Nirad chaudhuri biography

CHAUDHURI, NIRAD Apothegm. (1897–1999), renowned Indian writer. Nirad C. Chaudhuri was arguably say publicly greatest writer of nonfiction mid Indians in the twentieth hundred. A self-taught polyglot, vastly discerning, he claimed to have "read Shakespeare before I learned lengthen walk." With the publication unknot his magnum opus, Autobiography check an Unknown Indian, in 1951, however, he became widely acknowledged for his unabashed admiration take care of Western, especially British, culture bracket his acerbic, contrarian views touch on Indian civilization.

Chaudhuri was born interchangeable 1897 in Kishurganj in position Tangail district of present-day Bangladesh.

He spent the first 12 years of his life exclaim Kishurganj, and the next xxx years in Kolkata as tidy student and intellectual with devise endless thirst for knowledge. Before now proficient in Bengali and Indic by the time he progressive from college with a blameless degree in history, he confidential also mastered English, French, European, Greek, and Latin.

His intellectual interests ranged from art, construction, anthropology, and archaeology to accumulation, geography, classical Western music, significant military history. A dropout spread graduate school despite his neglected undergraduate record, he devoted domineering of his time to spadework in the Imperial (now National) Library in Kolkata while germaneness himself with a modest office in the Military Accounts Commission.

He was published in class noted English-language journal Modern Review in Kolkata, and later phoney briefly as its assistant writer. In Bengali letters, he became known for his conservative views as the editor of Shanibarer Chithi (The Saturday letter). Purify married Amiya Devi in 1932, and they had two sons.

Mostly unemployed in the 1930s, Chaudhuri battled poverty and insecurity greatest extent trying to make ends come across.

He later recorded the struggles of these years in description sequel to the Autobiography, titled Thy Hand, Great Anarch. Tight spot 1939 he became personal penman to Sarat Chandra Bose, pure leading nationalist figure in Bengal and the elder brother style Subhash Chandra Bose. In 1941 Sarat Bose was arrested with sent to prison, and Chaudhuri again became unemployed.

In 1942 he went to Delhi bend a job at All Bharat Radio.

Chaudhuri published his first volume in 1951, at the diagram of fifty-four, from Delhi—his renowned and much-maligned Autobiography. It was accorded the status of exceeding instant classic as an luxuriously written record of life kick up a rumpus small-town Bengal and in Metropolis, and a record of depiction far reaches of the Anglo-Bengali encounters beyond the upper echelons and elites of the community order.

It was maligned arm reviled in India because Chaudhuri dedicated the book to honourableness British for the blessings get the picture their two-hundred-year rule of Bharat. In 1955 a British Meeting grant enabled Chaudhuri to make a journey to England for the chief time. He recorded the not recall in Passage to England (1959).

In 1965 he published The Continent of Circe, his censorious introspection of independent India courier its many ills. His have control over Bengali book appeared in 1968. A handsome advance from rendering publisher persuaded him to inscribe Bangali Jivaney Ramani (Representation advice women in Bengali life).

Goodness project to work on on the rocks biography of Max Müller, rectitude great Sanskrit scholar, took him back to England in 1970. He settled in Oxford, on no account to return to India. Over the last thirty years endorse his long life, he was remarkably productive, writing both sight Bengali and English, and generating storms of controversy with converse in work.

His books include: The Learner Extraordinary (1974), Hinduism (1979), Thy Hand, Great Anarch (1987), From the Archives of a Centarian (1997), Three Horsemen of glory New Apocalypse (1997), and link books in Bengali.

He was honored by Oxford University climb on an honorary doctorate in information in 1989, and the monarch conferred on him the appellation "Commander of Order of representation British Empire" in 1993. Shore 1996 Visva Bharati University worthy him with Desikottama, the value of a doctorate in literature.

Chaudhuri considered the Bengal Renaissance (1860–1910) the high point of Anglo-Bengali encounters.

His Anglicist side emphatic steeping oneself deeply in fresh English and European letters. Chaudhuri quotes from Bankim Chandra Chatterji's novel Rajani to describe top-notch casual conversation between two visitors that includes references to archetype historians Tacitus, Plutarch, and Historian, and the philosophy of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, T.H.

Huxley, G.E.L. Owen, Ludwig Chemist, and Arthur Schopenhauer. His Asiatic side showed a certain presumptuousness and pride in the achievement of Occidental knowledge and betrayal articulate expression in modernist creative writings. In one of his hindmost pieces of writing in Ethnos, Chaudhuri says, "I always broach myself as a Bengali Asian or a Hindu Bengali, battle-cry as an Indian." Impeccably put on in European clothes when stylishness went out, Chaudhuri always wore dhoti and kurta at soupзon.

He did not give hike his Indian passport in description thirty years he lived rivet England. In his will, fiasco asked his heirs to emit his personal library to goodness Calcutta Club in Kolkata, grizzle demand to Oxford University or magnanimity National (formerly Imperial) Library extort Kolkata. The Calcutta Club was established in the colonial society in 1920 by the favoured Bengali professionals who had anachronistic denied membership in the European-exclusive Bengal Club.

Dilip K.

Basu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dhawan, Distinction. K. Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Ethics Scholar Extraordinary. New Delhi: Belief Books, 2000.

Kamani, Chetan. Nirad Aphorism. Chaudhuri. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Scott, Painter P. Perceiving India. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986.