhi. They don't have to study him; he is inside them and they can find in him what they wish.

T
HERE IS NO EXPLICIT
acknowledgement in Gandhi that in London and South Africa he is dealing with another civilisation. London is simply a big, expensive city where institutions are old and established, and where he has gone to study the law he hopes to practise in India, and where it is hard to get vegetarian food; and South Africa is a place where the laws are bad. Early travellers to Europe from Japan and China and Iran were not like that; they knew that they were looking at another civilisation. Gandhi came from British-ruled India. He knew English, knew about British-style courts and universities, and had seen British architecture in India. He couldn't feel an absolute stranger in London or South Africa. And this feeling of half familiarity made for a deeper confusion, which Gandhi was never able to resolve and finally, sunk in his mahatmahood, stopped worrying about. Nearly all Indians still live in varying degrees with this unacknowledged confusion.

This makes the ambition of Nirad Chaudhuri in
The Autobiography
of an Unknown Indian
all the more remarkable. His principal subject is the civilisation that, between 1860 and 1910, developed in Bengal with British rule and with the new learning of Europe that British rule brought. Chaudhuri was born in 1897 to an educated middle-class Bengali family who were part of that civilisation. He did nothing noteworthy in his working life. He was not a professional man, and the academic career he dreamed of as an adolescent never materialised. He began this book just before independence came to India in 1947, and it was published in 1951 in England by the grand old house of Macmillan, which had started publishing schoolbooks for India in the 1870s.

The book had a staggering but appropriate dedication:
To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred subject-hood on 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
. This dedication, in small capitals, was spaced out over twelve lines on the page, like a Victorian headstone or commemorative plaque. It ensured attention for the book when it was published. I remember reading Harold Nicolson's admiring review in the
Observer
. And yet, after this balanced beginning, Chaudhuri was claimed by the old Indian cultural confusion resulting from British rule, and ended absurdly; we shall come to that in due course.

His book has, at first, the shape and neutral tone of an ethnographic study. Chaudhuri came from East Bengal (Bangladesh today), and his opening chapters are about the three villages in that watery realm with which he is intimately connected:
his father's village, his mother's village, and his ancestral village (where everyone is a relation). The ethnographic tone, which might be modelled on something French, suits Chaudhuri. He is at his best in that mode. It doesn't deny autobiography, but it controls what might become too personal and slack, and it keeps at a distance the polemical and rather hectoring side of his personality, into which after a life of non-doing he is too ready to fall: the wish to display knowledge and settle accounts with the world.

He was very young when he first saw an English person. He and his older brother (who was just learning the English alphabet) had been sent to the bazaar to buy bananas. They were coming back when they saw the Englishman, who might have been Mr. Stapleton, the inspector of schools. The older boy dived into the ditch to hide, to protect his bananas (Englishmen were thought to be particularly fond of this fruit); and his younger brother followed his example. Some years later, when he was nine, he saw his second Englishman, Mr. Nathan, the divisional commissioner, who was coming to the local school to distribute prizes. He was with his wife, and the boys could not get over her blue eyes, her flaxen hair, her skirt, her hat, her high-heeled shoes. Still later, he saw a European baby and was ecstatic over its doll-like quality.

He tells these stories to show that his admiration for English civilisation was separate from his knowledge of English people; and to him there was nothing strange in this separation. The admiration for the civilisation continued as he went through school. Casual details in his narrative speak of a very good British-given education system. To Chaudhuri's remote
village or small town, for instance, there once came a benign school inspector who gave a prize-winning small boy (who had shown a drawing of a tiger) money to buy a colour-box; it was the kind of thing only adoring close relations might do.

Chaudhuri in due course went to Calcutta University, where distinguished visiting lecturers (T. R. Glover, Ramsay Muir, Michael Sadleir) came out from England. Chaudhuri went to their lectures. The accent made it hard for him to follow what was said, but he liked to study the faces of these scholars. There is an extraordinary description, written in a tone of worship (such as in the classical world might have been used of the library at Alexandria), of the wonders of the Imperial Library in Calcutta. There were four thousand volumes, only for reference, in the reading room; and a quarter of a million in the library as a whole. Lord Curzon, the viceroy, had built the library up from the much simpler Calcutta Public Library. He had given well-bound folios and quartos from his own collection, and he had brought out an expert from the British Museum to superintend the library's expansion. Calcutta was also where the great Indian Museum was. (When I went there late in 2002 the rooms were closed, or the doors were closed, and the air-conditioning turned off. Calcutta and Bengal have been communist for many years; they do things in their own way, and a consolation for them is that the Madras Museum, far to the south, is a mess, in places a charnel house of dusty sculptured pieces. Communism was what, inevitably, the Bengal renaissance led to in the mid–twentieth century; that was where the new learning ran finally into the sand.)

Chaudhuri became formidably well read. There was never
any complaint from him (as there was later—quite speciously, I feel—from places like the West Indies) about becoming separate from his roots. One of the criticisms of English education in India was that it only created clerks and officials. (There is an echo of this in Aldous Huxley, who says more interestingly, in
Jesting Pilate
, that there is as yet no industry to absorb the many thousands of graduates who leave the universities each year.) Chaudhuri makes another kind of point. He says that people who wished only to become clerks and officials could become just that, passing through the system “quite mechanically”; a few others, “recipients of grace,” saw “the original humanistic motive force of the system” and found in their education an introduction to a high civilisation.

Chaudhuri would have said that his English education was part of his education, and this education was part of the new Bengali civilisation in which he felt himself to be rooted. Hinduism had been reformed, given a Christian tinge in its outward aspects; questions of behaviour were ceaselessly discussed. Morality was a living issue; and Bengal, as a result of all these various forces, had the full apparatus of a living literary culture. It had writers and magazines that were important in the life of the middle class. This happened nowhere else in India.

And yet there should have been some feeling in Chaudhuri that he had come from another, more primeval world. Every year in his village (and elsewhere in Bengal and India) there was celebrated the Durga Puja, five days of prayers and rituals ending with a horrible sacrifice of goats and a water buffalo. Chaudhuri describes this sacrifice lyrically, and it is correct for
him to do so, since that was how the ritual appeared to him as a child in his village. The poor bleating goat was fixed in a vice; one servant pulled hard on its forelegs, another pulled hard on its hind legs, to make the little animal taut, and then the knife came down on the neck. The head came off and the blood ran, and the priest who had used the knife, wasting no time, put the head with some of the blood in a big plate and offered it at the feet of the goddess Durga.

The killing of the buffalo was messier. The buffalo was bathed and garlanded; three or four servants quickly made it fast; and melted butter was rubbed into the animal's neck to make the skin soft for the scimitar. The scimitar this time was not wielded by the priest but by someone sturdier, since if the scimitar stuck in the animal's neck bad luck would befall the house. As soon as the blow fell everyone in the house, servants, children, relations, visitors, everyone ran to the stricken animal in its death pangs, dabbed their faces and the faces of others with the blood, mixed the blood with the mud of the yard, and for fifteen minutes or so threw bloody mud pellets and balls at one another.

The evening—after this awesome orgiastic event, after what Chaudhuri calls the “alertness” of everybody in the house in the morning—was light-hearted, full of laughter and music. Classical literature is full of animal sacrifice, seldom described in this detail. But this almost certainly was what it would have been like: tense, then orgiastic, then relaxed and fulfilled.

It is astonishing that Chaudhuri could, without strain, have contained so many worlds within himself. But then strain came, with the politics of the nationalist movement, with the
new eyes that that movement gave, and everything that was so nicely balanced came tumbling down. There is no politics in Chaudhuri's account of his golden childhood in settled, golden Bengal. Then, quite late in his book, Chaudhuri says that the British had their own areas in Calcutta; the streets there were more elegantly paved than in the Indian areas; there were sections of Eden Gardens where Indians couldn't walk. When Indians (including Chaudhuri) wanted to go aboard the visiting German warship
Leipzig
—this was before the First World War—they were beaten back by policemen with sticks and whips.

This is more than information. This marks a change of mood; the earth here is about to move. “We believed in the second advent of our country and nation with a firmness of conviction which nothing could shake.” Forty years later, at the time of the writing of the
Autobiography
, he has another kind of comment to make. “This amazing faith, running counter to all the known facts of history which go to prove that a nation overtaken by decline after once creating a great civilisation never rises again, was to us justified by itself …” This is where, going against his earlier, natural emotion of pain and shame, his learning has taken him. This is how he will sit out the great nationalist movement that is about to unfold: offering nothing to anybody, offering no alternative way, knowing only, out of his deep learning, that what is happening around him is historically wrong.

This is where the
Autobiography
, great book though it is, becomes broken-backed; an intellectual flaw becomes a structural flaw. The reader has been led—by what he has read of
Bengal village life, and the journeys along its waterways, and childhood, and Calcutta, and the university—to expect something personal and descriptive (and humorous) about the nationalist movement (with all its great figures), set off perhaps at a lower level by something about Chaudhuri's marriage and his poor jobs. But there is nothing. There is only a long and wordy chapter of historical analysis, which reads like something from another book. As soon as Chaudhuri attempts analysis he becomes vain and mad and begins to use too many words, indifferent to the reader's patience. So it happens that out of a strange, suicidal vanity his once solid book ends in the air, and its better parts have lacked readers.

The error may have begun in Chaudhuri's too golden idea both of his childhood and the new Bengal civilisation which he sees as his own. At the end of the first chapter he states his case, and it is outrageously reactionary. But we are too early in the book to judge it; we read on and forget; and then, when it is almost too late, we are pulled up.