Enchanted by India, Britannia

Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, who would live to see the 20th century turn and fade, was perhaps the last surviving witness to the twilight of an empire and the fractured dawn of a nation.

Born in 1897 in the small town of Kishoreganj in East Bengal, his life became an extraordinary testimony to the collision of two worlds — a collision that shaped every word he would write. The Bengal Renaissance, that great ferment of intellectual awakening that had nourished his childhood, instilled in him a love for both Shakespeare and Sanskrit. This duality, this hunger for what was good in both civilisations, would become both his gift and his terrible curse.

When his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), appeared, it struck like a stone through glass. In a gesture of intellectual defiance, Chaudhuri dedicated it to “the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood upon us, but withheld citizenship”. VS Naipaul would later declare it “the one great book to have come out of the Indo-British encounter”.

A Scottish daily hailed it as “an extraordinary book. It is written by a Hindu of East Bengal… With a command of English that is not exceeded by Mr Nehru himself… No other Indian self-portrait can compare for interest or challenge, with the product of a tortured and assertive spirit”.

Yet Independent India recoiled. He was stripped of his pension from All India Radio, blacklisted, condemned as a traitor — called Macaulay's freakish progeny — to a nation he loved with impossible complexity.

It was The Continent of Circe (1965), winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, that revealed the torment at his heart. Drawing upon Homer's mythology — where Circe transformed men into swine through enchantment — Chaudhuri fashioned a merciless allegory.

India, he argued, possessed an ancient, terrible power to transform and dehumanise all who came to her. Immigrants, invaders, and colonisers alike fell under her spell, becoming something less than human. His thesis was that Hindus themselves, descended from distant Aryan stock, had been ‘emasculated’ by the subcontinent's very climate and character.

Yet one sees in Chaudhuri something beyond mere bitterness. His was a scholar's anguish, the pain of someone who believed deeply in the power of English thought, European rationalism, and the civilising force of learning, yet watched these very things be mocked and discarded. At the end, at 101, ensconced in Oxford’s embrace, he remained what he had always been: a man stranded between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, yet fiercely defending both with the pen.